Mafioso said:
I agree with many of your points, but PS4 Pro has its apparent limitations and that's why developers have been at odds as to which way to offer refinements due to those bottlenecks. I'd argue to the contrary, its actually been impressive what they've achieved given those limitations in many cases. Take into consideration that game developers have adapted to using PS4's fast memory bandwidth to hit that 1080p target...and now with PS4 PRO they have 2X the GPU and the SAME bandwidth. They are stuck passing the same asset quality and having to resort to checkerboarding to reconstruct a higher quality image. MS has had a better engineering effort and it shows, they dug deeper and smarter for a hardware refresh. They are giving developers a 384 bit bus and 326 GB/S to handle all the 4K assets and bandwith extensive data...thats GPU bandwith even get in the best 1080 PC with GDDR5/X you can buy. All the fast ram they need, more bandwidth they'd know what to do with, a FAST GPU clock for a console...they just targeted throughput better than in Sony's case and it will be developer friendly to have the overhead to do more. |
Sorry for the late reply, I was out.
I will 110% agree that the Scorpio is a much better machine than a ps4 pro. Not in the sense that its more powerful (which it obviously is) but in the sense that it is a lot more well thoughtout than the ps4 pro.
But to go back to the point of the ps4 pro, while I understand the whole "they were able to do a lot with what they had to due to ps4's limitation," there is a point to be made that looking at how developers have treated 1080p experience is kind of lackluster. For most games, developers either seem to do the most basic "enhancements" or none at all. Even sony's own developers have removed some 1080p enhancements from uc4 and the last of us remastered with patches instead of optimizing them. And of course, at checkerboarding for the most part, its just the regular ps4's graphical settings bumped up. The point is, while it's cool what developers can do, it mostly results in the most basic enhancements and then calling it a day.
Another thing is that a desktop 470 which we are matching with the Ps4 pro can achieve PC max settings for Rise of Tomb Raider at 1440p. (Obviously not at 60fps but the pro is running at 30fps)
Now of course, the ps4 pro is also checkerboarding to 4k while the 470 isn't but also remember that Rise of Tomb raider also uses ps4's graphical settings and not the PC max graphics settings. Also the desktop 470 has less memory bandwidth and less vram and a ps4 pro. However, even with all that, at 1080p with its enhanced visuals mode, the ps4 pro couldn't match PC max. So I feel like if they did put in more effort, they could have maybe reached higher detail which goes back to my point of how leaving it to optimization is a double edged sword. And Rise of Tomb raider is actually one of the if not the most enhanced games for the ps4 pro.
Now going back to Scorpio, many of it's enhancements require the developers to be able to take advantage of it. In the tech analysis for example, he states how the way they have implemented the additional bandwidth is not traditional. He goes to state that:
"What makes things especially interesting though is that Microsoft didn’t just switch out DDR3 for GDDR5, but they’re using a wider memory bus as well; expanding it by 50% to 384-bits wide. Not only does this even further expand the console’s memory bandwidth – now to a total of 326GB/sec, or 4.8x the XB1’s DDR3 – but it means we have an odd mismatch between the ROP backends and the memory bus."
"What this means is that at some level, Microsoft is running an additional memory crossbar in the SoC, which would be very similar to what AMD did back in 2012 with the Radeon HD 7970. Because the console SoC needs to split its memory bandwidth between the CPU and the GPU, things aren’t as cut and dry here as they are with discrete GPUs. But, at a high level, what we saw from the 7970 is that the extra bandwidth + crossbar setup did not offer much of a benefit over a straight-connected, lower bandwidth configuration. Accordingly, AMD has never done it again in their dGPUs. So I think it will be very interesting to see if developers can consistently consume more than 218GB/sec or so of bandwidth using the GPU."
So what my understanding is that while there is additional bandwith avaliable, developers will be able to use it through a slightly more different method than they traditionally will which means they will most likely have to optimize specifically for it. And that's just one example.
It might sound like I am consistantly trying to be the downer when it comes to Scorpio's performance but all I am saying is to keep peoples expectations in check because history does repeat itself and relying on optimization for non base hardware consoles is something that might turn out not so great results as one would expect from console level optimization. And of course, even with optimization, I am skepitcal at best.
PC Specs: CPU: 7800X3D || GPU: Strix 4090 || RAM: 32GB DDR5 6000 || Main SSD: WD 2TB SN850