| Intrinsic said: In all fairness though, even Nvidia is only really just dabbling with that tech with their RTX cards right nowO But I guess we can at least give them credit for trying. I agree though that Ray tracing is the next true shift in rendering but I really don't see amd or nvidia having anything viable for another 3 to four years. Especially when considering how its implemented right now on the RTX cards. Using ray tracing pretty much bottlenecks the card. |
Well. RTX is built at 12nm, which is essentially just a retooled 14/16nm process anyway.
I think architecturally it will start to come into it's own at 7nm where nVidia should be able to dedicate more silicon to the problem.
Though... To be fair, I don't really like nVidia's approach to Ray tracing anyway, but that's a discussion for another day.
| Mr Puggsly said: I'm no expert on PC specs, but a $100 Ryzen CPU seems like it can easily run most modern games above 60 fps. So yeah, I think that's what they will aim for at a minimum. |
Certainly can. The Ryzen 3 2300X is a Quadcore that operates at 3.5Ghz-4ghz. It's actually a pretty capable gaming CPU.
Even the slower 1300X is a pretty decent chip as well.
| Mr Puggsly said: Not sure if RAM upgrade is that essential, really depends on the impact on price I suppose. |
8GB of Ram is really starting to become a limiting issue on the PC. So the consoles need to step it up.
| Mr Puggsly said: I think they're gonna stick with standard HDDs for years to come simply because its more space for the price. Given the size of games now, I would hope the 9th gen launches with 2TB HDDs. |
I only mentioned SSD's because QLC NAND is getting cheap, but also slow, requiring the need for SLC/MLC NAND and DRAM to cache.
...Next gen is still a year or two away, meaning there is still time for the market to play the pricing game and make it a possible opportunity.
Otherwise... I completely agree, spinning rust will be here to stay if there isn't sufficient downward price movements on QLC Nand.
| Mr Puggsly said: I've seen ray tracing demos and I'm don't think its a great use of resources for the result. Just based on what I'm seeing thus far at least. |
It's still early days yet.
| Mr Puggsly said: When I look at crossgen games of 2013-2015 the visuals were getting muddier (resolution and textures) but performance was par for the course. Textures in crossgen games started getting really muddy, I think that showed RAM was really being stretched. Skyrim struggled with RAM limitations years before the 8th gen. CPU though, that always seemed very capable in the 7th gen and even running some impressive games at 60 fps. |
Developers were also leveraging the CPU to do framebuffer effects like morphological AA, which didn't really help with things, it's literally a filter that goes around the games scene and blurs all the edges.
Plus... Around half way through the generation developers were starting to stream meshes and textures from disk into Ram just so they could get some extra mileage out of it... And also started to employ techniques like impostering to cut down on geometric complexity in scenes.
| Intrinsic said: If consoles opt to go with HDDs again, then in about 3 years time they could find themselves as the only ones still using that antiquated technology. I mean right now even $300 laptops come with 128GB m.2 SSDs. And then there is performance. HDDs are slow. But lets put this into context; Right now we have ~5GB of RAM available for games in the current consoles. I think its safe to say that next gen that allotment will at the very least double. Using a HDD we already have games that take around 30 - 70 secs to load in a level or stage. If the RAM size doubles and game asset sizes double too then it will literally take twice as long to load up that level. We are going into a gen of higher rez textures on everything including shadows and the usual bump in general assets and code. Thats not going to be very pleasant at all. |
Performance is secondary to cost in the console space, that's the reality of the situation.
However... To be fair, the mechanical drives in the Xbox One and Playstation 4 weren't exactly the fastest on the market anyway.
The base Xbox one and Playstation 4 had drives that were good for probably 60-70MB/s of sustained reads, modern drives are capable of doubling that performance fairly easily and for semi-decent drives, even a tripling in performance.
The take away is that there is allot of room to move in improving performance even if Microsoft/Sony stick with spinning rust.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
