Xbox Series X's cross-gen approach is robbing players of the next-gen thrill

[DonFerrari]

goopy20 said:

Pemalite said:

Just keep in mind that Lumin and Nanite are separate technologies, they augment each other, sure.
But lumin isn't even the best of lighting technologies we have right now or even the best lighting supported in Unreal Engine 5, more intensive lighting can potentially make it look even better, that is entirely up to developer discretion of course and what their particular goals are.

And you are right, one of Nanites advantages is not having developers scale/rebuild assets, the engine does it, this will benefit indie/A/AA developers the most, suddenly they are going to be able to focus their limited resources on more impactful aspects of their games.

Ray Tracing is one of the biggest features of next-gen consoles, that isn't even in doubt.

Lumin is Ray Traced lighting. The demo even used Ray Tracing.

You don't need to exchange money to actually sell something.

Epic in this instance however most certainly does gain financially out of the promotion of the Unreal Engine, lets not kid ourselves here.

Bandwidth bottlenecks between Storage and Ram will still exist, it just won't be as pronounced as the 8th gen which stagnated on that front... We aren't at a point where we can fill the Ram 30x in 1 second like with the Nintendo 64 or where carts are 1/2 the bandwidth of the Ram.

But it does open up a ton of extra opportunities that spinning hard drives would have prevented, absolutely no doubt.

But SSD's aren't the second coming of Jesus, they don't process data, they simply allow developers to be more efficient with their memory use, it cannot entirely replace Ram.

Didn't Unreal 4 already have dynamic global illumination? I remember it was just too expensive for current gen consoles, so they ended up replacing it with a number of graphical effects that were less demanding. We will see, but I got a feeling that path tracing, like we're seeing in Minecraft, is a bridge too far for next gen consoles, at least when we're talking graphically demanding games. I hope I'm wrong, though, and maybe we will see some smaller scale games using it, or games running in 1080p. I mean Series X should be better at handling Ray Tracing than the ps5, but they also had to go with 1080p just to run Minecraft. My guess is that for path tracing we're going to need at least a RTX3*** gpu. However, Dynamic Global Illumination like Lumen looks like a fantastic alternative for next gen consoles, as its far less resource heavy than full blown path tracing.  

I think, not having to scale assets, will benefit developers of all shapes and sizes. It will be great for Indie developers working with a limited budget, but AAA games should also benefit greatly on the creative side. Just having a massive leap in assets variation alone is going to be a major game changer and should make for much more interesting and immersive world design. 

To me the SSD enabled tech does sound like it will the biggest break-through next gen when we're talking about consoles. Me thinks we'll see a much bigger leap than going from ps3 to ps4, because of it. But I also think it will be a much bigger limiting factor in cross-gen titles that still have to run on a HDD compared to just having a weaker gpu. Scaling things on the gpu side is one thing, but scaling the entire world design is going to be a different matter entirely.    

I guess we can have some sort of middle ground ray tracing path with on development they doing the mapping with it and using for global ilumination or some pre-baked.