Pemalite said:
Plenty of games have used full global illumination this generation, don't think I need to go back and provide the evidence for this again and again and again, but happy to do so.
But Lumen is not "far ahead" of anything we have seen this generation, granted most games would do pre-calculated GI and "baked" it into a scene, but not every game.
Unreal Engine 5 is taking a Hybrid approach... It uses screen space data for smaller micro scale assets (Again, nothing new) in conjunction with mesh signed distance fields for medium scale assets (Also nothing new) and then uses voxel based global illumination for the larger based assets. (Aka. SVOGI, nothing new.)
What is new is leveraging all three techniques at the same time, mostly out of a need to save on processing time.
But if we had the additional horsepower, we could have sidestepped this entirely... And we might still sidestep this entirely once developers play around with the hardware and learn what works best.
The real interesting and groundbreaking part to me in the UE5 demo was Nanite... Those micro details in that geometry really made the screen-space lighting really pop.
I am well aware of consoles being a cost-sensitive device... A statement I often use on these forums.
But as a consumer, the cost to build isn't important, more for your dollar is always better from a consumers point of view.
I agree on the Ram, I don't think it's limitations will become readily apparent though until the later half of the 9th gen, the SSD's will go to some lengths to hide those limitations.
But I think you can agree that having such hard limitations means developers tend to get adventurous and do some impressive technical feats.
Not all GPU/CPU tasks are Ram/Memory Bandwidth sensitive. Allot are, but not all.
An SSD either-way is never going to be fast enough to directly feed a GPU the necessary bandwidth to handle modern gaming, it can help us make better use of limited Ram pools though.
Console manufacturers had to strike a balance... Sony's balanced leans slightly in favor of I/O and Microsoft's balance leans slightly in favor of computation, who made the right choices? I guess we just need the games to definitely decide on that.
I think 60fps games will be more common in the 9th gen afforded by the jump in CPU and GPU capabilities, but there are probably going to be allot of AAA games that stick to 30fps due to developers prioritizing graphics over framerate, which is fine and entirely expected from consoles.
Resolution is probably going to be less of an importance... Right now the Playstation 4 Pro and Xbox Series X were chasing resolution, expending a ton of resources in the process rather than significantly bolstering relative image quality over the base consoles... There is likely going to be a bigger emphasis on frame reconstruction techniques in order to run games at a lower resolution and frame-reconstruct to a higher one.
The PC will likely still run resolutions without such shenanigans, but if we want those generational increases in visuals... Something needs to give.
The Xbox Series X also has more texturing capabilities than the Playstation 5 afforded by it's higher Texture Mapping Unit counts and memory bandwidth, where the Playstation 5 should pull ahead is swapping out higher quality textures more often and using them more extensively.
It's one of those... "Xbox has an advantage here, Playstation an advantage there". - What it means for games though needs to be demonstrated.
Geometry culling isn't actually a new thing... AMD for example is leveraging the Hyper-Z technology that ATI pioneered with the Radeon 7500/R100 series of GPU's from back in the year 2000 which would cull geometry out of view/hidden by another object.
With nVidia's Maxwell, nVidia introduce Draw Stream Binning Rasterization which did a similar thing but via a tiled approach which saved a heap of processing and bandwidth... AMD then pushed that technology with Vega (Although was ineffectual...) and refined it further with Navi.
The UE5 approach does things a little differently and not relying on hardware... I don't see any reason why the Xbox Series X with it's SSD couldn't do the same as the Playstation 5 with a few extra caveats.
Guess the games will prove it all.
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying Nintendo's approach was the "right" one, just saying that Nintendo has never had to develop games with mechanical hard drives in mind.
The Switch's Cart is capped at around 100MB/s if memory serves me right, essentially a Nintendo 64 cart offers twice the performance as a Switch Cart, it's still a speedy transfer rate relative to the paltry memory bandwidth of the console though.
Tegra does have hardware decompression logic blocks as well, it's leveraging relatively modern mobile technology... So things like tiled based draw stream binning rasterization, delta colour compression and so forth are all in, which is why the console seems to be able to do things outside of what the raw spec sheet numbers would otherwise imply.
In saying that, I am genuinely excited for the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X. I have both on pre-order... A first time for me.
|
