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Forums - Sony Discussion - PS4 'isn't quite as powerful as Epic was hoping for,' Digital Foundry reports

Hynad on 04 April 2013
J_Allard said:
Hynad said:
J_Allard said:
Argh_College said:
People were really expecting Ps4 to beat 3000$ Pcs?

LOL

iTs all about Games not Power, Ps4 will bring much better ad enjoyable experiences to Gamers than Pc in the NExt 5 years.

Do you get your PC components gold plated or something? lol @ $3,000.


You understand very well what he meant. His point stands. A gaming PC that beats the PS4's performances is going to cost you a lot more than a PS4.

No, it doesn't stand. Because we don't know everything about the PS4 and everything about the PC market by the time the PS4 launches. Either way, $3,000 is crazy. You could do it for less than 1/3 of that.

Anyway more on topic, the fact that they had to remove SVOGI should pretty much confirm that the consoles were not as powerful as Epic had hoped for. Although, that's not neccessarily a bad thing. But it does suck that we're not even into next gen and it would appear that consoles are already holding PC's back again.

Holding PC's back? There's nothing preventing devs from using SVOGI for the PC versions of their games... ¬_¬

As for the first part of your post, that's bad faith at best. But that's to be expected with you. We're talking about the PS4/Sony, after all.



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theprof00 on 04 April 2013

Anyhow, sony already said that specs aren't final, hopefully those aren't empty promises.



J_Allard on 04 April 2013

There's nothing bad faith there. Do you know everything inside the PS4? Do you know the price of components in Nov/Dec 2013? No? Ok then. Nothing I am saying is negative or bad towards Sony.

Epic has apparently pulled SVOGI out of UE4 altogether, not just the PS4 tech demo. So we're already seeing consoles affect the PC market.



Hynad on 04 April 2013
Kynes said:
theprof00 said:
Slimebeast said:
Hynad said:

When did Epic say that, exactly?

That article is misleading and missed something really important in Digital Foundry's analysis.

A nice update directly from Epic themselves:


Update: Brian Karis, senior graphics programmer at Epic Games adds some more insight in the comments below, explaining some of the more obvious differences - particularly in terms of the very different lighting schemes. At the technical level, the two demos are closer than it seems:

"The biggest changes actually came from the merging of two separate cinematics, the original Elemental and the extended Elemental we showed at PS4's launch event. Each had different sun directions and required some compromises to join them. This resulted in some major lighting differences that aren't platform related but were due to it being a joined cinematic. Another effect, in the original you could see the mountains through the door where in the merged one we made the view through the door white since the mountains outside were no longer the same. Same deal with the mountain fly by. The old mountain range doesn't exist in the new one. These changes from the merge make direct comparisons somewhat inaccurate.

"Feature wise most everything is the same, AA resolution, meshes, textures (PS4 has tons of memory), DOF (I assure you both use the same Bokeh DOF, not sure why that one shot has different focal range), motion blur.

"Biggest differences are SVOGI has been replaced with a more efficient GI solution, a slight scale down in the number of particles for some FX, and tessellation is broken on ps4 in the current build which the lava used for displacement. We will fix the tessellation in the future."

So yeah, this article is bullcrap, and fishing for clicks at the expense of integrity.

No it's not. It's a perfectly valid conclusion to draw when you realize what features are missing from the PS4 demo compared to the PC demo, and your quoted statement by Epic shows they were unable to deny that. Instead it confirms exactly those missing features that Epic, just like all gamers, had high hopes for:

* lack of SVO global illumination 

* and less particles on the PS4 version

See bolded


Non real time global illumination is always more efficient, but much less realistic. It's not a good thing having to use pre-baked illumination, it's used because it has much less performance penalty, not because it is better visually. That alone tells us that the performance difference is there, but anyone with hardware knowledge could have said it before any tech demo.

Yet GI can look just as good as SVOGI depending on what the content is and how it is implemented. SVOGI is neat, but not having it in games isn't a game breaker. Games will still look gorgeous. In fact, I don't think most people will notice any significant difference between the 2 methods.

And the judge is still out on whether or not that feature is possible on the PS4 down the line. When engines for the console get mature.



Carpevi on 04 April 2013

If they present their new engine saying "this is how new generation looks like", and even before the new generation console arrive to the market, they have to remove SVOGI or another "visual trick", then yes, the consoles are not as powerful as Epic hoped. If not, what were they calling "new generation?"..."expensive PC"? New generation PC's doesn't exist.



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Slimebeast on 04 April 2013
theprof00 said:
Slimebeast said:
Hynad said:

When did Epic say that, exactly?

That article is misleading and missed something really important in Digital Foundry's analysis.

A nice update directly from Epic themselves:


Update: Brian Karis, senior graphics programmer at Epic Games adds some more insight in the comments below, explaining some of the more obvious differences - particularly in terms of the very different lighting schemes. At the technical level, the two demos are closer than it seems:

"The biggest changes actually came from the merging of two separate cinematics, the original Elemental and the extended Elemental we showed at PS4's launch event. Each had different sun directions and required some compromises to join them. This resulted in some major lighting differences that aren't platform related but were due to it being a joined cinematic. Another effect, in the original you could see the mountains through the door where in the merged one we made the view through the door white since the mountains outside were no longer the same. Same deal with the mountain fly by. The old mountain range doesn't exist in the new one. These changes from the merge make direct comparisons somewhat inaccurate.

"Feature wise most everything is the same, AA resolution, meshes, textures (PS4 has tons of memory), DOF (I assure you both use the same Bokeh DOF, not sure why that one shot has different focal range), motion blur.

"Biggest differences are SVOGI has been replaced with a more efficient GI solution, a slight scale down in the number of particles for some FX, and tessellation is broken on ps4 in the current build which the lava used for displacement. We will fix the tessellation in the future."

So yeah, this article is bullcrap, and fishing for clicks at the expense of integrity.

No it's not. It's a perfectly valid conclusion to draw when you realize what features are missing from the PS4 demo compared to the PC demo, and your quoted statement by Epic shows they were unable to deny that. Instead it confirms exactly those missing features that Epic, just like all gamers, had high hopes for:

* lack of SVO global illumination 

* and less particles on the PS4 version

See bolded

Yes, because replacing dynamic global illumination with an obsolete UE3 feature into the console version of UE4 was surely at the top of Epic's wish list.



Kynes on 04 April 2013
Hynad said:
Kynes said:
theprof00 said:
Slimebeast said:
Hynad said:

When did Epic say that, exactly?

That article is misleading and missed something really important in Digital Foundry's analysis.

A nice update directly from Epic themselves:


Update: Brian Karis, senior graphics programmer at Epic Games adds some more insight in the comments below, explaining some of the more obvious differences - particularly in terms of the very different lighting schemes. At the technical level, the two demos are closer than it seems:

"The biggest changes actually came from the merging of two separate cinematics, the original Elemental and the extended Elemental we showed at PS4's launch event. Each had different sun directions and required some compromises to join them. This resulted in some major lighting differences that aren't platform related but were due to it being a joined cinematic. Another effect, in the original you could see the mountains through the door where in the merged one we made the view through the door white since the mountains outside were no longer the same. Same deal with the mountain fly by. The old mountain range doesn't exist in the new one. These changes from the merge make direct comparisons somewhat inaccurate.

"Feature wise most everything is the same, AA resolution, meshes, textures (PS4 has tons of memory), DOF (I assure you both use the same Bokeh DOF, not sure why that one shot has different focal range), motion blur.

"Biggest differences are SVOGI has been replaced with a more efficient GI solution, a slight scale down in the number of particles for some FX, and tessellation is broken on ps4 in the current build which the lava used for displacement. We will fix the tessellation in the future."

So yeah, this article is bullcrap, and fishing for clicks at the expense of integrity.

No it's not. It's a perfectly valid conclusion to draw when you realize what features are missing from the PS4 demo compared to the PC demo, and your quoted statement by Epic shows they were unable to deny that. Instead it confirms exactly those missing features that Epic, just like all gamers, had high hopes for:

* lack of SVO global illumination 

* and less particles on the PS4 version

See bolded


Non real time global illumination is always more efficient, but much less realistic. It's not a good thing having to use pre-baked illumination, it's used because it has much less performance penalty, not because it is better visually. That alone tells us that the performance difference is there, but anyone with hardware knowledge could have said it before any tech demo.

Yet GI can look just as good as SVOGI depending on what the content is and how it is implemented. SVOGI is neat, but not having it in games isn't a game breaker. Games will still look gorgeous. In fact, I don't think most people will notice any significant difference between the 2 methods.

And the judge is still out on whether or not that feature is possible on the PS4 down the line. When engines for the console get mature.

Only if SVOGI is badly implemented or the scene is really simple with a very low number of light sources. The advances in graphics aren't anymore about a higher resolution, or better textures, or more polygons... it's mainly improving the illumination of the scene, that's the main difference between cgi and realtime, and is where more performance is really useful. I'm not saying that PS4 is a weak console, I'm just saying that prebaked illumination is not what next gen console engines should aim for, and saying that it's not important is lying.



HoloDust on 04 April 2013

Honestly, lack of full scene dynamic GI (character and moving objects GI is still dynamic, even after replacing SVOGI with Lightmass) is bit of disappointment, but on the other hand, how many PCs currently would be able to run that....if we use Steam statistics, not more than 2-3 percent, if that much.

So, better question might be is SVOGI actually intended to run on anything in near future other than few selected cards that make up for extremely small market share? If PS4 and NextBox can't have it (and it's reasonable to assume that 720 also won't be able to run full dynamic GI), and only few percent of PCs can, for what hardware was Epic actually making UE4 version with SVOGI in the first place?



SENTIENT6 on 04 April 2013

LMAo some people are desperate. Quite sad, epic said the exact opposite, and it's early.

 

Considering the number of PC's that can run it at those settings are so small no one wil be happy.



psrock on 04 April 2013

Who cares. Sony , just give me $399 PS4 by november, thats all I ask.



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