General gaming discussion

Stone Deaf 4evr

Zero-Cool wrote: »

Ah okay, yeah PS Now is ****. You can now download PS4 games to your account though. They keep adding games that are free to PS Plus, absolute bollox. PS Now should be free or heavily discounted if you have PS Plus.

Amazon had 12 month subscriptions for 50 pounds at christmas, I'm gamesharing, so it works out as an even bigger bargain.

I will admit, that I've only played through one or two games from the catalog, but I've definitely more than made my money back. For kids or anyone who's strapped for cash its insane value.

TerrorFirmer

Spent the whole day playing games today, feels great. Four Apex wins, six POTG in Overwatch.

Life's grand.

PopePalpatine

I wish I had your luck. I got fucked by penalties and rammers in tonight's FIA races in GT Sport. I guess I needed a reminder I've got other games on my shelf.

davidmichaels

I have always love nfs underground 2 it was ana amazing and always the best game ever by nfs

Potential-Monke

Only talking with the lads in work, we'd love a remake of it. Just modern graphics, leave everything else as is.

That's all a lot of us want, a game where you can modify you car, arcade feel, but the cars don't go 'Super'. Like, NFSU2, the top car, iirc, was an R34 GTR. Now, the top car is a Pagini or Bugatti, Ferrari, etc. No one wants them. They're already fast and most games won't allow you to mod the look. Give us back our 'realistic' cars.

Mr Crispy

Frostpunk is coming to PS and XB. Available "summer".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-4yidfA0Wk

johnny_ultimate

Finished Minit earlier today - a pleasant, imaginative, short little game that's nothing spectacular but worth an hour or two of your time.

Only reason I bring this up is because I was a bit confused while playing - despite the game's core conceit of 'every life lasts a maximum of one minute', the in-game minute clearly wasn't actually a minute. Seemed around double that, although I never actually timed it. It was still completely playable (although the rare bursts of combat were oddly punishing), but it was super fast-paced and just felt strange.

Read a few reviews when I was done and they were all clearly suggesting 'each life is a minute', so that really confused me. Dug around a bit in the forums and turns out the game's timer is timed to frame rate or something. Playing on PC with a higher frame rate effectively doubled the speed of the game

In conclusion, if you're playing Minit, make sure a minute is actually a minute. Unless you want to play Half-Minit.

gizmo

Shacknews have a pretty cool long form article up on the making of Doom's latest episode, Sigil.

Icon of Sin: Doom and the Making of John Romero's Sigil

Definitely worth a read of anyone interested in the project.

Mr Crispy

First solid details about PS5, courtesy of Mark Cerny's chat with Wired. Details include;

• Backwards compatibility with PS4
• Ray tracing
• AMD custom APU
• 3D audio
• Custom SSD

TitianGerm

Darch Nemesis wrote: »

First solid details about PS5, courtesy of Mark Cerny's chat with Wired. Details include;

• Backwards compatibility with PS4
• Ray tracing
• AMD custom APU
• 3D audio
• Custom SSD

FPS tanks on a 2080TI when using RT. The GTX cards suffer even worse. Digital Foundry did a breakdown of them and a 1080TI was around 15-20FPS on the new Tomb Raider when RT was on (set to high I think). I can't imagine a console managing it at all.

https://youtu.be/TkY-20kdXl0

Retr0gamer

Ray tracing claim is likely nonsense.

Anyway an Amiga can do ray tracing. Doesn't mean you can get good FPS out of it. Ray tracing at 1080p with a 2080 ti is pushing it. It will be a disaster if they are targeting 4k

Unless they have a software solution to fake it.

marcbrophy

Well they currently fake 4k in general, so... :pac:

megaten

Delighted its going to have BC. I play games so slowly that I maybe only beat 3-6 a year so BC is really important for me.

super_furry

Backwards compatibility with PS4 is utterly essential given the size of people's digital library's now. Microsoft have set the standard with the 360 backwards compatibility and it's a relief to see that Sony will see sense on PS4 to PS5.

Good to see Mark Cerny behind the hardware again too, he did a great job on PS4.

Varik

If ray tracing was something they want to push, that was separate don't see why not.

A dedicated ray tracing ASIC, would be cheaper and using it would not be apply a computation loss elsewhere. These were already around but the fact that any ASIC will be readily outperformed in time isn't really an issue for console.

John Carmack wrote something years back about it and the disadvantages to rasterization, and that dedicated ray tracing cards for PC games weren't practical. Time have changed but this is releated to the closed console which don't have to worry too much about adoption of features for something like this. If the console manufactures could pay X per unit and only get a feature to write on the box it might be worth it for them.

THE WORLD MOST POWERFUL RAY TRACING CONSOLE

Penn

I would have been astonished if it didn't have BC at this stage for at least PS4 games. It'll be interesting to see if they can extend that to PS3 games, even in terms of being able to download PS3 games from the PS Store or PSNow rather than streaming. If they can do that (and presumably PS2 & PS1 games would therefore be included), all they need to do is make PSNow a proper competitor to GamePass.

Retr0gamer

Varik wrote: »

If ray tracing was something they want to push, that was separate don't see why not.

A dedicated ray tracing ASIC, would be cheaper and using it would not be apply a computation loss elsewhere. These were already around but the fact that any ASIC will be readily outperformed in time isn't really an issue for console.

AMD really haven't got one at the moment. We will wait and see what their answer is to Nvidia but ray tracing I feel just isn't there yet until you can do it at native resolution at 30-60 fps. the problem is with the move to 8k, ray tracing is just going to get way more expensive to perform.

I just feel even if this console comes out in next 18 months then ray tracing won't be viable on the system unless the user is willing to take a major hit in resolution. Maybe there'll be traditional lighting models available and optional ray tracing ones.

With the PS4 being so close to a PC, BC is a shoe in. Just would be great if they could get BC working for PS3 (which in turn will mean BC for the entire PS family).

Retr0gamer

Looks like a 2020 release so... Maybe enough time to get ray tracing to an acceptable level. I expected 2019. Still think we are 5 years away from it being viable.

ZiabR

Darch Nemesis wrote: »

First solid details about PS5, courtesy of Mark Cerny's chat with Wired. Details include;

• Backwards compatibility with PS4
• Ray tracing
• AMD custom APU
• 3D audio
• Custom SSD

Nothing really ground breaking here. The only real news is backwards compatibility. Sony really missed a beat here and Microsoft have gained ground because they were first to adopt it.

Ray Tracing is nothing new, has been on consoles for years. There were even some games on the PS4 that were presented using Ray Tracing.

AMD custom APU, nothing surprising here seeing as the last 2 generations of consoles have had custom APU.

3D audio is nice, but again something that you would almost expect on PS5.

Customer SSD, this is the way computing has been moving in the past few years. With the size of games and the speed of users internet connections, SSD is the obvious choice for gaming.

So really, we know nothing about the PS5 with the exception of backwards compatibility. Will it be PS3 and PS4 or just PS4. My bet is PS4 as the PS3 consoles architecture was completely different.

Unimpressed to say the least

Cordell

A dedicated ray tracing ASIC, would be cheaper and using it would not be apply a computation loss elsewhere

There is no such thing, an ASIC is both expensive to develop and expensive to run. The RTX cards have fixed function blocks (i.e. the raytracing ASIC) that are used for raytracing but the performance hit is massive.

J. Marston

I'm sure all those acronyms are cool and whoever Ray Tracing is, I'm sure he'll do a good job but will it do 60FPS on most/all games?

heebusjeebus

J. Marston wrote: »

I'm sure all those acronyms are cool and whoever Ray Tracing is, I'm sure he'll do a good job but will it do 60FPS?

I'd much prefer a smooth 60fps that whatever gubbins raytracing is going to provide anyway. Screenspace reflections are perfectly adequate IMO.
The talk in the wired article about how ray tracing being used to simulate if an NPC can hear you or not is a great idea and would be a far better use of the technology.

heebusjeebus

Another thought, would the 8 core CPU be powerful enough to cover backwards compatibility with the PS3?

Retr0gamer

heebusjeebus wrote: »

Another thought, would the 8 core CPU be powerful enough to cover backwards compatibility with the PS3?

I'm sure most modern PCs are more than capable of the task even if it's not very accurate. It's just going to be a bitch to code which is the big question mark.

Captain Chaos

heebusjeebus wrote: »

Another thought, would the 8 core CPU be powerful enough to cover backwards compatibility with the PS3?

Its because of the PS3s Cell cpu, like the PS2s Emotion Engine, the games were optimised to run with them so they are hard to emulate. Hard to do backwards compatibility.

The Xbox360 was basically a locked down PC, like Xbox and PS4 so they are easy to do backwards compatibility for.

heebusjeebus

Captain Chaos wrote: »

Its because of the PS3s Cell cpu, like the PS2s Emotion Engine, the games were optimised to run with them so they are hard to emulate. Hard to do backwards compatibility.

The Xbox360 was basically a locked down PC, like Xbox and PS4 so they are easy to do backwards compatibility for.

I've played around with RPCS3, trying to get Demon's Souls running and it ran like a pig on my PC

If Sony could just re-master DeS I wouldn't need to worry about backwards compatibility!

Varik

Cordell wrote: »

There is no such thing, an ASIC is both expensive to develop and expensive to run. The RTX cards have fixed function blocks (i.e. the raytracing ASIC) that are used for raytracing but the performance hit is massive.

Caustic Graphics/Imagination Tech have a google.

Retr0gamer

Captain Chaos wrote: »

Its because of the PS3s Cell cpu, like the PS2s Emotion Engine, the games were optimised to run with them so they are hard to emulate. Hard to do backwards compatibility.

The Xbox360 was basically a locked down PC, like Xbox and PS4 so they are easy to do backwards compatibility for.

The Xbox 360 was nothing like a PC, it has more in common with the Cell architecture with 3 Power PC cores with two threads each. The eDRAM setup on the GPU also doesn't help matters. It's about as tough to emulate as the PS3. It was easier to code for because it had similarities to the PS2 with the eDRAM setup. The PS2 was a difficult machine to work with but developers got used to the system. Xbox 360 was also a much better designed system with unified memory unlike the PS3.

The 360 is emulated by the One because Microsoft need every advantage they can. Sony on the other hand could do it on PS4 at great expense but when you are so far in the lead why bother.

K.O.Kiki

heebusjeebus wrote: »

Another thought, would the 8 core CPU be powerful enough to cover backwards compatibility with the PS3?

Probably not unless it's running at high frequency (3GHz+).

For all the talk of "Ray tracing sucks on RTX cards" - that's Nvidia's implementation using Tensor cores in their Turing GPUs.

We haven't even seen AMD's implementation yet, so no one knows what the performance impact will be.

That said: anyone that thinks ray tracing is bad or unnecessary doesn't get that it would enable, finally, CGI-quality visuals in-game.

Look up any ray tracing demo & tell me you DON'T want this to be possible :eek:

ERG89

Hopefully backwards compatibility means less last gen ports, in particular indie games not being left on another system as I have I'd say 100-ish ones on PS4 between PS+ & my own wallet