Developer Claims Difference in PS5 and Xbox Series X GPU Will Matter More in a Year or 2 - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 29 March 2023 / 32,320 Views
Caverns of Mars: Recharged game designer and producer Tadas Migauskas speaking with GamingBolt discussed the power of the graphics cards in the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles.
He said that the power difference, which is pretty small, won't make much of a difference for another year or two when newer rendering approaches are developed. The new rendering tools he expects to be pushed using the power of the GPUs of the consoles.
"You can see a general trend in games for consoles of previous generations – it takes a few years and a launch title or two for developers to realize and utilize the hardware capabilities," said Migauskas.
"At the moment, the impact on development is still quite low. A ~15% increase is significant, but both GPUs are so powerful, most developers probably won’t bat an eye. You can do a bit more on one of them. And since most of the games launch on both of the consoles, you have to work with the lowest common denominator.
"In a year or two, when newer rendering approaches are developed, more rendering work will be expected to be pushed through the GPU pipelines. Then, it’s likely developers with more resources, mainly AAA companies using custom engines, will try to adhere to platform differences increasingly more."
The majority of games released on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S have been multiplatform and released on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It is mainly starting this year there will be more games skipping the last generation consoles.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
More Articles
The console with the leading sales is the only one that really matters for 3rd party stuff as it's the lead development priority. Always has been.
Nice. Should I wait for resident evil 4 on Switch?
Sure- Wait as long as you like.👍
Hopefully soon like 6 months . I have a PS5 and desperately wanna play resident evil 4 but it would be better to play it on the go
Don't rule out a cloud version and likely a native port to Switch 2.
If he lives in Japan =p
LOL! im sure you know he means PS5 and Series
Talking about PS5. It leads sales over Series X so developers will prioritize PS5 over Xbox. It will be up to 1st parties to show any real difference in hardware power.
Resident Evil 4 is already on the Switch, just not the new remake :P
Depends who has the marketing rights to the game.
Matter for the number craving folks, not really for anyone else. the difference in specs even if could be tapped into 100% would not change much. maybe a fewer less frames drops here and there. Maybe native 4k vs FSR 4k from 1800P at most.
Not true. Advancement in ai, physics, much greater draw distances and rendered detail instantly , all running at high res and at 60 to 120 fps. Some game changing features.
Most games I have played still have drawn in and pop up and it isn't limited to distant objects.
Things will change when they start developing exclusively for the newer consoles and start taking advantage of the new architecure and the software for it.
And I wouldn't be surprised if we see a game that demonstrates hair growth by way of real time five o'clock shadows😊 while the same old problems of the past 30 odd years stay with us.
you really think so, shifting to ray traced? ?
We have already started to see RT Global Illumination rendering pipelines in engines such as Unreal already.
People said the same thing with the Xbox One/Playstation 4.
AMD historically had inferior Tessellation performance to nVidia, but once developers had transitioned to 8th gen fully, we finally saw those geometry units put to full use in an effective way, even though they were pretty average capability-wise in Graphics Core Next.
At the moment developers are just bolting on RT Shadows and Reflections, rather than shifting their lighting model, but that will change at some point... Once we cut the cord with 8th gen hardware.
I don't disagree with with seeing improved rt this gen , but what confuses me is on the one hand you talk about how Zen 2 is lacking when it comes to high end PC games let alone next gen consoles and that's before throwing RT jobs at it , but in the next breathe you state that we will see a console paradigm shift late in the gen, my stance is we will see improvements and more implementation of RT driven by the likes UE5 but Zen 2 per your observations means a full paradigm shift wont happen till the following gen.
The RT will eat up CPU time... Because not all tasks related to Ray Tracing is offloaded onto the GPU yet.
That means the "increased performance" of Zen 2 over the older Cat cores isn't going to be as pronounced when we need to dedicate a chunk of those resources to graphics duties.
It will mean more 30fps titles.
Current Zen 2 CPU's do get hit hard on PC when you start throwing in Ray Tracing, many games won't hit 60fps because of the load, but will happily operate at 30fps.
Zen 4 chips offer almost twice the performance.
There is a paradigm shift happening. And that is in regards to Ray Tracing and lighting.
Metro Exodus for example uses Ray Traced Global Illumination and looks the part.
Games like Cyberpunk has Ray Traced Global Illumination on PC and it looks incredible.
Pretty much every game that uses Unreal Engine 5 will have Ray Tracing global illumination...
Albeit a highly optimized and hybrid form of it.
It uses multiple forms of ray-tracing including screen-tracing (SSRT), Signed Distance Fields (SDFs), and Mesh Distance Fields (MDFs) in parallel to calculate the global illumination.
So again, there is a massive fundamental shift in the way we handle lighting this generation.
The paradigm shift is happening now and will happen all generation long. - Not sure which part has you confused?
These things start to gain traction and evolve over the course of a generation.
We saw it with Tessellation in generation 8.
We saw it with deferred rendering in Generation 7.
We saw it with shading in Generation 6.
This generation is all about Ray Traced/Bounce Lighting... And that is absolutely a paradigm shift compared to the lighting models we saw on previous console generations.
Once again not arguing about ray tracing in general, I will spell it out for you , you talked about there will be a paradigm shift once cross gen is finished compared to the gen now regarding CONSOLES but having stated that you then argued against Zen 2 's capabilities to deliver that paradigm shift.
I agree this gen kicked off RT and that shift was already underway, across the Industry, so my argument isn't that there isn't a paradigm shift, its your use of the term paradigm when describing RT in the later half of the console gen since that infers we will see a fundamental RT change during the later half of the console gen on top of the usual improvements that we see in tech over the gen.
I don't see anything that would lead us to that conclusion, what I see is the shift that started with this gen continuing to improve and become more cemented in the industry just like all the other mentioned tech did, sure we will see more RT console games in the later half of the console gen as those newer games come to market but I wouldn't hail that as paradigm shift.
Yes that much is correct but the difference have never been that small before. Both have the same feature and tech meaning they are very much comparable based on clocks for the CPU (3.8/3.5 max diff or ~8.5%) and Tflops on the GPU(12.155/10.28 or ~18.2% ).
Yes the series X may have an advantage with ray tracing but isn't specially powerfully either in meaning that while yes the paradigm may very well shift deeply with PC in that regards it will continue to saw limited use on both those 9th gen system. You also have to take into account API options as Ps5 and series X/S don't have a common API which may muddy things a bit based on every options strength and weakness.
Anyway long post to say yes it may have some degree of benefits but, All in all the difference in image fidelity should remain pretty marginal and in the vast majority of case you will more than likely require Digital Foundry to point them out that's why I said "Matter for the number craving folks, not really for anyone else".
In 1 or 2 years, we have the PS5 pro.
Yeah that's what I've always meant by it just doesn't feel like the "next-gen" has truly started yet.
The last-gen consoles were very CPU limited, but that's been alleviated big time this current-gen. I'm really anxious to see how games will start to evolve to match the power of these new consoles over the coming few years.
Cross-gen being the norm has meant that high frame-rate on current-gen consoles has been the norm. Often 30 FPS on last-gen and 60 (or even 120) FPS on this gen. I'm concerned that once titles are no longer cross-gen, that they'll start targeting 30 FPS for current-gen titles to get higher resolutions and levels of detail, and I don't want that.
With any luck it'll continue to be selectable (performance mode vs. quality mode), but I'm fearful that it won't be.
I think most developers will continue to offer a choice between 30 fps fidelity modes and 60 fps performance modes, that seems to have become the norm for many devs.
It's becoming the norm for cross-gen titles, agreed. My concern is whether it will stay the norm past that, as developers start having trouble even hitting 30 FPS for current-gen-only titles as they start to ramp up LoD.
The current consoles are still CPU limited... 8x moderately clocked Zen 2 cores isn't exactly anything to write home about in 2023 when Zen 4 can offer almost double the performance... Plus Microsoft/Sony reserve CPU resources for the OS and Background tasks, so you don't get all those Cores for gaming anyway.
Still far better than the cat cores in the last gen devices, but AMD has moved quickly in the CPU space over the last couple of years and Zen 2 isn't exactly a shining point in current high-end games on PC, let alone next-gen... Especially once you start throwing Ray Tracing jobs at it.
To be fair, CPU on PCs are way more overloaded with OS and Background Stuff. One of the greatest advantage of a console is the "Focus" in the main task of runing a game, PC ( in especial windows PC) are full with side funcitions related to OS and other apps.
I remember watching a documentary about OG Xbox and that the team was tasked to run Windows on the console, It didn't work. Bill Gates got furious but in the end he needed to undrestand consoles can't Just follow PC rules.
The resource demands for the console Operating Systems+Background tasks is greater than Windows.
Sony dedicates one and a half Zen 2 @ 3.5Ghz CPU cores for that task and 2GB of Ram, 24/7.
Microsoft dedicates an entire Zen 2 @ 3.8Ghz CPU core for that task and 2.5GB of Ram, 24/7.
I can assure you, Windows on PC does not use an entire core and 2GB of Ram 24/7 just to function or do light duties like the consoles... And I use such devices in industrial settings.
The OG Xbox is also a different kettle of fish, it didn't have PC levels of Ram... For comparison my PC in that era had 1024MB of Ram... The OG Xbox? A pathetic 64MB.
But Microsoft still got a Windows Kernel on it. Go figure.
Ironically, the least CPU-constrained system is the Series S. Nearly the same CPU as the Series X, but being asked to deal with a less.
The bottleneck in the Series S is the amount of RAM... they went with 10 GB, and they probably should have gone with 12 GB instead. Oh well, live and learn.
Nice, maybe they will finally be able to make Series X games run as smoothly as they run on the PS5 and Digital Foundry won't have to be so puzzled about it.
Id imagine thats when the ps5 pro will land and negate the the difference.
Xbox series S will still be the potato regardless.
Which has sold 1.5 times more than the X.
Which will have to be catered for!
So the tools are coming?
Because certainly this dev certainly works in games that are the cutting edge of technical achievement =p
And if he is saying the lowest common denominator, that would be Series S, so is he saying S will hold the others down?
Well obviously. Games are still made with cross gen in mind. Curious to see these consoles unshackled and hitting their peaks.
Been hearing something like this since they announced the consoles and the "experts" from vgchartz been saying it would be such a diffenrence it was not even funny since when they got announced too.
By 2030 Series X will show a major difference against PS5 =p
A monstrous difference, because don't forget, it's a Monster!
It eats monsters for breakfast.
