SSD and 60 fps was the biggest perceptible change this gen for me. Going from 1 minute to boot the console, 1 minute to start the game and 1 minute to load a save to just 60s to jump straight into gameplay changes how one interacts with the console.
Similarly, it may not seem like a lot but 30 fps > 60 fps is a 16.66ms difference while 60 -> 120 is 8.33ms difference.
Neither of these change how a game looks. One may argue chasing next gen graphics has lead to poorer image quality (we’re looking at 720p upscaled to 4k), so staying same as previous gen but 60 or even 120 fps would’ve been a much better route in hindsight.
With this knowledge, I feel the next gen might give us 120 and 240 fps games (frame generation might help to ease CPU burden) for cross gen stuff while most games would burn themselves trying to path trace at 720p at 40 fps and abuse upscaling and frame generation to pass it off as 4k120 (yes that’s 2 ai frames between 2 real frames)
We’re certainly at a point where chasing higher and higher fidelity is adding development cost which doesn’t often pay off in terms of sales.
The future hardware still can push more pixels than what we’re experiencing with these consoles and high end PC hardware, but is the game more fun or enticing because of that?
He mentioned that game design and genre development is where innovation is going to lie in the future and I hope that’s the future we see
I think AI will help reduce the dev costs over time. I mean that it can assist with uprezing things and generative placement of objects and textures is only going to get better.
I do not mean that ai should ever be used to creat me games or assets whole cloth.
Yeah for sure that could increase productivity. Tbh I’m not sure how much the process can benefit from AI, for sure there are applications but I wasn’t under the impression developers would be multiple times more productive. Maybe I’m wrong there.
At this point the evidence is mounting that the productivity boost through AI for software development is somewhere between negligible and negative.
Layden says releasing PC versions of PlayStation games years after they first arrive on the console causes plenty of anger among Sony fans, so Xbox releases from PlayStation Studios would result in even more outcry, potentially harming Sony’s brand reputation. “I don’t know if the juice is worth the squeeze,” he said.
Waiting years to release on PC causes anger among Sony fans?
If he has no new ideas for consoles that’s why he’s a former boss.
I mean, major leaps are hard to come by in all hardware, not just console. Everything since about the PS2 has been slow and steady iterations. Major leaps each time seemed to be PS3 era upping the RAM dramatically, and PS4 era forcing games to be installed to HDD. This gen was SSDs with a sprinkling of RT.
SSDs were a major one. The seek time on a traditional spinning HDD is about the same as latency on your internet connection halfway across the country. Boot a laptop on HDD now and it’s so slow you’ll think it’s broken.
Ray Tracing has tried, but needs to be several orders of magnitude more powerful to realistically be able to replace traditional rendering at the quality levels gamers expect. So it’ll be just for a bit of reflections and nicer lighting here and there.
I guess VRR/FreeSync/GSync is nice as well. Moving to that means games can run as fast as they are able on lower end hardware. There’s a world of difference between a 40-50fps VRR display and a 60fps display skipping frames.
Clearly he never watched the PS9 commercials.
