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Console Wars Thread! PS4 vs. Xbox One vs. Wii U Fight!

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout' started by Mr.Scarface, Dec 22, 2013.

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RC Cola Member

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Sony sent out a tweet, revealing their dev clause that lists which platforms you cannot release on:
https://twitter.com/amboyes/status/443892294056304640/photo/1

#1501 RC Cola, Mar 12, 2014

KingLeoric Member

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Cool list, I wish more companies' list is like this one.

#1502 KingLeoric, Mar 12, 2014
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#1503 ChankMcStank, Mar 12, 2014
Pizza_Da_Hut I put on pants for this?

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ChankMcStank said: ↑

Click to expand...

I can only assume that a man who looks like Bill Gates touched you as a child. Its ok, the bad man can't hurt you anymore...

#1504 Pizza_Da_Hut, Mar 12, 2014
Mr.Scarface Member

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Pizza_Da_Hut said: ↑

I can only assume that a man who looks like Bill Gates touched you as a child. Its ok, the bad man can't hurt you anymore...
Click to expand...

Sony and their fanboys are trying too hard. If the XB1 is no threat, why are are they talking about it so much? Can't keep the name out of their mouths. Or maybe Second Son is just another game and there is not another game exclusive close to release to get the buzz back?

#1505 Mr.Scarface, Mar 13, 2014
ChankMcStank Member

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Pizza_Da_Hut said: ↑

I can only assume that a man who looks like Bill Gates touched you as a child. Its ok, the bad man can't hurt you anymore...
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's why I game on the Windows.

#1506 ChankMcStank, Mar 13, 2014
Pizza_Da_Hut I put on pants for this?

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ChankMcStank said: ↑

Yeah, that's why I game on the Windows.
Click to expand...

Maybe you are starting to fall in love with your captor? No matter, my joke is still funnier than yours.

#1507 Pizza_Da_Hut, Mar 13, 2014

ChankMcStank Member

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Sorry to burst your bubbles, I root for the master race

I couldn't give two ****s about your console systems. I just found that GIF funny. NEXT GEN, HERE WE COME!

#1508 ChankMcStank, Mar 13, 2014
Pizza_Da_Hut I put on pants for this?

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ChankMcStank said: ↑

Sorry to burst your bubbles, I root for the master race

I couldn't give two ****s about your console systems. I just found that GIF funny. NEXT GEN, HERE WE COME!
Click to expand...

Then why even post here unless to be a troll? The douchbaggery is strong with this one.

#1509 Pizza_Da_Hut, Mar 13, 2014
ChankMcStank Member

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It was console-related. Why you mad doe?

#1510 ChankMcStank, Mar 13, 2014
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ChankMcStank said: ↑

Sorry to burst your bubbles, I root for the master race

I couldn't give two ****s about your console systems. I just found that GIF funny. NEXT GEN, HERE WE COME!
Click to expand...

How does 2560x1440 resolution at 60 fps compare to XBO at 792P? About the same?

#1511 Bandwagoner, Mar 13, 2014
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Bandwagoner said: ↑

How does 2560x1440 resolution at 60 fps compare to XBO at 792P? About the same?
Click to expand...

Wouldn't know. Currently doing 1080p @ 120FPS.

#1512 ChankMcStank, Mar 13, 2014
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720p/30fps games are not that bad. I enjoyed them on PS3.

#1513 KingLeoric, Mar 13, 2014

seclusion rip chadwick

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I'm playing titanfall at 120 fps in 1080p with everything on high, and 4X MSAA. I would say I have a mid level PC at this point (core i5/8 gb ram/gtx 670).

I'm just going to guess that I get more frames than people on Xbox. Anyway, it's delightful. Nothing against anyone with an Xbox (personally I wish I could play on my PS4 too), just figured I'd respond there.

#1514 seclusion, Mar 13, 2014
RC Cola Member

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There's a very good (IMO) article about the tech behind Titanfall at Digital Foundry:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-titanfall-tech-interview
They have a good discussion with the lead engineer at Respawn, and he's pretty honest and open about what they did/are doing with the game. Some things seemed a bit odd, but a good read nevertheless (also some info on what to expect in the future as far as updates).

Posted this in the Titanfall thread so fans of the game could read it. But I also decided to post some of it here, in case anything related to CONSOLE WARS gets started. It would be better to have that stuff here vs the other thread.

Some interesting points...

About the Cloud:

What made the situation somewhat unique is that it was the first time that Microsoft's Azure cloud platform had really been stress-tested for gameplay. Respawn isn't making any grand claims about the cloud as a gateway to a next-gen nirvana ("In the end it's just a bunch of computer capacity. You can do anything with the cloud that you can do with a bunch of computers," says Baker) but it is a highly innovative approach to tackling the issue of multiplayer infrastructure which could open the door to a wider array of developers.

Rather than buying a whole bunch of dedicated servers, Titanfall accesses Microsoft's existing cloud network, with servers spooling up on demand. When there's no demand, those same servers will service Azure's existing customers. Client-side, Titanfall presents a dedicated server experience much like any other but from the developer and publisher perspective, the financials in launching an ambitious online game change radically.

"The biggest thing is that it allows people to take a little more risk. In the past you would have a game where you're like, 'OK, we have a game where we think we're going to get 10 million people play it day one,' and you buy a bunch of servers for day one... You need to have a lot of servers available to make the game super popular and, if not, you lose lots of money. On the opposite side, if you don't have a lot of servers on day one you're kind of screwed... Now nobody has to buy servers just in case they're going to be super-successful."

Titanfall may well be one of the most hyped and well-funded launches of 2014, but the implications here are intriguing - smaller developers can tap into the Azure infrastructure and don't have to take on the enormous financial burden of buying a server network with worldwide coverage. Bespoke server code created by the developer runs on Azure, and it could be tasked to do anything. In Respawn's case, it's a dedicated server, with trimmings - for example, running the AI cannon fodder drones that populate the levels. There is potential here for something more, and a mature network to make it happen. Perhaps the biggest revolution of Microsoft's cloud isn't game-changing graphics, but instead accessibility. The only question really is how much CPU resource is given to game creators - and did Respawn need to push Microsoft for functionality that simply wasn't present?

"We were mostly using local servers here while we were developing. We always want more CPU so there was a little going back and forth with Microsoft trying to get more CPU and to get the servers up faster," notes Baker.
Click to expand...

There's a bit more about Azure in the article, but I think this is one of the better write-ups about what this "Cloud" can offer to games. It IS really exciting, once you put it in the right perspective. Of course, it remains to be seen if just ANYBODY can get this treatment (could Digital Extremes put out a game that requires a lot of CPU processing from Azure?), but I guess that will be answered over time.

No texture streaming?

"No, we have a lot of high-res textures. We talked a lot about having some kind of mega-texture support or streaming but it's a multiplayer game, you drop in anywhere, you move around quickly," Baker says. "If we added streaming, we could use a lot less RAM for the same visual quality - if you were sitting still and looking in the same direction. But given that you're spinning around, wall-running and jumping through windows all over the place all the time, we didn't have a whole lot of confidence in texture-streaming without getting textures delayed a lot."
Click to expand...

Hmm...I guess. Though I'm a bit surprised they didn't get some sort of acceptable texture streaming implemented (I don't know if I completely buy this excuse). Might have resulted in better textures. *shrug*

Required disk space on PC:

Another performance worry was tackled with sheer disk space - the 48GB install has around 35GB of uncompressed audio. Most games use compressed sound files, but Respawn would rather spend CPU time on running the game as opposed to unpacking audio files on the fly. This isn't a problem on Xbox One - and wouldn't be on PlayStation 4 in theory - as the next-gen consoles have dedicated onboard media engines for handling compressed audio.

"On a higher PC it wouldn't be an issue," points out Baker. "On a medium or moderate PC, it wouldn't be an issue, it's that on a two-core [machine] with where our min spec is, we couldn't dedicate those resources to audio."

An optional download would have been our preference, but Respawn's philosophy appears to be all about keeping things as light as possible in order to service the gameplay. Titanfall doesn't have the same kind of advanced audio processing as Battlefield 4 or Killzone: Shadow Fall. It doesn't embrace computationally expensive deferred lighting solutions. The focus is entirely different: key to the firm's ethos is pursuit of low-latency controls, the best possible 'handshake' between the player and the game.
Click to expand...

This kind of sounds like an excuse too...but sure.

I wonder how many of these low-spec machines will actually be playing the game? I know they targeted very low minimum specs, but I'm curious to see if that was really worth it.

Some of those reasons why it is so hard to get 1080p on XBO:

Titanfall may have shipped, but from what Respawn is telling us, the game is still being tightened up and improved. Systems will continue to be optimised, hopefully yielding better overall performance, while there may be changes to the options available to PC owners - only hardware anti-aliasing is supported right now, but FXAA may be included too for those whose GPU resources are limited. Even those running higher-end GPUs could benefit here - for example, running the game at 4K resolution.

Respawn is also talking about what sounds rather like extensive Xbox One optimisations, including a revision for the 1408x792 native rendering resolution of the game on the Microsoft console.

"We've been experimenting with making it higher and lower. One of the big tricks is how much ESRAM we're going to use, so we're thinking of not using hardware MSAA and instead using FXAA to make it so we don't have to have this larger render target," Baker tells us. "We're going to experiment. The target is either 1080p non-anti-aliased or 900p with FXAA. We're trying to optimise... we don't want to give up anything for higher res. So far we're not 100 per cent happy with any of the options. We're still working on it. For day one it's not going to change. We're still looking at it for post-day one. We're likely to increase resolution after we ship."

The utilisation of 2x multi-sampling anti-aliasing is a lock for the initial rollout of the Xbox One code, and GPU optimisations are promised for smoother performance on the Microsoft console. As our beta analysis indicated, there's a long way to go there - Titanfall's frame-rate clearly falls short in the most intense action, which is really where the higher frame-rate is needed most in our opinion.

"A lot of the performance is on the GPU side. There's still room for optimisation and we're still working on it," Baker says. "Ideally it would have been a rock-solid 60 all the time when we shipped but obviously when there's big fights going on, lots of particle effects, lots of physics objects... we're still working to condense the systems, make them more parallel so we can hit 60 all the time, ideally."

Titanfall's '792p' resolution and frame-rate dips call into question - once again - the power of the Xbox One's hardware architecture. The GPU - based on AMD's Bonaire part - seems to be falling well short of the sort of performance we would expect from the architecture, making us wonder if the custom ESRAM is proving to be more of a problem than it should be.

"We're just trying to put as much trust in it as we can. It's an extra thing you have to manage but if it makes the game run better it's better than not having it, obviously," says Baker. "We've iterated on it - whether the shadow maps should be in there, whether it's better to have more render targets, whether some of the textures we use a lot should be in there. We played with it a lot and it definitely helps performance so if it wasn't there, it would be bad [laughs]."
Click to expand...

Will MS be giving back some of those GPU resources?

It's known that Microsoft is attempting to free up precious graphics resources. Last year, the Xbox One architects told us that the GPU "time-slice" - the amount of processing time reserved by the operating system for elements like Kinect - would be made available to game developers. Respawn confirms that this hasn't happened yet.

"They were talking about having it available for launch and I think there were some issues for how it was going to work," Baker tells us. "It's not available for launch but we're definitely going to take advantage of that if they give that as an option. And the plan that is they will make that an option, so when it's visible we'll enable it for our game and we should be able to crank up resolution proportionally."
Click to expand...

About the 360 version:

As our session with Baker comes to an end, it's time to address the great unknown. Just what is going on with the Xbox 360 version of the game? We wanted to know about resolution, frame-rate and feature parity. Two weeks from release and still nobody has seen the game.

"Yeah, we've actually been playing it almost every day here. Bluepoint's developing it and we've mostly been hands-off, letting them make their own technical decisions," he says. "It seems pretty close [in terms of] feature parity and they're still working on getting the frame-rate up. I'm not sure about the resolution..."

And at that point, our previously silent EA invigilator steps in: "There's nothing much more we can say."
Click to expand...

I can't help but be very curious about the 360 version.

I guess I ended up quoting 80% of the article, but definitely click the link and read the rest if this is of interest to you. I did leave SOME things out.

It is an online game, so I guess this will always be true. But I can't help but get the feeling this game could have maybe used another 3-6 months in the oven.

Oh yeah, and about those servers for Australia:
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/03/australia-and-new-zealand-to-get-titanfall-servers/

#1515 RC Cola, Mar 13, 2014
seclusion rip chadwick

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The game can be incredibly fast (especially as a pilot), I could see why texture streaming would be an issue. I don't think they have much reason to lie here, no one (except for 1 or 2 nerd psychos) is going to decline buying the game just because it doesn't have streaming textures.

It absolutely could have used some more time (there are bugs naturally), and some obvious features missing as well as some questionable issues (matchmaking team balancing, lack of mod support, raw input and vsync issues). At least the game works though and it's fun. People were still buying Battlefield even though I'm told it was virtually unplayable for months. I hear there is still net code issues that won't go away also.

#1516 seclusion, Mar 13, 2014
Last edited: Mar 13, 2014
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Haha, yeah I'm not bashing them too hard, nor do I think they're lying per se. I think if they could have gotten something acceptable, they certainly would have used it.

I guess I was just saying I'm surprised they couldn't find something acceptable. Or to put it another way, I'm questioning their technical prowess...which shouldn't be too surprising given some of the other technical issues with the game.

I do agree that Titanfall is the type of game that would make this most challenging, but just seems like something that would have been solved by now (or...probably has been I would have to think).

Not really that big of a deal. This is just nerding out over something like the lack of AF in a game.

And yeah, this seems MUCH better than BF from what I understand. Like I said, I think it might now be "acceptable" to put out a mostly-polished-but-not-quite-done game (especially if the gameplay is solid). Nothing necessarily wrong with that either, as long as people know/expect that.

#1517 RC Cola, Mar 13, 2014
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Just popped in to say that I've been a Playstation, then XBox, and now both guy for years. But yesterday I got a Wii U because I have a 5 year old daughter and 7 year old son, and it's the most fun we've ever had playing video games together.

My 5 year old can actively participate in the games with the Wii U GamePad, which is pretty awesome.

Anyway, that is all, carry on with the poo flinging.

#1518 DarkHorse, Mar 13, 2014

seclusion rip chadwick

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I think a big issue is the size of the developer. Are there any other AAA developers of Respawn's size? (<100) I'm guessing there aren't many if any, and they certainly aren't putting out a game with as much hype / expectations surrounding it.

I feel like they had to seriously pick and choose their battles. They're likely still doing that with launch issues.

#1519 seclusion, Mar 13, 2014
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DarkHorse said: ↑

Just popped in to say that I've been a Playstation, then XBox, and now both guy for years. But yesterday I got a Wii U because I have a 5 year old daughter and 7 year old son, and it's the most fun we've ever had playing video games together.

My 5 year old can actively participate in the games with the Wii U GamePad, which is pretty awesome.

Anyway, that is all, carry on with the poo flinging.
Click to expand...

I can imagine the level of awesomeness. If my son was 5 years older I would definetely have gotten a Wii U.

#1520 KingLeoric, Mar 13, 2014

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