crispy4000

We see a fair bit of of Xbox One S/PS4 games running poorly today. Even unacceptably poor with a game like Control. Porting is easy, porting well is hard and will continue to get harder for the current gen. We absolutely need a comparison to know how much PC could have to brute force. Smart people can say stupid things on occasion. He’s getting plenty of blowback for his comment elsewhere. It’s blatantly false if you consider all those SATA SSDs that never got taken advantage of past faster loading.

I'm bringing it up because the vast majority of developers aren't making games exclusive to the xbox ecosystem. There's so many console SKUs these days, more than ever to juggle in a transition to a new gen. Some of those ports will inevitably not get the proper TLC, which is typically an advantage consoles have with static specs instead of a continuum. We don't have a point of comparison yet for how different a typical PC M2 drive will perform relative to PS5 or XSX. The issue largely isn't that they're not fast enough, it's the I/O processes in communicating with the drives where consoles could blow past PC in the short term. It'd likely only be a problem for next-gen only games though. More RAM should be able to brute force things more or less, but we still don't know just how much more ram would be needed for it to match the news consoles with UE5 and such.

Ok

Hasn’t annoyed me

Starts at the top of the hour from this post.

Could end up varying game by game. I don't think we'd see something like Ratchet does working off a SATA drive. But I do expect consoles to quickly set PC minimums for SSDs by the end of the cross-gen period.

All makes sense from Microsoft's market perspective... but none of it is justification to say that high end PC's haven't been held back by lower end machines. It only reinforces it.

SSDs will inevitably become minimum spec for AAA development on PC once the current gen consoles are dropped by devs. Bigger question is how quickly suggested specs will shoot past 4 Teraflop GPUs. We’re already seeing some cross gen games recommend 1070’s.

There’s at least 6. (XBO, PS4, PSPro, X1X, PS5, XSX) And I wouldn’t call supporting the baseline XBO and PS4 in the cross-gen period easy. We’ve already seen some optimization shortfalls on them as the result of priority given to X/Pro.

Uh, Phil’s gone off the deep end with that. The highest end PC versions today are held back by needing to be designed for scaled back machines without SSD’s, antiquated Jaguar CPUs, and low amounts of RAM. We don’t know where game design would be today if those weren’t the minimum specs targeted. In other words, it’s actually the lowest console specs that are holding PC back. If he believes Lockhart won’t, then we’ll have to see what happens. But in today’s market? It’s a straight up falsehood. All this chest beating about SSD’s now is particularly ironic when PC gamers have been waiting for years for it to be an assumed given.

Hard to know what this means. - Sony's already got several in house engines that they'll keep building on and using, so it's unlikely the UE5 stuff is what prompted this. - EGS could be a huge boon for their profits if their PC storefront gains more popularity. Everyone else has a launcher, so it kind of makes sense to latch onto one instead of building their own. But so far Sony hasn't tried the timed exclusivity thing there like everyone else has. - As for the dedicated multimedia events ... Playstation Home coming back? Who even knows. It could also just be that they see Epic going on the up and up and want a share of that.

Sale ends at the top of the next hour.

Awesome to hear. This has always been one of the more exciting things about MS's acquisitions. They're not going after the big guns usually, just snapping up a bunch of the mid-sized ones that needed a boost.

New batch of Epic games are up: Killing Floor 2, Escapists 2, Lifeless Planet. Torchlight 2 is free next week.

Waiting for the reviews as always with this series since its heyday. Though it is good to hear from someone who actually played Color Splash. I’d be tempted to pick it up if I ever found a crazy bargain.