crispy4000

Nintendo may just stumble into it to some degree with DLSS 2.0. Producing a handheld as capable as a 2060 could work well enough, especially at handheld resolutions. Nvidia was a great partner choice for them.

Almost no 3rd party developer came out and said that was the reason for not supporting the Gamecube. There were 2-disc games pretty early on always. Also, Gamecube supposedly had more future-looking texture compression than the other consoles that gen. The big reason for less support was that sales weren't there. Not for the console, and certainly not 3rd party games on it. A bit of a chicken and the egg scenario left over from the N64 days. That bias still exists today somewhat among AAA publishers, so it's cathartic in a way for indies to be doing so well on Switch. Switch tends to get many indies first (alongside PC) before the other consoles. On paper, the Gamecube should have won. More powerful than the PS2, almost as powerful as the Xbox, for 2/3's the price of either. Spec wise, I don't think there's ever been a console that launched at a better value for its time. You just get a few less liscenced music tracks or shorter FMV in some games. That's the biggest difference in ports.

Runs great, occasional slowdown but hardly a dealbreaker. It’s only on PC and Switch at the moment but is cross save.

I’ll never be tempted to cancel so long as I can keep pausing with the classic plan. The occasional good month is worth it.

Humble Choice is pretty meh this month. So buy on Steam/Epic without fear. https://www.humblebundle.com/subscription/january-2021

Was Forza Horizon 4 poorly optimized on Series S? Sea of Thieves? There’s Microsoft and non-Microsoft games both that are lacking 1440p modes in their patches. Those signs point to the hardware not being totally up to snuff for AAA stuff at that level, especially as the gen goes on. It’s not the devs fault. There are some supremely well optimized last-gen games like Gears 5 that buck the trend, but I wouldn’t call the games that don’t live up to that lazy. It’s too early for Series S to hold anything back. Even later on, developers likely won’t build to its spec. They’ll probably try salvaging what they can in late stages of development. The issue is the headroom they’ll have left to do that. It’s not so simple as saying all is fine on a HDTV display. Performance woes and sub-1080p resolutions with reconstruction artifacts are pretty much inevitable. Ask yourself how a worse GPU than the Xbox One’s has held up in AAA releases over the past few years.

I thought the PS4 Pro version of the first game hid it well. Is it any worse than that?

They’d be crazy not to pick the 60fps RT performance mode instead.

Series X/PS5 games are hitting 4K more often than the One X and Pro did. It’s not quite so rare. I think that’s a win, even if reconstruction, a 30fps cap, or performance modes are involved. At least it’s ballpark to the target for now. Can’t say the same for Series S in many games. IMO, it’s because they’re tied together. There could be more of a case for the Series S if it was delivering more on its stated 1440p performance goals now. There’d be more headroom later on to scale down.

Most Series X/PS5 games at this point do hit 4k in some manner. You really aren’t seeing many games that tap out at 1440p at tops. Series S is a currently crapshoot whether or not a game goes higher than 1080p or not. With last gen ports even. There’s deceptive marketing in things like “true 4K” or “up to 120fps” too. It’s just not quite as egregious.

I don’t think calling out the Series S’ shortcomings thus far is console warring. It says nothing about the Series X vs PS5 at all. Unless Nintendo comes around with something similar, there is no competing console taking its approach.

120fps has always been talked about as a possibility rather than a norm. MS and Sony have both been on record to say Series X/PS5 target 4k60 (in performance modes). They might not hit it all the time, and there’s reconstruction in many cases, but it’s ballpark. No one is thinking these are actually 1440p machines. Not at this point in the gen anyways. Series S meanwhile isn’t making the grade. If it wanted to be as close to its target as the others are to theirs, it needed a few more teraflops and a bit more RAM possibly. Which is why DF called its marketing deceptive.

All consoles are close enough to PC architecture (from a development perspective) nowadays. We’re seeing that play out already in Series X / PS5 comparisons. Nevertheless, scalability doesn’t save the Series S’ GPU from being grossly underpowered. We all saw how the og Xbox One limped to the finish line this gen (in Control, Avengers, etc). Series S begs the question: what if a next-gen console cut even more corners than the last time? Games already intended for low spec PCs will be fine on it. AAA games, it’s undoubtedly going to get rough as the gen goes on. World building is such a nebulous term. Consoles have been capable of large scale open world games for several generations now. The larger concern with Series S should be performance and optimization effort. Some games will take serious elbow grease to not look and/or run like a bad port job. As for Cyperpunk, it’s not (yet) indicative of next-gen demands on consoles. It’s an example of a game poorly optimized for last gen machines getting a slight but much needed boost until a proper next-gen patch comes. Sea of Thieves and Forza Horizon 4 are 1080p on Series S. These are Series S optimized, 1st party, last-gen ports. Its capable of 1440p60 in some circumstances.

https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Bluetooth-Adapter-Nintendo-Switch-Raspberry/dp/B0786JC6VW Get this instead if you want to save some money. Might be able to find it cheaper than that if you search around.

What did you think of Rise compared to the reboot?

Anyone else have any gaming resolutions for the new year? I won't be building a PC or getting a current gen console anytime soon, so it's going to be another big backlog year. Beat another Final Fantasy: I've finished 4-7, FF7R and FFXIII. But I own the whole rest of the series outside of FFXII, and the MMO ones (which aren't for me). Thinking of starting with either FFIX (w/ upscaled backgrounds) or FFX remastered. Use my Switch more: Hopefully a new Switch model will be released, so I'll be more motivated to play Torna and Age of Calamity. Otherwise, it might be time to give Mario & Rabbids a good go. I'm almost done with Hades now. Polish off the Wii U: Almost done with Captain Toad. Still need to get around to Tropical Freeze. Retro stuff: I've been slowly but steadily making my way through Yoshi's Island. I'd like to play Castlevania SoTN for the first time in 2021 too. Been eying Alundra and Minish Cap as well. Sony catch-up (Part 2): I beat most of the Uncharted series from scratch in 2020, as well as remakes of the first Ratchet, Crash and Sypro. Still have a lot left: SoTC, Last of Us, Horizon, finishing up GoW, etc. I just got Ghosts as a Christmas as well... but no PS5 so I might wait on it.

Desert Child free on Indiegala. https://freebies.indiegala.com/desert-child Most of their freebies aren't good at all so I don't share, but this seems alright.

Jurassic World Evolution today on EGS. Crying Suns next week.

If you see it that way, its shown it’s capable of more in some indie games. The whole issue here is MS repeatedly stated that 1440/60 was its “performance target.” It’s missing that target far too often, at a point when the games should be the least demanding. Even Digital Foundry said it’s deceptive, and it should have be marketed as a 1080p+ machine in the current landscape. Expectations were set out of whack. Take a look at the way Cyberpunk is being received on the base consoles. PC releases come with the expectation that a game might not be optimized for your spec. Console releases come with the expectation that it’s been optimized specifically for your machine to run acceptably. There’s no way Series S won’t be a thorn in AAA devs side in the later part of the generation. We’ll likely see some games’ PC min req overshoot it. But if it was working more often as advertised today, it would be a little less of a concern.

To be fair, there's a large number of Series S games that hit 1080p60 (which is still less than advertised). Most of the 1st party last-gen ports do. It's some 3rd party ports like Yakuza 7 or Destiny 2 that fail to hit 1080p60. And of course, games like Watch Dogs Legion that try to push things a little further into current-gen territory. It feels like Microsoft designed the Series S spec around what the Coalition could do with a Gears 5 port. It's super impressive on it, but that's also in comparison to everything else.

It won’t be that rough in the cross gen period for Series S. Just as it won’t be for One X. The real problem for Series S is that we’re not seeing most cross-gen games and last gen ports hitting 1440p. 1080p in the here and now doesn’t imply there’s much headroom left for future demands. Watch Dogs Legion doing 900p-1080p at 30fps is probably the best window into the future we have for it. But games will still get more demanding than its cross-gen target as time goes on. We’ll see RT cuts when possible in some games, but there’s reason to question if even that’s enough. Or how games heavy on the GPU (or RAM) in other ways will be forced to scale back. Performance woes are pretty much inevitable.

... But why even buy a Series S for that? Xbox chief hints at TV streaming sticks for xCloud WWW.THEVERGE.COM Additional tiers of xCloud game streaming could be on the way Going cloud-based won't help devs unless MS straight up says Series X games no longer have to run directly on Series S hardware. I doubt it'll ever happen.

Sony and MS both get a bigger cut from digital sales than from retail. There's no game resale market either. It cuts out all middlemen. Neither the PS4 Digital or Series S would be priced as low as they are if that wasn't the case.

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