Duderino

Potentially a lot. There are 2 years of engine changes to resolve, plus optimizing for Raytracing specific performance bottlenecks and material rebalancing. Some of that work will obviously overlap with MM, but not all. That's not to say the high-cost upgrade path is justified (it's not), just that adding Raytracing retroactively to a game like Spiderman is probably much more involved than flipping a switch.

It is unfortunate that there is no upgrade path outside of purchasing the $70 MM edition. I do have a suspicion though that this may be isolated case. Not expecting any of the games in the PsPlus Collection to receive upgrades on the same level, but my guess is whatever improvements happen will be free. No official word on that, but it's hard to imagine otherwise.

Turn 10, Ninja Theory, the Collation, and Playground games are all capable of such. Regardless, I don't think Microsoft needs their first party to sell people on the capabilities of the Series X. Just like with the XBX, MS can rely on a numbers advantage, whether it's teraflops, FPS, or resolutions, to sell systems. Think it's way more critical anyways that Microsoft 1st party sets a high bar on the Series S.

Means the loading demo of Outer Worlds did not leverage Sampler Feedback Streaming. Suppose it is technically possible that Outer Worlds could still be using UE4’s new Streaming Virtual Texturing (same concept, but in theory could work on the One S given it is not reliant on the Velocity architecture). Given when Outer Worlds released though, I'd say that is highly unlikely.

Sacrificing RAM speed/size over the CPU is solid advice given the $300 target.

I can't imagine AAA developers not having to plan around the Series S's RAM once next gen is in full swing.

Hard to tell how much of this shot is Raytracing vs screen space reflections, but if Ubisoft is indeed leveraging Raytracing in a notable way on the S, the Watchdogs team deserves major props.

Agreed. A quick glance at PC RTX requirements illustrates just how RAM hungry Raytracing can be: Min RAM RAM RTX Minecraft 2 GB 8 GB Cyberpunk 8 GB 16 GB Control 8 GB 16 GB BFV 8 GB 12-16 GB COD: Cold War 8 GB 12 GB The ID engineer is not wrong. The Series S's RAM presents major challenges for Raytracing. Even by the most generous estimates, the Velocity Architecture and ML Super Sampling are not likely to free up 4-8 GBs of RAM on the S. All that said I do think we will see some games with Raytracing on the Series S, starting with Crysis Remastered. These titles however will need to target a much lower RAM baseline to make it happen.

The Series S specs present a potential challenge for AAA developers that want to fully embrace future tech and new workflows. Let's use Lighting as an example. Many devs are no doubt hard at work on Raytracing implementations for the quality and iteration benefits, but could hit a wall with the limited RAM and GPU of the Series S. Yes, dropping resolutions to say 1080 or 720 would free up some resources for additional raycasts and BVH volumes (memory heavy aspect of Raytracing), but with the Series S's specs there is only so much to gain back. Raytracing does not scale down quite as neatly as other graphical bells and whistles. Low raycounts can lead to lighting flickering artifacts and a loss of quality. Low BVH counts can lead to light leaking and other inacuracies. A large resolution drop is not necessarily going to cover these issues up. I suspect we'll see developers either temporarily blur the hell out of Raytracing uses on the Series S or throw in the towel and determine they need a separate solution for this SKU. And honestly quality-wise, lightmaps may be preferable to a very compromised Raytracing implementation. Other future tech may have similar caveats on the Series S. UE4's Nanite for example is going to rely on the GPU to help compute the display tessellation of assets. How much overhead that needs is not known, but it will be an additional cost beyond drawing polygons. Does all this technically hold the PS5/XSX back? No, but it may have implications on what tech developers can rely on, especially with deadlines in the mix. The recommendation from Microsoft is to target the Series X first, but it may not work out that way in practice for all AAA devs.

Guessing the XSX’s additional 2 TF vs the PS5’s 2.5 GB/s bump will level the costs.

It’s going to be interesting to see exactly how developers approach the Series S ports as the gen goes on. The velocity architecture and lower res texture delivery will obviously help, but the size of geometry, lighting, animation, and audio data will go up as well. I could see higher compression for these assets becoming a necessity for devs that don’t treat the S as their baseline.

Beyond the 4TF GPU, RAM is likely to be a limiting factor for Raytracing in the Series S. ID’s principal engine programmer elaborates:

This conversation should have ended pages ago, right after we established that this game would not be realistic on the PS4/Xbone.

I wouldn’t say this approaches the complexity of the world/asset swaps in the Ratchet demo. It’s not that these concepts haven’t been done before, because they have. The hardware has just limited the scope of what is possible or practical for developers.

And beyond just Ratchet, this bodes well for any game that could benefit from a wider breadth of content in the gameplay loop or has pacing shortcomings related to the HDD.

It's irrelevant because it is not pertinent to the discussion at hand, plain and simple. I don't even disagree. This is pointless.

Why push for answers to an irrelevant question?

In question by who exactly? Is anyone in this thread actually stating that Ratchet has new mechanics only possible with the SSD? I don't get why you're stuck on this.

Let me rephrase my statement by saying it has been quite a while since console hardware, on it's own, has lead to brand new gameplay mechanics. It is not a realistic expectation to have. Definitely not "next-gen" criteria to me. As you've pointed out above, this is not the first generation where storage speed leaps have lead to new possibilities. While open world games existed in the PS2/Xbox era, the HDD in the PS3/360 did remove an important bottleneck for developers. The SSD leap is no different. What developers can do with this added freedom is going to be what differentiates this gen from the last. Ratchet is one of the first games that is showing that in practice.

Struggling to think of the last console generation that allowed for notable new gameplay mechanics. It's not exactly a realistic expectation to have here. New "gameplay experiences" however, as in scenarios that are not realistic on the aging PS4/Xbone, Ratchet does have on display.

What game is a better next-gen showcase than Ratchet? Lets see a point of comparison please.

Feel like a broken record now but outside of the obvious world hoping, the loading/spawning of diverse enemy architypes in a short span of time. The CPU, RAM, and especially HDD of last gen consoles would quickly become limiting factors if Insomniac were to attempted this game on the PS4. Given the streaming challenges of the current gen, it's hard to imagine this title running on PS4 without game changing sacrifices, major loading hitches, and/or an unrealistic amount of dev time spent optimizing transitions.

A wider breadth of possible enemy encounters in a given gameplay sequence is one of the advantages the PS5/SeriesX/S can bring to next-gen AAA games. Ratchet is demonstrating that. Again, it might not be the flashest use case of the new hardware, but I'd argue this can make a very broad positive impact on game design with next gen tittles.

NXgamer, the developers themselves, multiple GDC talks discussing streaming challenges of current gen consoles, games that have hitched this gen loading much less. Scripted sequence have been used to mask the limitations this gen, but none that I've seen come close to the quantity of high quality assets/worlds transitioning here. By all means though if you can find a comparable counter example let's discuss.

Loading and spawning large sets of different enemy assets that would not all fit in RAM previously, whether we are talking enemies jumping through portals or when Ratchet jumps to new locals. With the PS4/Xbone, one limiting factor to diversity of enemy encounters is the HDD. AAA tittles that do not have the available RAM to pre-load every enemy archetype (and their animations) are limited by the speed at which they can load data from disc + make room in RAM. Beyond just the slow baseline read speeds, devs also have to contend with the needle. Special care with asset packaging is required to reduce its travel distance. If you want to get a sense of exactly how much of a limiting factor this can be for the current gen, go play Jedi: Fallen Order. Many enemy archetypes are streamed in on the spot in that game, leading to slow enemy reset times, frequent hitches, and lots of bugs. Back to Ratchet, I agree with NXgamer here. Scripted sequences or not, this would not be possible on this level with the current gen consoles. It marks a pretty big shift in what designers are now free to do.