Duderino

4 hours ago, JPDunks4 said:

Game still looks gorgeous with awesome effects, but the SSD with whats shown thus far hasn't shown me anything that improves the gameplay experience of the game much.

While not as eye catching as jumping between worlds, the encounter design on display does illustrate a break from limitations of last gen.  If you haven’t done so already, watch the NXgamer breakdown posted a page back.

I do hope these services end up consolidating like this.

22 minutes ago, ManUtdRedDevils said:

 

Was expecting less RAM, but not this level of a speed hit.

Control also had one of the more perfomant Raytracing implementations (on PC).

17 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

It's not going to come down to who has the better lawyers on this one. It's going to come down to how courts want to treat these tech giants. This stuff has been milling about for years. I don't know if the US has the what it takes to try to take the big tech companies down a notch, but I'm sure Epic started this case with their eyes on Apple's issues aboard as well.

Agreed.  The best these Apple lawyers can hope for is minimizing the restrictions placed on Apple as a result of this lawsuit and others.

3 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

So if they aren’t having issue clearing stock or meeting fiscal goals, both of which end in the creation of new customers, why would they cut the price further?

 

Because they aren’t having issues clearing stock or meeting fiscal goals. They are selling more consoles in 2020 than 2019!

Not sure exactly how many current gen consoles either Sony or Microsoft are expecting to sell before transitioning fully to the SeriesX/PS5, but there is a limited timeframe where either company can realistically expect these systems to sell and retailers to have dedicated PS4/Xbone spaces. Perhaps Covid may have extended it a bit, but the clock is still ticking.
 

The fact of the matter is neither of us have the inside scoop on how many PS4s/Xbone’s are sitting in store shelves, but the Xbox X’s ceased production does speak to where we are at in the generation, even if the consoles prices do not (yet) reflect it.

8 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

Why? Should companies sell products for less than the market will bear just for fun?

Same reason sales happen; to clear stock, gain new consumers, and meet fiscal year goals.

$300 for an Xbox One S or PS4 Slim in 2020 is not a great price point.  $300 for the Xbox Series S on the other hand in a few months, is a far better deal.

Yes, both current gen consoles still provide a lot of value for $300, but at this point in time we should be seeing deeper cuts.  Whatever the reason, they are not being priced yet to clear out stock.

👀 Let’s make it official!

Xbox Series S | Next-gen performance in the ˢᵐᵃˡˡᵉˢᵗ Xbox ever. $299 (ERP).

Looking forward to sharing more! Soon. Promise. pic.twitter.com/8wIEpLPVEq

— Xbox (@Xbox) September 8, 2020

Heads up, Microsoft’s DirectStorage API, which RTX i/o relies on, is not going to be made available to developers until 2021.

Direct Storage will also requires an nVME drive, so SATA SSD owners will need to upgrade to receive these benefits.  (SATA SSDs are significantly slower already)

Some have also noted nVidia slides use 14 GB/s as their peak number, whereas the PS5 lists 22 GB/s as the theoretical peak.  I wouldn't read too much into this comparison, but if the PS5 actually ends up being faster in the early years, it'll likely be due to Kraken.

4 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

Two more bits of news on SSD I/O:

  

 

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-coming-to-pc/

 

"Hi. RTX IO is supported on all GeForce RTX Turing and NVIDIA Ampere-architecture GPUs."  - Andrew Burnes

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-io-gpu-accelerated-storage-technology/
 

Some key points:

Quote

GeForce RTX GPUs are capable of decompression performance beyond the limits of even Gen4 SSDs, offloading dozens of CPU cores’ worth of work to deliver maximum overall system performance for next generation games.

Quote

 improving I/O performance by a factor of 2.

Quick Recap:

Theoretically, when developers start applying this tech, a 5 GB/s nVME 4.0 drive + RTX GPU card could get you around PS5 speeds.  A few potential caveats:

• Some of the GPU load will go towards decompression.
• This is an accelerator for data sent to the GPU, not necessarily data sent to system memory.
• Fewer lanes on most PC SSDs.

All and all, this is excellent news. Bodes well for future tittles taking larger leaps forward.

2 hours ago, Remarkableriots said:

So what you're saying is that the PC filthy peasants will be trying to hold back the PS 5 master race? 

What I’m saying is there is reason to look forward to what the PS5 is bringing to the table here.

Some steps forward don't happen simultaneously on every platform and that is ok.

Apple is also blocking Facebook from notifying users within their App about the 30% cut.

2 hours ago, TwinIon said:

MS has their own decompression architecture and hardware in the Series X, and I believe they the framework would be available on the PC. Given how much CPU overhead most PCs have, I don't suspect that decompression would be a huge roadblock.

 

I believe the point stands. The SSD itself is a great piece of tech, but it's been underutilized in games because it was only available on PCs. Having fast storage standardized in consoles means that we'll see developers take proper advantage of that speed in ways they haven't bothered to before.

To clarify, the Series X by default uses zlib for general compression and the new bcpack for texture compression.  For the PS5 Sony licensed RAD Tool's Kraken for general compression and for textures, the new Ooodle Texture.  Both Series X and PS5 have dedicated decompression hardware blocks, unlike PCs.  The PS5 difference is a faster SSD, more channels/lanes, and Kraken as a standard (which provides much better compression + faster decompression compared to zlib).  Remains to be seen how Oodle Texture and bcPack compare, or how other architecture specifics will contribute here.

The SSD speed + compression tech will clearly raise the baseline for games exclusive to PS5.  For 3rd part tittles, I think it's reasonable enough to predict improvements to asset streaming and reduced load times compared to other platforms.

I agree that consoles moving from HDD to SSD is the biggest initial leap forward, but following directly behind that is the leap in compression tech.  The two are related and will result in an even larger impact together.  I don't subscribe to the idea that average SSD speeds today are the peak of what developers can successfully leverage/benefit from, or that compression has only a small role to play.

2 hours ago, TwinIon said:

Exactly. Arguing about exactly how "unprecedented" the PS5 SSD is compared to existing PC storage is beside the point.

 

Here we have a technology that has existed for some time that hasn't really been put to much use in games because it was never part of the lowest common denominator. This generation of consoles will change that. 

Agree that the SSD alone is not unprecedented, but the integration of Kraken is.  That decompression edge will only be the lowest common denominator on the PS5.  

I imagine though many Series X and PC developers will license Kraken from RAD Tools as well.  It just won't be the baseline on those platforms.

Just now, crispy4000 said:

 

Curious to know what you’re referring to here.  Where else is it used?

8 channels is common for consumer SSDs.  Server storage though is more likely to see a split across more channels.

The PS5’s 12-channel SSD is an uncommon configuration, but from a hardware perspective alone it is not new tech.

There is however no PC configuration you can buy on the market today that will standardize the use of Kraken decompression across all tittles, let alone offload that work from the CPU.

I'd say that qualifies as unprecedented.  The difference just doesn't initially register for the hardware spec junkies out there.

Long time coming:

It sounded good on paper, but not in the real world.

— Ryan McCaffrey (@DMC_Ryan) August 24, 2020

Epic breaking the Apple TOS will be a point of contention in this case, but the real billion dollar question is if Apple's terms and actions have violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in the first place.

Hoeg is obviously far from the only voice in the legal world on this matter.  Polygon reached to a few others (quoted important bits in case you want to avoid the clicks):

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“Epic is going at the heart of the App Store monopoly, as well as Google’s comparable monopoly over the sale of Android apps,” Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at anti-monopoly research and advocacy group Open Markets Institute, told Polygon. “It’s challenging the practices by which [Apple and Google] acquired this dominant position and tried to leverage this dominant position into new markets. This is a major lawsuit.”

 

Vaheesan said Epic Games’ lawyers presented “detailed factual allegations” that rely on “strong legal theories,” which bodes well for the company. Epic isn’t asking the court to rewrite antitrust law as it stands — instead, it’s asking a judge to just enforce the law as it exists. It’s different, in that way, from the antitrust hearing in Congress last month, where government officials discussed potential changes to market power rules. (Epic’s lawsuit, however, is still important in that if Epic wins, it’ll make it clear that Apple’s and Google’s practices are illegal, and then those companies will be forced to change their practices.)

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“It’ll be a test of whether the law that’s nominally on the books is actually effective in constraining the power and practices of these big tech companies,” Vaheesan said.

The problem isn’t simply that Apple and Google are monolithic companies, but that they have large monopolies over certain markets. Valarie Williams, an antitrust lawyer and partner at Alston & Bird, told Polygon that Epic Games’ basic allegation comes down to whether or not Apple (and, subsequently, Google) has a monopoly through its App Store. For Epic to succeed in its lawsuits, it has to prove the market exists — and that the companies have monopolies over them.

 

She pointed to another restriction, the “tying” arrangement, that Epic Games said is violating antitrust laws. “[Apple] is saying that if you’re going to use the App Store, then you have to use our payment processing service; you can’t use your own,” Williams said. If you don’t want to do that, then you can’t use the App Store — and that’s why Fortnite was removed.

 

“It’s not a problem to be a monopoly,” Williams said. “It’s not a problem under the law to have market power. It’s when you use that to restrain competition.” And Epic Games has alleged that that’s exactly what the restrictions do, at least in the case of Apple — you can’t just move to a different app store on iOS, because Apple doesn’t permit them to exist.

I agree.  The law on this matter is already in place.  

The question is if Apple and Google's lawyers can make a compelling case that their market-status and integrated App stores do not violate the same law that lost Microsoft the Windows + Interent Explorer anti-trust case.

1 hour ago, sblfilms said:

My question is directly connected to Crispy’s position that Apple’s App Store policies are a completely novel scheme and a divergence for Apple, when in reality it is the natural evolution of their business model.

• Novel? No
• Divergent revenue from the past? Yes
• Protected under the law?  No ( Mac OS hardware rights ruling has no application here)
• In violation of anti-trust?  TBD, but there is precidence.

30 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

But again I ask, are consumers better off because they can’t install the boxed copy of Mac OS they purchased on whatever hardware they own that could technically run it?

The Mac OS platform's supported hardware limitations is entirely separate from the situation on iOS that is landing Apple in anti-trust lawsuits.

This tangent is not only irrelevant, it's not addressing the actual issue.

What exactly is the legal precedence for Apple to block competing storefronts and/or in-app payment methods on iOS anyways?  
 

Seems like a good way to not just give themselves a leg up with Apple Pay and royalties, but also dictate who the winners and losers are in their sizable space in the mobile market.

5 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

12 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

Not opting to sell their software for other platforms is one thing.  Charging others a royalty to sell on theirs is another.

 

This isn’t hard to understand.  The two are not equivalent, like for like, etc.

 

Its apples to oranges.

All artificial locks are the same, no matter how they are achieved. Apple writing code into Mac o to prevent it being installed on non Apple hardware was done for exactly the same reason as Apple not allowing third party App installers.

It's quite a different situation for developers, which is the whole point of this debate.

9 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

There is no reason that Mac OS couldn’t be run on non-Apple hardware. It was just a mechanism to sell more Apple hardware. Now Apple uses the same type of mechanism to sell more services. You may want to look up what happened with Apple during the time when Jobs was gone. They opened Mac OS up to third party hardware. Their renaissance began when they went back to artificially locking Mac OS to Apple hardware. That predates all things iPhone and iOS.

Apple's mobile division is very much still in the business of making large margins on hardware (check out the iPhone's).  App Store service royalties have not changed their hardware profit model.

1 hour ago, sblfilms said:

Which do they spend more time and resources on? Why do you think that is? And certainly, Apple would adapt to iOS being more open. Would the average consumer be better off with an Apple that has less to gain from selling closed systems? That is certainly up for debate. I think Android is terrible, and most of my displeasure with it comes from the more open design of the OS. 

From a user standpoint, iOS and it's suite of Apple developed software has seen nowhere near the evolution that Mac OS and it's applications have during Apple's most prolific development years predating the App Store.  

If this 30% fee for external developers is really going back into iOS, Apple's engineers output is coming up way short.