General Gaming Best Gaming Graphics of 2020, Best Games of 2020, and Best PC Games of 2020 (Digital Foundry) and Best Graphics/Technology of 2020 (NX Gamer)

[SaysWho?]

2 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

 

Would've been very odd if Series S could be $200 cheaper than Series X with only the disc drive and storage space lacking.  It's surprising enough that Sony was able to answer at $400.

They pretty much had to, given that Microsoft decided to deceptively market the thing as a 1440p 60fps+ machine.

 

I figured they were just eating the cost, but it just seems like something not worth buying considering the options. PS5 standard, PS5 digital, Xbox Series X are the way to go looks like.

[crispy4000]

2 hours ago, SaysWho? said:

 

I figured they were just eating the cost, but it just seems like something not worth buying considering the options. PS5 standard, PS5 digital, Xbox Series X are the way to go looks like.

 

People are buying it though, which is kind of the problem.

 

For a generational comparison, it's as if a low-end Xbox One model was saddled with the Switch's GPU.  How are most AAA devs going to support it the whole generation?  They might have to, given the way things are going.

 

A Switch 2 could even have more GPU oomph than Series S, especially with DLSS factored in.

[crispy4000]

 

[TwinIon]

Ghosts is a game where the art really helps it outshine some serious technical limitations. It's full of low res textures that feel like they're base layers waiting for the higher LOD texture to pop-in, but they never do. Materials often look like they lack texture depth, feeling flat and artificial. At the same time, it's got some very high quality assets that it does its best to highlight and keep front and center. Mostly though, it's a triumph of highly romanticised dynamic lighting and scenery that really just makes everything look amazing most of the time. It's clear that they optimized for a given look and were hitting the limits of the PS4, and I think they were very successful in what they set out to achieve, but I feel like I saw more cracks in that look than I did in something like TLOU2. 

[Keyser_Soze]

4 hours ago, SaysWho? said:

 

I figured they were just eating the cost, but it just seems like something not worth buying considering the options. PS5 standard, PS5 digital, Xbox Series X are the way to go looks like.

 

I think it's more strange for Sony. Microsoft has a reason for having a cheaper console, it's less powerful. Sony has a second console because disc drives are $100?

[crispy4000]

45 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

I think it's more strange for Sony. Microsoft has a reason for having a cheaper console, it's less powerful. Sony has a second console because disc drives are $100?

 

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.

[stepee]

I really think the biggest problems the new consoles have is disk space. I understand I’m a heavy user but I’m already moving stuff around after getting COD and it’s been like a month.

 

I think even casuals are going to get hit fast, especially if they play COD. There needs to be way to add cheaper external soon or it can detract people from impulse buys. Right now for me it’s already about the storage, not the price of a game when I look at the store.

 

Same thing happened to me with vita and I think it does hurt game stores if you have to calculate how you will store a game before you go to purchase it.

[SaysWho?]

4 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

I think it's more strange for Sony. Microsoft has a reason for having a cheaper console, it's less powerful. Sony has a second console because disc drives are $100?

 

You can go all digital and have games play worse or go all digital and have games that don't. I'd say the former is significantly stranger.

[Brian]

Series S will be fine as it will transition to a XCloud streaming box. @TomCat please put these Sony Fanboys in their place. 

[crispy4000]

1 hour ago, ManUtdRedDevils said:

Series S will be fine as it will transition to a XCloud streaming box. @TomCat please put these Sony Fanboys in their place. 

... But why even buy a Series S for that?
 

Quote

“I think you’re going to see lower priced hardware as part of our ecosystem when you think about streaming sticks and other things that somebody might want to just go plug into their TV and go play via xCloud,” says Spencer. “You could imagine us even having something that we just included in the Game Pass subscription that gave you an ability to stream xCloud games to your television and buying the controller.”

 

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.

[Ghost_MH]

30 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

... 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.

 

Why even get into the streaming stick game? Just release your app on Roku, Android, and Fire. I'm not including Apple here because their rules are crazy. This only makes if it's just another Android TV stick, but bundled with one of their controllers.

[Keyser_Soze]

6 hours ago, SaysWho? said:

You can go all digital and have games play worse or go all digital and have games that don't. I'd say the former is significantly stranger.

 

Yeah but they don't play worse because they have targeted lower resolutions so they play great at like 1080p. They are budget consoles made for people who don't have 4K tvs or care about super sexy rtx stuff.

[crispy4000]

9 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

Yeah but they don't play worse because they have targeted lower resolutions so they play great at like 1080p. They are budget consoles made for people who don't have 4K tvs or care about super sexy rtx stuff.

 

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.

[SaysWho?]

7 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

Yeah but they don't play worse because they have targeted lower resolutions so they play great at like 1080p. They are budget consoles made for people who don't have 4K tvs or care about super sexy rtx stuff.

 

They play worse as well. You're not getting a 1080p/60fps experience (or 1440p/120fps as was advertised). You're getting 30fps Hellblade/Valhalla/Evil Within/Sekiro, sometimes 900p games from last gen, and we just started.

 

Doesn't seem to be a point to play next-gen games long-term since it's not even upgrading your Xbox One games that much. 

[Spork3245]

Two reasons why XSX may be performing worse in cross-platform titles: 

1.) building performance around both the S and X (and during a pandemic) has led to some issues, as the original idea of the S was to keep the same graphical fidelity of X titles but at 1080p-1440p instead of 4k.

2.) the hardware was finalized later and “final” dev kits came out much later than the PS5’s - though I may be confusing reality with TomCat-ality here  

[crispy4000]

1 hour ago, SaysWho? said:

They play worse as well. You're not getting a 1080p/60fps experience (or 1440p/120fps as was advertised). You're getting 30fps Hellblade/Valhalla/Evil Within/Sekiro, sometimes 900p games from last gen, and we just started.

 

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.

[SaysWho?]

21 hours ago, TwinIon said:

Ghosts is a game where the art really helps it outshine some serious technical limitations. It's full of low res textures that feel like they're base layers waiting for the higher LOD texture to pop-in, but they never do. Materials often look like they lack texture depth, feeling flat and artificial. At the same time, it's got some very high quality assets that it does its best to highlight and keep front and center. Mostly though, it's a triumph of highly romanticised dynamic lighting and scenery that really just makes everything look amazing most of the time. It's clear that they optimized for a given look and were hitting the limits of the PS4, and I think they were very successful in what they set out to achieve, but I feel like I saw more cracks in that look than I did in something like TLOU2. 

 

I'd be surprised otherwise considering Ghost is in an open world. I feel it's easier to make a game like TLOU2, which is a visual marvel in so many ways, look as good as possible when there are fewer dynamic factors than a game such as Ghost.

 

But it's not really a knock on TLOU2; the game is a stunner. And it performs far more consistently than TLOU did, both functioning as swan songs for their respective console, as TLOU dipped a ton in frame rate while TLOU2 didn't. I'm sure PS4's simpler architecture helped tremendously over the PS3 cell.  

[skillzdadirecta]

16 hours ago, Spork3245 said:

Two reasons why XSX may be performing worse in cross-platform titles: 

1.) building performance around both the S and X (and during a pandemic) has led to some issues, as the original idea of the S was to keep the same graphical fidelity of X titles but at 1080p-1440p instead of 4k.

2.) the hardware was finalized later and “final” dev kits came out much later than the PS5’s - though I may be confusing reality with TomCat-ality here  

It's really this. Devs didn't get the final kits for the Xbox consoles until this past June. They had PS5 kits for a full year I believe.

[BloodyHell]

On 12/29/2020 at 8:59 AM, crispy4000 said:

 

Would've been very odd if Series S could be $200 cheaper than Series X with only the disc drive and storage space lacking.  It's surprising enough that Sony was able to answer at $400.

They pretty much had to, given that Microsoft decided to deceptively market the thing as a 1440p 60fps+ machine.

Not much deceptive about it. It's absolutely capable of 1440/60.

[BloodyHell]

On 12/29/2020 at 9:10 AM, crispy4000 said:

 

People are buying it though, which is kind of the problem.

 

For a generational comparison, it's as if a low-end Xbox One model was saddled with the Switch's GPU.  How are most AAA devs going to support it the whole generation?  They might have to, given the way things are going.

 

A Switch 2 could even have more GPU oomph than Series S, especially with DLSS factored in.

I mean, they support it the same way devs support multiple pc power levels. This is nothing new.

[crispy4000]

5 hours ago, BloodyHell said:

Not much deceptive about it. It's absolutely capable of 1440/60.

 

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.
 

5 hours ago, BloodyHell said:

I mean, they support it the same way devs support multiple pc power levels. This is nothing new.

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.

[BloodyHell]

22 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

 

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.

Xbox sex and ses architecture is much closer to pc, allowing them to treat releases just like pc does. PS4 and PS5 are totally different stories. 

 

Aldo, cyberpunk runs fine on Series S,it's also a huge open world, you either sacrifice graphics or world building.

 

Also, it's not ms's fault if 3rd parties don't develop at 1440p on it. That's on the devs. Theres Nothing deceptive, that box is absolutely capable of 1440p.

[stepee]

I mean the ps4 pro is capable of 1440p/60 as well, but I sure wouldn’t want games being built around it for the next 7 years.

[Spork3245]

Who is connecting their consoles to 1440p displays? 0.001% of console gamers? The XSS is meant for people with HDTVs.

[BloodyHell]

2 minutes ago, stepee said:

I mean the ps4 pro is capable of 1440p/60 as well, but I sure wouldn’t want games being built around it for the next 7 years.

Again, you're comparing completely different architecture. The xbox is just a windows pc locked behind a walled garden. Development for many pc sku's has always been a thing.

[Spork3245]

3 minutes ago, BloodyHell said:

Again, you're comparing completely different architecture. The xbox is just a windows pc locked behind a walled garden. Development for many pc sku's has always been a thing.

Aren’t PS4/Pro and PS5 just basically using PC parts now too?

[stepee]

I feel like there is a confusion of what the concern is, I don’t think anyone is concerned that the XSS itself is a bad system or value proposition as I don’t think anyone here will be getting one as a main system.

 

The issue people are concerned about is that at a certain point games have to toned down in overall scope/vision based on the minimum requirements they have to develop for. PC minimum requirements will go up but for game devs they are stuck with supporting the S as the minimum, if it can barely handle cross gen, then that’s a concern that it won’t be compromising games design for 7 years.

[crispy4000]

1 hour ago, BloodyHell said:

Xbox sex and ses architecture is much closer to pc, allowing them to treat releases just like pc does. PS4 and PS5 are totally different stories. 

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.

 

1 hour ago, BloodyHell said:

Aldo, cyberpunk runs fine on Series S,it's also a huge open world, you either sacrifice graphics or world building.

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.

 

1 hour ago, BloodyHell said:

Also, it's not ms's fault if 3rd parties don't develop at 1440p on it. That's on the devs. Theres Nothing deceptive, that box is absolutely capable of 1440p.

 

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.

[Spork3245]

3 minutes ago, stepee said:

I feel like there is a confusion of what the concern is, I don’t think anyone is concerned that the XSS itself is a bad system or value proposition as I don’t think anyone here will be getting one as a main system.

 

The issue people are concerned about is that at a certain point games have to toned down in overall scope/vision based on the minimum requirements they have to develop for. PC minimum requirements will go up but for game devs they are stuck with supporting the S as they minimum, if it can barely handle cross gen, then that’s a concern that it won’t be compromising games design for 7 years.

Yup, games are based around minimum specs, not maximum.

The odd thing itt is the blasting of the 1440p/60 statement - it’s not anymore misleading than PS5 or XSX 4k/120 statements.

[Keyser_Soze]

13 minutes ago, Spork3245 said:

Who is connecting their consoles to 1440p displays? 0.001% of console gamers? The XSS is meant for people with HDTVs.

 

I know at least one! I gave him one of my old korean monitors that does 1440p. Even braved the pandemic to meet in person and give it to him!

[crispy4000]

12 minutes ago, Spork3245 said:

Yup, games are based around minimum specs, not maximum.

The odd thing itt is the blasting of the 1440p/60 statement - it’s not anymore misleading than PS5 or XSX 4k/120 statements.

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.

 

[Spork3245]

4 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

I know at least one! I gave him one of my old korean monitors that does 1440p. Even braved the pandemic to meet in person and give it to him!

You risked your life for 1440p? It would take at least 8k for me  

[Spork3245]

9 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

120fps has always been talked about as a possibility rather than a norm.  

 

MS and Sony have both been on record to say their machines 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.

 

 

 

 




I guess I’m just not seeing the difference.

[Mercury33]

Lol this thread is a solid way to rebrand having a console war argument. 

[crispy4000]

8 minutes ago, Mercury33 said:

Lol this thread is a solid way to rebrand having a console war argument. 

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.