However, I'm pessimistic on how this can keep evolving. RT already takes a non trivial amount of transistor budget and now those high end AI solutions require another considerable chunk of the transistor budget. If we are already reaching the limits of what non generative AI up-scaling and frame-gen can do, I can't see where a PS7 can go other than using generative AI to interpret a very crude low-detail frame and generating a highly detailed photorealistic scene from that, but that will, I think, require many times more transistor budget than what will likely ever be economically achievable for a whole PS7 system.
Will that be the end of consoles? Will everything move to the cloud and a power guzzling 4KW machine will take care of rendering your PS7 game?
I really can only hope there is a break-trough in miniaturization and we can go back to a pace of improvement that can actually give us a new generation of consoles (and computers) that makes the transition from an SNES to a N64 feel quaint.
We also have a lot of fun playing board games, simple stuff from design, card games, here, the game play is the fun factor. Yes, better hardware may bring more realistic, more x or y, but my feeling is that the real driver, long term, is the quality of the game play. Like the quality of the story telling in a good movie.
What I see as a problem though is that the incumbent console manufacturers, sans Nintendo, have been chasing graphical fidelity since time immemorial as the main attraction for new generations of consoles and may have a hard time convincing buyers to purchase a new system once they can't irk out expressive gains in this area. Maybe they will successfully transition into something more akin to what Nintendo does and focus on delivering killer apps, gimmicks and other innovations every new generation.
Or perhaps they will slowly fall into irrelevance and everything will converge into PC/Steam (I doubt Microsoft can pull off whatever plan they have for the future of xbox) and any half-decent computer can run any game for decades to come and Gabe Newell becomes the richest person in the world.
The quest for graphical realism in games has been running against a diminishing-returns-wall for quite a while now (see hardware raytracing - all that effort for slightly better reflections and shadows, yay?), what we need most right now is more risk-taking in gameplay by big budget games.
Maybe if there's a fundamental leap in AI. It's still undecided if larger datasets and larger models will make these problems go away.
There's a reason why such "build your own story" games like Dwarf Fortress are fairly niche.
I keep thinking there is going to be a video game crash soon, over saturation of samey games. But I'm probably wrong about that. I just think that's what Nintendo had right all along: if you commoditize games, they become worthless. We have endless choice of crap now.
In 1994 at age 13 I stopped playing games altogether. Endless 2d fighters and 2d platformer was just boring. It would take playing wave race and golden eye on the N64 to drag me back in. They were truly extraordinary and completely new experiences (me and my mates never liked doom). Anyway I don't see this kind of shift ever happening again. Infact talking to my 13 year old nephew confirms what I (probably wrongly) believe, he's complaining there's nothing new. He's bored or fortnight and mine craft and whatever else. It's like he's experiencing what I experienced, but I doubt a new generation of hardware will change anything.
But we did hit a point where the games were good enough, and better hardware just meant more polygons, better textures, and more lighting. The issues with Unreal Engine 1 (or maybe just games of that era) was that the worlds were too sparse.
> over saturation of samey games
So that's the thing. Are we at a point where graphics and gameplay in 10-year-old games is good enough?
Personally, there are enough good games from the 32bit generation of consoles, and before, to keep me from ever needing to buy a new console, and these are games from ~25 years ago. I can comfortably play them on a MiSTer (or whatever PC).
Even AAAs aim to create new levels of spectacle (much like blockbuster movies), even if they don’t innovate on gameplay.
The fatigue is real (and I think it’s particularly bad for this generation raised to spend all their gaming time inside the big 3), but there’s something for you out there, the problem is discoverability, not a lack of innovation.
???? hmm wrong??? if everyone can make game, the floor is raising making the "industry standard" of a game is really high
while I agree with you that if everything is A then A is not meaning anything but the problem is A isn't vanish, they just moved to another higher tier
Gunpei yokoi said something similar here:
https://shmuplations.com/yokoi/
Yokoi: When I ask myself why things are like this today, I wonder if it isn’t because we’ve run out of ideas for games. Recent games take the same basic elements from older games, but slap on characters, improve the graphics and processing speed… basically, they make games through a process of ornamentation.
handheld devices like switch,steam deck etc is really the future while phone is also true for some extend but gaming on a phone vs gaming on a handheld is really world of a differences
give it few generations then traditional consoles would obsolete, I mean we are literally have a lot of people enjoy indie game in steam deck right now
In the past a game console might launch at a high price point and then after a few years, the price goes down and they can release a new console at a high at a price close to where the last one started.
Blame crypto, AI, COVID but there has been no price drop for the PS5 and if there was gonna be a PS6 that was really better it would probably have to cost upwards of $1000 and you might as well get a PC. Sure there are people who haven’t tried Steam + an XBOX controller and think PV gaming is all unfun and sweaty but they will come around.
Thus the PS6 should be around 699 at launch.
Typically, you should be receiving at least an annual cost of living increase each year. This is standard practice for every company I’ve ever worked for and it’s a common practice across the industry. Getting a true raise is the amount above and beyond the annual cost of living increase.
If your company has been keeping your salary fixed during this time of inflation, then you are correct that you are losing earning power. I would strongly recommend you hit the job market if that’s the case because the rest of the world has moved on.
In some of the lower wage brackets (not us tech people) the increase in wages has actually outpaced inflation.
If you've got a decent tech job in Canada your marginal tax rate will be near 50%. Any new income is taxed at that rate, so that 3% COL raise, is really a 1.5% raise in your purchasing power, which typically makes you worse off.
Until you're at a very comfortable salary, you're better off job hopping to boost your salary. I'm pretty sure all the financial people are well aware they're eroding their employees salaries over time, and are hoping you are not aware.
In the US the bottom tax brackets where 10% under 2020 $19,750 then 12% next bucket, in 2025 it’s 10% under $23,850 then 12% next bracket. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/historical-income...
That makes sense. The market for remote jobs has been shrinking while more people are competing for the smaller number of remote jobs. In office comes with a premium now and remote is a high competition space.
If a console designed to break even is $1,000 then surely an equivalent PC hardware designed to be profitable without software sales revenue will be more expensive.
Economists use the consumer price index, which tracks a wide basket of goods and services.
Comparing console prices to a single good is nonsense, even if the good has 6000 of years of history, it's not a good comparison to a single good in a vacuum.
You don’t have to install any drivers or anything and with the big screen mode in Steam it’s a lean back experience where you can pick out your games and start one up without using anything other than the controller.
The "it just works" factor and not having to mess with drivers is a huge advantage of consoles.
Apple TV could almost be a decent game system if Apple ever decided to ship a controller in the box and stopped breaking App Store games every year (though live service games rot on the shelf anyway.)
DualSense 4 and 5 support under Linux is rock-solid, wired or wireless. That's to be expected since the drivers are maintained by Sony[1]. I have no idea about the XBox controller, but I know DS works perfectly with Steam/Proton out of the box, with the vanilla Linux kernel.
My experience with Steam Input is ... OK in some cases. It's annoying that it seems to break games that actually do support the DualSense properly (though full haptics only work in wired mode) like FFXIV.
PS1: 24.32 grams at launch
PS5 (disc): 8.28 grams at launch
(So I guess that if what one uses for currency is a sock drawer full of gold, then consoles have become a lot cheaper in the past decades.)
Somewhere between 60 hz and 240hz, theres zero fundamental benefits. Same for resolution.
It isnt just that hardware progress is a sigmoid, our experiential value.
The reality is that exponential improvement is not a fundamental force. Its always going to find some limit.
Resolution-wise, it depends a lot on the kind of content you are viewing as well. If you're looking at a locally-rendered UI filled with sharp lines, 720p is going to look horrible compared to 4k. But when it comes to video you've got to take bitrate into account as well. If anything, a 4k movie with a bitrate of 3Mbps is going to look worse than a 720p movie with a bitrate of 3Mbps.
I definitely prefer 4k over 720p as well, and there's a reason my desktop setup has had a 32" 4k monitor for ages. But beyond that? I might be able to be convinced to spend a few bucks extra for 6k or 8k if my current setup dies, but anything more would be a complete waste of money - at reasonable viewing distances there's absolutely zero visual difference.
We're not going to see 10.000Hz 32k graphics in the future, simply because nobody will want to pay extra to upgrade from 7.500Hz 16k graphics. Even the "hardcore gamers" don't hate money that much.
The resolution part is even sillier - you literally get more information per frame at higher resolutions.
Yes, the law of diminishing returns still applies, but 720p@60hz is way below the optimum. I'd estimate 4k@120hz as the low end of optimal maybe? There's some variance w.r.t the application, a first person game is going to have different requirements from a movie, but either way 720p ain't it.
There's a noticeable and obvious improvement from 720 to 1080p to 4k (depending on the screen size). While there are diminishing gains, up to at least 1440p there's still a very noticeable difference.
> Somewhere between 60 hz and 240hz, theres zero fundamental benefits. Same for resolution.
Also not true. While the difference between 40fps and 60fps is more noticeable than say from 60 to 100fps, the difference is still noticeable enough. Add the reduction in latency that's also very noticeable.
The difference between 60 and 120hz is huge to me. I havent had a lot of experience above 140.
Likewise, 4k is a huge difference in font rendering, and 1080->1440 is big in gaming.
If you have this combination and you play with it for an hour and you go back to a locked 100hz Game you would never want to go back. It's rather annoying in that regard actually.
Yes.
> The OP said "somewhere between 60hz and 240hz" and I agree.
Plenty of us dont. A 240hz OLED still provides a signifacntly blurrier image in motion than my 20+ year old CRT.
It didnt have too.
> Something other than framerate is at play here.
Yes, sample and hold motion blur, inherent to all modern display types commonly in use for the most part.
Even at 240hz, modern displays can not match CRT for motion quality.
Ray tracing is the obvious path towards perfect photorealistic graphics. The problem is that ray tracing is really expensive, and you can't stuff enough ray tracing hardware into a GPU which can also run traditional graphics for older games. This means games are forced to take a hybrid approach, with ray tracing used to augment traditional graphics.
However, full-scene ray tracing has essentially a fixed cost: the hardware needed depends primarily on the resolution and framerate, not the complexity of the scene. Rendering a million photorealistic objects is not much more compute-intensive than rendering a hundred cartoon objects, and without all the complicated tricks needed to fake things in a traditional pipeline any indie dev could make games with AAA graphics. And if you have the hardware for proper full-scene raytracing, you no longer need the whole AI upscaling and framegen to fake it...
Ideally you'd want a GPU which is 100% focused on ray tracing and ditches the entire legacy triangle pipeline - but that's a very hard sell in the PC market. Consoles don't have that problem, because not providing perfect backwards compatibility for 20+ years of games isn't a dealbreaker there.
Increasing the object count by that many orders of magnitude is definitely much more compute intensive.
Surely ray/triangle intersection tests, brdf evaluation, acceleration structure rebuilds (when things move/animate) all would cost more in your photorealistic scenario than the cartoon scenario?
I'm not sure that's actually true for Sony. You can currently play several generations of games on the PS5, and I think losing that on PS6 would be a big deal to a lot of people.
However I suspect that this isn't as cost and space effective as it used to be.
> However, full-scene ray tracing has essentially a fixed cost: the hardware needed depends primarily on the resolution and framerate, not the complexity of the scene.
That's also true for modern rasterization with virtual geometry. Virtual geometry keeps the number of rendered triangles roughly proportional to the screen resolution, not to the scene complexity. Moreover, virtual textures also keep the amount of texture detail in memory roughly proportional to the screen resolution.
The real advantage of modern ray tracing (ReSTIR path tracing) is that it is independent of the number of light sources in the scene.
And while consoles usually lag behind the latest available graphics, I'd expect raytracing and even path tracing to become available to console graphics eventually.
One advantage of consoles is that they're a fixed hardware target, so games can test on the exact hardware and know exactly what performance they'll get, and whether they consider that performance an acceptable experience.
You can not have "Path Tracing" in games, not according to what it is. And it also probably does not make sense, because the goal of real-time rendering is not to render the perfect frame at any time, but it is to produce the best reactive, coherent sequence of frames possible in response to simulation and players inputs. This being said, HW ray tracing is still somehow game changing because it shapes a SIMT HW to make it good at inherently divergent computation (eg. traversing a graph of nodes representing a scene): following this direction, many more things will be unlocked in real-time simulation and rendering. But not 6k samples unidirectionally path-traced per pixel in a game.
It seems like you're deliberately ignoring the terminology currently widely used in the gaming industry.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/should-you-bother-with-path...
https://gamingbolt.com/10-games-that-make-the-best-use-of-pa...
(And any number of other sources, those are just the first two I found.)
If you have some issue with that terminology, by all means raise that issue, but "You can not have" is just factually incorrect here.
It is not incorrect because, at least for now, all those "path tracing" modes do not do compute multiple "paths" (with each being made of multiple rays casted) per pixel but rasterize primary rays and then either fire 1 [in rare occasions, 2] rays for such a pixel, or, more often, read a value from a local special cache called a "reservoir" or from a radiance cache - which is sometimes a neural network. All of this goes even against the defition your first article gives itself of path tracing :D
I don't have problems with many people calling it "path tracing" in the same way I don't have issues with many (more) people calling Chrome "Google" or any browser "the internet", but if one wants to talk about future trends in computing (or is posting on hacker news!) I believe it's better to indicate a browser as a browser, Google as a search engine, and Path Tracing as what it is.
I know this isn't an original idea, but I wonder if this will be the trick for step-level improvement in visuals. Use traditional 3D models for the broad strokes and generative AI for texture and lighting details. We're at diminishing returns for add polygons and better lighting, and generative AI seems to be better at improving from there—when it doesn't have to get the finger count right.
I’m a huge fan of Final Fantasy games. Every mainline game (those with just a number; excluding 11 and 14 which are MMOs) pushes the graphical limits of the platforms at the time. The jump from 6 to 7 (from SNES to PS1); from 9 to 10 (PS1 to 2); and from 12 to 13 (PS3/X360) were all mind blowing. 15 (PS4) and 16 (PS5) were also major improvements in graphics quality, but the “oh wow” generational gap is gone.
And then I look at the gameplay of these games, and it’s generally regarded as going in the opposite direction- it’s all subjective of course but 10 is generally regarded as the last “amazing” overall game, with opinions dropping off from there.
We’ve now reached the point where an engaging game with good mechanics is way more important than graphics: case in point being Nintendo Switch, which is cheaper and has much worse hardware, but competes with the PS5 and massively outsells Xbox by huge margins, because the games are fun.
And don't forget the series of MMOs:
FF11 merged Final Fantasy with old-school MMOs, notably Everquest, to great success.
FF14 2.0 was literally A Realm Reborn from the ashes of the failed 1.0, and was followed by the exceptional Heavensward expansion.
FF14 Shadowbringers was and is considered great.
Even in the latest versions of unreal and unity you will find the classic tools. They just won't be advertised and the engine vendor might even frown upon them during a tech demo to make their fancy new temporal slop solution seem superior.
The trick is to not get taken for a ride by the tools vendors. Real time lights, "free" anti aliasing, and sub-pixel triangles are the forbidden fruits of game dev. It's really easy to get caught up in the devil's bargain of trading unlimited art detail for unknowns at end customer time.
ps2 sales number is iffy at very least, also ps2 sales has been dethrone "few times" quotation mark since when nintendo sales is creeping up, sony announced there are "few millions sales" added while they already didnt produce them years ago
The switch literally has and according to projections the Switch 1 will in fact have outsold the PS2 globally by the end of the year.
https://portfoliocharts.com/2021/12/16/three-secret-ingredie...
> bitcoin
:D
It felt like "real" referred to the physical: gold, food, energy, minerals, real physical things that people have a constant demand for.
It was funny to spot the odd entry, where bitcoins are fully digital and have a very socially dependent agreement and entire digital infrastructure required to keep them functioning.
Gold has a bit of a social agreement as well, but it's social agreement dates thousands of years and even if it broke away still has value as a physical material.
https://www.investopedia.com/news/hyperinflation-produces-su...
https://decrypt.co/332083/billionaire-ray-dalio-urges-invest...
But in any case, if OP meant deflationary, I don't think "real" is a good synonym.
I’d be absolutely shocked if in 10 years, all AAA games aren’t being rendered by a transformer. Google’s veo 3 is already extremely impressive. No way games will be rendered through traditional shaders in 2035.
Now that will be peak power efficiency and a real solution for the world where all electricity and silicon are hogged by AI farms.
/s or not, you decide.
10 years ago people were predicting VR would be everywhere, it flopped hard.
10 years ago, people were predicting that deep learning will change everything. And it did.
Why just use one example (VR) and apply it to everything? Even then, a good portion of people did not think VR would be everywhere by now.
Fully autonomous in select defined cities owned by big corps is probably a reasonable expectation.
Fully autonomous in the hands of an owner applied to all driving conditions and working reliably is likely still a distant goal.
It is odd how many people don't realize how developed self-driving taxis are.
I think most people will consider self driving tech to be a thing when it's as widespread as TVs were, 20 years after their introduction.
Those with the real vested interest don't care if that flops, while zealous worshippers to the next brand new disruptive tech are just a free vehicle to that end.
The answer is clearly transformer based.
The other major success of recent years not discussed much so far is gaussian splats, which tear up the established production pipeline again.
The images rendered in a game need to accurately represent a very complex world state. Do we have any examples of Transformer based models doing something in this category? Can they do it in real-time?
I could absolutely see something like rendering a simplified and stylised version and getting Transformers to fill in details. That's kind of a direct evolution from the upscaling approach described here, but end to end rendering from game state is far less obvious.
I’m really curious why this would be preferable for a AAA studio game outside of potential cost savings. Also imagine it’d come at the cost of deterministic output / consistency in visuals.
I could absolutely see something like rendering a simplified and stylised version and getting Transformers to fill in details. That's kind of a direct evolution from the upscaling approach described here, but end to end rendering from game state is far less obvious.
The main rendering would be done by the transformer.
Already in 2025, Google Veo 3 is generating pixels far more realistic than AAA games. I don't see why this wouldn't be the default rendering mode for AAA games in 2035. It's insanity to think it won't be.
That’s because games are "realtime", meaning with a tight frame-time budget. AI models are not (and are even running on multiple cards each costing 6 figures).
I’m so excited to be charged AAA prices for said wonderful experience.
For Genie to exceed AAA Graphics in 2035 at 60 to 120fps per second would require a breakthrough of efficiency that is at least an order of magnitude, and much higher for it to be cost effective.
The gaming industry for AAA titles requires at least 3-4 years in making. Which means AAA titles studios would need to start working on it in 2031. Possibility of All AAA games in 2031 are made with LLM model is practically zero.
We are talking 10 years from now.
And unfortunately 10 years isn't that long time in many industries. We are barely talking about 3 cycles.
You conflate the challenge of generating realistic pixels with the challenge of generating realistic pixels that represent a highly detailed world state.
So I don't think your argument is convincing or complete.
Traditional rendering techniques can also easily exceed the quality of AAA games if you don't impose strict time or latency constraints on them. Wake me up when a version of Veo is generating HD frames in less than 16 milliseconds, on consumer hardware, without batching, and then we can talk about whether that inevitably much smaller model is good enough to be a competitive game renderer.
It will be AI all the way down soon. The models internal world view could be multiple passes and multi layer with different strategies... In any case; safe to say more AI will be involved in more places ;)
I think it's reasonable to assume we won't see this tech replace game engines without significant further breakthroughs...
For LLMs agentic workflows ended up being a big breakthrough to make them usable. Maybe these World Models will interact with a sort of game engine directly somehow to get the required consistency. But it's not evident that you can just scale your way from "visual memory extending up to one minute ago" to 70+ hour game experiences.
Competition works wonders.
The main goal of Direct3D 12, and subsequently Vulcan, was to allow for better use of the underlying graphics hardware as it had changed more and more from its fixed pipeline roots.
So maybe the time is ripe for a rethink, again.
Particularly the frame generation features, upscaling and frame interpolation, have promise but needs to be integrated in a different way I think to really be of benefit.
You aren't seeing them adopted that much, because the hardware still isn't deployed at scale that games can count on them being available, and also it cannot ping back on improving the developer experience adopting them.
The times of console giants, their fiefdoms and the big game studios is coming to an end.
And there are AAA that make and will make good money with graphics being front and center.
I'm just not sold.
Do I really think that BG3 being slightly prettier than, say, Dragon Age / Skyrim / etc made it a more enticing game? Not to me certainly. Was cyberpunk prettier than Witcher 3? Did it need to be for me to play it?
My query isn't about whether you can get people to upgrade to play new stuff (always true). But whether they'd still upgrade if they could play on the old console with worse graphics.
I also don't think anyone is going to suddenly start playing video games because the graphics improve further.
Absolutely - graphical improvements make the game more immersive for me and I don't want to go back and replay the games I spent hundreds of hours in mid two thousands, like say NVN or Icewind Dale (never played BG 2). It's just not the same feeling now that I've played games with incomparable graphics, polished mechanics and movie level voice acting/mocap cutscenes. I even picked up Mass Effect recently out of nostalgia but gave up fast because it just isn't as captivating as it was back when it was peak graphics.
I routinely re-play games like Diablo 2 or BG1/2 and I couldn't care less about graphics, voice acting or motion capture.
Exactly. Graphics are not the end all be all for assessing games, but it’s odd how quickly people handwave away graphics in a visual medium.
There is a difference between graphics as in rendering (i.e. the technical side, how something gets rendered) and graphics as in aesthetics (i.e. visual styles, presentation, etc).
The latter is important for games because it can be used to evoke some feel to the player (e.g. cartoony Mario games or dreadful Silent Hill games). The former however is not important by itself, its importance only comes as means to achieve the latter. When people handwave away graphics in games they handwave the misplaced focus on graphics-as-in-tech, not on graphics-as-in-aesthetics.
Very successful games are still being made that use sprites, low-res polygons, cel shading, etc. While these techniques still can run into hardware limits, they generally don't benefit from the sort of improvements (and that word is becoming ever more debatable with things like AI frame generation) that make for better looking [whatever that quality is called] games.
This is just one type of graphics. And focusing too heavily on it is not going to be enough to keep the big players in the industry afloat for much longer. Some gamers care--apparently some care a lot--but that isn't translating into enough sales to overcome the bloated costs.
And yet many more have no such issue doing exactly this. Despite having a machine capable of the best graphics at the best resolution, I have exactly zero issues going back and playing older games.
Just in the past month alone with some time off for surgery I played and completed Quake, Heretic and Blood. All easily as good, fun and as compelling as modern titles, if not in some ways better.
-How difficult it must be for the art/technical teams at game studios to figure out for all the detail they are capable of putting on screen how much of it will be appreciated by gamers. Essentially making sure that anything they're going to be budgeting significant amount of worker time to creating, gamers aren't going to run right past it and ignore or doesn't contribute meaningfully to 'more than the sum of its parts'.
-As much as technology is an enabler for art, alongside the install base issue how well does pursuing new methods fit how their studio is used to working, and is the payoff there if they spend time adapting. A lot of gaming business is about shipping product, and the studios concern is primarily about getting content to gamers than chasing tech as that is what lets their business continue, selling GPUs/consoles is another company's business.
There is a reason there are so many complaints in social media about being obvious to gamers in what game engine a game was written on.
It used to be that game development quality was taken more seriously, when they were sold via storage media, and there was a deadline to burn those discs/cartridges.
Now they just ship whatever is done by the deadline, and updates will come later via a DLC, if at all.
If it was so simple to bootstrap an engine no one would pay the percentage points to Unity and Epic.
The reality is the quality bar is insanely high.
Both of these seem to suffer from incentive issues similar to enterprise software: They're not marketing and selling to either end users or professionals, but studio executives. So it's important to have - preferably a steady stream of - flashy headline features (e.g. nanite, lumen) instead of a product that actually works on the most basic level (consistently render frames). It doesn't really matter to Epic Games that UE4/5 RT is largely unplayable; even for game publishers, if you can pull nice-looking screenshots out of the engine or do good-looking 24p offline renders (and slap "in-game graphics" on them), that's good enough.
The shader stutter issues are non-existent on console because consoles have one architecture and you can ship shaders as compiled machine code. For PC you don't know what architecture you will be targeting, so you ship some form of bytecode that needs to be compiled on the target machine.
The issue is that, because of monolithic pipelines, you have to provide the exact state the shaders will be used in. There's a lot of that, and a large part of it depends on user authored content, which makes it really hard to figure out in advance.
It's a fundamental design mistake in D3D12/Vulkan that is slowly being corrected, but it will take some time (and even more for game engines to catch up).
Like, on the one hand, you have engines/games which always stutter, have more-or-less long "shader precompilation" splashscreens on every patch and still stutter anyway. The frametime graph of any UE title looks like a topographic cross-section of Verdun. On the other hand there are titles not using those engines where you wouldn't even notice there were any shaders to precompile which... just run.
[1] https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...
> In a highly programmable real-time rendering environment such as Unreal Engine (UE), any application with a large amount of content has too many GPU state parameters that can change to make it practical to manually configure PSOs in advance. To work around this complication, UE can collect data about the GPU state from an application build at runtime, then use this cached data to generate new PSOs far in advance of when they are used. This narrows down the possible GPU states to only the ones used in the application. The PSO descriptions gathered from running the application are called PSO caches.
> The steps to collect PSOs in Unreal are:
> 1. Play the game.
> 2. Log what is actually drawn.
> 3. Include this information in the build.
> After that, on subsequent playthroughs the game can create the necessary GPU states earlier than they are needed by the rendering code.
Of course, if the playthrough used for generating the list of shadersdoesn't hit X codepath ("oh this particular spell was not cast while holding down shift"), a player hitting it will then get a 0.1s game pause when they invariably do.
Just a quick search,
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/the-ps5-stutter-issue-is-re...
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/stutters-on-xbox-series...
Can't do that for PC so you either have long first runs or stutter for JIT shader compiles.
I mean, are you actually talking from experience at all here?
It's really more that engines are an insane expense in money and time and buying one gets your full team in engine far sooner. That's why they're popular.
Honestly the only reason I caved with the GPU purchase (which cost the equivalent of a PS pro) was the local AI - but in retrospect that was useless as well.
And I can count on those games still being playable on my six year old hardware because they are in fact developed for 6 year old hardware.
> PC performance for 6+ year hardware is guaranteed to suck
For new titles at maximum graphics level sure. For new titles at the kind of fidelity six year old consoles are putting out? Nah. You just drop your settings from "ULTIMATE MAXIMUM HYPER FOR NEWEST GPUS ONLY" to "the same low to medium at best settings the consoles are running" and off you go.
The Last of Us franchise, especially part 2 have been the most immersive experiences that I have had in gaming.
This game pretty much told me that the PlayStation is more than capable of delivering this kind of experiences.
Now, if some of those high budget so-called AAA games cannot deliver not even a fraction of that - I believe - is on them.
They were enough since PS4 era to deliver smooth, immersive graphics.
For example, Tiny Glade and Teardown have ray traced global illumination, which makes them look great with their own art style, rather than expensive hyper-realism.
But currently this is technically hard to pull off, and works only within certain constrained environments.
Devs are also constrained by the need to support multiple generations of GPUs. That's great from perspective of preventing e-waste and making games more accessible. But technically it means that assets/levels still have to be built with workarounds for rasterized lights and inaccurate shadows. Simply plugging in better lighting makes things look worse by exposing the workarounds, while also lacking polish for the new lighting system. This is why optional ray tracing effects are underwhelming.
Many PC users also own a switch. It is in fact one of the most common pairings. There is very little I want get on PC from PS/Xbox so very little point in owning one, I won't get any of the Nintendo titles so keeping one around makes significantly more sense if I want to cover my bases for exclusives.
I'm curious why graphics are stagnating and even getting worse in many cases.
Battlefield 6 vs Battlefield 1 - Direct Comparison! Attention to Detail & Graphics! PC 4K
The progress in 9 years do seems underwhelming.
BF1 is genuinely gorgeous, I can't lie. I think it's the photogrammetry. Do you think the lighting is better in BF1? I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that BF6's lighting is more dynamic.
To my eyes everything looked better in BF1.
Maybe it's trickery but it doesn't matter to me. BF6, new COD, and other games all look pretty bad. At least compared to what I would expect from games in 2025.
I don't see any real differences from similar games released 10 years ago.
The ability to do irregular sampling, efficient shadow computation (every flavour of shadow mapping is terrible!) and global illumination is already making its way into games, and path tracing has been the algorithm of choice in offline rendering (my profession since 2010) for quite a while already.
Making a flexible rasterisation-based renderer is a huge engineering undertaking, see e.g. Unreal Engine. With the relentless march of processing power, and finally having hardware acceleration as rasterisation has enjoyed for decades, it's going to be possible for much smaller teams to deliver realistic and creative (see e.g. Dreams[0]) visuals with far less engineering effort. Some nice recent examples of this are Teardown[1] and Tiny Glade[2].
It's even more inevitable from today's point of view than it was back in the 90s :)
[0] Dreams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI
[1] Teardown: https://teardowngame.com/
[2] Tiny Glade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jusWW2pPnA0
The idea of the radiance cores is pretty neato
I still dont understand how it is different to Nvidia's RT Core.
I should dig that up and add NURBS and see how it performs today.
Games written for the PlayStation exclusively get to take advantage of everything, but there is nothing to compare the release to.
Alternatively, if a game is release cross-platform, there’s little incentive to tune the performance past the benchmarks of comparable platforms. Why make the PlayStation game look better than Xbox if it involves rewriting engine layer stuff to take advantage of the hardware, for one platform only.
Basically all of the most interesting utilization of the hardware comes at the very end of the consoles lifecycle. It’s been like that for decades.
For PS2, game consoles didn't become the centre of home computing; for PS3, programming against the GPU became the standard of doing real time graphics, not some exotic processor, plus that home entertaining moved on to take other forms (like watching YouTube on an iPad instead of having a media centre set up around the TV); for PS4, people didn't care if the console does social networking; PS5 has been practical, it's just the technology/approach ended up adopted by everyone, so it lost its novelty later on.
PS3s edge was generally seen as the DVD player.
That's why Sony went with Blue Ray in the PS4, hoping to capitalize on the next medium, too. While that bet didn't pay out, Xbox kinda self destructed, consequently making them the dominant player any way.
Finally:
> PS5 has been practical, it's just the technology/approach ended up adopted by everyone, so it lost its novelty later on.
PS5 did not have any novel approach that was consequently adopted by others. The only thing "novel" in the current generation is frame generation, and that was already being pushed for years by the time Sony jumped on that bandwagon.
The PS2 was the DVD console. The PS3 was the bluray console.
The PS4 and PS5 are also bluray consoles, however blurays are too slow now so they're just a medium for movies or to download the game from.
DualSense haptics are terrific, though the Switch kind of did them first with the Joy-Cons. I'd say haptics and adaptive triggers are two features that should become standard. Once you have them you never want to go back.
PS5's fast SSD was a bit of a game changer in terms of load time and texture streaming, and everyone except Nintendo has gone for fast m.2/nvme storage. PS5 also finally delivered the full remote play experience that PS3 and PS4 had teased but not completed. Original PS5 also had superior thermals vs. PS4 pro, while PS5 pro does solid 4K gaming while costing less than most game PCs (and is still quieter than PS4 pro.) Fast loading, solid remote play, solid 4K, low-ish noise are all things I don't want to give up in any console or game PC.
My favorite PS5 feature however is fast game updates (vs. PS4's interminable "copying" stage.) Switch and Switch 2 also seem to have fairly fast game updates, but slower flash storage.
I’m intrigued.
Technically the PS4 supported 2.5" SATA or USB SSDs, but yeah PS5 is first gen that requires SSDs, and you cannot run PS5 games off USB anymore.
Console also partially had to be quirky dragsters because of Moore's Law - they had to be ahead of PC by years, because it had to be at least comparable to PC games at the end of lifecycle, not utterly obsolete.
But we've all moved on. IMO that is a good thing.
| Game | Release Year |
|-------------------------------------------|--------------|
| GTA III | 2001 |
| GTA Vice City | 2002 |
| GTA San Andreas | 2004 |
| Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus | 2002 |
| Sly 2: Band of Thieves | 2004 |
| Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves | 2005 |
| Infamous | 2009 |
| Infamous 2 | 2011 |
| Game | Release Year |
|-------------------------------------------|--------------|
| Astro's Playroom | 2020 |
| Demon's Souls | 2020 |
| Destruction AllStars | 2021 |
| Gran Turismo 7 | 2022 |
| Horizon Call of the Mountain | 2023 |
| Firewall Ultra | 2023 |
| Astro Bot | 2024 |
| Death Stranding 2: On the Beach | 2025 |
| Ghost of Yōtei | 2025 |Graphic is nice but not number one.
I've had issues with Xbox instant resume. Lots of "your save file has changed since the last time you played, so we have to close the game and relaunch" issues. Even when the game was suspended an hour earlier. I assume it's just cloud save time sync issues where the cloud save looks newer because it has a timestamp 2 seconds after the local one. Doesn't fill me with confidence, though.
The most important impact by far of the PS5 adopting this storage architecture (and the Xbox Series X doing something similar) is that it gave game developers permission to make games that require SSD performance.
The compression codec they licensed was built by some of the best programmers alive [0], and was later acquired by Epic [1]
I dunno how you put those together and come up with "isn't really fast" or "not particularly innovative".
Fast doesn't mean 'faster than anything else in existence'. Fast is relative to other existing solutions with similar resource constraints.
[0] https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/about/ [1] https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/epic-acquires-rad-...
"Five years later, laptops are just catching up" is a flat out lie.
"at the same price point, it's faster than what you'd expect from a PC" sounds impressive until you remember that the entire business model of Sony and Microsoft consoles is to sell the console at or below cost and make the real money on games, subscription services, and accessories.
The only interesting or at all innovative part of this story is the hardware decompression stuff (that's in the SoC rather than the SSD controller), but you're overselling it. Microsoft did pretty much the same thing with their console and a different compression codec. (Also, the fact that Kraken is a very good compression method for running on CPUs absolutely does not imply that it's the best choice for implementing in silicon. Sony's decision to implement it in hardware was likely mainly due to the fact that lots of PS4 games used it.) Your own source says that space savings for PS5 games were more due to the deduplication enabled by not having seek latency to worry about, than due to the Kraken compression.
To my knowledge we haven’t really got a version of that in PC land. The closest is an nvidia-specific thing that lets the GPU read storage directly, but that’s still not the same.
How good it will be? Just look at the current upscalers working on perfectly rendered images - photos. And they aren't doing it in realtime. So the errors, noise, and artefacts are all but inevitable. Those will be masked by post processing techniques that will inevitably degrade image clarity.
You can give much more input than a single low res frame. You could throw in motion vectors, scene depth, scene normals, unlit color, you could separately upscale opaque, transparent and post process effect... I feel like you could really do a lot more.
Plus, aren't cellphone camera upscalers pretty much realtime these days? I think you're comparing generating an image to what would actually be happening.
> You can give much more input than a single low res frame. You could throw in motion vectors, scene depth, scene normals, unlit color, you could separately upscale opaque, transparent and post process effect... I feel like you could really do a lot more.
NVIDIA has already been down that road. What you're describing is pretty much DLSS, at various points in its history. To the extent that those techniques were low-hanging fruit for improving upscaler quality, it's already been tried and adopted to the extent that it's practical. At this point, it's more reasonable to assume that there isn't much low-hanging fruit for further quality improvements in upscalers without significant hardware improvements, and that the remaining artifacts and other downsides are hard problems.
Even without modern deep-learning based "AI", it's not like the pixels you see with traditional rendering pipelines were all artisanal and curated.
Given netflix popularity, most people obviously don’t value image quality as much as other factors.
And it’s even true for myself. For gaming, given the choice of 30fps at a higher bitrate, or 60fps at a lower one, I’ll take the 60fps.
But I want high bitrate and high fps. I am certainly not going to celebrate the reduction in image quality.
What about perceived image quality? If you are just playing the game chances of you noticing anything (unless you crank up the upscaling to the maximum) are near zero.
I am playing on a 55” TV at computer monitor distance, so the difference between a true 4K image and an upscaled one is very significant.
When I was a kid people had dozens of CDs with movies, while pretty much nobody had DVDs. DVD was simply too expensive, while Xvid allowed to compress entire movie into a CD while keeping good quality. Of course original DVD release would've been better, but we were too poor, and watching ten movies at 80% quality was better than watching one movie at 100% quality.
DLSS allows to effectively quadruple FPS with minimal subjective quality impact. Of course natively rendered image would've been better, but most people are simply too poor to buy game rig that plays newest games 4k 120FPS on maximum settings. You can keep arguing as much as you want that natively rendered image is better, but unless you send me money to buy a new PC, I'll keep using DLSS.
Some [0] are seeing 20 to 30% drop in actual frames when activating DLSS, and that means as much latency as well.
There's still games where it should be a decent tradeoff (racing or flight simulators ? Infinite Nikki ?), but it's definitely not a no-brainer.
But how about a practical argument instead. Enabling raytracing in games tends to suck. The graphical improvements on offer are simply not worth the performance cost.
A common argument is that we don't have fast enough hardware yet, or developers haven't been able to use raytracing to it's fullest yet, but it's been a pretty long damn time since this hardware was mainstream.
I think the most damning evidence of this is the just released Battlefield 6. This is a franchise that previously had raytracing as a top-level feature. This new release doesn't support it, doesn't intend to support it.
And in a world where basically every AAA release is panned for performance problems, BF6 has articles like this: https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/battlefield-6-this-is-what-...
Pretty much this - even in games that have good ray tracing, I can't tell when it's off or on (except for the FPS hit) - I cared so little I bought a card not known to be good at it (7900XTX) because the two games I play the most don't support it anyway.
They oversold the technology/benefits and I wasn't buying it.
Ray tracing looks almost indistinguishable from really good rasterized lighting in MOST conditions. In scenes with high amounts of gloss and reflections, it's a little more pronounced. A little.
From my perspective, you're getting, like, a 5% improvement in only one specific aspect of graphics in exchange for a 200% cost.
It's just not worth it.
CP2077 rasterization vs ray tracing vs path tracing is like night and day. Rasterization looks "gamey". Path tracing makes it look pre-rendered. Huge difference.
As soon as you remove the ridiculous amounts of gloss, the difference is almost imperceptible.
But that's a game design change that takes longer
Because enabling raytracing means the game supports non-raytracing too. Which limits the game's design on how they can take advantage of raytracing being realtime.
The only exception to this I've seen The Finals: https://youtu.be/MxkRJ_7sg8Y . Made by ex-Battlefield devs, the dynamic environment from them 2 years ago is on a whole other level even compared to Battlefield 6.
With raytracing lighting a scene goes from taking hours-days to just designating objects that emit light
(sorry if obvious / already done)
Ray tracing is solving the light transport problem in the hardest way possible. Each additional bounce adds exponentially more computational complexity. The control flows are also very branchy when you start getting into the wild indirect lighting scenarios. GPUs prefer straight SIMD flows, not wild, hierarchical rabbit hole exploration. Disney still uses CPU based render farms. There's no way you are reasonably emulating that experience in <16ms.
The closest thing we have to functional ray tracing for gaming is light mapping. This is effectively just ray tracing done ahead of time, but the advantage is you can bake for hours to get insanely accurate light maps and then push 200+ fps on moderate hardware. It's almost like you are cheating the universe when this is done well.
The human brain has a built in TAA solution that excels as frame latencies drop into single digit milliseconds.
I would say, the closest we can get are workarounds like radiance cascades. But everything else than raytracing is just an ugly workaround which falls apart in dynamic scenarios. And don't forget that baking times and storing those results, leading to massive game sizes, are a huge negative.
Funnily enough raytracing is also just an approximation to the real world, but at least artists and devs can expect it to work everywhere without hacks (in theory).
edit: not Doom Etenral, it’s Doom The Dark Ages, the latest one.
Light mapping is a cute trick and the reason why Mirror's Edge still looks so good after all these years, but it requires doing away with dynamic lighting, which is a non-starter for most games.
I want my true-to-life dynamic lighting in games thank you very much.
Most modern engines support (and encourage) use of a mixed lighting mode. You can have the best of both worlds. One directional RT light probably isn't going to ruin the pudding if the rest of the lights are baked.
On a more subjective note, you get less interesting art styles because studio somehow have to cram raytracing as a value proposition in there.
2. People turn on RT in games not designed with it in mind and therefore observe only minor graphical improvements for vastly reduced performance. Simple chicken-and-egg problem, hardware improvements will fix it.
In accelerated compute, the largest areas of interest for advancement are 1) simulation and modeling and 2) learning and inference.
That's why this doesn't make sense to a lot of people. Sony and AMD aren't trying to extend current trends, they're leveraging their portfolios to make the advancements that will shape future markets 20-40 years out. It's really quite bold.
Come to think of it, Sony is also stuck in the PS4 era since PS5 pro is basically a PS4 pro that plays most of the same games but at 4K/60. (Though it does add a fast SSD and nice haptics on the DualSense controller.) But it's really about the games, and we haven't seen a lot of system seller exclusives on the PS5 that aren't on PS4, PC, or other consoles. (Though I'm partial to Astro-bot and also enjoyed timed exclusives like FF16 and FF7 Rebirth.)
PS5 and Switch 2 are still great gaming consoles - PS5 is cheaper than many GPU cards, while Switch 2 competes favorably with Steam Deck as a handheld and hybrid game system.
But the way it is framed as a revolutionary step and as a Sony collab is a tad misleading. AMD is competent enough to do it by itself, and this will definitely show up in PC and the competing Xbox.
I'm rooting for something unique because I haven't owned a console for 20 years and I like interesting hardware. But hopefully they've learned a lesson about developer ergonomics this time around.
Just so we’re clear, you’re talking about a decision that didn’t really pan out made over 20 years ago.
PS6 will be an upgraded PS5 without question. You aren’t ever going to see a massive divergence away from the PC everyone took the last twenty years working towards.
The landscape favors Microsoft, but they’ll drop the ball, again.
The PS3 sold 87m units, and more importantly, it sold more than the Xbox 360, so I think it panned out fine even if we shouldn't call it a roaring success.
It did sell less than the PS2 or PS4 but I don't think the had much to do with the cell architecture.
Game developer hated it, but that's a different issue.
I do agree that a truly unusual architecture like this is very unlikely for the next gen though.
There are no exclusive games for AMD and Nvidia and yet no one complains about that, they just choose whichever brand they prefer to game on and that's it.
If we can get high texture + throughput content like dual 4k streams but with 1080p bandwidth, we can get VR that isn't as janky. If we can get lower power consumption, we can get smaller (and cooler) form functions which means we might see a future where the Playstation Portal is the console itself. I'm about to get on a flight to Sweden, and I'd kill to have something like my Steam Deck but running way cooler, way more powerful, and less prone to render errors.
I get the feeling Sony will definitely focus on graphics as that's been their play since the 90s, but my word if we get a monumental form factor shift and native VR support that feels closer to the promise on paper, that could be a game changer.
every year, Playstation ranks very high when it comes to GOTY nominations
just last year, Playstation had the most nominations for GOTY: https://x.com/thegameawards/status/1858558789320142971
not only that, but PS5 has more 1st party games than Microsoft's Xbox S|X
1053 vs 812 (that got inflated with recent Activision acquisition)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PlayStation_5_games
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_Series_X_and_Seri...
It's important to check the facts before spreading random FUD
PS5 had the strongest lineup of games this generation, hence why they sold this many consoles
Still today, consumers are attracted to PS5's lineup, and this is corroborated by facts and data https://www.vgchartz.com/
In August for example, the ratio between PS5 and Xbox is 8:1; almost as good as the new Nintendo Switch 2, and the console is almost 5 years old!
You say "underwhelming", people are saying otherwise
Also, to my knowledge, the PS5 still lags behind the PS4 in terms of sales, despite the significant boost that COVID-19 provided.
Each generation has around half the number of games as the previous. This does get a bit murky with the advent of shovelware in online stores, but my point remains.
I think this only proves is that games are now ridiculously expensive to create and met the quality standards expected. Maybe AI will improved this in this future. Take-Two has confirmed that GTA6's budget has exceeded US$1 billion, which is mind-blowing.
Its sequel Saros is coming out next year too.
There’s also Spider-Man 2, Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart, Astro Bot, Death Stranding 2, Ghost of Yotei…
Their output hasn’t been worse than the PS4 at all imo.
And why wouldn’t they? In many cases they’re are some compiler settings and a few drivers away from working.
so fake frames generation ?
I'll also go a step further - not every machine-learning pass is frame generation. Nvidia uses AI for DLAA, a form of DLSS that works with 100% input resolution as a denoiser/antialiasing combined pass. It's absolutely excellent if your GPU can keep up with the displayed content.
As someone working at an ISP, I am frustrated with how bad Sony has mangled the networking stack on these consoles. I thought BSD was supposed to be the best in breed of networking but instead Sony has found all sorts of magical ways to make it Not Work.
From the PS5 variants that just hate 802.11ax to all the gamers making wild suggestions like changing MTU settings or DNS settings just to make your games work online... man, does Sony make it a pain for us to troubleshoot when they wreck it.
Bonus points that they took away the Web browser so we can't even try to do forward-facing troubleshooting without going through an obtuse process of the third-party-account-linking system to sneak out of the process to run a proper speedtest to Speedtest/Fast to show that "no, it's PSN being slow, not us".
Not entirely unlike how many AI academics who step functioned their compensation a decade ago by pivoting to the tech industry had no experience bringing an AI product to market, but they certainly felt free pontificate on how things are done.
I eagerly await the shakeout due from the weakly efficient market as the future of gaming ends up looking like nothing anyone imagineered.
clicks article
"Project Amethyst is focused on going beyond traditional rasterization techniques that don't scale well when you try to "brute force that with raw power alone," Huynh said in the video. Instead, the new architecture is focused on more efficient running of the kinds of machine-learning-based neural networks behind AMD's FSR upscaling technology and Sony's similar PSSR system."
"Yep..."
Sigh.
Why not also give a mini AMD EPYC cpu with 32 cores? This way games would start to be much better at multicore.
Seems they didn’t learn from the PS3, and that exotic architectures don't drive sales. Gamers don’t give a shit and devs won’t choose it unless they have a lucrative first party contract.
Since Mark Cerny became the hardware architect of PS they have not made the mistakes of the PS3 generation at all.
Now, shackling yourself to AMD and expecting a miracle... that I cannot say is a good idea. Maybe Cerny has seen something we haven't, who knows.
TL:DW - it's not quite the full-fat CNN model but it's also not a uselessly pared-back upscaler. Seems to handle antialiasing and simple upscale well at super low TDPs (<10w).
In this video, Alex goes in-depth on Switch 2 DLSS, confirming that there are actually two different forms of the technology available - the DLSS we know from PC gaming and a faster, far more simplified version.Frankly after releasing the $700 pro and going “it’s basically the same specs but it can actually do 4K60 this time we promise” and given how many friends I have with the PS5 sitting around as an expensive paper weight, I can’t see a world where I get a PS6 despite decades of console gaming. The PS5 is an oversized final fantasy machine supported by remakes/remasters of all their hits from the PS3/PS4 era. It’s kind of striking when you look at the most popular games on the console.
Don’t even get me started on Xbox lol
But it’s a fact development times continue to increase. But that’s not a Sony thing it’s happening to every publisher.
If you don’t need Final Fantasy or to (re)play improved PS4 games, the PS5 is an expensive paperweight and you may as well just grab a series S or something for half the price, half the shelf space, and play 90% of the same games.
Let me ask you this: should we really be taking this console seriously if they’re about to go an entire cycle without naughty dog releasing a game?
And I own every console.
We don’t need to flex about owning every console. I own basically every one as well except PS5. I kept waiting and waiting for a good sale and a good library just like PS4. The wait has not rewarded me lol
I get every console at launch, so I went from PS4 to Pro to PS5 to Pro.
At launch I really enjoyed Demon’s Souls, which I never played in PS3, fantastic game. Then came out Returnal probably my favorite 1st party game so far, really looking forward to its sequel Saros next year.
I also played Ragnarok, GT7 (with PSVR2 is fantastic), Horizon 2, and yes, all these came out also for PS4 but are undoubtedly better on the PS5. I’d just get a PS5 just because of the fast loading, it’s awesome.
There’s also Spider-Man 2, Ratchet, Death Stranding 2, Ghost of Yotei, and I’ll probably leaving others but there’s plenty of great 1st party exclusives. There’s also a bunch of great 3rd party exclusives as well.
I don’t game on PC though, used to when I was younger but I prefer to play on consoles now and use the computers for work and other things.
I understand these things don’t bother you but you can’t say it has plenty of exclusives when it literally does not. You just aren’t bothered by that fact and that is fine. But it makes me question what I would be buying when I have more affordable ways of playing all of these games since again, they have virtually no exclusives and their best studios have dropped little to nothing due to their failed gamble with live service.
The PS3/PS4 had several single player titles that you could only play on PlayStation and were made specifically for them. They weren’t resting on the laurels of previous releases and just giving them a new coat of paint. They had bigger, better, more exclusive libraries. The PS4 in particular had clear value. No one had to argue for it. The library is considered one of the best.
I am a big proponent of consoles believe it or not but frankly the PS5 is a head scratcher for me at the end of the day. Especially for the (now increased) price.
That's not correct. God of war Ragnarok an Ghost of Yotei are not on PC / XBox. But they will probably eventually make it to PC.
Why do you think that releasing games on the PC (a year or two after the PlayStation release) is a bad thing? It means you don't need to buy a PlayStation to play their first-party titles, assuming you're a patient gamer. It also means Sony makes more money from the bigger PC market. Win-win
You’re correct about Yotei, so yes 1 (likely timed) exclusive 5 years in. I think my overall point clearly still stands.
Like I said, since I don’t want to play on PC the best option for me it’s to play them on the latest PS hardware, that a game also comes out elsewhere doesn’t detriment my experience.
I’m not debating preference. I’m saying they don’t have a robust library for the PS5 compared to previous hardware and they lack exclusives, yet here they are hyping the PS6. If you are happy with your PS5 then great! Many people are. But the library is thinner and depends on old titles. That is just reality.
Why should I expect the library to be better next iteration when they’ve farted their way through the last 5+ years and seem to have no interest doing otherwise?