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Comment by leppr | Hacker News Reader

Shorter load times is an attractive argument, but it doesn't matter when the #1 issue with current-gen consoles is how unoptimized most games are. The traditional argument to game consoles was that it was cheaper and allowed developers to make the most out of known hardware configurations.

As things are now, flagship games on the PS4/Xbox One struggle to stay at 30FPS, frequently dropping to 20FPS or less, without the option to reduce graphics quality or resolution PC gamers have. All the while the low power Nintendo Switch is a joy to game on because most games are specifically optimized for it.

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> Shorter load times is an attractive argument,

Visible shorter loading times are not the main effect. Cernys talk was enlightening. A big part of level design is making sure that the player doesn't move so fast that the hardware cannot deliver the assets any more. So, you get corners and corner, and elevators and whatever tricks dev use just to make sure they can load the next part of the level fast enough without showing a loading screen. If a game can request assets and they are almost instantly you don't have to redesign levels again and again because "yes, this looks the way we want, but the hardware isn't fast enough".

For me the interesting question is if developers will use the playstation specific options. For playstation exclusives it's a given, but for multi platform releases there probably won't be different levels for playstation vs pc/xbox, so much of it could be wasted. Same for all the other things. Doesn't help much if the controller has six levels of priority if game devs don't use them because PC has only two.

The talk for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph8LyNIT9sg

I found it really quite interesting, even if I don't game on consoles primarily.

The Crash Bandicoot CTR game that's a remake of a PS1 game takes anywhere between 2 and 5 minutes to start up on my Xbox One. It's absolutely ridiculous.

wow it loads waaaay faster than that on my PS4

that's funny when games would load faster on the original C64 with a 1541 than today.

I have the PS4 and I hate how long it takes for games and menus and all of that stuff to transition. I just want my N64 back.

Yeah it's brutal. Even loading the Playstation Store takes wayyy too long on my original PS4. It's like it's doing an npm install every time I want to spend money...

I play Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled with my kids. I have calculated that you can spend only about 3/4 of the time actually playing the game if you don't play the same map every time, 1/4 is necessarily wasted looking at various loading screens. Pretty disappointing for a relatively simple game.

It’s a lot better than it wa on the PS3. In both cases I suspect the problem is that the store app is a webview wrapper for a “webapp”. Though in the PS4 I also suspect they’ve stuck webtech stuff all over the main menu and it only remains tolerably quick because the machine’s a beast.

and then every menu tab on the left that you scroll through takes forever as well.

I have a theory that's more to do with their serverside/networking architecture than anything to do with the PS4 itself.

Do you find it fails to work when you're most interested in buying something? Because that's how it goes with me, literally as soon as I'm like "oh yes I would like to buy that game" the store stops working completely.

Downloading updates for games has been a sore point with me, particularly when I get a new game. Oh great, 8 hours of downloads, so much for that instant gratification of playing it tonight...

Same with ongoing updates. I replaced my original HD with a FireCuda which helps some but I feel like the PS online infrastructure is run on fractional T1s and Sun boxes or something

The current gen hardware is over 6 years old, and when writing for it you can definitely feel its age. Modern PC hardware even at the lower end is so much better and easier to deal with. Also you are forced to make the game run on the lowest specification of any console version, so that means the least powerful machine of all the consoles of this generation.

For a low end PC system we are talking about having 8 cores, 16GB of ram, a decent video card, and an SSD usually or at least a disk capable of 100+ MB/s. Also the platform is pretty easy to develop for and release on.

For a console you get 5 or 6 cores to use, each of which is not as good as a modern CPU core, 8GB of shared ram, and a disk where you have to handle being only able to read from it at 30MB/s. You also have to deal with the black box of vendor tools, that don't necessarily work easily.

So the whole team ends up spending a lot of time actually optimising the game to actually run on these underpowered and lowest spec'd consoles. Removing extra details, downgrading graphics, culling data, compressing, managing memory, just so it can run at 30fps.

> The current gen hardware is over 6 years old, and when writing for it you can definitely feel its age

But it is also very much a known quantity and games should be designed to take that into account. Arguably it should be easier to write games that hit 60fps today than it was 6 years ago.

If you want to make the same game now that you would have released 5 years ago, sure.

But games have become way more complex in that time, and the expectations of players have grown considerably. So you end up having to put more content in, more features and more data. The disk and memory become a bottleneck and you need to write and optimise some pretty complex systems to be able to handle that well.

PC Hardware has actually advanced since that time as well, so the artists have now more power to create better looking and feeling things in their tools, which means more data to process and get into the game.

Also designers will often surprise you as a programmer with the features and creative solutions to problems. They don't really think and design the same way a programmer would, and don't really design for the system hardware (except for the input/output devices of it).

> For a low end PC system we are talking about having 8 cores, 16GB of ram, a decent video card, and an SSD usually or at least a disk capable of 100+ MB/s.

That's definitely not low-end. More like mid to high-end.

Low-end is still 2 cores, 4 GB of RAM, with integrated graphics.

Most games simply don't target integrated graphics.

Most AAA games don’t, but a lot of games do. Sims 4 for example is still a very popular 3D game, but it’s not very demanding. MMO’s are often designed for very low minimum hardware.

False. Most games do target iGPUs, including most eSports and most indie games, which are the /most popular games.

The console AAA games are the ones that target proper GPUs because consoles have them. If they were targeting PC only, you wouldn't see them.

8 processor threads, 4 physical cores.

Yes it's more of a mid tier system but it's a low end system that you would get to play games on.

Also given that games still target the consoles you can get away with 8GB of ram easy.

You said cores, not threads. In any case, 2 cores are still a thing. Even the new Macbook Air has 2 cores, so yeah...

Further, no one targets 16 GB RAM for a game. Not even the non-released, next-gen consoles have 16 GB dedicated CPU memory.

Similarly, not everyone one has an SSD and therefore companies cannot target that. Only in a few months with the new gen of consoles we will see actual games targeting SSD speeds.

Yes I made a mistake during editing the comment, I had processor threads in there before and somehow got mixed up with cores, my apologies.

As with the other points though, a low-mid tier gaming PC is something like 4 core/8 thread, 16GB ram, a HDD for bulk storage and an SSD for system & some select game(s). Someone that is buying a Macbook Air or an Ultrabook or something with only 2 cores is selecting it for something else rather than gaming. So irrelevant to the discussion.

The reason no big publisher targets 16GB for a game is because of these old consoles. The games can and do use more memory if available but they are limited by having to target these low spec consoles. They're also required to support the slow HDD speed of the current generation of consoles, so no exploiting SSDs either. This takes significant time and resources to optimise for!

I stopped playing Zelda on switch because of the loading times. It gets very frustrating when you try out a dungeon.

I would replace my current switch in a blink of an eye if a new model with reduced loading time would come out

An update a good few months ago decreased loading times pretty substantially. Not sure when you stopped playing, but I hardly notice it loading sometimes.

Could easily be. I got it when it came out.

Will have more time the next few weeks anyway.

The annoying part of breath of the wild is how much a better experience you can get for it by emulating the game with CEMU.

With a gaming computer you'll get 2k resolution and 60+fps easily.

On switch you barely get 720p/30fps

Wow, I wish I’d known this. I bought the handheld-only Switch for BotW, and lamented not having an HD edition that ran with good frame rates.

This is great, thank you for this piece of information!

Well, if you’ve got a good PC Cemu emulates the Wii U botw amazingly well.

Too bad about it being closed source.

Once they get a C&D and they close shop and disappear into the void taking the source with them, the patreon supporters are going to feel so dumb.

My advice is to _Never_ support the development of a closed source emulator.

Or their Patreon backers know exactly what they're supporting, and are content to fund people creating the software they use.

That's some faith in mankind.

To be fair the game's best content is the overworld. The shrines and main quests could have been cut from the game and it would arguably be a better game.

I loved the shrines. There were some really cool designs, like the one that was basically minigolf but you whacked stuff with your weapons. And the electricity puzzles (that you could cheat at if you were savvy and realized all your metal equipment could conduct electricity the same as the actual puzzle blocks).

Really? I thought most of the puzzles were either insultingly easy or the same combat shrine for the 30th time. Granted, it's technically a product for kids so it makes sense that some of the content is that easy, but it's such a missed opportunity for the game to introduce so many cool ways of interacting with the world and never build up on them in the puzzles. There's not a single shrine in the game that uses more than two "apps" at once, and even those that do use two are so few and far between I can't remember a single example.

I do agree there were too many identical combat shrines, I was always disappointed when I found one of them, but did you try to get all the chests as well? Most shrines had one or more optional chests that basically acted as "hard mode" and your minimap reported which shrines you'd found all the chests in too.

The ideas in the shrines definitely could have been expanded on more though for sure.

That's a good point. I remember some of the chests being fun to get, though I never bothered to get all of them because there's really no reward besides the extra challenge. I know that's what I'm asking for, but it always felt like a waste of time.

The shrines would've been better when they were part of the overworld. I don't like the fact that they feel like an extension.

I hope for the second part to include more surprises into the world itself and not in shrines.

Could be but I got hung up on one of those shrines and whenever I start it now, I'm still there and try it a few times and get annoyed by it.

I have to get out of it but then it's probably better to start a new game... :-(

Why not look up the solution online? If the challenge is making your experience worse, it seems like an okay thing to do in my opinion.

>As things are now, flagship games on the PS4/Xbox One struggle to stay at 30FPS, frequently dropping to 20FPS or less, without the option to reduce graphics quality or resolution PC gamers have.

Developers are doing what they can here, but the average game that has these sorts of drops is dealing with limited CPU resources, budgeted around a 30FPS target. Especially on consoles like Xbox One X (due to its powerful GPU but limited CPU), it becomes evident that, on average, resolution and graphics cuts have little effect on performance in these situations. The only mitigation is to build your game with a higher frame rate target in mind from the start, requiring serious compromises to things like simulation complexity, for instance.

PS5 and Xbox Series X have a good chance of pushing past this limit. Current generation consoles are using aged laptop-grade CPUs while the upcoming console generation features desktop-grade Zen 2 processors at surprisingly high clock rates.

The big benefit of this generation is that with almost no porting effort PS4 and Xbox One games will run as they should given how much better Zen 2 and RDNA2 are than Jaguar and GCN.

Another problem that arises with the (small) SSD in the machine, games are getting up into the 200GB range. Specifically, the most recent call of duty title clocked in at around 175 GB.

That means you'll be able to store maybe 4 AAA grade games on the SSD.

That is my biggest problem with it too. Sony and MS need to crack down on that. We don't need 4k assets. We're not f'ing there yet. Quit making us all have to download them.

? A significant portion of Xbox One X games are native 4k

An interesting note from Mark Cerny's talk, a lot of games have multiple copies of data installed to keep locality when loading up say a region of the game world, with the way SSD reads work they won't have to do that anymore which should cut down sizes, though how much I don't know if they have figured out yet.

I'm sure the SSD will get bigger on later revisions, and they are having support for expandable storage which should come down in price over the lifetime of the console.

That was the promise for the last generation of consoles as well, and some of their generation-closing consoles still had small internal storage quantities; the launch PS4 had 500GB, and the latest PS4 Pro only has 1TB (about 150GB more than the PS5).

You can put an off-the-shelf SSD into your PS4.

Does it matter that much when you can connect a 5TB+ external drive (or upgrade the internal drive trivially on PS4)?

I could see that happening, but on the discounted revisions. At the same price over time I’d expect more storage.

Switch is a weird case because plugged in its 1080p and in handheld mode it runs at 720p.

It was actually worst with older games; For example, games such as Goldeneye64, Perfect dark or Zelda ocarina of time were running at a mere 21 FPS (19 on PAL!)

N64 was the worst of that gen by far in terms of frame rate though, a lot (maybe a majority?) of ps1 and saturn games ran at a solid 30 or 60fps.

Would be interesting to compare the effective latency though. Switch adds a few tens of milliseconds to input, so 60 FPS on it may feel worse than 21 FPS on N64.

I am a fan of the Switch too, but the Xbox One X offers the ability to use performance modes which reduce the resolution for better frame rate. Also, the arguably best game on Switch, Zelda: BOTW, drops in frame rate a lot.

Which is to say that xbox/ps5 have basically become branded PCs, and the switch is basically a branded Android SoC.

Consoles don't really make sense as a concept anymore. The only remaining appeal is their DRM capability for publishers.

They do make sense to me and others. My pc is a tool, and my consoles are toys. I need the physical separation.

You can build a gaming PC in the same form factor as the new xbox using nothing but off the shelf components and have a separate device that can play a larger gamut of games on higher settings.

I'm not sure how anyone can dispute that the new xbox and play station are anything other than slightly customised branded PC builds that offer no physical advantages over the real thing, only marketing ones like DRM and exclusive releases.

Or you can walk over to the store, put down a few green pieces of paper, be back at home and play the games without worrying about CPU frequencies, graphic card speed, or motherboard compatibilities.

My friends will come over for 4 hours on a Sunday. I will spend no more than 10 minutes when they're here figuring out controllers. I will spend no more than 15 minutes at any point ahead of time to keep things working.

When they come over, the thing we want to spend most of our time doing is 2 v 2 FIFA. If I spend 30 mins doing anything here, we're losing precious time. If I spend 60 mins debugging, I'm just not going to do it. I'll even take a zero probability of fixing if it means a lower probability of failure of any sort (even recoverable).

Consoles offer lots of advantages, to the MASS MARKET, that you are overlooking. In fact I am a former PCMR gamer that moved to consoles for a few reasons:

* I can rent games from my local redbox to try out for a few days. Sometimes, that's all I need and I saved myself the price of the game.

* Couch co-op is typically superior on console.

* Ease of use: simple connection to TV, simple remote controllers. The story for HDR support is also steamlined (as in, my TV supports it so if the game does too, done)

* Consoles are much quieter, making them a much better TV-room appliance.

* Easy purchase and sharing games, especially with a physical copy. Loan out the physical game, no fuss.

* Some sort of resale value for physical games, albeit not that much. However if you are the type to locust the content of a game quickly, as in the first week of release, you can often resell for most the purchase price.

* A UI built for TV and remote use. No, I'm not excited about controlling Windows from across the room by keyboard/mouse.

* Great portability. One of my consoles is a Nintendo Switch, and it travels far better than a PC. Yes you can get a gaming notebook but that solution is no longer competitive on pricing.

* Better multi-user design. It's easier to have a family console with multiple accounts than it is have a Windows PC with multiple accounts. And have parental controls, etc.

Sure, with suitable amount of time/research and other stuff I'm just no longer interested in doing, I can get wireless controllers, quiet(er) fans, apps for launching that are usable at typical resolution from 6' or more away, fiddle with multiple accounts on Windows (who ACTUALLY does this outside a work setting? It's just... not smooth at all), but there is a cost in my time I don't want to invest anymore.

and other reasons such as

* I want to step away from Microsoft Windows and various issues from privacy to updates. Since the consoles are only for entertainment (gaming, playing videos) I am less concerned about telemetry possibly swooping up everything I'm doing.

Many might not care about that last case... but how many times do half the people in an HN thread about Windows gripe loudly about privacy or monthly updates? It seems like there is some problem with a Windows update 2 or 3 times a year. Yeah, I want off that merry-go-round for my ENTERTAINMENT system.

So, I'm actually doing something about a Window dependency, rather than just griping online. I migrated to Linux for my dekstop (on a NUC) and console gaming to fill the gaming gap. Yeah it isn't perfect and there are a handful of games I still need Windows for, but between linux and consoles, that's about 90% of my need for Windows removed.

I agree with almost everything you wrote, but...

> * Consoles are much quieter, making them a much better TV-room appliance.

This is a joke, right? My gaming PC is virtually silent (140 mm exhaust fan FTW) while my friend's PS4 Pro sounds like a hair dryer under load.

My PS4 Pro is quieter than the PC gaming systems I've had, but not as quiet as the NUC (for obvious reasons). Quieter as in, I can play a movie and not hear the console above the dialog/soundtrack.

My Switch is essentially 100% silent, as in, not detectable that it is on from any noise that it makes.

I don't know about Xboxes.

As far as anecdotes, I have a friend whose gaming PC is loud enough to be distracting while watching movies. Heck it's audible above the A/C.

Now that I'm more into consoles, I'm more sensitive to PC noise... before I'd just accept and tune out a certain amount, but now it is grating because I've seen the alternatives and am constantly unintentionally comparing.

Having built various gaming PC's over the years, yes you can have a fairly quiet gaming PC. But you also need to invest some time/effort/money to get liquid cooling, quiet case fans, quiet power supply, quiet CPU fans, etc and you need to take that into account.

Yes, I've read PS4's can be pretty loud. It's a common complaint on /r/PS4. I can't say I've tracked actual numbers, but my feeling is that 80% of those situations are the same root cause: dust/pet hair clogging up the fan, and after cleaning, the system is much quieter.

My current gaming PC is a PowerSpec G706. You know, for those handful of games I still need Windows for. ;) And I got lazy just buying a system instead of building individual components because... I'm just not into that anymore. Anyway, I would rate this system as pretty quiet compared to other ones I've had, but I always know that it is on. Even not playing a game, the ambient noise under zero load is there. Meanwhile, I can't always tell my PS4 is on. And I can't tell if the Switch is on without looking at it.

So, YMMV but in my experience, for off the shelf purchases, consoles are quieter than PC's on average. Also, the people that have "silent" PC's, like myself in a former gaming life, bought specialized components to get there.

If you have any links to computer systems, pre-assembled (since the average person isn't going to build them component by component) that are also price competitive with consoles (around $275 for a ps4 slim or xbox one s, around $350 for a ps4 pro or xbox one x) that are ALSO silent, I'd like to see them. I have a feeling that a PC in that price range is nowhere near as quiet as a console, but I'd love to hear otherwise.

I'll also state without proof that there is zero chance of a gaming PC, price competitive with a switch, that is quieter. That's equivalent to a gaming PC quieter than a cell phone. I don't believe it exists at that price point ($200 to $300 depending on whether you get a switch lite or regular switch).

Sure, at the same price point as consoles, all gaming PCs are basically garbage ;)

I have done that, and I finally got a console this year.

A lounge PC is a shithouse experience compared to a console. Absolute garbage. Simply supporting multiple people in a household on an Xbox is trivial and easy. On a PC using Steam it's absolute trash. Steam treats PCs like it's 1995 and single-user.

The only thing you’ll be physically separated from is your money.

> Consoles don't really make sense as a concept anymore. The only remaining appeal is their DRM capability for publishers.

As someone who prefers console gaming to computer gaming (for the most part), I have to disagree. I like that the console is hooked up to my gigantic TV instead of my less gigantic computer monitor. I like that it uses controllers instead of mouse and keyboard (the same things I'm using all day at work). I like that my console is in a different room from my computer. I like that it's more conducive to playing a game with (local) friends, since they can just sit down on the couch and turn on another controller. I like that I don't have to worry about what graphics card my console has, or worry about a game not working well with that graphics card. I like that it's simply not my computer.

Yes, I know that you can hook a computer up to a TV, and you can use controllers with your computer, and not all of these apply to everyone, and so on and so on. There's still a difference, and I like that difference.

I think console still do make sense insofar as that they provide developers the confidence that their game can run on a given set of hardware.

Yeah, they're mostly just a PC under the hood. But they're PCs with consistent hardware. How much easier would PC game development be if you know all of your customers had the same CPU, GPU, RAM, and OS?

That's not true due to hardware fragmentation and dynamic clocks anymore though. Which was the point that the root comment raised. Even first party titles sag to 20fps, and the settings screen of a modern console game contains more and more dials that are starting to look a lot like what you get in PC releases.

The clocks are dynamic but they are also deterministic because they're based on power usage, not temperature like on smartphones and PCs.

If you have looked at a switch then you may have noticed that it uses a completely different form factor than a standard smartphone.

Many/most people on HN don't do their computing on Windows. (I think you are talking about windows and not pc, as pc gaming is pretty different on other pc operating systems)

> I am a fan of the Switch too, but the Xbox One X offers the ability to use performance modes which reduce the resolution for better frame rate

Many (most ? ) Switch games already do that automatically.

Which games are these that are optimized for the switch that play so much worse on the other consoles? DFRetro usually does game comparisons and the switches games are always worse with a much lower resolution. Hell Doom Eternal targeting 60fps on the Xbox and PS4.

I'm really bummed that this absolute nonsense is also prevalent on hackernews.

Low framerates are almost always completely unrelated to optimization. I can make a horribly optimized version of Tetris that still runs at 144hz on modern hardware.

Likewise, I can write a perfectly optimized game that still runs at 20fps on modern consoles.

Framerates are determined by how much the developer wants to push graphical fidelity/AI etc.

> Low framerates are almost always completely unrelated to optimization.

I would be interested to see a source on this.

> Framerates are determined by how much the developer wants to push graphical fidelity/AI etc.

Framerates are determined by how much the console has to process before it can display a frame. Apart from possibly setting an upper bound, FPS is a variable developers do not directly control.

The issue I am pointing is unintentional drops in framerate caused by game events. A developer can spend time testing their game, and tailoring the amount of processing each possible configuration of events and objects require so that at any one time, it doesn't exceed the processing budget allowed by the target framerate. That is optimization. If you do not do it, the framerate will be essentially random.

If you are trying to fight nonsense, please don't promote additional nonsense.

Generally, in game development, the term "optimization" refers to the holistic process around getting the game performing at speed, be it compiler optimization options, SIMD-ification, or even adjusting texture resolution (graphical fidelity) or AI parameters. It often starts with profiling, and identifying bottlenecks, and focusing on what can be done to get the game to perform within spec.

Optimization is entirely about context, so, while I generally agree with your comment about Tetris, I'd say your second example is "poorly optimized" by definition.

As to your comment about being determined by how much the developer wants to push... Yes, aiming for higher fidelity will use more resource, it's hardly every simply the "developer's wants" that determine the performance of a particular title, instead performance ends up being the end result of thousands of tiny decisions and elements that contribute to the final experience.

Developers determine a framerate target.

They have a bunch of levers to pull to reach that target. Failing to pull the lever that reduces particle effects does not mean the game is un-optimized.

In game development, the process of identifying, balancing, and pulling those levers is called optimization.

Source: This, specifically game optimization, is my profession and I've been doing it for 15 years.

Edit: To add, this is clearly a vocabulary argument, it'd help your argument if you gave context and defined what you think specifically optimization refers to. But even then, words are used in context, and the context here seems to be strongly game development flavored.

Part of optimization is optimizing your code. Part is optimizing your graphical assets.

If you're making an 8 bit 64x64 pixel platformer, your main bottleneck is likely code. If you're making a 3D flight simulator, your main bottleneck is likely draw distance, texture resolution, and the number of assets filling the screen.

If your game is running 20 FPS, your problem very likely is lack of optimization in some way.

None of that is optimization. Thats deciding what you want your game to look like

Since in many cases, adjusting texture resolution (in the case of under-sampled textures), or removing items from the scene or from being rendered (in the case of items being entirely obscured) can dramatically affect a game's performance without changing at all "what you want the game to look like" So clearly that phrase isn't sufficient to describe the action being taken. Please try again.

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