Sony just spilled confidential Playstation information because of a Sharpie
theverge.com
theverge.com
Every time a game comes out for PC and the community complains about how 'unoptimized' it is, that figure pops in my head. Companies almost always develop to the most popular console, and put in the barest minimum of effort to port it to PC and elsewhere.
On console the ram is shared, and moving data to / from ram can be accomplished via onboard streaming hardware. PC lacks this, so they try to load everything in one shot to avoid studders. That's why you see so many games these days that need 12-16gb of vram. Devs don't bother optimizing for PC as it's simply not worth the effort. This kind of shifts the price / perf curve way out on PC, and a lot of people are unhappy about it, but publishers don't really care anymore.
Put succinctly: even if this hardware advantage were available on PC, game devs wouldn’t optimize for it.
Laptops have had unified memory for a ~decade as a result, but once you go to a discreet GPU instead of integrated then there's no feasible way to share the IOMMU & memory bus, at which point it's not practical. And then up-gradable graphics or just 400W GPUs like the 3090/4090 behemoths are incompatible without extreme cost.
Sure, but to get the same memory bandwidth as a M1 Max you'd need 8-channel DDR5 memory, so your socket would look like Epyc and consume 50W+ just for data movement.
GDDR allows moving much more data than regular DDR (or even LPDDR) but both GDDR and LPDDR5X require much tighter signaling requirements that preclude socketed memory. And that means much higher watts-per-byte-transferred for socketed memory, in practice. Like dozens and dozens of watts higher for a typical configuration.
> Laptops have had unified memory for a ~decade as a result
There's unified memory, and there's unified memory.
Fusion HSA and Intel iGPUs have always required you to designate memory as either graphics or CPU side so that it knows which cache controller to run it through, and this has implications for memory and cache visibility.
ctrl-f 'garlic' and 'onion': https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-how-the-crew-was-po...
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/amd-kaveri-apu-features-t...
Money shot: "One issue we had was that we had some of our shaders allocated in Garlic but the constant writing code actually had to read something from the shaders to understand what it was meant to be writing - and because that was in Garlic memory, that was a very slow read because it's not going through the CPU caches. That was one issue we had to sort out early on, making sure that everything is split into the correct memory regions otherwise that can really slow you down."
In contrast, the newer stuff like PS5/Xbox Series family and Apple Silicon family has true zero-copy where it's all just flat memory and all writes are immediately visible to all clients of the memory controller. You can interleave GPU and CPU and Neural Engine tasks without forcing explicit sync into memory to flush the cache/bus. I think most people would say that's meaningfully different.
Both are "unified" but one is more unified than the other.
You can’t have the same memory with the same latency used for both CPUs and GPUs because GPUs don’t have DIMM and CPUs do, for example.
You also can’t guarantee a fast enough SSD to be able to delay loading assets until they are needed.
any PC would be an example
This hasn't been true for years now.
Further, the piracy situation on PC is much worse (from the developer’s POV) than on consoles.
These factors might explain why developers wouldn’t be chomping at the bit to make well-optimized PC games.
I am still not over those statements from Microsoft from the first Xbox era and Fable and how it would speed up dev. and how we would get games on both platforms at the same time and then how they didn't release Fable 2 on PC even though they said DirectX blah blah. /rant
Uh, no? The majority of VRAM data is texture data, and there's absolutely no point or benefit to sharing that with the CPU. So unified vs. not is irrelevant and plays no role.
Also consoles have been (and still absolutely do) stream texture data in regardless. Hell texture pop-in was easily the biggest graphics issue of the outgoing generation of consoles. But even on the current generation 16GB of shared memory is absolutely not enough to contain all the texture & geometry for a modern open world game. It still absolutely streams data, which is why Sony invested so much into texture streaming tech with the PS5 still.
Compare that to a PC with a discrete GPU, you have to load the texture/mesh into RAM and (possibly memcpy to a mapped buffer that the GPU can see) and then issue a copy to move it over PCIe to dedicate GPU vram.
Also you don't have to load it to system RAM first. DirectStorage exists (kinda)
It depends on how you define it. I'd define it as having more than half of all game software sales (including DLC, subscriptions, microtransactions, etc.). You could also include hardware spending, but most people bought computers to do other things. You could also use time spent playing games, and in that case, the PC might win because of Solitaire and Minesweeper.
I'd define “PC” as a machine running MS-DOS or Windows. Also, I'd include any machine with a built-in compatibility layer, like the Steam Deck. I wouldn't include other personal computer platforms.
I've been searching the web, but I haven't been able to find the stats on this.
Disagree. Publishers care about PC today more than 15-20 years ago.
Back then, there was real risk of the entire PC gaming market disappearing with the exception of FPS, real-time strategy, and 4X. Once FPS (especially online multiplayer) became viable on consoles, and RTS and 4X's shares of the overall market shrank bigtime, the PC market was saved by MMORPGs, then Steam, then indie games, and so on.
Today you have Microsoft finally taking seriously its vow from way back when (as johnchristopher noted) to meld PC and console development and publishing, Sony unexpectedly making a PC game push, and the rising tide from Steam Deck becoming a viable platform benefiting both the mainstream PC and Linux gaming markets.
Consoles remain the largest category as a market, but the PC market compares well with any single console. There's a reason why Madden NFL returned to PC after a decade away.
GTA V had a massive head start on PS3 before it was released on PC, and then re-released on PS4, and then re-re-released on PS5.
Which begs the question, if this was done digitally, did nobody look at the result? Nobody saw that the redacted text was easily still readable?
From the look of it, it's like they used a tool for highlighting, with the color set to something dark.
Without being too much of a conspiracy theorist, it almost seems like this was an intentional leak. Hanlon's razor and everything, but it wouldn't really be "malice" if they were trying to either sow false information or reveal details that they wanted to make seem like they were trying to keep private.
When scanners shine green light into a page, the kinds of details they reveal is extraordinary. I have been able to recover hidden text this way. The same thing happened when I took a camera snapshot of a page. And used filters to make it gray. Hidden text security feature pops out.
If you manage to find a server, and active players, you can tell those players have been at it since 1999, and it takes all of the fun out of it.
If any of those 1 million call of duty players are here. I want to tell you that you're missing out.
I recently finished a Final Fantasy game after more than 300 hours, so I can spend a lot of time on a single title myself and I absolutely have a few games I keep going back to when I want a break from the backlog. I think as long as people are trying out new things it's fine to fall back on familiar favorites. My worry was that these people were 100% CoD and nothing else which seems very strange and self-limiting.
I figure that all the other games are too hard for them.
> Call of Duty players spending more than 70 percent of their time on Call of Duty spent an average of 296 hours on the franchise
That’s less than an hour per day, and that includes the actual hardcore CoD nolifers. Somehow I think that “people who spend 100 % of their playtime on CoD” are most likely some busy parents who barely manage to squeeze a few rounds of CoD with friends into their week.
You'd think with all that money there would be more competitors with much larger budgets.
That just seems like crazy high figure. One of the things that is kind annoying me with games these days is how long it takes them to build the next one. Edler Scrolls is about 5-6 years away and that probably means Fallout is 10 years away. Sure we'll have Starfield but decades between games in a series is just bonkers.
Skyrim w/mods is totally viable to me as an open-world RPG for years to come. I skipped Fallout 4, but if I had a refreshed (optimized, less-buggy, Linux-friendly) version of Fallout: New Vegas I wouldn't be concerned about getting another FO entry anytime soon either.
Hugely excited for Starfield though, it scratches an itch I've had for years: blending Mass Effect, Deus Ex, Fallout, and Elder Scrolls.
To be fair, everyone is playing 10+ years old games. GTA, Skyrim, Fallout, etc. The next versions haven't been released and are still all years away.
> Hugely excited for Starfield though
I pre-ordered it which is huge for me since normally I just wait years until the price drops. I just picked up Cyberpunk at the weekend which should show how long I am willing to wait before getting a AAA game.
Even if we excluded the contractors and only included the employees, that's $183,000/employee/year. That doesn't seem that insane, considering that's the upper-bound cost per employee. One you start to add in any other expenses and the contractors, it would quickly approach reasonable.
https://www.dualshockers.com/biggest-video-game-budgets/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...
As for waiting years between installments, we have plenty of great games to play through in the meantime. "We will release it when it's ready" is a mentality that has sadly been forgotten over the past several years.
It's very questionable if we do have plenty of great games. And there is a difference between rushing a release and spending 15 years between releases.
Putting it as waiting years is presenting it in a false light, it's waiting decades. It's very possible the time between Skyrim and the next installment is 20-years.
GTA5 was 10-years ago and has been on 3 different generations of consoles. It could very well be that GTA6 doesn't even get release on PS4 because it'll take so long.
I think as paying consumers who they keep selling to there is a level of entitlement. The whole "they don't owe us anything" doesn't really work, they kinda owe us their success. Especially when they re-release the same game multiple times instead of a new one.
unless Microsoft gets obsidian to make 'New Vegas 2' on the fallout 4 engine.
1. use a grease pencil. The grease is opaque.
2. scan in monochrome black & white, and turn up the sensitivity of the scan.
3. use MS-Paint to draw a filled rectangle over it.
4. black tape
Other PDF editors have a pdf redaction feature that replaces the image pixels with white space. That works too.
Man, I'm dumb. Does this mean they printed out stuff on paper, put ink on that, and scanned it back in?
Because if it was done by hand, those black strips are damn regular.
???
They say that this data comes from an "internal survey". I'm guessing PS5 consoles are using bluetooth to read whatever other console's controllers are in range and reporting that back to Sony.
Other ways they might get that kind of data would be collecting it from data brokers, or by analysis of PS5 player's conversations/in game chats and messages.
On the accuracy side, the only catch is that you might detect consoles that belong to someone else in the household. In some settings, like apartment complexes, they might log a device belonging to a very close neighbor, but otherwise it's a pretty good measure. I'm willing to bet they could filter most of that by signal strength alone.
I'm just saying that there are a lot of ways sony could be collecting this data, but one of them is clearly more likely since anything else is going to cost more, require more work, and be less accurate/inclusive.
> In 2021, over [14?] million users (by device) spent 30 percent or more of their time playing Call of Duty, over 6 million users spent more than 70% of their time on Call of Duty, and about 1 million users spent 100% of their gaming time on Call of Duty
It certainly helps that the game hit 250GB+ even back in the MW2 days, such that you basically have to empty everything else off your console to keep MW2 on it.
Nice little perverse incentive to not care about disk space/not properly implement the ability to take singleplayer off (you can take multiplayer off though! in... COD... meaning it's single-player-only COD...)
Of course, these are also the kind of folks who call people like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein 'traitors', so what do I know.
Pretty sure they have some licensing revenue (clothes, accessories, products,etc) and, possibly, some exclusivity income.
Steve Jobs' minions made sure that man would never be physically capable of holding an iPhone ever again.