Comment by talldayo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by talldayo | Hacker News Reader

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> that xbox dev is standardized on the S stopping the X from showing it's capacilities

I find it really hard to take this at face-value. The CPU power difference between the S and the X is negligible; it's the GPU cuts that are the biggest drawback. It makes sense to me that games on Series S get cut-back to enable playable performance, but I don't think the existence of a less-powerful GPU meaningfully limits the scalability of console titles on the bigger console.

> Coupled with the complete lack of worthy first party or dedicated IP beside Forza

That's just like, your opinion man. It's been nice watching Microsoft start publishing smaller titles in an age where the future of gaming is looking more-and-more bleak. Sony's IP library is starting to get milked dry, in comparison. The big exclusives are a Final Fantasy remake, a Demon's Souls remake, an upcoming Metal Gear Solid III remake... I've already played those games. The biggest reason I can muster to buy a PS5 is so I can play Bloodborne at a stable framerate. Sony used to have just as strong of a sell as Nintendo in this regard, but I think we're starting to see them fall from grace.

> It makes sense to me that games on Series S get cut-back to enable playable performance, but I don't think the existence of a less-powerful GPU meaningfully limits the scalability of console titles on the bigger console.

It's not so much the existence of a weaker Series S that meaningfully limits console titles, but rather Microsoft's decree that games must have full feature parity on the Series S and X; they had to make a special exception for Baldur's Gate 3 to cut features on the Series S version entirely (split-screen co-op) for it to ship on Xbox at all.

The Series S exists as a way to try and entice people into the Xbox ecosystem by drastically undercutting the PS5 in price, but it _absolutely_ hamstrings the Xbox Series X because 100% feature parity is required between the two. We have literal proof it's why some games aren't on Xbox (or wouldn't be without Microsoft bending the knee and making exceptions), pretending it's not a millstone around their neck this gen is absolutely foolish

If you don't mind, what are some other examples of games eschewing Xbox for performance reasons?

>Sony's IP library is starting to get milked dry, in comparison.

Didn't they just have huge layoffs at their major studio in London?

It seems like major AAA gaming might be going through a tough time.

Unfortunately it would seem that way. I don't want to point fingers, because ultimately the entire industry is going through it right now and it's really a tough time for everyone. That being said, it's a good way to frame the discussion around how successful these big-budget games can be, and whether it's even worth the risk. Digital Foundry had a great discussion on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvTQF00qtNY

In a AAA game, written in the past 15 years or so the CPU is used to handle I/O (controllers, network, "HDD" etc) and, sometimes, sound (the more modern GPUs have low latency cores to work with sound but a plain old PS4/Xbone has too much latency on the GPU to work with sound). On PC the CPU is affecting game performance because there are many layers of data transformation between the userland game and the data that GPU reads and all these are processed on the CPU, but on a console the game writes the native GPU command buffers and surfaces so there is no intermediate processing so CPU is pretty much irrelevant as long as it's fast enough to write couple megs of command buffers per frame and not skip interrupts from the I/O devices.

Sony never had an IP stable as strong as Nintendo, their exclusive have been selling like hot cakes this generation and lead their selling lists, and sales of respective consoles shows a clear preference from gamers.

At the end of the day, my point is not based on only my preferences but the actual numbers. Look up Xbox head he himself says as much : the last Gen was the worst Gen to lose, and they're terrible at making their own games.

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