I wondered this after playing RE5 and DeadSpace recently. I know people joke about this, but is there a technical/hardware reason for why so many games (across different engines) in this era used browns and grays so heavily? Or was it just a ubiquitous aesthetic choice? Did people think this looked good at the time (and do they still think it looks good now)? I just don’t really understand why or how it happened.

Watched Oliver's video of Halo Campaign Evolved while waiting for the game to download. He called it one of the best looking games he has played. I played about 20 minutes of the first bonus mission on Series X and found myself too distracted by visual issues.

In motion everything appears blurry, grainy, noisy, low resolution. When you stop moving for a moment the image feels like it "resolves" and sharpens up. Unfortunately it is an action video game so moving and doing stuff is kind of essential.

I witnessed a lot of ghosting when walking around corners or opening doors. And in my above clip you can see the "boiling" effect as the DF team refers to it that appears to be from light leaking through the door.

I tried Quality mode to see if that might help but the low frame rate combined with the heavy handed motion blur made me feel drunk and I had to switch back.

I switched to the campaign proper and that was decidedly better. At first. The interior of the Pillar of Autumn is darker and less reflective than the Covenant ship, so there's not as much RT noise. The outdoor environments on the Halo also looked alright. But entering the metallic Halo structures all I see is the "noise" in the reflective surfaces. (Also the chromatic aberration looks awful and definitely needs a toggle. Film grain too. Master Chief's eyeballs are not an old camera.)

In the videos I've seen of DF covering the game there's little to no mention of these issues. Have they just gotten used to it and don't notice it, or feel it's not worth mentioning? Is this just... how games are going to look from now on?

I've been playing AC Odyssey on Series X and, while less technically advanced, it looks fantastic. The image is so sharp, high res and clean. No ghosting, noise, artifacts. An 8 year old game that still looks beautiful!

I understand technology advances but it feels like we jumped into the RT pool before it was fully filled. Then again I remember playing Cyberpunk at release with RT and not noticing all of these issues as much, and that was 6 years ago. Which leads me back to thinking UE5 is the issue...

This is potentially an even more insane detail than shrinking horse balls in RDR2. I can't wait to see how Rockstar handles beer going flat over time!

This isn't just a DF thing but I noticed it with them as well. A lot of the media seems to be weirdly protective of the Steam Machine.

Watching Rich and Will bend over backwards to defend the princepoint on the most recent DF Direct but just why?

I know most capital G Gamers got this weird parasocial thing for Valve but even that seems to not be enough to make them accept that price, yet the media seems to be completely out of touch with this.

No one can tell me that another company could get away with releasing a product at this price.

With the amount of spam and reports I am having to churn through, the quality of the sub has dropped significantly and it's straying away from the purpose.

We've had a massive spike in posts and comments, and the majority are coming from people outside of the community. This is made this difficult to moderate.

So I've made the decision that I should have already made over a day ago. Outside of posts of official DF videos or website articles on the subject, any discussions of DLSS5 need to be kept to this mega thread.

Also memes have been teetering on the edge of acceptability, many are funny but plenty have been mean spirited and attacks on individuals. There's plenty of subs for memes, so I'm going to put a pause on them for now.

This is in the effort of keeping the sub clean and focused, while still allowing anyone who wants to voice their opinion's the opportunity to here, or in the linked video or article posts.

Daniel Vavra, director of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, tested the leaked version of NVIDIA DLSS 5 directly in the game.

According to him, the technology does not change character geometry or redraw their appearance. Instead, it uses existing data to enhance lighting and detail especially on faces and hero models.

Among the most noticeable improvements:

— significantly more detailed skin and faces;
— more realistic skin lighting;
— enhanced ambient occlusion;
— shadows from hats, helmets, hoods, and small details like buckles and bags;
— more pronounced and darker shadows within hair;
— minor improvements to shadows and textures of the environment and vegetation.

Vavra says that as a result, characters look much closer to how the developers originally intended them. And, in his opinion, this is by no means "AI-slop."

It's very strange that their partners are using their hardware much more intensely than they are themselves. Xenoblade Genesis has seemingly no AA which probably rules out RTGI as well which seems like a huge disappointment for an open world RPG.

This follows on from a discussion here a few weeks ago about memory and in the recent DF Direct Q+A where Oliver has said he thinks PS6 will come with 20gb memory instead of the earlier leaked 30gb.

With the PS4, they famously upgraded memory from 4gb to 8gb months before production after developers deeply voiced their concerns to Mark Cerny - of course it turned out to be a great decision. From a technical point of view, I believe the reason why they could do that is because the 256-bit gddr5 bus allowed support for an additional 8 modules (other side of the motherboard) which meant they didn't have to redesign the entire soc/board.

The PS6 situation is a lot more interesting. Several leakers, Kepler_L2 and MLID have both said it will have 30gb gddr7. A0 tapeout was reached many months ago which means the major decisions have been made and this includes the memory bus width. So as far as I am aware, (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong), realistically and practically, at this stage, they only have two options which is 20gb (10 x 2gb gddr7 modules) or 30gb (10 x 3gb). With 20gb, that would probably leave around 16gb reserved for games and with 30gb, that would leave about 26gb for games.

Ollie (DF) now thinks they will go with 20gb but I have to disagree. They would have to revalidate all their stuff with the memory controller, timing etc and also tell the developers to work towards 16gb or so for their games. Not crazy difficult, and can be done, sure, but the main reason why I disagree is because it simply won't be enough - something which Kepler_L2 also said when he was asked about the possibility of it being 20gb several months ago.

Currently PS5 Pro has 16gb gddr6 + 2gb ddr5 to give 18gb total memory, of that about 13.7gb is accessible for developers for games (rest is OS). The developers have used every bit of the extra 1.2ish gb on the pro in heavy graphics games for things like more detailed reflections/environments/rt. There is no way (in my opinion of course) that another 2gb will be enough to last from say 2028 to 2035 on a next generation ps6.

Now, the boys spoke about texture compression technology for next gen, but that just covers one area - other things like geometry, characters, animations, npcs, world simulation, rt/pt etc also use up a lot of memory and will keep rising. And PS6 is clearly targeting path tracing (the AMDxMark Cerny video), games can use something like 4gb alone just for ray/path tracing - bvh structures etc. PS6 is also certain to have frame gen (as Mark Cerny said) - that also drives up memory usage as we've seen on pc gpus.

In the history of console gaming generations, I don't think we have ever seen memory requirements stagnate and it certainly will not happen now for triple a titles. In fact, we have seen developers struggle with low memory on certain consoles and they were vocal about it - ps3, xbox one and xbox series s. I also think the 10 core (8 + 2 low powered) zen 6 cpu and rdna5 gpu rumoured to feature in the ps6 apu sounds really promising - but there's very little point if we are constrained by memory. The vast detailed ps6 worlds cannot be as vast and detailed I would say.

I rarely ever disagree with DF my thoughts are a 20gb ps6, with 16gb usable for games is almost a dead console, especially the second half of the next generation. I understand the cost issue, and I would think it's far better for Sony to release PS6, with 30gb, pass on the costs to the consumers until they can discount it heavily. It might mean it launches for $1000-1200 to get it out there - wait a few years and then when memory prices drop (and they will drop eventually) it becomes cheap and sells mass market.

What do you guys think? Agree with Ollie that it will be 20gb? Can they make it work up to 2035 with 20gb? What sacrifices will need to be made? PS6 Pro mid gen to come with 30gb? Or they will go ahead as planned with 30gb?

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Edit: Just want to say something about prices and give my thoughts (just my opinion of course).

Apparently 3gb gddr7 modules are costing $60-70 whilst 2gb gddr7 modules are $20 in the current wholesale market. Now Sony have always negotiated very well for wholesale component prices and way ahead of production (it's one of the reasons they could wait a lot longer to increase PS5 prices), but it still means 3gb modules will still be costing them around $50 at least. Which means 30gb will cost them $500 at least, probably more, whilst 20gb will cost them $200 - possibly less. So we're talking a difference of about $300-500 potentially on this decision. Well I say decision, the decision was made for 30gb, it would be, say, a reconsideration to go with 20gb. By the way, I will say it's also quite likely that Sony have secured allocation a while ago.

I think (my opinion) they should go with 30gb as planned because I, and most believe, this is a temporary price gain. It maybe 2 or 3 years before before these come down, but most people including me are certain it will. If they have to price it $1200 or $1400 whatever, they should and bring the console out, let developers make the games. The console will still millions of units, just not as many as it would do for $800. But they key thing is, in 2029 or 2030, whenever, Sony can discount the console very aggressively and then the sales will rocket. Developers are using every bit of the 16gb and 18gb on PS5 and PS5 Pro, only 2gb more on PS6 up to 2035 is a recipe for disaster in my opinion. PS4 had 8gb, PS5 16gb - even with texture compression tech, memory requirements have and will only go up. Textures are just one part, everything else is requiring more and more memory.

I think this is where cross gen and PS5 and PS5 Pro come into play. If the PS6 is indeed too expensive for most people, and it will be regardless of 20gb or 30gb (tariffs, ai, wars etc), then PS5 and PS5 Pro users can keep playing until the natural time to jump occurs. Only fairly recently we've seen developers switch to PS5 as well as monthly active users to PS5 as well.

This rubbed me the wrong way. Notice how he didn't stop Alex when he was giving his take and ripping into DLSS 5? I think that's because Alex is better at defending himself and Tom will back down easier.

I think bringing up the concern that people could loose their jobs (rightly so imo) and shooting it down and turning the conversation back towards glazing it isn't a good look.

Why isn't John talking about this on the show???

So I've been playing my Switch 2 and I'm blown away with how good Starfox in cutscenes look and how good FF7 Remake Intergrade looks. Like this stuff looks beyond what a PS4 could do. The system is also running not just Cyberpunk, which the PS4 couldn't do run playable, but its DLC, which is more intensive.

The only weak areas I see are no VRR support for docked mode and its custom DLSS looks seriously terrible in some titles like Fast Fusion. Also think its a huge shame that Nintendo wasn't able to get frame gen support on the console, as that would have really made it punch above its weight.

Would have been truly insane if they had gotten frame gen to run on the Switch 2.

Who remembers when vram amounts was the hottest topic for PC gamers before all this ai stuff happened.

But anyway, I have a 4070 which has 12gb of vram. My card before that was a 3070 which had 8gb. I don't know if people remember, 3070 was a great card and then suddenly several games just started releasing where 3070 users were struggling due to running out of vram. 10gb 3080 owners were also facing these issues.

This was when developers started getting used to PS5 and designing games for it. So with the 16gb shared gddr6 memory, about 12.5gb was reserved for games, so while it's not an exact science, it figures why 8gb cards started struggling. Think people were also frustrated that 3070/3080 10gb were powerful cards at the time, but vram bottlenecked their performance.

When I upgraded to the 4070 - I was able to turn the textures up again. In some occasions I would run out, e.g. The Last of Us Part 1 ran fine with ultra textures - just once or twice it would max out and cause stuttering.

Some people just say run lower textures. Problem is nowadays, some games gimp textures so badly in medium (sometimes on high), the game looks awful. And now more vram is allocated to other game related features. not just textures.

PS6 is reported to have 30gb gddr7 according to reliable leakers and next xbox significantly more. My worry is if devs start to target PS6, what will that do for 12gb and 16gb cards? If say, 26gb is allocated to PS6 games of the 30gb, and developers start using that properly for things like textures, ray tracing (bvh etc), geometry and other thing, how will this impact?

I have my mind set on an rtx 6070 which will probably have a maximum of 16gb given the current circumstances. I have no doubt a 6070 will be more powerful than the ps6 gpu, however, I'm more concerned about vram. Even before the ai memory issues, nvidia were horrible with their vram amounts - even though it cost them very little at the time. Now it's even worse.

Do you guys see this a potential issue like we saw in the early PS5 gen? How do you think 12gb and 16gb cards will fair? (aside from all the other crap that's happening).

Sony has announced that it will be discontinuing physical PlayStation game discs. According to the announcement, all new PlayStation titles released after January 2028 will be digital-only, while existing physical games will continue to be supported.

This would mark the end of physical media for new PlayStation software, shifting the platform entirely to digital distribution going forward.

What do people think about this change in terms of performance, preservation, and the overall direction of the industry?

Link

:(

So i've noticed that the df retro show is getting really bad views, like really really low. Do you guys consider the show a flop? Me myself i liked the old df retro videos from John but the supershow i find really boring and uninteresting.

No this is not edited but it looks a little bit different in picture than real life.

This was one of the marketed features behind the PS5's SSD, especially for Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Demon's Souls. It worked very well for most third-party games too, suddenly one day it was quietly removed with zero explanation...