Digital Foundry: Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered - PS5 DF Tech Review - Is The Upgrade Worthwhile?
- Thread starter John Elden Ring
- Start date
Nixxes has unironically been one of Sony's best studio purchases. Probably their best after Insomniac and Naughty Dog for me.
Naughty Dog still takes the cake, but they have a pretty good track record with the companies they buy.
The only company they probably should have purchased and didn't and really regret was FromSoftware. They should still probably look at buying Arrowhead Games. They have a real chance do something crazy with Helldivers 3, but doubt that they can do that with their current makeup while making the current game as successful as it should be.
Sony hasn't had as much success with their startups, but they were never going to. That's kind of the inherent risk with start ups. They're likely to fail, but also were probably significantly cheaper than other purchases.
You look at other companies they didn't buy like Quantic Dream, Supermassive Games, Ready at Dawn, Ninja Theory, and I doubt they're kicking themselves very hard.
Sanzaru Games made a huge VR game, but Sony probably would have closed them before that happened. That would have been a better buy than say Firesprite.
They would have banned you from reset era for that truth bomb.
"LaZY DeV RhEtORiC"
The only profession in the world that works hard at their trade I guess.
I was banned because I said to Xbox doing market in the holiday for a game that was launching on PS4 (it was timed exclusive and released a year early on Xbox) was basically free marketing to Sony… like you remembering gamers that the game were launching on Xbox.
They could not that it well.
Back to my point.
I don’t think devs are lazy but coders (these that work on optimization paths for better frame rate) are make of experiences… they had to try different ways of for the same results to find the one that is fastest.
When you work on PC games you basically try to find a code path that works better on nVidia and another that works better on AMD but it is a general path to all GPUs supported… it is not specific to run the fastest the RTX 4090 can do…
So in a sense all the experimentation and test are left to users on PC and so that is why developers gives several options to the user try to see what works better for it system.
In that scenario… DRS and VRR are really great to users reach the best experience for it own hardware.
But consoles are fixed hardware.
Here the developer can optimize and find the best path for every part of the code it created for the game… that is part of the optimization… and you really can go deep here without care about anything else (you don’t need to optimize a code for a nVidia GPU thinking it will be slow on AMD GPU… or choose a slow code because the best you create only works in some GPUs).
That job of optimization for a single hardware is based in experience, in try different ways, test what is the best one for this specific hardware.
And at the phase you target a frame rate… let’s say 60fps and if you will work trying new things until you game runs over 60fps (not at or close to 60fps) most of time.
The experience the developer have will be used in future project he will optimize… so optimization is a ever learning art… you always find some logic, way to reach the same faster… and whatever you get better, have more experience, etc… more you find new ways, think outside of common sense… create what some say the secret magic.
When you add techs like DRS and VRR on a fixed machine you basically says to the dev… you won’t have time anymore to do optimizations… you won’t improve your skills, won’t reach deep in optimization, won’t create the magic.
You will start to reach the minimum… so if the game is already most of time over 48fps why bother optimization to be over 60fps most of time? Just let VRR do the “magic”.
Ohhh out game is not reach the frame rate target? Instead to find the issue, code a better path, optimize and do the magic… just enable DRS and whatever it doesn’t reach the target the resolution drops for it.
And the owner of the money… publishers, executives, investors, etc all support and even mandate these decrease in optimization in favor of use of these techs because it saves time and money.
But that doesn’t change that in my view, maybe due I’m old school developer, I call VRR, DRS, etc as lazy techs (well don’t ask me what I think about VRS
).But that is not just game development.
You know AI is there and there are people in big companies already using ChatGPD like tools to code for them… basically they don’t even know how to make a code anymore and when something goes wrong they need to ask support of these that know because they can’t really understand their “own” code (they didn’t create it after all).
VRR and DRS are features that have it places and are very welcome to these that know how to use and have hundred of hardware configuration to deal like PC platform.
But in a fixed hardware it just harm than help.
The same for AI help… it can help you if you know where and how to use and not using it like to replace something you don’t have experience or skill for it.
Thinks will be become worst in game development… I’m already facing it in big software companies… the level of skills of the professionals are decreasing (of course there are the exceptions)but overall the people are become less skilled.
Like I always said here… a game that runs at fixed resumption without any drop below 60fps doesn’t need VRR or DRS at all.
That is good optimization in my book.