it’s not the game that does it, it’s literally the graphic cards that does it The game is just software. It will execute on the GPU and CPU. DLSS (proprietary) and XeSS (OSS) are both libraries to run the AI bits of the cards for upscaling, because they weren’t really being used for anything. Gamedevs have the skills to use them just like regular AI devs do.
By AI here I mean what is traditionally meant by “game AI”, pathfinding, decisionmaking, co-ordination, etc. There is a counterstrike bot which uses neural nets (CPU), and it’s been around for decades now. It is trained like normal bots are trained. You can train an AI in a game and then have the AI as NPCs, enemies, etc.
TIL for no tessellation on skeletal meshes. I hope over time Unreal / Epic will put some effort in on minimising memory usage, even though I know they “just” got done with Nanite and friends.
OK so this is now offtopic for the conversation, but…
However, that’s not the way artists traditionally work.
To some extent, it’s authoring tools which affect how they work. A procedural materials pipeline can help them compose on top of already procedural content. In a way, you could see PBR as a part of that pipeline because PBR materials are physics modelled. Having said that I do take your point, even building out that pipeline takes time. Creating a PBR materials library is not super easy, and obviously organic stuff is very hard to model as a material.
meshes made up a significantly larger amount of RAM usage
From watching blender modelling, I thought the pattern was to have minimal rigging on the base mesh and then tesselation via normal maps + subdivision (apparently this is very doable even with sculpting). Obviously for animation you need a certain quality but beyond that I thought everything would be normal maps, reflection maps, etc etc.
who decided that it’s a good idea to have less RAM on the Series S than on the Series X…
Supply chains are complicated, and MS probably did their due diligence to ensure minimal blockages. From seeing the memory structures of newer video cards, I’m pretty sure there are supply constraints to memory to think of.
Honestly I think gamedevs leaning on memory this hard instead of compute is a mistake. You can have intelligently tiled, procedurally generated textures and have a lot more of them, but instead everyone is leaning on authored content on disc. This goes against industry trends in non-game rendering where procedural generation is the norm. If Doom Eternal can look that good with forward rendering, there are no excuses.
My main beef with the hate on the Series S is that both times it’s been a big deal (BG3 and Halo Infinite), it has been split screen which has held back shipping. The community would be as justified going after split screen as they are going after the Series S.
I don’t think there are palette limitations, but many games are running on the Series S at SD with FSR upscaling to 1080P. Quality wise they do look acceptable. See Immportals of Aveum as an example
The S only has 10GB of RAM compared to 16 in the X,
Yes, and the Switch is an ARM based architecture, the 360 was a PowerPC. Architecturally, the S and the X are very similar. Your argument seems to be “The Series S is slower and has less RAM”, which is true, but games should just scale properly. Lower res and lower framerate targets should work. They aren’t working because the game probably doesn’t scale across some critical axis. That’s basically a bug and they should fix it.
I think it bothers people because they think that Series S is “holding back” Series X, which is simply not how it works. Fixing things fixes them everywhere. Series S makes Series X games run faster and better.
The Series S and X are extremely similar hardware wise. Games really just need to scale to fit the two targets. The real issue is that the games and game makers which MS owns largely use a lot more CPU power, which doesn’t really scale down as easily as GPU power. Having a PC game maker act like a console game maker is the real gap in skillset, not the dual targets.