Could the PS6 be the last console generation with an expressive improvement in compute and graphics? Miniaturization keeps giving ever more diminishing returns each shrink, prices of electronics are going up (even sans tariffs), lead by the increase in the price of making chips. Alternate techniques have slowly been introduced to offset the compute deficit, first with post processing AA in the seventh generation, then with "temporal everything" hacks (including TAA) in the previous generation and finally with minor usage of AI up-scaling in the current generation and (projected) major usage of AI up-scaling and frame-gen in the next gen.
However, I'm pessimistic on how this can keep evolving. RT already takes a non trivial amount of transistor budget and now those high end AI solutions require another considerable chunk of the transistor budget. If we are already reaching the limits of what non generative AI up-scaling and frame-gen can do, I can't see where a PS7 can go other than using generative AI to interpret a very crude low-detail frame and generating a highly detailed photorealistic scene from that, but that will, I think, require many times more transistor budget than what will likely ever be economically achievable for a whole PS7 system.
Will that be the end of consoles? Will everything move to the cloud and a power guzzling 4KW machine will take care of rendering your PS7 game?
I really can only hope there is a break-trough in miniaturization and we can go back to a pace of improvement that can actually give us a new generation of consoles (and computers) that makes the transition from an SNES to a N64 feel quaint.
My kids are playing Fortnite on a PS4, it works, they are happy, I feel the rendering is really good (but I am an old guy) and normally, the only problem while playing is the stability of the Internet connection.
We also have a lot of fun playing board games, simple stuff from design, card games, here, the game play is the fun factor. Yes, better hardware may bring more realistic, more x or y, but my feeling is that the real driver, long term, is the quality of the game play. Like the quality of the story telling in a good movie.
Every generation thinks the current generation of graphics won't be topped, but I think you have no idea what putting realtime generative models into the rendering pipeline will do for realism. We will finally get rid of the uncanny valley effect with facial rendering, and the results will almost certainly be mindblowing.
Yes, that's something I failed to address in my post. I myself have also been happier playing older or just simpler games than chasing the latest AAA with cutting edge graphics.
What I see as a problem though is that the incumbent console manufacturers, sans Nintendo, have been chasing graphical fidelity since time immemorial as the main attraction for new generations of consoles and may have a hard time convincing buyers to purchase a new system once they can't irk out expressive gains in this area. Maybe they will successfully transition into something more akin to what Nintendo does and focus on delivering killer apps, gimmicks and other innovations every new generation.
Or perhaps they will slowly fall into irrelevance and everything will converge into PC/Steam (I doubt Microsoft can pull off whatever plan they have for the future of xbox) and any half-decent computer can run any game for decades to come and Gabe Newell becomes the richest person in the world.
That's the Nintendo way. Avoiding the photorealism war altogether by making things intentionally sparse and cartoony. Then you can sell cheap hardware, make things portable etc.
Unreal engine 1 looks good to me, so I am not a good judge.
I keep thinking there is going to be a video game crash soon, over saturation of samey games. But I'm probably wrong about that. I just think that's what Nintendo had right all along: if you commoditize games, they become worthless. We have endless choice of crap now.
In 1994 at age 13 I stopped playing games altogether. Endless 2d fighters and 2d platformer was just boring. It would take playing wave race and golden eye on the N64 to drag me back in. They were truly extraordinary and completely new experiences (me and my mates never liked doom).
Anyway I don't see this kind of shift ever happening again. Infact talking to my 13 year old nephew confirms what I (probably wrongly) believe, he's complaining there's nothing new. He's bored or fortnight and mine craft and whatever else. It's like he's experiencing what I experienced, but I doubt a new generation of hardware will change anything.
It sounds like even the PS6 isn’t going to have an expressive improvement, and that the PS5 was the last such console. PS5 Pro was the first console focused on fake frame generation instead of real output resolution/frame rate improvements, and per the article PS6 is continuing that trend.
In the past a game console might launch at a high price point and then after a few years, the price goes down and they can release a new console at a high at a price close to where the last one started.
Blame crypto, AI, COVID but there has been no price drop for the PS5 and if there was gonna be a PS6 that was really better it would probably have to cost upwards of $1000 and you might as well get a PC. Sure there are people who haven’t tried Steam + an XBOX controller and think PV gaming is all unfun and sweaty but they will come around.
Consoles are the perfect platform for a proper pure ray tracing revolution.
Ray tracing is the obvious path towards perfect photorealistic graphics. The problem is that ray tracing is really expensive, and you can't stuff enough ray tracing hardware into a GPU which can also run traditional graphics for older games. This means games are forced to take a hybrid approach, with ray tracing used to augment traditional graphics.
However, full-scene ray tracing has essentially a fixed cost: the hardware needed depends primarily on the resolution and framerate, not the complexity of the scene. Rendering a million photorealistic objects is not much more compute-intensive than rendering a hundred cartoon objects, and without all the complicated tricks needed to fake things in a traditional pipeline any indie dev could make games with AAA graphics. And if you have the hardware for proper full-scene raytracing, you no longer need the whole AI upscaling and framegen to fake it...
Ideally you'd want a GPU which is 100% focused on ray tracing and ditches the entire legacy triangle pipeline - but that's a very hard sell in the PC market. Consoles don't have that problem, because not providing perfect backwards compatibility for 20+ years of games isn't a dealbreaker there.
> Rendering a million photorealistic objects is not much more compute-intensive than rendering a hundred cartoon objects
Surely ray/triangle intersection tests, brdf evaluation, acceleration structure rebuilds (when things move/animate) all would cost more in your photorealistic scenario than the cartoon scenario?
Combining both ray tracing (including path tracing, which is a form of ray tracing) and rasterization is the most effective approach. The way it is currently done is that primary visibility is calculated using triangle rasterization, which produces perfectly sharp and noise free textures, and then the ray traced lighting (slightly blurry due to low sample count and denoising) is layered on top.
> However, full-scene ray tracing has essentially a fixed cost: the hardware needed depends primarily on the resolution and framerate, not the complexity of the scene.
That's also true for modern rasterization with virtual geometry. Virtual geometry keeps the number of rendered triangles roughly proportional to the screen resolution, not to the scene complexity. Moreover, virtual textures also keep the amount of texture detail in memory roughly proportional to the screen resolution.
The real advantage of modern ray tracing (ReSTIR path tracing) is that it is independent of the number of light sources in the scene.
>Consoles don't have that problem, because not providing perfect backwards compatibility for 20+ years of games isn't a dealbreaker there.
I'm not sure that's actually true for Sony. You can currently play several generations of games on the PS5, and I think losing that on PS6 would be a big deal to a lot of people.
I think there are a few factors that are likely to slow the pace down quite a bit soon:
1. We realistically aren't going much past 4k anytime soon. Even the few 8k sets on the market are sort of tech demos, because there isn't really the content for it. Maybe 120/240/etc FPS will be a thing, but that's really a linear growth, not exponential, and it has a pretty short path to go (will 500Hz displays ever become a big seller? 1kHz?)
2. The triple-A games market itself is strained-- too many big-money flops, and those are the ones that have historically substituted more triangles for better storytelling.
So you're going to reach a point where the hardware isn't really limiting the designers' visions anymore.
GenAI seems like a questionable approach for game rendering, both because of inefficiency and non-repeatability. If the AI renders the same scene slightly differently on two machines, it could cause bugs or unfair competitive edges. At most, we'd see AI during the development process to build assets, and that doesn't require a bigger local GPU.
After raytracing, the next obvious massive improvement would be path tracing.
And while consoles usually lag behind the latest available graphics, I'd expect raytracing and even path tracing to become available to console graphics eventually.
One advantage of consoles is that they're a fixed hardware target, so games can test on the exact hardware and know exactly what performance they'll get, and whether they consider that performance an acceptable experience.
There is no real difference between "Ray Tracing" and "Path Tracing", or better, the former is just the operation of intersecting a ray with a scene (and not a rendering technique), the latter is a way to solve the integral to approximate the rendering equation (hence, it could be considered a rendering technique). Sure, you can go back to the terminology used by Kajiya in his earlier works etc etc, but it was only a "academic terminology game" which is worthless today. Today, the former is accelerated by HW since around a decade (I am cunting the PowerVR wizard). The latter is how most of non-realtime rendering renders frames.
You can not have "Path Tracing" in games, not according to what it is. And it also probably does not make sense, because the goal of real-time rendering is not to render the perfect frame at any time, but it is to produce the best reactive, coherent sequence of frames possible in response to simulation and players inputs. This being said, HW ray tracing is still somehow game changing because it shapes a SIMT HW to make it good at inherently divergent computation (eg. traversing a graph of nodes representing a scene): following this direction, many more things will be unlocked in real-time simulation and rendering. But not 6k samples unidirectionally path-traced per pixel in a game.
not all games need horse power. We've now past the point of good enough to run a ton of it. Sure, tentpole attractions will warrant more and more, but we're turning back to mechanics, input methods, gameplay, storytelling. If you play 'old' games now, they're perfectly playable. Just like older movies are perfectly watchable. Not saying you should play those (you should), but there's not kuch of a leap needed to keep such ideas going strong and fresh.
This is my take as well. I haven’t felt that graphics improvement has “wowed” me since the PS3 era honestly.
I’m a huge fan of Final Fantasy games. Every mainline game (those with just a number; excluding 11 and 14 which are MMOs) pushes the graphical limits of the platforms at the time. The jump from 6 to 7 (from SNES to PS1); from 9 to 10 (PS1 to 2); and from 12 to 13 (PS3/X360) were all mind blowing. 15 (PS4) and 16 (PS5) were also major improvements in graphics quality, but the “oh wow” generational gap is gone.
And then I look at the gameplay of these games, and it’s generally regarded as going in the opposite direction- it’s all subjective of course but 10 is generally regarded as the last “amazing” overall game, with opinions dropping off from there.
We’ve now reached the point where an engaging game with good mechanics is way more important than graphics: case in point being Nintendo Switch, which is cheaper and has much worse hardware, but competes with the PS5 and massively outsells Xbox by huge margins, because the games are fun.
I know this isn't an original idea, but I wonder if this will be the trick for step-level improvement in visuals. Use traditional 3D models for the broad strokes and generative AI for texture and lighting details. We're at diminishing returns for add polygons and better lighting, and generative AI seems to be better at improving from there—when it doesn't have to get the finger count right.
There's likely still room to go super wide with CPU cores and much more ram but everyone is talking about neutral nets so that's what the press release is about.
Gaming using weird tech is not a hardware manufacturer or availability issue. It is a game studio leadership problem.
Even in the latest versions of unreal and unity you will find the classic tools. They just won't be advertised and the engine vendor might even frown upon them during a tech demo to make their fancy new temporal slop solution seem superior.
The trick is to not get taken for a ride by the tools vendors. Real time lights, "free" anti aliasing, and sub-pixel triangles are the forbidden fruits of game dev. It's really easy to get caught up in the devil's bargain of trading unlimited art detail for unknowns at end customer time.
doubtful, they say this with every generation of console and even gaming pc systems. When it's popularity decreases then profits decrease and then maybe it will be "the last generation".
It's not just technology that's eating away at console sales, it's also the fact that 1) nearly everything is available on PC these days (save Nintendo with its massive IP), 2) mobile gaming, and 3) there's a limitless amount of retro games and hacks or mods of retro games to play and dedicated retro handhelds are a rapidly growing market. Nothing will ever come close to PS2 level sales again. Will be interesting to see how the video game industry evolves over the next decade or two. I suspect subscriptions (sigh) will start to make up for lost console sales.
"Nothing will ever come close to PS2 level sales again."
ps2 sales number is iffy at very least, also ps2 sales has been dethrone "few times"
quotation mark since when nintendo sales is creeping up, sony announced there are "few millions sales" added while they already didnt produce them years ago
Beyond the PS6, the answer is very clearly graphics generated in real time via a transformer model.
I’d be absolutely shocked if in 10 years, all AAA games aren’t being rendered by a transformer. Google’s veo 3 is already extremely impressive. No way games will be rendered through traditional shaders in 2035.
The future of gaming is the Grid-Independent Post-Silicon Chemo-Neural Convergence, the user will be injected with drugs designed by AI based on a loose prompt (AI generated as well, because humans have long lost the ability to formulate their intent) of the gameplay trip they must induce.
Now that will be peak power efficiency and a real solution for the world where all electricity and silicon are hogged by AI farms.
Just because it's possible doesn't mean it is clearly the answer. Is a transformer model truly likely to require less compute than current methods? We can't even run models like Veo 3 on consumer hardware at their current level of quality.
That's just not efficient. AAA games will use AI to pre-render assets, and use AI shaders to make stuff pop more, but on the fly asset generation will still be slow and produce low quality compared to offline asset generation. We might have a ShadCN style asset library that people use AI to tweak to produce "realtime" assets, but there will always be an offline core of templates at the very least.
This _might_ be true, but it's utterly absurd to claim this is a certainty.
The images rendered in a game need to accurately represent a very complex world state. Do we have any examples of Transformer based models doing something in this category? Can they do it in real-time?
I could absolutely see something like rendering a simplified and stylised version and getting Transformers to fill in details. That's kind of a direct evolution from the upscaling approach described here, but end to end rendering from game state is far less obvious.
I was going to say "again?", but then I recalled DirectX 12 was released 10 years ago and now I feel old...
The main goal of Direct3D 12, and subsequently Vulcan, was to allow for better use of the underlying graphics hardware as it had changed more and more from its fixed pipeline roots.
So maybe the time is ripe for a rethink, again.
Particularly the frame generation features, upscaling and frame interpolation, have promise but needs to be integrated in a different way I think to really be of benefit.
The rethink is already taking place via mesh shaders and neural shaders.
You aren't seeing them adopted that much, because the hardware still isn't deployed at scale that games can count on them being available, and also it cannot ping back on improving the developer experience adopting them.
The industry, and at large the gaming community is just long past being interested in graphics advancement. AAA games are too complicated and expensive, the whole notion of ever more complex and grandiose experiences doesn't scale. Gamers are fractured along thousands of small niches, even in sense of timeline in terms of 80s, 90s, PS1 era each having a small circle of businesses serving them.
The times of console giants, their fiefdoms and the big game studios is coming to an end.
I'll take the other side of this argument and state that people are interested in higher graphics, BUT they expect to see an equally higher simulation to go along with it. People aren't excited for GTA6 just because of the graphics, but because they know the simulation is going to be better then anything they've seen before. They need to go hand in hand.
That's totally where all this is going. More horsepower on a GPU doesn't necessarily mean it's all going towards pixels on the screen. People will get creative with it.
I'm almost certain that we'll see comments that GTA6 feels like a downgrade to big GTA5 fans, as there was a decade of content created for the online version of GTA5.
I disagree - current gen console aren't enough to deliver smooth immersive graphics - I played BG3 on PS first and then on PC and there's just no comparing the graphics. Cyberpunk same deal. I'll pay to upgrade to consistent 120/4k and better graphics, and I'll buy the games.
And there are AAA that make and will make good money with graphics being front and center.
>aren't enough to deliver smooth immersive graphics
I'm just not sold.
Do I really think that BG3 being slightly prettier than, say, Dragon Age / Skyrim / etc made it a more enticing game? Not to me certainly. Was cyberpunk prettier than Witcher 3? Did it need to be for me to play it?
My query isn't about whether you can get people to upgrade to play new stuff (always true). But whether they'd still upgrade if they could play on the old console with worse graphics.
I also don't think anyone is going to suddenly start playing video games because the graphics improve further.
Being an old dog that still cares about gaming, I would assert many games are also not taking advantage of current gen hardware, coded in Unreal and Unity, a kind of Electron for games, in what concerns taking advantage of existing hardware.
There is a reason there are so many complaints in social media about being obvious to gamers in what game engine a game was written on.
It used to be that game development quality was taken more seriously, when they were sold via storage media, and there was a deadline to burn those discs/cartridges.
Now they just ship whatever is done by the deadline, and updates will come later via a DLC, if at all.
Advancements in lighting can help all games, not just AAA ones.
For example, Tiny Glade and Teardown have ray traced global illumination, which makes them look great with their own art style, rather than expensive hyper-realism.
But currently this is technically hard to pull off, and works only within certain constrained environments.
Devs are also constrained by the need to support multiple generations of GPUs. That's great from perspective of preventing e-waste and making games more accessible. But technically it means that assets/levels still have to be built with workarounds for rasterized lights and inaccurate shadows. Simply plugging in better lighting makes things look worse by exposing the workarounds, while also lacking polish for the new lighting system. This is why optional ray tracing effects are underwhelming.
Nintendo dominated last generation with switch. The games were only HD and many at 30fps. Some AAA didn't even get ported to them. But they sold a ton of units and a ton of games and few complained because they were having fun which is what gaming is all about anyways.
It's not, though. The use of RT in games is generally limited to secondary rays; the primaries are still rasterized. (Though the rasterization is increasingly done in “software rendering”, aka compute shaders.)
As you can tell, I'm patient :) A very important quality for any ray tracing enthusiast lol
The ability to do irregular sampling, efficient shadow computation (every flavour of shadow mapping is terrible!) and global illumination is already making its way into games, and path tracing has been the algorithm of choice in offline rendering (my profession since 2010) for quite a while already.
Making a flexible rasterisation-based renderer is a huge engineering undertaking, see e.g. Unreal Engine. With the relentless march of processing power, and finally having hardware acceleration as rasterisation has enjoyed for decades, it's going to be possible for much smaller teams to deliver realistic and creative (see e.g. Dreams[0]) visuals with far less engineering effort. Some nice recent examples of this are Teardown[1] and Tiny Glade[2].
It's even more inevitable from today's point of view than it was back in the 90s :)
My old ray tracer could do arbitrary quadric surfaces, toroids with 2 minor radii, and CSG of all those. Triangles too (no CSG). It was getting kind of fast 20 years ago - 10fps at 1024x768. Never had good shading though.
I should dig that up and add NURBS and see how it performs today.
It feels like each time SCE makes a new console, it'd always come with some novelty that's supposed to change the field forever, but after two years they'd always end up just another console.
Games written for the PlayStation exclusively get to take advantage of everything, but there is nothing to compare the release to.
Alternatively, if a game is release cross-platform, there’s little incentive to tune the performance past the benchmarks of comparable platforms. Why make the PlayStation game look better than Xbox if it involves rewriting engine layer stuff to take advantage of the hardware, for one platform only.
Basically all of the most interesting utilization of the hardware comes at the very end of the consoles lifecycle. It’s been like that for decades.
I think apart from cross-platform woes (if you can call it that), it's also that the technology landscape would shift, two or few years after the console's release:
For PS2, game consoles didn't become the centre of home computing; for PS3, programming against the GPU became the standard of doing real time graphics, not some exotic processor, plus that home entertaining moved on to take other forms (like watching YouTube on an iPad instead of having a media centre set up around the TV); for PS4, people didn't care if the console does social networking; PS5 has been practical, it's just the technology/approach ended up adopted by everyone, so it lost its novelty later on.
It’s also that way on the C64 - while it came out in 1981, people figures out how to get 8 bit sound and high resolution color graphics with multiple sprites only after 2000…
Maybe I ate too much marketing but it does feel like having the PS5 support SSDs raised the bar for how fast games are expected to load, even across platforms.
Not just loading times, but I expect more games do more aggressive dynamic asset streaming. Hopefully we'll get less 'squeeze through this gap in the wall while we hide the loading of the next area of the map' in games.
Technically the PS4 supported 2.5" SATA or USB SSDs, but yeah PS5 is first gen that requires SSDs, and you cannot run PS5 games off USB anymore.
It does but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, they at least are willing to take some calculated risks about architecture - since consoles have essentially collapsed to been a PC internally.
I don't think it's a bad thing either. Consoles are a curious breed in today's consumer electronics landscape, it's great that someone's still devoted to doing interesting experiments with it.
That was kind of true until Xbox 360 and later Unity, those ended eras of consoles as machines made of quirks as well as game design as primarily software architecture problems. The definitive barrier to entry for indie gamedevs before Unity was the ability to write a toy OS, a rich 3D engine, and GUI toolkit by themselves. Only little storytelling skills were needed.
Console also partially had to be quirky dragsters because of Moore's Law - they had to be ahead of PC by years, because it had to be at least comparable to PC games at the end of lifecycle, not utterly obsolete.
Graphics could stand to get toned down. It sucks to wait 7 years for a sequel to your favorite game. There was a time where sequels came out while the games were still relevant. We are getting sequels 8 years or more apart for what? Better beard graphics? Beer bottles where the liquid reacts when you bump into it? Who cares!
| Game | Release Year |
|-------------------------------------------|--------------|
| GTA III | 2001 |
| GTA Vice City | 2002 |
| GTA San Andreas | 2004 |
| Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus | 2002 |
| Sly 2: Band of Thieves | 2004 |
| Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves | 2005 |
| Infamous | 2009 |
| Infamous 2 | 2011 |
We are 5 full years into the PS5's lifetime. These are the only games that are exclusive to the console.
| Game | Release Year |
|-------------------------------------------|--------------|
| Astro's Playroom | 2020 |
| Demon's Souls | 2020 |
| Destruction AllStars | 2021 |
| Gran Turismo 7 | 2022 |
| Horizon Call of the Mountain | 2023 |
| Firewall Ultra | 2023 |
| Astro Bot | 2024 |
| Death Stranding 2: On the Beach | 2025 |
| Ghost of Yōtei | 2025 |
It feels very weird to not include games like Ratchet & Clank, Returnal, and a few others just because they were later released on PC. Especially when Death Stranding 2 is here and also released on PC.
Sony’s strategy is for almost every game to eventually be on PC as well so it’s not entirely a case of development slowing (although it has).
Funny that I thought the biggest improvement of PS5 is actually crazy fast storage. No loading screen is really gamechanger. I would love to get xbox instant resume on Playstation.
The hardware 3D audio acceleration (basically fancy HRTFs) is also really cool, but almost no 3rd party games use it.
I've had issues with Xbox instant resume. Lots of "your save file has changed since the last time you played, so we have to close the game and relaunch" issues. Even when the game was suspended an hour earlier. I assume it's just cloud save time sync issues where the cloud save looks newer because it has a timestamp 2 seconds after the local one. Doesn't fill me with confidence, though.
Pretty sure they licensed a compression codec from RAD and implemented it in hardware, which is why storage is so fast on the PS5. Sounds like they're doing the same thing for GPU transfers now.
Storage on the PS5 isn't really fast. It's just not stupidly slow. At the time of release, the raw SSD speeds for the PS5 were comparable to the high-end consumer SSDs of the time, which Sony achieved by using a controller with more channels than usual so that they didn't have to source the latest NAND flash memory (and so that they could ship with only 0.75 TB capacity). The hardware compression support merely compensates for the PS5 having much less CPU power than a typical gaming desktop PC. For its price, the PS5 has better storage performance than you'd expect from a similarly-priced PC, but it's not particularly innovative and even gaming laptops have surpassed it.
The most important impact by far of the PS5 adopting this storage architecture (and the Xbox Series X doing something similar) is that it gave game developers permission to make games that require SSD performance.
This video is a direct continuation of the one where Cerny explains logic behind PlayStation 5 pro design and telling that the path forward for them goes into rendering near perfect low res image then upscaling it with neural networks to 4K.
How good it will be? Just look at the current upscalers working on perfectly rendered images - photos. And they aren't doing it in realtime. So the errors, noise, and artefacts are all but inevitable. Those will be masked by post processing techniques that will inevitably degrade image clarity.
It only takes a marketing psyop to alter the perception of the end user with the slogans along the lines of "Tired of pixel exactness, hurt by sharpness? Free YOUR imagination and embrace the future of ever-shifting vague forms and softness. Artifact stands for Art!"
I’m replaying CP2077 for the third time, and all the sarcastic marketing material and ads you find in the game, don’t seem so sarcastic after all when you really think about the present.
I don't know, I think it's conceivable that you could get much much better results from a custom upscale per game.
You can give much more input than a single low res frame. You could throw in motion vectors, scene depth, scene normals, unlit color, you could separately upscale opaque, transparent and post process effect... I feel like you could really do a lot more.
Plus, aren't cellphone camera upscalers pretty much realtime these days? I think you're comparing generating an image to what would actually be happening.
> I think it's conceivable that you could get much much better results from a custom upscale per game.
> You can give much more input than a single low res frame. You could throw in motion vectors, scene depth, scene normals, unlit color, you could separately upscale opaque, transparent and post process effect... I feel like you could really do a lot more.
NVIDIA has already been down that road. What you're describing is pretty much DLSS, at various points in its history. To the extent that those techniques were low-hanging fruit for improving upscaler quality, it's already been tried and adopted to the extent that it's practical. At this point, it's more reasonable to assume that there isn't much low-hanging fruit for further quality improvements in upscalers without significant hardware improvements, and that the remaining artifacts and other downsides are hard problems.
Could be true, but not sure how good the results can theoretically become. According to Cerny's words from an interview the current PS5 pro upscaler is tuned specifically for popular playstation games, i.e. they have some extensive testing to catch artefacts.
However it can be a way to ship a smaller and less capable model which fits limited memory and is working just good enough.
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However, I'm pessimistic on how this can keep evolving. RT already takes a non trivial amount of transistor budget and now those high end AI solutions require another considerable chunk of the transistor budget. If we are already reaching the limits of what non generative AI up-scaling and frame-gen can do, I can't see where a PS7 can go other than using generative AI to interpret a very crude low-detail frame and generating a highly detailed photorealistic scene from that, but that will, I think, require many times more transistor budget than what will likely ever be economically achievable for a whole PS7 system.
Will that be the end of consoles? Will everything move to the cloud and a power guzzling 4KW machine will take care of rendering your PS7 game?
I really can only hope there is a break-trough in miniaturization and we can go back to a pace of improvement that can actually give us a new generation of consoles (and computers) that makes the transition from an SNES to a N64 feel quaint.
We also have a lot of fun playing board games, simple stuff from design, card games, here, the game play is the fun factor. Yes, better hardware may bring more realistic, more x or y, but my feeling is that the real driver, long term, is the quality of the game play. Like the quality of the story telling in a good movie.
What I see as a problem though is that the incumbent console manufacturers, sans Nintendo, have been chasing graphical fidelity since time immemorial as the main attraction for new generations of consoles and may have a hard time convincing buyers to purchase a new system once they can't irk out expressive gains in this area. Maybe they will successfully transition into something more akin to what Nintendo does and focus on delivering killer apps, gimmicks and other innovations every new generation.
Or perhaps they will slowly fall into irrelevance and everything will converge into PC/Steam (I doubt Microsoft can pull off whatever plan they have for the future of xbox) and any half-decent computer can run any game for decades to come and Gabe Newell becomes the richest person in the world.
I keep thinking there is going to be a video game crash soon, over saturation of samey games. But I'm probably wrong about that. I just think that's what Nintendo had right all along: if you commoditize games, they become worthless. We have endless choice of crap now.
In 1994 at age 13 I stopped playing games altogether. Endless 2d fighters and 2d platformer was just boring. It would take playing wave race and golden eye on the N64 to drag me back in. They were truly extraordinary and completely new experiences (me and my mates never liked doom). Anyway I don't see this kind of shift ever happening again. Infact talking to my 13 year old nephew confirms what I (probably wrongly) believe, he's complaining there's nothing new. He's bored or fortnight and mine craft and whatever else. It's like he's experiencing what I experienced, but I doubt a new generation of hardware will change anything.
In the past a game console might launch at a high price point and then after a few years, the price goes down and they can release a new console at a high at a price close to where the last one started.
Blame crypto, AI, COVID but there has been no price drop for the PS5 and if there was gonna be a PS6 that was really better it would probably have to cost upwards of $1000 and you might as well get a PC. Sure there are people who haven’t tried Steam + an XBOX controller and think PV gaming is all unfun and sweaty but they will come around.
Ray tracing is the obvious path towards perfect photorealistic graphics. The problem is that ray tracing is really expensive, and you can't stuff enough ray tracing hardware into a GPU which can also run traditional graphics for older games. This means games are forced to take a hybrid approach, with ray tracing used to augment traditional graphics.
However, full-scene ray tracing has essentially a fixed cost: the hardware needed depends primarily on the resolution and framerate, not the complexity of the scene. Rendering a million photorealistic objects is not much more compute-intensive than rendering a hundred cartoon objects, and without all the complicated tricks needed to fake things in a traditional pipeline any indie dev could make games with AAA graphics. And if you have the hardware for proper full-scene raytracing, you no longer need the whole AI upscaling and framegen to fake it...
Ideally you'd want a GPU which is 100% focused on ray tracing and ditches the entire legacy triangle pipeline - but that's a very hard sell in the PC market. Consoles don't have that problem, because not providing perfect backwards compatibility for 20+ years of games isn't a dealbreaker there.
Increasing the object count by that many orders of magnitude is definitely much more compute intensive.
Surely ray/triangle intersection tests, brdf evaluation, acceleration structure rebuilds (when things move/animate) all would cost more in your photorealistic scenario than the cartoon scenario?
> However, full-scene ray tracing has essentially a fixed cost: the hardware needed depends primarily on the resolution and framerate, not the complexity of the scene.
That's also true for modern rasterization with virtual geometry. Virtual geometry keeps the number of rendered triangles roughly proportional to the screen resolution, not to the scene complexity. Moreover, virtual textures also keep the amount of texture detail in memory roughly proportional to the screen resolution.
The real advantage of modern ray tracing (ReSTIR path tracing) is that it is independent of the number of light sources in the scene.
I'm not sure that's actually true for Sony. You can currently play several generations of games on the PS5, and I think losing that on PS6 would be a big deal to a lot of people.
1. We realistically aren't going much past 4k anytime soon. Even the few 8k sets on the market are sort of tech demos, because there isn't really the content for it. Maybe 120/240/etc FPS will be a thing, but that's really a linear growth, not exponential, and it has a pretty short path to go (will 500Hz displays ever become a big seller? 1kHz?)
2. The triple-A games market itself is strained-- too many big-money flops, and those are the ones that have historically substituted more triangles for better storytelling.
So you're going to reach a point where the hardware isn't really limiting the designers' visions anymore.
GenAI seems like a questionable approach for game rendering, both because of inefficiency and non-repeatability. If the AI renders the same scene slightly differently on two machines, it could cause bugs or unfair competitive edges. At most, we'd see AI during the development process to build assets, and that doesn't require a bigger local GPU.
And while consoles usually lag behind the latest available graphics, I'd expect raytracing and even path tracing to become available to console graphics eventually.
One advantage of consoles is that they're a fixed hardware target, so games can test on the exact hardware and know exactly what performance they'll get, and whether they consider that performance an acceptable experience.
You can not have "Path Tracing" in games, not according to what it is. And it also probably does not make sense, because the goal of real-time rendering is not to render the perfect frame at any time, but it is to produce the best reactive, coherent sequence of frames possible in response to simulation and players inputs. This being said, HW ray tracing is still somehow game changing because it shapes a SIMT HW to make it good at inherently divergent computation (eg. traversing a graph of nodes representing a scene): following this direction, many more things will be unlocked in real-time simulation and rendering. But not 6k samples unidirectionally path-traced per pixel in a game.
I’m a huge fan of Final Fantasy games. Every mainline game (those with just a number; excluding 11 and 14 which are MMOs) pushes the graphical limits of the platforms at the time. The jump from 6 to 7 (from SNES to PS1); from 9 to 10 (PS1 to 2); and from 12 to 13 (PS3/X360) were all mind blowing. 15 (PS4) and 16 (PS5) were also major improvements in graphics quality, but the “oh wow” generational gap is gone.
And then I look at the gameplay of these games, and it’s generally regarded as going in the opposite direction- it’s all subjective of course but 10 is generally regarded as the last “amazing” overall game, with opinions dropping off from there.
We’ve now reached the point where an engaging game with good mechanics is way more important than graphics: case in point being Nintendo Switch, which is cheaper and has much worse hardware, but competes with the PS5 and massively outsells Xbox by huge margins, because the games are fun.
I know this isn't an original idea, but I wonder if this will be the trick for step-level improvement in visuals. Use traditional 3D models for the broad strokes and generative AI for texture and lighting details. We're at diminishing returns for add polygons and better lighting, and generative AI seems to be better at improving from there—when it doesn't have to get the finger count right.
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Even in the latest versions of unreal and unity you will find the classic tools. They just won't be advertised and the engine vendor might even frown upon them during a tech demo to make their fancy new temporal slop solution seem superior.
The trick is to not get taken for a ride by the tools vendors. Real time lights, "free" anti aliasing, and sub-pixel triangles are the forbidden fruits of game dev. It's really easy to get caught up in the devil's bargain of trading unlimited art detail for unknowns at end customer time.
ps2 sales number is iffy at very least, also ps2 sales has been dethrone "few times" quotation mark since when nintendo sales is creeping up, sony announced there are "few millions sales" added while they already didnt produce them years ago
The switch literally has and according to projections the Switch 1 will in fact have outsold the PS2 globally by the end of the year.
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I’d be absolutely shocked if in 10 years, all AAA games aren’t being rendered by a transformer. Google’s veo 3 is already extremely impressive. No way games will be rendered through traditional shaders in 2035.
Now that will be peak power efficiency and a real solution for the world where all electricity and silicon are hogged by AI farms.
/s or not, you decide.
10 years ago people were predicting VR would be everywhere, it flopped hard.
The other major success of recent years not discussed much so far is gaussian splats, which tear up the established production pipeline again.
The images rendered in a game need to accurately represent a very complex world state. Do we have any examples of Transformer based models doing something in this category? Can they do it in real-time?
I could absolutely see something like rendering a simplified and stylised version and getting Transformers to fill in details. That's kind of a direct evolution from the upscaling approach described here, but end to end rendering from game state is far less obvious.
The main goal of Direct3D 12, and subsequently Vulcan, was to allow for better use of the underlying graphics hardware as it had changed more and more from its fixed pipeline roots.
So maybe the time is ripe for a rethink, again.
Particularly the frame generation features, upscaling and frame interpolation, have promise but needs to be integrated in a different way I think to really be of benefit.
You aren't seeing them adopted that much, because the hardware still isn't deployed at scale that games can count on them being available, and also it cannot ping back on improving the developer experience adopting them.
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The times of console giants, their fiefdoms and the big game studios is coming to an end.
And there are AAA that make and will make good money with graphics being front and center.
I'm just not sold.
Do I really think that BG3 being slightly prettier than, say, Dragon Age / Skyrim / etc made it a more enticing game? Not to me certainly. Was cyberpunk prettier than Witcher 3? Did it need to be for me to play it?
My query isn't about whether you can get people to upgrade to play new stuff (always true). But whether they'd still upgrade if they could play on the old console with worse graphics.
I also don't think anyone is going to suddenly start playing video games because the graphics improve further.
There is a reason there are so many complaints in social media about being obvious to gamers in what game engine a game was written on.
It used to be that game development quality was taken more seriously, when they were sold via storage media, and there was a deadline to burn those discs/cartridges.
Now they just ship whatever is done by the deadline, and updates will come later via a DLC, if at all.
The Last of Us franchise, especially part 2 have been the most immersive experiences that I have had in gaming.
This game pretty much told me that the PlayStation is more than capable of delivering this kind of experiences.
Now, if some of those high budget so-called AAA games cannot deliver not even a fraction of that - I believe - is on them.
They were enough since PS4 era to deliver smooth, immersive graphics.
For example, Tiny Glade and Teardown have ray traced global illumination, which makes them look great with their own art style, rather than expensive hyper-realism.
But currently this is technically hard to pull off, and works only within certain constrained environments.
Devs are also constrained by the need to support multiple generations of GPUs. That's great from perspective of preventing e-waste and making games more accessible. But technically it means that assets/levels still have to be built with workarounds for rasterized lights and inaccurate shadows. Simply plugging in better lighting makes things look worse by exposing the workarounds, while also lacking polish for the new lighting system. This is why optional ray tracing effects are underwhelming.
I'm curious why graphics are stagnating and even getting worse in many cases.
The ability to do irregular sampling, efficient shadow computation (every flavour of shadow mapping is terrible!) and global illumination is already making its way into games, and path tracing has been the algorithm of choice in offline rendering (my profession since 2010) for quite a while already.
Making a flexible rasterisation-based renderer is a huge engineering undertaking, see e.g. Unreal Engine. With the relentless march of processing power, and finally having hardware acceleration as rasterisation has enjoyed for decades, it's going to be possible for much smaller teams to deliver realistic and creative (see e.g. Dreams[0]) visuals with far less engineering effort. Some nice recent examples of this are Teardown[1] and Tiny Glade[2].
It's even more inevitable from today's point of view than it was back in the 90s :)
[0] Dreams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI
[1] Teardown: https://teardowngame.com/
[2] Tiny Glade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jusWW2pPnA0
The idea of the radiance cores is pretty neato
I still dont understand how it is different to Nvidia's RT Core.
I should dig that up and add NURBS and see how it performs today.
Games written for the PlayStation exclusively get to take advantage of everything, but there is nothing to compare the release to.
Alternatively, if a game is release cross-platform, there’s little incentive to tune the performance past the benchmarks of comparable platforms. Why make the PlayStation game look better than Xbox if it involves rewriting engine layer stuff to take advantage of the hardware, for one platform only.
Basically all of the most interesting utilization of the hardware comes at the very end of the consoles lifecycle. It’s been like that for decades.
For PS2, game consoles didn't become the centre of home computing; for PS3, programming against the GPU became the standard of doing real time graphics, not some exotic processor, plus that home entertaining moved on to take other forms (like watching YouTube on an iPad instead of having a media centre set up around the TV); for PS4, people didn't care if the console does social networking; PS5 has been practical, it's just the technology/approach ended up adopted by everyone, so it lost its novelty later on.
Technically the PS4 supported 2.5" SATA or USB SSDs, but yeah PS5 is first gen that requires SSDs, and you cannot run PS5 games off USB anymore.
Console also partially had to be quirky dragsters because of Moore's Law - they had to be ahead of PC by years, because it had to be at least comparable to PC games at the end of lifecycle, not utterly obsolete.
But we've all moved on. IMO that is a good thing.
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Sony’s strategy is for almost every game to eventually be on PC as well so it’s not entirely a case of development slowing (although it has).
Graphic is nice but not number one.
I've had issues with Xbox instant resume. Lots of "your save file has changed since the last time you played, so we have to close the game and relaunch" issues. Even when the game was suspended an hour earlier. I assume it's just cloud save time sync issues where the cloud save looks newer because it has a timestamp 2 seconds after the local one. Doesn't fill me with confidence, though.
The most important impact by far of the PS5 adopting this storage architecture (and the Xbox Series X doing something similar) is that it gave game developers permission to make games that require SSD performance.
How good it will be? Just look at the current upscalers working on perfectly rendered images - photos. And they aren't doing it in realtime. So the errors, noise, and artefacts are all but inevitable. Those will be masked by post processing techniques that will inevitably degrade image clarity.
You can give much more input than a single low res frame. You could throw in motion vectors, scene depth, scene normals, unlit color, you could separately upscale opaque, transparent and post process effect... I feel like you could really do a lot more.
Plus, aren't cellphone camera upscalers pretty much realtime these days? I think you're comparing generating an image to what would actually be happening.
> You can give much more input than a single low res frame. You could throw in motion vectors, scene depth, scene normals, unlit color, you could separately upscale opaque, transparent and post process effect... I feel like you could really do a lot more.
NVIDIA has already been down that road. What you're describing is pretty much DLSS, at various points in its history. To the extent that those techniques were low-hanging fruit for improving upscaler quality, it's already been tried and adopted to the extent that it's practical. At this point, it's more reasonable to assume that there isn't much low-hanging fruit for further quality improvements in upscalers without significant hardware improvements, and that the remaining artifacts and other downsides are hard problems.
However it can be a way to ship a smaller and less capable model which fits limited memory and is working just good enough.