How the fuck have they even managed that? Just turning off bloom and high-res shadows should give them a major boost. I wonder if they're trying to force ray tracing or something stupid like that.
I think staying in business and selling hardware is costing Microsoft more money than if they just pulled the plug on the Xbox division. The reason they don't is because they need to, or hope to be able to, transition (lol) to a 3rd party software company.
I think some blame can be laid at the developers' feet too. It's a mistake to target the "pro" or higher-spec version of a console without making sure it works properly on the base model first. The high-spec machines should add bonuses (higher framerates, better graphics, faster load times, etc.), not be the baseline that then gets stripped down to barely work on the lower end.
The decision to make the Series S weaker feels like it was made by the higher-ups without caring for what the studios might have to say. It screams "We hear what you have to say but we are moving forward with our decision anyway" to me.
Probably, yeah. Though the seemingly-underspec'd Switch doesn't seem to have caused too much of a rebellion among devs either. They ported Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal to the bloody thing. Granted, it's 30 FPS (heh) but the Switch's hardware is downright anemic compared to even the low-rent Xbox and PS4/PS5 SKUs. If modern-day Zenimax iD can work out how to squeeze that kind of performance out of a mid-tier 8-year-old tablet, there's really no excuse for others to have trouble getting great performance out of better hardware.
People aren't aware of how bad Unreal 5 really is. Lumen is hybrid raytracing. UE5 targets 30fps on all hardware, but people aren't aware of this. UE5 was made for films first, not games, Nanite and Lumen are far too heavy for PCs unless you have something super high end, but you will still be forced to use some sort of upscaler unless you are playing at 1080p, even then you still need one because of how much of the engine relies on temporal denoising and reprojection. On PCs its borderline unplayable with 8gb of VRAM or lower. You can imagine how bad it is on consoles. The Immortals of Aveum game tried to use Lumen and Nanite on console and it upscales 720p to 4k on the Series X/PS5 and still doesn't hit 60fps, on Series S its sub 480p upscaled to 1440p. Seeing everything using Unreal nowadays just makes me not want to play the game at all.
I presume there is more into it than power problems. The PS3 was notoriously hard for game devs to use even though it was strong. I think the Switch is really development friendly judging from the shear volume if different specs games that were ported into it. My guess is that the X Box Series X/S are the opposite, that is really hard to make games for.
WTF is Epic thinking?
It makes sense, apparently Unreal was used for the backgrounds in Mandalorian.
To be fair, Obsidian is known for cranking out shit that doesn't run well at this point.
Could they not have done it in a way that it does not make developing games in it suck? That is like burning your lucrative business to use the insurance pay-out to fund an experimental side-gig. Then again, Epic did something similar with its terms of service for the UE5 too, so...
Maybe but Series S has been a thorn to MS 's side this entire generation. Not to mention, the engine they use is horrible. The X Box Brand cannot take one step forward without making two leaps backwards. That has been true since forever.
Doesn't the latter imply the former?
I mean, does developing games on it suck that bad? People buy games developed on it, and since it's so plug-and-use most people do not have to have as-good programming knowledge anymore.
I was talking more to game devs rather than engine devs.
Somehow I missed that this thread already existed, anyways i also agree that Xbox as we once knew it is pretty much dead, anyone that still believes that Phil Spencer is somehow going to return Xbox to 360 era greatness is frankly deluding themselves, the entire leadership of the Xbox division needs to be replaced with people who actually understand how a successful gaming company should be run, if only Peter Moore had never left the company...
Nanite has a higher performance cost than traditional geometry, it only outperforms it when you have absurdly high polygon counts. All the UE5 features aren't performant, if Epic was trying to imply that then they are lying. What they allow is faster turnaround, you can just throw your raw sculpts into a scene with no optimization work and have Lumen automatically do the fancy lighting in 'real time' with no baking steps. But doing these things in real time is exorbitantly expensive. It's why its made for films, CGI artists don't know how to optimize meshes or textures for games, they don't care because they don't need to do that, so for them being able to throw everything into Unreal and get instant results with no render time is a godsend. CGI artists coming to games is actually a big issue with the industry, they don't know how to work in a real time space with performance requirements, or how to design art to look good without 32 samples per pixel.
They demanded that even the code use inclusive language when making a game on it. That is stupid.
