Jess Birch @shivoa@mastodon.gamedev.place

Why do informed members of the gaming press compare Game Pass with PS+?
PS+ is clearly equivalent to Xbox (Games with) Gold [online play + incremental library of games while you subscribe]. PS Now started with streaming then added rental downloads; Xbox Game Pass started with rentals now is adding streaming - they're obviously current equivalents. Getting this stuff right is probably quite important going into a generation transition.

Amazing to remember that a few years ago it was quite widely agreed that "chiplet" GPUs would take a long time to work around local bandwidth issues (while implicit SLI/CFX vanished due to extreme memory problems) on fixed power budget when used for typical game rendering.
Also ending a console generation which started with transistors for GPU cores + fast memory vs transistors for cache with slower memory (PS4 clearly doing a lot more with die area choices; Intel dropping Iris eDRAM).

Interesting suggestion: "having both undef & poison in LLVM is overkill; undef can & should be removed at some point. This was not true in the past..." https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1837

Interesting that by far the most popular game this generation (bothering the top of sales charts from launch in late 2014 all the way to right now) is a port of a 2013 last-gen title that continues to be updated as a live service game and yet didn't get a mid-cycle enhancement patch (Pro or X) so the only >1080p30 version is on PC (which launched last, in early 2015). And it's already announced as getting ported to the next consoles too.

I wish this video opened with a more detailed description of the techniques. (Maybe their target audience doesn't care for details most relevant to coders? Or they assume anyone curious will read the [very good] papers devs have published?)
Those particle trails are certainly a rather unfortunate failure of the DLSS system considering how excellent it otherwise is in DS. https://youtu.be/9ggro8CyZK4

PR interview top tip: don't pretend your audience is stupid to help massage your talking point. https://wccftech.com/microsoft-admits-xbox-game-pass-isnt-really-making-a-lot-of-money-right-now/
No one is worried about MS. Most are justifiably worried this is an "extinguish" strategy where you eat losses for a few years to kill any competition then take control of an effective monopoly (a tech classic). Others may worry someone over your head decides to abandon the market & leave your ecosystem in ruins. (Do unpatched GfWL games play after MS abandoned that store?)

Hearing "Fable will be online the same way Forza Horizon is online" makes me wonder if they're working off the same underlying (open world) tech rather than having to use an entirely new (to the studio) engine.
Reminded that previous games included ghosts/orbs of other players shadowed into your world & that could be radically expanded today.

Oh hey, I guess someone cracked Prey (2017) on Windows so Bethesda got their money back & now they've patched the official version to remove Denuvo. The game binary shrinks from 300MB to 38MB with the patch.
Going to send this message back in time to when I was (poorly writing &) running programs from floppy disks.

Oooh, day-night cycle in Halo Infinite. I wonder if you can pick when you want to take on certain encounters or if they fudge it by advancing the clock at various times during missions to match a more authored experience.

Trying to imagine nVidia's business style as applied to the potential purchase of ARM. I'm just not seeing it. It would clearly be quite a jewel in their crown as long as no licensee ran.

There's something magical about easily importing in prototypes of all the pieces you think you need (Crates, PyPI, even APT/Yum) & hooking them together.
It then becomes the opposite of magical when you have to get back to reasonable performance (be that compile time or whatever) by working out what you're actually using & getting rid of as much of that scaffolding as you can.

Watching TrackMania ghosts, I'm slightly surprised world records don't upload a recording of their inputs to verify replaying them (on a server) does actually generate the time they claim it does.

Starting to wonder if AMD even get a choice of opting out of tensor-type silicon for PC RDNA2 GPUs (something absent from talks on their console variants).
The performance gulf (for a set image quality target) isn't going to be something they can counter by pricing lower (due to smaller die) & CAS+upscaling appears incapable of reaching an equivalent visual target (with similar framerates) right now. https://youtu.be/ggnvhFSrPGE

Interesting to think of this period as the final big Sony releases for the PS4 (reviews seems pretty positive; critics definitely finding plenty of meat to dig into) while MS have committed to another 2 years of XB1 ports of all 1st party games (although it is yet to be seen how different versions are - Forza Horizon 2 on 360 would indicate games could have quite different feature sets; I wouldn't expect Forza [M.8 & H.5] to necessarily have crossplay).

I will say that one of the things nVidia is highlighting in this video is some very apparent ghosting in the TAA applied to the native 4K image that could be fixed without requiring a DLSS implementation.
But DLSS is showing zero ghosting or any other of the artefacts we've seen in some previous games using DLSS - that's very good news for a robust competition for image quality (FB published their own DLSS-a-like paper recently; AMD might have Tensor-type silicon in PC RDNA2 GPUs).

I am always going to be slightly concerned with integrating a sharpen pass with TAA/AI-AA but you can't argue with results like this. Look at that stability of fine line width between frames with DLSS vs native 4K (while also doubling the framerate & losing minimal [if any] fine details). Amazing work if it holds up nearly as well throughout the rest of the game's scenes.
https://youtu.be/IMi3JpNBQeM

I gather from the latest Master Chief Collection patch notes that MS have given up trying to avoid licensing the Waves Audio tech (originally used by Bungie for Halo 3 onwards). Clearly players were not satisfied by the audio (even when avoiding the buggy crackling output on PC) & licensing the DSP plugins again will hopefully fix that.
"aligning closer to Xbox 360 quality" https://support.halowaypoint.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045689232-Halo-The-Master-Chief-Collection-Patch-Notes-7-14-20

2K: $70 next gen.
MS, looking at the Simulator prices *even before announcing any DLC*: $120 if you want all (30) the planes & non-proc-gen airports (40) at launch.
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/07/13/microsoft-flight-simulator-launch-date-announcement/
Fun story: one of our undergrad courseworks (years ago) was to generate correct renderings of the functional parts (eg full lights, including accurate PAPI) of airports from a basic description of the runways.

Remember back in 2016 when (roguelite) survival modes were decided to be the new hotness AAA would attempt & we ended up with DLC adding it to Rise of the Tomb Raider & Tom Clancy's The Division?

Weirdly enough, my first thought was about the various Sony-funded games that are prominently displayed in the Epic Store right now (due to imminent releases). I assume business as normal in console-land but more latitude for interesting moves around PC maybe if anything happens due to investment tying the companies closer?
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200709005844/en/Epic-Games-Receives-Strategic-Investment-Sony-Corporation