Comments 1,590

Re: Report: PS5's Price Could Be $50 Cheaper if You Go for the Digital Edition

leucocyte

edition with disc drive only option for me. i don't think i've bought any games digitally that exist on disc.. the last thing i bought on PSN was the horizon zero dawn expansion. but if the difference in price is £100, i will quite happily tell jim ryan right to his face where he can stick it. i am not being ripped off for a cheap blu-ray drive to subsidise a loss for the digital edition.

a possible option is they'll be the same price but the digital edition will come with an extra controller.. but buying a controller might be £70 or £80 if you buy it alone. The dualsense5 sounds like it's going to be a step up in tech (and thus price) from the dualshock 4, which still retails at £50

Re: PS5 Console Revealed, Standard and Digital Only Edition

leucocyte

a blu-ray drive isn't worth an extra 100, the manufacturing cost is a fraction of that.. if the standard edition is more than 50 above the digital edition, i'll pass.. i'll just be resentful, and feel i'm getting ripped off. the fact the digital only edition is available right-off the bat suggests it's going to be pretty expensive, otherwise i don't think sony would feel the need to offer a cheaper alternative. i've purchased very little in the way of digital content, and that's not going to change anytime soon. so if the standard edition is stupidly more expensive, then it's the no-edition for me.

Re: Reaction: PS5 Deep Dive Was As Expected, But Was Shockingly Misjudged

leucocyte

@Cybrshrk - it's 825Gb for a reason, related to it being custom design so it can use available NAND and build something for a much more optimal price than standard sized drives. the custom 12-channel interface offers incredible speed, most people do seem to think it will be game changing, it is significantly faster than XBX, or anything PC has or will have the short/medium term. it has dedicated dma hardware controller that's using the equivalent of an extra 2 zen2 cores - it's essentially going to make the hard-drive function almost as if it's RAM, it should also offer big savings in memory efficiency. also a raw teraflops comparison is not a true measure of performance.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4higSVRZlkA

Re: Fans Show Displeasure at Disappointing Road to PS5 Reveal

leucocyte

@carlos82 - digtal foundry already saw this PS5 presentation days ago, so it was obviously recorded before any MS announcement the other day, and they have since had an in-depth interview with cerny. there's a deeper article with more detail coming further down the road. even regarding the current presentation.. "What's exciting about this presentation is that Sony presents a vision for next-gen that recaptures some of the pioneering spirit of its early consoles by delivering state-of-the-art, exotic custom silicon with a razor-sharp focus on taking the gaming experience to the next level. But at the same time, the design embraces the developer-friendly ethos that proved so successful with PlayStation 4." meant little to vast majority of people, but the tech nerds seem excited.

Re: PS5's Backwards Compatibility with PS4 Has Fans Baffled

leucocyte

if PS5 is switching to use DX12 (i read a passing comment about DX12 from cerny in regard to RDNA2 architecture, but i didn't see the full context), then PS4 backwards compatibility is not a trivial matter of it should just work since PS4 games use OpenGL. there'd be some kind of translation middleware layer required. maybe they're using the 100 "top games" to iron out that mechanism.. if say 90% of those are working at launch, then it's possible 3600 of the 4000 PS4 games would work - without testing them it could be hard to guarantee it.

Re: Reaction: PS5 Deep Dive Was As Expected, But Was Shockingly Misjudged

leucocyte

@DanM - i game on playstation for similar reasons. can't stand asymmetrical sticks, detest microsoft (not for xbox reasons, but practically everything else) and i don't find nintendo (or xbox for that matter) games remotely interesting, and my internet connection is nowhere fast enough at present or has low enough latency for streaming to be viable - even though the promise of stadia on linux eventually removes the windows barrier for PC gaming for me.

Re: PS5 Backwards Compatibility Will Support 'Almost' All PS4 Games

leucocyte

there aren't any PS4 games i want to play over again, so it's no big deal for me. the backwards compatibility announcement sounds deliberately vague though.. the features are working well, based on testing the top 100 games. but how many work? if it's 80%.. then that could mean 3200 of the 4000 PS4 games should work fine, though i suppose they won't know if they test them. if it's 20% but confident they'll have the vast majority of the other 80 working in 8-9 months time.. that's a whole different story.

i didn't watch the video.. thought i read something about cerny mentioning DX12 features in the AMD/RDNA2 architecture??. if sony have switched to DX12, it might explain why games need to be tested individually, because PS4 games use OpenGL, so a translation middleware layer would be required.

Re: Reaction: PS5 Deep Dive Was As Expected, But Was Shockingly Misjudged

leucocyte

the 36CUs in the PS5s GPU are equivalent to 58 of PS4 CUs, and each one runs at > 2.7 its frequency, so that's about 9 times the GPU power (along with a bunch of other bells and whistles, hardware ray-tracing, etc) of the PS4, coupled with a vastly superior CPU, and an SSD that's a couple of years ahead of the PC market. look at horizon zero dawn on a standard PS4, now tell me that horizon zero dawn 2 isn't going to look f***ing stellar on PS5.. regardless if the headline teraflops figure is less (and a direct top trumps comparison isn't a completely accurate reflection of performance anyway).

Re: Talking Point: Did Sony's PS5 Deep Dive Live Up to the Hype?

leucocyte

@Truthhurts2 - no, the 36 CUs in the GPU are equivalent to 58 of PS4s CUs, and each one is more than 2.7 times faster. so it's roughly 9 times the GPU power of the PS4.. which is maybe something to consider before people get their knickers in a twist over its 'lack' of teraflops. think of how good games can look on PS4. 9 times the GPU power (plus a whole bunch of extra custom bells and whistles), a vastly superior CPU, and a SSD drive that's a couple of years ahead of anything in the PC market.. i'm not sure people will really have much to complain about how games will look. for me, i don't have a 4K tv.. so i'd be amazed if i'm not playing PS5 games at 1080p @60fps with extremely high detail levels, especially with how fast it's going to be able to load ultra-high density texture maps.

Re: PS5 'Blindingly Fast' SSD Enables 'Instantaneous' Load Times

leucocyte

@wiiware - any old m2 drive won't work, though it seems you will be able to chose any capacity you like/can afford, as long as the drive itself meets a few compatibility requirements.

"We've seen Microsoft's proprietary drives but Sony is sticking with its strategy of allowing users to buy off-the-shelf parts and fit them into the console themselves - so yes, NVMe PC drives will work in PlayStation 5. The only problem is that PC technology is significantly behind PS5. It'll take some time for the newer, PCIe 4.0-based drives with the bandwidth required to match Sony's spec to hit the market.

And then, Sony needs to validate them to ensure that they will work properly. The PS5 will have an NVMe slot, but drive compatibility will be paramount. It's not just a bandwidth issue either, though clearly that is a factor. PS5's spec delivers six priority levels to developers, while the NVMe spec has just two.

"We can hook up a drive with only two priority levels, definitely, but our custom I/O unit has to arbitrate the extra priorities - rather than the M.2 drive's flash controller - and so the M.2 drive needs a little extra speed to take care of issues arising from the different approach," says Cerny. "That commercial drive also needs to physically fit inside the bay we created in PS5 for M.2 drives. Unlike internal hard drives, there's unfortunately no standard for the height of an M.2 drive, and some M.2 drives have giant heat sinks - in fact, some of them even have their own fans."

While the internal SSD solution is proprietary, with what might be considered a non-standard capacity, this will have no impact on the storage available from compatible M.2 drives, if you buy a 1TB or 2TB drive, that's the storage you'll have available. "The M.2 drive will have its own flash controller with its own (invisible) internal interface to its NAND flash dies. We don't know, or need to know, the details of that internal interface, or the size and type of NAND flash attached via that interface," Cerny explains. "What's relevant is the M.2 drive's external interface (eg four lanes of Gen4 PCIe so it can hook up to our flash controller) and the read bandwidth it can support via that interface."

In short, expandable storage is possible and you won't need proprietary drives from Sony to get the extra space you want. However, in the short term at least, the advice is simple: don't buy an NVMe drive without Sony validation if you plan to use it in PlayStation 5."

Re: Talking Point: Why Isn't Sony Saying More About PS5?

leucocyte

meh, it'll happen when it happens. personally i don't think the games available at launch (if it still manages to release before christmas) will be overly appealing to me, so i don't expect to buy one for a while. info now or info later is going to make little difference.

the US and UK are the only two regions where the sales gap between PS4 and XB1 manages to be less than 200% (in fact less than 300%) which is probably where most of this site's demographic resides and that may cause a different dynamic in the conversation. from what i can see, microsoft is making similar mistakes to the last time.. it practically abandoned the xbox360 gamewise for the last year or two, whilst sony released games like Beyond Two Souls, God of War Ascension, Gran Turismo 6 , MLB 13, Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, The Last of Us in PS3's final year. it's virtually left the XB1 to rot.. (for different reasons, but still..) whilst sony's already release dreams, and has got nioh2, last of us 2, ghost of tsushima.. to come.

plus the world economy is in danger of going into a deep recession, so talk of expensive game consoles could seem a bit presumptious or even insensitive whilst some people struggle to buy in weeks worth of food they might need if they have to self-isolate. plenty of people already have PS4s, and it's a much cheaper option to sustain the company's bottom line through tough market conditions.

Re: eFootball PES 2020 Is the Only Way England Can Win the Euros This Year

leucocyte

@Col_McCafferty - if the Euros get cancelled, i think the PL would consider a possible extension to the end of the season and play it in june if it meant it would get finished. i'm not a liverpool fan, so cancelling and writing the season off would be great from that point of view. but promotion/relegation for next season would be a complete mess if the season can't be completed...

i also think uefa would rather get the champions league/europa league completed rather than play the Euros.. the problem you have then is if the leagues and european competitions were trying to cram in all the games in a short timeframe, it would be massively unfair on some teams.. man utd or wolves could face having to play 10 league games to try for the last champions league place, as well as complete the last 16, potentially last 8, last 4.. etc of europa league games, and FA cup, in the space of 6-7 weeks.

Re: Ex-Guerrilla Producer Rips Butthurt PlayStation Fans Over Horizon PC Port

leucocyte

personally, i think HZD2 will be on PC within 6 months of its PS5 release, regardless of hermann hulst's platitudes.. i think guerrilla's ambition is license the decima tech to third parties, and HZD games are a good showcase for its potential.

it does seem a bit incongruous that when its exclusives sold 2-3m (as in the case of killzone) that it didn't court all this untapped potential revenue in the PC market, but now they're selling 10m+ it can't ignore it... whatevers.

Re: PS4 Exclusive Horizon: Zero Dawn Confirmed for PC in Summer 2020

leucocyte

hmm.. i suspect this might have been done as a test project for the decima engine, to prepare it for streaming at much higher framerates etc. than PS4 is capable of probably even before PS5 devkits were a twinkle in mark cerny's eye. if they've done the work, might as well monetise it.. at the same time, i don't think this is a particularly judicious move by sony, and wonder which one of the execs is the driving force behind it.

Re: Guide: Call of Duty: Warzone - All PS4 Launch Times

leucocyte

FFS... i've had it with this title. deleted. another humungous f***ing update.. WTF is this adding that the last huge patch a week or so ago didn't have? i have zero interest in battle royale, i don't even play the multiplayer.. but i can't get into the co-op features unless i download another 20gb of disk wasteage?!? the patch/update management of this game is abysmal.

Re: Ghost of Tsushima Release Date Confirmed for June 2020

leucocyte

from a visual and atmosphere perspective, it looks top notch.. but i just can't shake the feeling that it has a lot of similarities with assassin's creed, and if i never play another AC game it'll be too soon. there's a lot of coverage in the latest official playstation magazine, and it talks about striking fast from the shadows, and stealthily taking out opponents on a 1-on-1 basis, and having to master the "way of the ghost". there's instant 'aerial takedowns', a grappling hook to swing from point to point, extra tools like smoke bombs, sticky grenades, bow and (fire) arrows . some of the stealth stuff seems more ninja than assassin, but the gameplay tropes are fairly similar. there's apparently no waypoints at all, you need to use landmarks and pay attention to whats going (eg: smoke stack in the distance) to navigate, and where you choose to explore affects how the story is experienced, and relationships with NPCs can develop in different ways.. all sounds a bit too ubisoftish to me.

Re: PS Plus March 2020 PS4 Games Announced

leucocyte

shadow of the colossus is great, with one of the all-time great soundtracks, but i have it already, and i'd need to be paid (a lot) to play the other game. my ps+ ends in three weeks time, i'll probably let it lapse, i haven't downloaded a plus game since 2015, and i have no go-to mp at the minute.

Re: Guide: What Are Teraflops, and How Many Do PS4 and PS5 Have?

leucocyte

@rjejr - it's not overly relevant. the switch's GPU is ~400Gflops, which is less than 10% of PS4 pro.. but PS4 pro isn't $3000. PS5/XBSX will be using chips/architecture from an entirely different family compared to the PS4pro/XB1X, unrelated to how much they're 'boosted' from the old SoCs. teraflop is not really a very accurate indicator of what a GPU is actually capable of. comparing teraflops from tensor cores with traditional cuda/gcn/rdna cores for example is fairly meaningless. a tensor core does 4x4 tensor (matrix) calculations per cycle.

Re: PlayStation Fans' Patience Running Thin As PS5 Remains a No-Show

leucocyte

nothing really new about MS's info, mostly confirmation of stuff they already said and smart delivery is just cross-buy by another name.

sony drip feed info and all you get is complaints about not saving stuff for a big event.. then there's no event and all it is is constant whineing about no new info. collectively the internet is a pretty dumb place. apart from first party launch games, i'd argue more is known about PS5 now than PS4 in feb 2013. there are could be a lot of valid reasons why the company has not or is not ready to share more details.. not least of which the impact the coronavirus might be having on manufacturing and software development plans.

Re: Rumour: Expensive PS5 Parts Could Force Sony to Set Price Point Above $450

leucocyte

@sanderson72 - the GBP is in a very different place from 2007 when PS3 launched, and 2013 when PS4 launched. using a currency conversion to look at the prices of products between different places tells you nothing about the purchasing power of those currencies (nor the taxes involved in those countries). you might as well compare the price of PS5 in big macs.

Re: Rumour: Expensive PS5 Parts Could Force Sony to Set Price Point Above $450

leucocyte

i read an article somewhere, digital foundry i think, that suggested MS would struggle to bring project scarlett to market for less than $700. rumours still persist that lockhart, a cheaper discless version targetting 1440p @ 60fps, is definitely being made, so i suspect that PS5 will fall somewhere in between, $500-$600.

but if manufacturing costs are £400, once you add in worldwide shipping and distribution costs, a roughly 30% retailer margin, and 20% sales tax (for UK).. the "real" cost is considerably more. that's before you add in the possibility of import tariffs. yes, sony may sell at a loss, but they're not going to cut off their noses at the same time.

Re: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's Latest PS4 Patch Is a Ludicrous 51GB in Size

leucocyte

@Knuckles-Fajita on a 4Tb drive you lose about 10% just to the conversion from the manufacturer definition of a Tb (10^12 bytes) to an actual Tb (1.024^4)x10^12 - i think my 4Tb external seagate drive reports as 3.6Tb on PS4 pro. i find external drives rather unreliable, so i don't play games from them. i already lost 2Tb of games on one HDD (fortunately i buy nearly everything on disc, so re-installing most of it wasn't that bad).

Re: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's Latest PS4 Patch Is a Ludicrous 51GB in Size

leucocyte

it's unacceptable imo, 51gb is absurd.. especially if there were a couple of consoles in the house with the game on it, and a capped internet connection. i know they're doing free season pass stuff, instead of paid multiplayer packs, but in some respects, i think it would still be better to make a lot of the new content optional, and get users to download it from the store - use the games menus to let them know its available.

Re: No Plans for PS5 Port of The Division 2, Says Dev

leucocyte

i would expect service games to just work as is with backwards compatibility, your game/character data is stored on the games servers and the client will be the same, even if the host architecture has changed a bit.

seems a bit weird that backwards compatibility is seen as such a major thing, then one of the first things people ask about particular games is if it's getting a PS5 port.

Re: Ubisoft to Release Five AAA Games Through March 2021 with PS5 Support

leucocyte

starting the next gen with mostly the same s**t as the last one.. that's one of the main apprehensions I have about PS5 launch. the last ubisoft game i finished was the division, in fact it's the only one i finished on PS4. i finished far cry 3 on PS3, but far cry 4 was just tedious guff, i shelved it about 4-5 hours in. in fact i think i played its multiplayer longer, and that's usually an afterthought in FC games.

Re: Xbox Boss Phil Spencer Doesn't See Sony As Competition Going Forward

leucocyte

i hope sony doesn't take its cloud gaming to azure.. azure blows. of course MS doesn't want sony to align with google or amazon webservices. since the middle of this console generation, phil spencer's been like snakeoil salesman.. this "direction" for xbox has come from much higher up within microsoft.. if it was two generations ago, xbox would have been canned, satya nadella has no affinity for gaming - it's just another thing he can sell as a service. it's why microsoft has become much less proprietary in the last decade.. the biggest server base on azure is linux, not windows server, there has concentrated effort on windows 10 to produce a reliable WSL (windows subsystem for linux).. there are even suggestions windows 11 could abandon the windows NT kernel (which has been sh*t for 30 years) and replace it with the linux kernel. it's all part of a plan where windows desktop will also be a service, imo and even if a customer chose to run it on AWS or google, or wherever, and not azure, MS is still getting the subscription. windows desktop is nowhere near the big money maker it used to be, and a one-off fee (which is usually mostly subsidised) for an O/S that people might stick with for years compared to ongoing subs of a few dollars a month? windows 10 has been garbage from the start, and the amount of dumbf***ery regarding windows 10 updates that's been coming out of redmond, its obvious it's becoming a bit of a backburner product. Everything as a service (Desktop, Platform, Infrastructure... Games) is the position satya nadella sees for microsoft. phil just comes across as a shill.

Re: Sony Suggests PS5 Price Is Still Undecided

leucocyte

minimum i think will be $499/£479/€499, but i could see it being more. whatever the cost, it'll probably be worth it for the tech inside it, a bigger concern for me is that i don't think it'll have anything really worth playing when it launches.

Re: PS4 Sales on the Decline as PS5 Draws Near

leucocyte

@Ryall - even with two cheaper variants, the XB1 is selling about 1/4 of the PS4.. so price is not the main reason for the dip in sales imo. PS4 seems to have had some kind of spike in jan of last year (can't remember what came out though), so the year-to-year to drop is unusually large.