Disclaimer: I am an SIE employee, but this is my opinion and how I understand it from the article description. It may not be correct.
It sounds like this will be similar to the way some other sound card manufacturers have created "3d audio" in that you won't need something like a 7.1 system to be able to better portray where exactly a sound is coming from. Stereo headphones will be able to give you a more immersive feeling by having audio be more directional instead of a general area (i.e. left speaker or right speaker).
I can't really give an answer to that one. I haven't gamed with a 7.1 system and generally just wear headphones when I do.
I'm sure some people do use stereo speakers, but headphones are almost a given for professional gaming since it shuts out environmental noise to hear quiet noises in game. Paired with 3d audio it would probably just give better situational awareness. As to how well it will work, I can't answer that.
This doesn't make sense to me. I've used 7.1 and 5.1 systems that have very good stereo imaging, and being able to place sounds clearly on one side or the other like that... didn't seem unusual.
To do it properly I think it does need to be headphones, and they should track your head orientation too.
Speakers are much less fussy and a lot nicer in a theater setup, but without feeding directly into your ears you need to actually surround yourself with audio sources (possibly bouncing some with a sound bar).
> I've always wondered, which is better: a 7.1 system or stereo headphones with "3d audio"?
Stereo headphones all the way. You only have two ears; they can only ascertain direction based on a) the amplitude and phase differences between the sound reaching each ear and b) the frequency and time-domain filtering effects of your outer ear. These effects can be very accurately emulated using a physical head model or digital signal processing. Properly recorded and mixed binaural audio will provide the most convincing spatial effect, because your eardrums can't tell the difference between a binaural recording and actually being in an acoustic environment.
>And if 3d audio is so great, why doesn't everyone just use stereo speakers (maybe with a subwoofer)?
Your living room isn't an anechoic chamber, so you're hearing both the sound of your speakers and the reverberation of your room. You can tell that you're listening to two sound sources positioned in front of you, because that room reverberation provides substantial spatial information about your actual acoustic environment and degrades the spatial information of the recording. You can mount speakers really close to your ears, so you only hear the sound of each speaker with one ear without the colouring effect of your listening environment; we call such an arrangement "headphones".
I've done both, and (for me) it's the opposite. You're probably right for "accuracy of sound", but when gaming having a bunch of powerful speakers making sound effects gives a better "experience". :)
eg You can feel decent sized speakers with your whole body, which you're missing when using just headphones
Headphones provide a worse spatial experience than stereo speakers where the source material has been mixed for speakers; the equation becomes significantly different with flexible spatial formats like Dolby Atmos.
>You can feel decent sized speakers with your whole body
Using headphones with a subwoofer is a workable (albeit highly antisocial) option. You can't feel frequencies above about 150Hz, which is comfortably within the bandwidth of most headphones. You can also fit a low-frequency transducer to your chair, which will provide a similar feel to a powerful subwoofer without annoying the neighbours.
Speakers are undoubtedly more convenient and more practical for shared listening, but headphones provide a simply unmatched price-to-performance ratio; to get the best out of a pair of speakers, you need to spend at least as much on acoustic treatment to control the resonance of your listening environment.
Agreed. I'm back to using headphones myself at the moment (moved location recently, not yet set up properly), but I'm really missing my proper sound system setup. ;)
Having a subwoofer that shakes the literally structure of your house and makes low frequency effects thud into your chest is something that headphones can't replicate. For a movie or really cinemenatic game, I can't imagine headphones being anywhere near the experience.
> your eardrums can't tell the difference between a binaural recording and actually being in an acoustic environment.
They can, primarily because ear shape varies, and you're going to hear the sounds from different positions based on the differences between the modeled and actual ear shapes. The infamous barber shop recording fails (for me) because it isn't clear what's in front of the user, and what is behind the user.
A great example of why ear shape matters is that ears can tell the location of objects in a vertical space based on the shape of the ear.
That said, I mostly agree with you in terms of the sound quality, especially in terms of price.
7.1 for positional audio. Your ears are sensitive to the direction of sound in more than just left and right. They can also determine front from back, and up/down (for sounds in front of a person).
Headphones simply can't mirror that effect, and you can tell this by simply turning your head while wearing them. If the soundscape doesn't change, it's not going to be accurate in terms of position.
Given the choice, I'd always pick the 7.1 system. I've been forced into playing primarily headphones because of where I live, but it pales in comparison with my old 7.1 setup. There's just something about the whole room being filled with sounds and vibration that you feel with your whole body that can't be replicated by headphones. If I ever get to live in a house again, first thing I buy is a good 5.1 or 7.1 system.
I just bought a house. Before turning on my PC (or even plugging it in), I set up my 7.1 system, including mounting most speakers to the living room walls. I swear that it sounds better than it did similarly set up at the old place (and that's not "it's better because I own it" sentimental BS).
I believe it. There are a lot of small environmental details that make a big difference to sound quality and how sound bounces around a room. Wall/floor material, distance between the speakers or to the listener, distance from the walls, ceiling height, etc. It's the kind of thing people will spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to get just right.
Use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonics for internal processing then output as binaural stereo. 3D audio! External speakers can approximate binaural audio to a passable degree.
Traditionally, you have a movie with 2, 5, 7 channels of surround sound to create a 3d soundscape. Artists can manually place sound in those channels. The view perspective is set in stone when you're filming so its easy to place exactly what you want.
In games, you usually have mono sound emitters placed in a 3d world and dynamically mix the sound channels but its still mono sound sources. You hear the same sound in all the speakers but only at different volumes.
3D audio most likely refers to newer audio systems that work with binaural of other multi channel sound sources that account for source and listener position and forward direction. These are getting popular because of VR. Its much easier to mix an ambient soundscape as 3D audio and drop it into a game than to place many emitters.
You can also get some binaural effect now with current sound pipelines (VR games do it) but my guess is in this gen its most likely done with code in the CPU instead of hardware acceleration.
A lot of the things they revealed about the Ps5 don't really "wow" me.
The system better be backwards-compatible, consoles these days are pretty much more custom PCs, there shouldn't be a problem with backwards-compatibility. Switching to SSD is also a no-brainer, getting better load times as a result of using better hardware isn't that big of an accomplishment, and you could get that performance increase even with a Ps3 if you swapped out the drives iirc.
What's the appeal of 8K? Is the support just there for some future VR plans? I already have my couch about as close to my 55" 4K TV as is reasonable, and can barely tell the difference between 1080p and 4K video. If I had an absurdly large TV (70"+) and didn't move my couch back yeah, 4K'd be a clear improvement. But 8K? Why?
For a game, with this amount of GPU power, there's not a tremendous benefit to an 8k screen.
It's good to be future-proof, and if you are at a desk you can pretty easily get a screen where the difference is notable. And people are making 8k content, so you want to support playing that on your flashy high-end machine.
But the important part would be the implications for VR. And also that if it can output 8k@60, then it can output 4k@veryhigh.
Meanwhile, HDR makes a massive difference, but laypeople seem to be pretty familiar with the term "4K" while very few know about "HDR". A testament to the power of numbers in marketing.
I would love to see less emphasis on resolution in consumer TVs and more on refresh rates. It would be great if I could play games on PlayStation at 120 Hz on my living room TV.
At this point, the hardware on the PS5 sounds powerful enough to provide backwards compatibility for the PS3 (and all of its predecessors). That would appeal to some people who have old consoles/games collecting dust in their basements/attics.
It would be nice, but I'd be surprised if they make much of an effort. There's little financial motivation to make available a huge library of practically free games, especially if people are willing to pay for new "nostalgia" consoles with a small selection of greatest hits preloaded.
Why would there not be a problem with backwards-compatibility? If they're switching processor architecture or vendor at all, there's going to be a huge problem.
Sorry, I knew it was backwards-compatible, my point was that given that AMD powered the Ps4, backwards compatibility shouldn't be something you parade around. Ps3/Ps2 backwards compatibility is impressive, however.
Great to see we're finally getting an SSD by default in consoles. The only thing I'm worried about with this is the fact that high capacity SSDs are more expensive and with a push towards more digital storefronts, I'm wondering how this will work for the users. Then again, it's also a wonderful chance to push streaming, so there is that too.
I think consoles are a perfect fit for a fusion drive like in some Apple models. I have tons of games on my Xbox that I'm not going to play any time soon, but don't want to delete. They can be swapped to the hard disk, while games I play more often get loaded onto a smaller SSD.
You probably don't want the drives combined for that, though. You want the active game to be fully loaded onto the SSD.
So at that point of needing a pretty big SSD, make the console less expensive by only having the SSD, then let the user plug in a cheap external hard drive. Five minutes to transfer a game is pretty reasonable.
not to mention vendors typically sell the hardware at a loss (or at least they used to), and make up those losses via higher margins on content and service sales. I'd be curious to know if that's still the case.
Seems like Sony was the only one selling at a slight loss (compared to the PS3's heavy 200+ USD loss per unit) and it's most likely improved for everybody since.
My guess is that they'll use technology like Apple uses that allows the base game to be downloaded and upcoming assets to be streamed in as needed (and no longer needed assets to be gotten rid of).
The Apple TV does some really interesting stuff with how it manages large games and files. Too bad it doesn't ship with a controller.
For a read heavy environment, QLC SSDs should be fine. Sony can probably get the raw QLC flash at something like $.05/GB by next year. They also will have less returns due to damaged consoles, as magnetic HD are by far the most delicate part of the system.
Interesting to see how/if the cable companies respond to the resolution wars - last time I checked the only one offering 4k was DirecTV, with everyone else still at 1080
Newer stuff upscaled from 1080 generally looks fine to my increasingly middle-aged eyes, but content filmed on older cameras looks awful at 4k (Law and Order springs to mind)
When the tech demos in stores made the main use case how clear newspaper text looks in 4k instead of 1080p i realized we probably had reached the end of the TV resolution S-curve.
Maybe that specific technology allows users to rest their arms on top of something while gesturing (even though it is not shown in any of the demo videos), but you specifically asked for a “Minority Report interface”, which does not do that.
Soli uses radar, so the scale of minority report is achievable. It's just that the target use case with soli is geared towards gesturing at your mobile device.
I’ve no idea what your argument is. My point is that a “Minority Report interface”, which you specifically wanted, is hampered by the “gorilla arm” problem. You pointed to the Google Soli thing, but that does not (from what I can tell) seem to solve the gorilla arm problem either, and even if it did, a “Minority Report interface” would still have the gorilla arm problem.
I guess I should have simply said gesture UI. Of course, I'd like eye-tracking and voice UI too.
I simply said "Minority Report interface" to help people visualize the idea. How about Iron Man's Jarvis? Would you have had a silly little rant over that too?
I would think that it’s hard to do those without the gorilla arm problem, since I haven’t seen any without it. If you have, please elaborate.
> Of course, I'd like eye-tracking and voice UI too.
Sure, those are no problem for the arms. But, IIRC, people whose job it is to talk all day have been shown to have a higher rate of vocal cord cancer. But, sure, that’s a different problem.
> How about Iron Man's Jarvis?
The movies (of which your linked clip is a representative sample) essentially show a Minority Report-style interface with a holographic display instead of a large flat display. Nothing about the gestures themselves changes, so from what I can tell, it, too, would have the gorilla arm problem if it were to be used for any length of time.
> Would you have had a silly little rant over that too?
I really don’t think anything I wrote deserved that jab.
So, with the voice UI, eye-tracking, and lots of subtle Soli gestures (https://atap.google.com/soli/), think I could work for 20-30 minutes?
-->"But, IIRC, people whose job it is to talk all day have been shown to have a higher rate of vocal cord cancer."
Because nowhere did I say how long I wanted to work. For some reason you're taking your lack of imagination and trying to extrapolate it into an all day affair where I'm holding up my arms.
Btw, I wouldn't mind that holographic display either but I'm willing to settle for an 8k display for now. After 17 years, and zero "Minority Report" gestures, I've learned that these things take time.
Barely, maybe. Gesturing with your arms for that long is hard work. I don’t know what the practical limits would be, but even lecturers who hold long speeches with lots of gestures rest their arms on the podium for a reason, and can continue speaking while resting their arms.
> you're taking your lack of imagination and trying to extrapolate it into an all day affair
On the contrary, you’re taking my writing “for any length of time”, and somehow assuming I meant “all day”. Which I didn’t mean. I only used the phrase “all day” in an unrelated aside about voice interfaces, and only then while referring to a study which (IIRC) specifically was about people who talked all day. But this was unrelated to gesture interfaces, which is why I did not follow this line of inquiry.
My point is that gesture interfaces are very hard work to use for longer periods of time (I’m unsure of the exact number), and if they can only be used for shorter periods, are they worth the hassle to learn? If you have work you need to do which takes longer than your arms can handle, you need an alternate interface anyway, (presumably some keyboard/mouse variation which have proven themselves to be reasonably effective) and if you already have that, why do you want to have to learn the gesture one?
This assumes, of course, that no gesture interface can solve the gorilla arm problem. But there might be one. Case in point: iPads were successful in avoiding the gorilla arm problem even though they are touch interfaces which the “gorilla arm” phrase originally refers to, and iPads avoid the problem by being small enough that people can use one while holding their arms in their lap – essentially while mostly resting their arms. There might be some solution to gesture interfaces which I’ve not yet seen.
> your lack of imagination
That’s twice you’ve now insulted me without provocation. Are you upset about the fact that I question the premise on which gesture-based interfaces are based?
From what I could see from the Soli page, all the video showed people with arms in the air not resting on anything. OK, there’s one quick shot of a resting arm at 3min 36sec on the longer video.
But all this is irrelevant to the original issue, which is specifically about large-scale arm-based movements as exemplified by Minority Report. I can’t see how those, specifically, can ever be practical.
> I’m getting tired of repeating myself.
Repeating what? I asked you upthread if you had seen any gesture-based interfaces which avoided the gorilla arm problem, and you did not answer.
> No affiliation with Google or Soli.
(Yes, I can see that. I apologize for asking, implying you might have been, when I could easily have looked it up. I deleted the question from my text.)
> I keep repeating it because you seem to to be hung up with the extended arm motion and “gorilla arm”
Well, you’re the one who specifically wanted “a Minority Report interface”. Which I can’t see ever being practical. Google Soli, perhaps, if used in the small, like you describe, with armrests. Maybe. But not Minority Report or Jarvis.
> MIT has done some gesture UI work
From what I can tell, that work looks like it’s all 10 years old. Also, from what I have seen in the past, all efforts like those are essentially about creating nifty-looking models for interaction (with stunning visuals and huge wow-factors), and not ergonomic interactions made to be used for any length of time. Indeed, the entire “gorilla arm” jargon term was entirely about how people simply forgot about how different something is if you’re using it for doing real work for 4 hours as opposed to doing a 5 minute demo (or, as it were, a two-minute movie scene).
> I clarified that immediately in my first followup.
Where? I don’t see it. On the contrary, you doubled down by saying “Jarvis”, and gave a link, which, as I said previously, is exactly the same style of interface as in Minority Report, and has the same problem. You also said that you thought that the Soli technology could make the Minority Report interface “achievable”.
Later, when we were discussing the Soli interface specifically, you said “I’m only moving my hands. I can still move my hands while resting my arms.”, but you never said that Soli is what you wanted.
So if you, contrary to what you originally wrote, don’t want Minority Report and/or Jarvis, what do you want? Soli? That style might possibly work, but I remain skeptical; I would have to be convinced that Soli does not suffer from the gorilla arm problem, since nothing in the Soli demo video seem to show a comfortable mode of working for extended periods, only spiffy short-term interactions.
My point is that the tech for minority report exists today (soli, leap, etc.) but the demand for novel mobile device interfaces is stronger than some waving-your-arms interface at a giant desk full of monitors.
Yes; I’m sorry. I did not see that you were not “melling”, the GP poster.
I’m still confused about what your point is. If you simply meant that Soli, etc. might not have the gorilla arm problem, then I am open to the idea, but remain somewhat skeptical. It might work for using a handheld device for a few seconds, but what I’m worried about, and what the GP wanted, was “a nice large wall size screen”, and in that context, doing real work for extended periods, I remain doubtful.
Resolution isn't an indication of image quality. Just like megapixel chasing in photography. Sure it's 4k, but it's heavily compressed, just like the terrible audio quality you get still to this day. They aren't streaming you 100GB.
It depends on how restrictive the bitrate was to begin with. Higher bitrates mean there's more data to move from mini-improvements over to filling in extra resolution. Lower bitrates mean you're already squeezing every drop out and the codec will collapse when asked to handle more pixels.
have you run 4K video through things like Handbrake? They've been proven to seriously reduce the amount of space (and, therefore, bandwidth) that video files need, and considering that 4K videos have about three times the resolution [1] they have a lot of space to gain from it. I would guess that there are appliances that can run some flavor of compression in real-time to get 4K to stream well. Yes, it will take more space than 1080p will, but that's to be expected.
precompressed content at 4K h.265 is pretty damned good at even relatively high compression. I also prefer the degredation method h.265 uses over h.264. For 720p-1080p it can actually go both ways, the higher the resolution the better h.265 is as the compression algo.
However, that means nothing for live streaming as generally speaking "live stream" compression really tends to suck a lot. And as to the above, a lot of devices don't do well with 4k h.265 streams for playback, but getting better.
Also, I really don't think I'd notice going from 4K to 8K for home video, maybe for some gaming, but even then I'm doubtful. Also, I'd expect 8K gaming on even next gen's console to be closer to Wii model quality than what we see in 1080p gaming today.
"but even then I'm doubtful. Also, I'd expect 8K gaming on even next gen's console to be closer to Wii model quality than what we see in 1080p gaming today."
That's something I kinda wish more game ethusiasts would pick up on. There's not really a such thing as "4K" or "1080P" or whatever; it's more about fill rates and other numbers and the question of how much you can push at 1080P or whatever, vs. what the developer tries to push.
There's actually a couple of PS2 games that push 1080 (can't remember if it's P or i) with the right setup. But obviously, there's a quality stepdown.
There's no particular reason other than lack of hardware outputs the PS3-era machines couldn't push 4K games. They'd just have to be very, very simple games. I recall being impressed in the PS2 era by Katamari Damacy, which seemed to be one of the few games of its era that noticed that if you only allocate like 10 polygons and a teenytiny texture for a game world object you can have a crapton of things happening on the screen, at a high frame rate, and build a game around it. I can only imagine what a full-powered, brand-new Katamari Damacy would look like on even a Switch today.
It's a fun comparison there, because 1080p to 4K demands a doubling of bandwidth, and h.264 to h.265 lets you cut bandwidth in half. So you get all that extra quality for free.
It's roughly 4X the bandwidth, not 2X... though 4K at roughly double the size with h.265 or even close to the same size is often "good enough" looking and better than 1080p.
Though, I still tend to mostly use 720p h.265 for TV watching as, again, it's "good enough" that I often don't notice too much. 65" TV at about 10' away. I do notice from 720p to 1080 and from 1080 to 4k (UHD). It depends more on what I'm watching. Some settings are better on some content, and as I mention I actually like the way h.265 degrades (often blurry in the background) vs blocky h.264. (facial hair for live motion is my guide)
When increasing the level of detail, most nearby pixels are similar enough that it takes less than 4x the bits to split each pixel into four. Most guidelines that I can find seem to agree that 4K needs about 2x as much bandwidth as 1080p. Here's some random ones, because I can't find a proper study:
A good portion of cable isn’t even 1080p/i. Many cable companies squish things down to 720p/i to minimize bandwidth and shove more channels into their lineups.
And the compression - good gawd. I recently upgrade to a 4k OLED TV, and watching cable TV almost hurts - the blacks in Game of Thrones are painfully crushed, incredibly splotchy messes due to the compression.
The inclusion of ray tracing hardware is interesting to me, and sounds like good news to Nvidia, who has been pushing ray tracing as part of their RTX cards.
Even though this uses a custom GPU, if consoles don't support ray tracing, PC games are unlikely to be designed for it, since most games have cross platform releases.
It's also interesting to me that they're supporting the existing PSVR - The new hardware will really help it have some amazing experiences, and it suggests they're decoupling their VR products from the console releases.
Ray tracing hardware being included kind of worries me actually. Unless they're selling it at a loss I can't see it being below 500 dollars with the prices of ray tracing capable cards being as high as they are.
As far as PSVR, the herculean amount of effort required to get something in the vein of backwards compatibility going between PS3 and PS4 makes me think it was designed from the ground up to work with basically everything PS4.
Almost all video game consoles are sold at a loss -- sometimes a huge loss in the first few years. Making money on console hardware has never been the name of the game. Every game sold for a Playstation comes with a licensing fee. It's in Sony's best interest to sell as many games as possible, which often means selling consoles at a loss.
Sony and other hardware makers also sell a lot of accessories, which often have huge margins too. The online services they sell also have big margins.
Selling hardware at a loss is one reason that consoles have always punched much higher graphically relative to price.
If the PS5 comes out for $500, it probably cost Sony around $700 to make it, and this is with getting massive volume discounts (guaranteed CPU and GPU contracts over several years with huge volumes of orders coming in) that your PC can't get.
And then because consoles only have one CPU and GPU combo to program to, you can get a lot more out of the hardware than you can with a PC.
This is why when the PS5 and the new Xbox launch, it'll probably give you better fidelity than a much more expense gaming PC -- and it will only get better visual fidelity for years to come as developers learn to exploit the architecture better.
I guess that would explain why Sony got rid of the option to run Linux on the PS3. With businesses buying PS3s as cheap servers and not buying any games, that would definitely be a bad deal for Sony if they sold the PS3 at a loss.
Yes that makes a lot of sense. Sony does not want to incentivize people to buy their consoles and never buy anything that they actually make money off of.
Also, PS4 Pro specs list its GPU perf at 4.2 Tflops, while a GTX 1080, worth $499 and predating PS4 Pro by half a year has 8.2 Tflops. It's in the ballpark of 3.8Tflops of GTX 1060, MSRP $249.
The PS4 Pro's CPU at 2.13 GHz is also not what one would call punching above your weight. There are cheap i3's more powerful than that.
A console's value is a very dubious proposition if you are in a country which is given a favorable regional pricing by Steam.
It was always the case that you can build a faster PC than a console at roughly the same price. The difference is the games are optimized for the console then usually poorly ported to PC so they aren't very comparable.
The inverse can also be true, I've been recently told by console players that Diablo 3 for instance simply omits rendering of crucial enemy attacks (e.g. Molten explosions), if there are too many enemies on the screen. And console versions have less enemies than the PC version to begin with.
Cross platform games that are based on high-level APIs are probably not going to showcase this well, but look at the work that Naughty Dog does and try to find a budget gaming PC that can compete with that. Big budget, cross platform games aren't that well optimized, but the really well optimized games can look really good on old console hardware.
Heck, look at what Nintendo has done with Breath of the Wild on the Switch hardware.
A console's value is about much more than performance. Consoles are for people who want a streamlined experience. Desktop operating systems don't make comfortable couch gaming systems. With a console, you can control the entire system with a simple controller from across the room, and you never have to worry about what's under the hood.
It's the same reason people pay a premium for Apple products even when they're strictly less functional - they're nicer to use.
Steam has been making strides in this direction with its big screen mode, though I admit that I have never used it and cannot testify to its efficiency.
Apple products have quite a few things going for them other than the smooth UX, I remember being surprised that a lot of non-technical people thought that they could not get a virus if they used Macs instead of PCs.
I don't disagree with pwthornton, but I'd also point out Sony has a looooong history of hype-hype-hyping the heck out of their hardware, far beyond its actual capabilities. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest they ship "ray tracing" capabilities that work on one launch game, and every other (serious) game developer takes one look at and says "no thanks, the 'conventional' pipeline for me, thanks" because in their rush to get it in there and get it shipping it'll have some critical oversight that renders it nowhere near as useful as it could have been. (For instance, not having enough bandwidth to and from the raytracing elements to be able to keep up or something like that, or if you use that mode it turns off too many other useful features so that nobody ever really uses it, for example, if you can raytrace but then architecturally have no practical way to post-process the image because it's all set up to be shoveled straight to the display, few game developers may find it that appealing.)
I still run into about one person a year on the internet who still can't understand why we're not all running Cell processors in our desktops, or who still thinks the PS3 has never had its power "fully unlocked", the answer being Sony hyped them well beyond what the tech could actually handle. In the end, it was merely about the level of hardware we'd expect for that amount of money at that time in a console, and was somewhat ahead of the XBox 360 in some ways and somewhat behind in others, not some sort of massive cutting edge next step thing that nobody caught up to for years.
I'd say take Sony's claims with a grain of salt, but that's probably not strong enough; do something more like divide everything they say by 4 or 5 and you're probably getting closer to the truth.
As I understand it (and I'm not an expert) the difficulty around PS3 backwards compatibility was an effect of its weird architecture.
The PS4 (and XB1) are structured like most other PCs. It makes sense the peripherals would still be compatible, and it would be easy to make games backwards compatible.
Given how incredible the first game looked on the PS3, and it's performance, I have a feeling that if TLOU2 is a multi-generation release, Naughty Dog will pull it off without having to water it down technically. We've seen game-play, and it looks insane as is already, and supposedly that was on PS4...
Naughty Dog is the studio who can pull it off, on both PS4/PS5, or just PS5.
It appears that next year Sony will be releasing a console with similar specs to the PC I purchased last year.
One key difference being that while the PS5 will be backwards compatible with PS4 games, any PC is backwards compatible with virtually every PC game ever made.
If there's a case to be made for purchasing a next gen console instead of a gaming PC - other than artificial reasons like exclusive titles - I'd like to hear it.
Not sure that Exclusive Titles is an artificial reason. Some of the best games I've experienced have been released/published by Sony and their first party studios.
The quality, story, characters, and graphically fidelity are often unrivaled by their contemporaries. God Of War(2018), Horizon Zero Dawn, the Uncharted series, and Shadow of the Colossus (remake) are some of my favorite releases of this generation. I'll gladly plunk down $400+ for their next gen console for more games like that, I don't focus on the tech specs, but rather the experience their platform provides.
IMO, the difference is between titles that wouldn't exist without Sony, and titles that Sony paid to have the exclusive for, but it wasn't actually necessary to have the game exist.
I think for the most part that Sony does the former, and I'm fine with that.
Epic has been getting a lock of Flack lately for doing the latter. Games that were already on Steam were taken off Steam because Epic paid for exclusivity. That's just scummy, IMO.
Real world is rarely driven by necessity but by happenity. Lots of thing could happen without X,Y,Z in theory; but the reality is that exclusive titles on slightly specialized hardware capture developpers mind more than PC
Convenience? Single-minded focus? Price? Local coop? People don't want to fuck around with Windows when they play games. They want to pop in a disc and play (once the damn thing has finished installing the game and updates). 99% of my gaming is on my PC, and I really, really don't get why PC gamers are always like "Omg, but consoles are so much more inferior, why doesn't everybody just buy a PC?????" People like consoles. I'm fine with that. Why aren't you?
I agreed with you until you got to exclusive titles. Despite Sony's past blunders like the PS3, they did good work with exclusive titles, and it's real reason to have a Playstation. Unlike Epic's exclusives, they're not just timed either. Also most if not all of Sony's back library will run on the latest PlayStation because Sony bought Gaikai years ago. Everything said, I still like PCs better than consoles, and Sony has a history of overhyping their hardware. I'd be surprised if it has good performance in 4k let alone 8k.
The ability to put in a disk and play a game without checking DRM or doing anything other than pressing start. That, and the massive advantage of not having to mess around with tuning graphics settings.
>other than artificial reasons like exclusive titles - I'd like to hear it
That is literally the reason for the tech inclined, and it's not artificial. The politics behind it don't matter; if I want to play X and I can only play it on console Y, guess what I'm going to buy?
Other than that, consoles are still cheaper than building a comparable gaming rig. Not by a huge margin, but still cheaper, and people already ha e nice TVs to play on (so don't ignore the cost of a monitor.) Beyond price, the fact is that building a rig is harder than plugging in a console. I know it's not _hard_, but most people just don't want to deal with it.
Interesting that while Microsoft and now Google are building platforms that are de-emphasizing local hardware, Sony recognizes this as an opportunity to differentiate by focusing on how great their box is. Their was a passing reference to a "cloud strategy", but there hasn't been as much evidence as their competitors.
This will wind up making for the most interesting console generation since the 32/64 bit era, since the platform differences go beyond hardware specs and release date. M/G's platform/subscription approach seems to be more in line with where the world is going, but remains to be seen if the timing's right.
PlayStation Now is still a thing, you can subscribe to play lots of PS3 and PS4 games on it, they run on Sony's servers and are streamed to your local device.
Not anymore -- while they still offer that feature, it's downplayed in favor of a Netflix-style rotating library of games that are downloaded and run on local hardware.
To be fair: Microsoft has the most powerful "local hardware" out there right now, with the One X. Though, having both a One X and a PS4P, while multiplatform games like RDR2 definitely look better on the One X, there are some games (like GoW or HZD) that, to my eye, look better than anything the One X has. Their rumored next-gen hardware (keyword is Project Scarlett) has two rumored consoles codenamed Lockhart and Anaconda, which aims to bring One X performance to a lower price point, and introduce a new console even more powerful than the One X.
In other words, they aren't giving up on local hardware; Microsoft is big enough to do both.
More opinionated point here, but I really think this current generation will go down in history as the most interesting console generation of all time. Its the first generation that's felt like every player is just innovating their fucking heart out and truly pushing what consoles are capable of, while simultaneously releasing literally the highest quality games ever made during any generation. We're in a golden age right now.
With Stadia and, honestly, Apple Arcade kind of competing in the "next generation" of consoles, there are more players than ever, but the narrative will still be driven by Sony and Nintendo. American tech companies get a lot of mindshare, but the reality is that every single Playstation couch console has outsold every single Xbox console, even if you compare cross-generation. PSN is the world's most active gaming community. The reason is the Games. American tech companies get SO DISTRACTED by all this technology and value add services, but American companies just don't get the games right, especially this generation. Stadia can throw money at the problem, but Microsoft has been doing that for years and all they've ended up with is their Three Big Studios (343, The Coalition, Turn10/Playground). Compared to the breadth and more importantly quality of Sony's and Nintendo's studios, the attempt isn't enough. Stadia just can't enter at the 11th hour and expect to do better.
I wonder if the 3D Audio system will include special hardware like the PSVR which changes the sound based on the angle of your head? If so, it could be pretty awesome, as that system is incredible for increasing immersion. If not, then it's really only a minor improvement except to those with acute hearing.
I wish they make it run at a stable 60fps instead. You have to have a large screen or sit close to the screen in order to benefit from 4K. I can't imagine how large or close a 8K screen needs to be for any benefit at all.
It's a nice spec to make it sound future proof, but I am guessing the ability to run at max visual settings at 4K60 will be the criterion most people will judge the GPU on.
Why? Just because the console can output at 8K doesn't mean games will. The PS3 supported 1080p output but you can probably count on one hand the number of games who rendered at that resolution.
Nice to see that Sony is still dedicated to hardware, knowing that streaming is a pipe dream in the USA, and will continue to be so in the coming years.
After reading the more detailed Wired article, I can assuredly place myself in the "cautiously optimistic" car of the hype train for the PS5 (I myself own a PS4 Pro that I've been happy with).
There are a lot of solid boxes that Sony's ticking: backwards compatibility with the previous generation, sticking with physical game copies instead of moving towards a "games-as-a-service" cloud model, updates to hardware that justify the new console's number increment, releasing devkits early to get game devs on board with said hardware, etc.
That being said, as others have mentioned, the support for 8K stupifies me. As far as I understand it, 8K displays are only just now becoming commercial, and only for the highest buyers. I'd much rather have higher, consistent framerates.
Ray-tracing, I'm indifferent to. If they can make it work, great, more reflective windows and puddles for all. If not, then perhaps game devs can choose not to implement it.
Shame there will be no additional information on this at E3. Makes me wonder if they're saving their winning hand for a future round of poker, so to speak.
8K output support doesn't really cost much so I wouldn't worry about it. It doesn't matter to most of the GPU internals. Games will internally run at whatever resolution they think results in the best quality/responsiveness/fluidity/development-cost trade-off, supporting 8K doesn't change anything there.
Fair enough. My concerns were more rooted in performance than the cost of the console itself. But the performance gains they reported by switching to an SSD would more than likely trump anything lost by supporting higher resolutions.
I'm assuming that there are basically two reasons to support 8K now. One is that it gets them higher resolution for a potential future VR headset. The other is that it is bigger than 4K and that sounds good in their marketing.
The N64 is also mainly hampered by it's texture memory. You only have 4KB total to play with for a texture (it's manually managed memory, not a cache) and with mipmaping, that's effectively 2KB. That's one 32x32 picture at 16bit color.
Additionally, developers didn't have a great handle on how the more modern memory hierarchy (read high DRAM latency) affected things yet so a lot of techniques they used sort of fought against the architecture and led to low resolutions, and they used heavy blurring and antialiasing to compensate.
They took this to the next level with bad fur day. By combining simple textures with plain color filters they could create complex visuals without using more memory. Eg: All the liquids (there are a lot!) look and flow the same, but have different color filters applied to differentiate them. They managed to squeeze in a full voice track too!
Perhaps, but a huge part of this is the shoddy decoding circuitry that most LCD TVs have. You can do a lot better. For example, you could buy a Framemeister, or you could retrofit the N64 with HDMI output.
Many artistic techniques in pre-LCD-era games are designed for the physical effects of composite cables and CRT screens. A simple example is transparency via dithering, where intentional color bleed produces the effect in the display equipment rather than the console: https://i.imgur.com/F6aW3dG.png
The N64 the console with the worse video output and it poor texture quality doesn't help. The only thing that really improves it is an expensive internal HDMI mod.
The 8K support definitely seems bizarre considering 4K seems barely supported properly in even most PS4 games. Or if it is supported, you have to play the game in 30fps instead of 60fps @1080.
4K gaming on PC, even with decent hardware, is still somewhat hard to hit comfortable frame rates.
I doubt we’ll see broad 8K support in triple-A games for some time, but 2D games arguably benefit more from higher resolution, anyway. The Playstation 3, which ran most games at a maximum of 720p (many, like the Grand Theft Auto series, rendered internally at 640 or 512), actually supported 1080p output, something the Pixeljunk series used to great effect. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a sprite or vector-based game on the PS5 that does something similar with 8K.
Raytracing is a good thing, not so much because of the better graphics, but because it enables produce nice graphics with less sophisticated engines and less artist input. A lot of the lighting etc. is currently baked into textures, hard coded, hand-optimized. This takes a lot of time. With raytracing, a lot of this comes "for free", so smaller / indie dev teams can produce games with AAA level graphics.
At the high cost of performance. As a consumer I am not really concerned with how easy it is to develop for. I'd rather see high frame rates than bleeding edge graphics. It's a good technology, but if we can't even manage 60 FPS minimum in 2020 I will be highly disappointed.
> As a consumer I am not really concerned with how easy it is to develop for.
I don't see how this could possibly be. Ease of development could mean the difference between your next favorite game existing at all. Or having the funds to become your next favorite game instead of cutting scope into a mediocre game that never got to realize its full creative ambition.
All upstream concerns contribute to the end result that you do care about.
Anything that helps people create AAA-quality games without needing the coffers of Electronic Arts is good for gamers.
I don't understand what you are talking about. You don't need AAA-quality graphics or a 2019 AAA-size budget for a game to be great. The boom of indie games has shown that great games can have great gameplay and performance, but without the fancy graphics of an AAA game.
Do you have any examples of the complexity of AAA graphics caused a game to either have its scope cut, or not exist at all? The only one remotely close to that is Destiny 1's devtools making created/editing levels difficult. However, that game had more fundamental problems, like needing to support the PS3 in addition to the PS4.
The point is that with ray tracing the indie game and the AAA game might not look all that different in terms of graphics. Right now AAA games use crazy 40-50 pass shaders and mountains of custom tweaked texture maps to get stuff looking like it does. With ray tracing you can accomplish a lot of that with almost zero effort.
Because when people look to buy something they are judging the end product and not the process. If indie studio A and massive studio B both create a nearly identical game, but studio A spend 100x less on development because of ease of development due to raytracing it still doesn't concern me. I'd expect studios A and B to get similar sales. If studio A used raytracing tech to develop the same game, but it only ran at half the framerate I would go with studio B regardless of whatever processes they used to create the game.
Raytracing democratizes graphics. Indie shops will have to spend less time writing shaders and lighting and can refocus that attention on making the gameplay and overall experience better.
When they talk about ray-tracing, they don't mean that real-time ray-tracing at 60fps is suddenly possible. We're a decade if not more away from that. They're talking about extremely limited applications for a few effects here and there, in specific scenes. That's what's been demoed so far.
NVidia has a bunch of demos with their newest hard-ware. The "Stormtroopers" demo was rendered in real-time, but on a very high-end >$60k workstation.
you are absolutely right, the systems we have today are not fast enough. But they will get faster with every generation, and the fact that is is available in at least one next-gen console makes it more likely that the industry will indeed go in that direction.
Both PS4 and Xbox One came out just as 4K was starting to get into market (prob a bit ahead of where 8K will be when PS5 launches), and it was frustrating that we had to wait 4ish years to get 4k support. Committing to 8K early means the same box will serve the early adopters as well as everybody else without a mid-cycle upgrade.
I generally think there will be limited urgency to upgrade to 8K any time soon (benefits over 4K seem incremental and we're not close to done w/ that transition yet) in the home, but love that Sony is making a strong stake for technical leadership.
Regarding 8K... even though 4K TVs are readily available, my guess is most of those TVs don't display 4K content. Netflix will often give you 720p. Game consoles have a difficult time simply pushing 4K pixels down the pipeline. Some games have taken to something akin to interlacing, except with the pixels divided in a checkerboard pattern.
Netflix is actually probably the most common source of 4k home video for most people. Nearly all of the Netflix original content is 4k, increasingly in Dolby Vision. Unfortunately (and bizarrely, to me), you do have to buy the most expensive monthly plan to have access to the 4k content. I don't understand why they would choose to make video quality the main object of price discrimination (it seems like associating Netflix with great video quality would be extremely advantageous to them), but hey, it worked for them to get the extra bucks from me.
Well, if I could offer content (some of which was unique) to a self-selected audience that has very low price sensitivity, I would absolutely put it at a higher price point. Seems like a no-brainer.
I wonder at that - you can clearly see the difference with an HDR and Dolby Vision image in a way that you can't "downsample", so, do they/can they downsample the HDR image to hit 1080p?
People are mostly concerned about content rather than picture quality. Netflix can deliver 720p and people will pay for it, some people will pay for 4K because of the marketing but don't actually notice that they're getting 720p, and only a small group of people left over actually care enough.
Just like how TVs come with default settings that mangle the picture quite a lot, and only some people will fix them.
Oh, are you suggesting that they're just straight up lying? They would need to not just trick me into thinking I'm seeing HDR (which is probably doable), but also trick my TV into thinking it's playing Dolby Vision, and also actually use significantly more bandwidth than a 720p stream would (I've checked at my router).
I'm sure all those things are possible, but it's also pretty likely that they're actually producing and distributing content in 4K and Dolby Vision.
Yeah, I can't see a way to fake Dolby Vision - it's pretty obvious when you're getting the extra dynamic range from the image - I'm surprised by how much more apparent it is than 4k. I can see resolution fakery, but that's why I asked if they thought it was possible to scale down the 4k Dolby Vision to 1080p Dolby Vision
I mean, you can definitely fake Dolby Vision. The Apple TV 4K has an option to always output Dolby Vision, and they do their own tone mapping to output normal HDR or SDR content in Dolby Vision. I don't use this feature, and it had pretty terrible reviews at launch (although I heard they have improved it).
But yeah, I think the actual presence of additional dynamic range is pretty noticeable for most well-produced content.
I think you may be responding to something that I didn't write, because I absolutely never suggested that NetFlix is lying or tricking you.
It's just a matter of fact that, for various (many) reasons, people will get 720p streams. Some of these people are paying $3/month for "Premium" with "Ultra HD" and simply do not notice that they are not getting 4K streams. NetFlix would probably rather keep the $3/month, the alternative would be to educate their users about why they are are not getting 4K (can your TV handle it? can your playback device handle it? are they connected correctly? are they configured correctly? do you have sufficient bandwidth? are there problems with your ISP? does your device have the right DRM?) and this is both time-consuming and likely to create a bit of a support nightmare.
Do you mean if you don't have a 4K TV and streaming device? Or if your bandwidth isn't enough? I'm not sure how they downsample their Dolby Vision streams, since my TV definitely switched over into Dolby Vision. I suppose the Netflix app may be able to stream lower resolution versions still with the Dolby Vision metadata.
Seems to me that both 8k and ray tracing capabilities fall into the category of better to be prepared than not, because upgrading consoles beyond the HDD isn't really much of a thing – you just replace the whole thing. Maybe they could do a PS5 Pro thing much like they did with PS4, but why not just include the hardware right off the bat if it's available and fits within the cost parameters?
As a very happy PS4 Pro customer, I'm definitely also in the optimistic camp. Heck, I don't even care all that much for the hardware, but I absolutely loved Horizon Zero Dawn and given its a PS exclusive I'll buy the PS5 just because of the next HZD installment.
PS5 will support 8K just like PS3 supported 1080p: it was there but almost no one used it. Nearly every game opted for 720p instead. It's a way to future-proof the generation, allowing for a future enhanced version of the console.
Cautionary tale: the PS4 Pro retroactively dropped support for many early 4K displays, including my own, in a software update. The updates were hardware fused to prevent downgrading, of course.
My plan for 8k is to wait for mass market adoption before buying one and hooking it up to a DRM-box built by a company with foreseeable financial interest in "stimulating" display upgrades during a down quarter.
Lest we forget, Sony also sold PS3s with the advertised feature of Linux support, which was later removed in a firmware update. The same Sony which sold audio CDs with rootkits.
I miss the idealistic days when hackers held grudges. Don't buy Sony. They are the enemy.
They won't really support native 8k in any real game. They'll support 8k the way ps4 pro support 4k. Through their upscaling technique. I'm all for that. The ps5 should definitely be able to do true, real 4k, and upsample to 8k
How long have consoles used almost exclusively AMD hardware? It seems like Xbox One/PS4 were the first generation this was true, is there any lock-in in this market? How many consoles are sold vs. desktops and laptops?
Depends on how you define AMD and exclusively. This is the first generation that AMD has got both a CPU and GPU into successful mainstream consoles. The Wii, Wii U, and Xbox 360 have an ATI GPU (from before AMD bought ATI). Going back further, the Gamecube has an ArtX GPU (from before ATI bought ArtX).
Given that the current Playstation and Xbox are based on (more or less) the same AMD platform, is it reasonable to expect that the next Xbox will too (with an identical feature set)?
Yes, it is rumored that PS5 is Zen 2 + Navi and Xbox Scarlett is also Zen 2 + Navi. That leaves room for different RAM, different numbers of CUs, different accelerators, etc. but they're expected to be pretty similar.
We're getting into nitpicking here, but what is the difference between a PS5 that is a spec-boosted upgrade of the PS4 and a PS5 that is fully backwards compatible with the PS4 yet still "next generation"? They're both AMD+AMD.
Is there any prediction on the future of stand-alone gaming consoles with 5G and streaming games(e.g., Google Stadia) coming soon?
While I'm not really much of a gamer now I spent a lot of my childhood playing video games and the thought of dedicated home game consoles going the way of arcades makes me sad.
I think I'll finally pick up that Switch I've been planning on...
The thing is Stadia does nothing new, StreamOn comes to mind just like pretty much every major player in the industry running their own thing, even Nvidia.
Granted: If anybody can make it work, it's gonna be Google, but I'm still quite skeptical. For many consumers network bandwidth and traffic volume are still very real issues, and there's not that much Google can do about that on a global scale, at least in the short time-frame.
Long-term they would have to roll out Google fiber on a global scale and pretty much go into the ISP business with full commitment, which I just don't see happening because Google fiber is dead.
8K doesn't make sense, anywhere. I'm middle-aged, and I can't at 2 meters distinguish 4K from 1080p. Nobody in the world can see the difference between 8K and 4K. It's a shameful waste of resource and ridiculous planned obsolescence.
In fact, it should probably be forbidden for wasting precious resources for no good reason.
The more pixels you throw at font rendering, the better. It also allows for cleaner upscaling from lower resolutions. However, those two uses are needed more on computer monitors, not TVs.
You are right that most folks with 50-65" TVs at 2-3 meters don't benefit from anything higher than 1080p.
Exactly. I would prefer they directed their budget somewhere other than graphics for this reason. The switch still plays most games at only 720p I believe, but this is more than sufficient for enjoyable games. I think 4k is a waste of memory, let alone 8k.
VR can be bandwidth intensive. VR immersive-gaming low-end headsets are 60 fps, and high-end are 90 fps. And I've been told 120 fps is a noticeable "like butter" improvement on 90 fps. So a 8K@30 might mean 4K@120.
VR lenses piss away pixels. With a current 1440x1440/eye, you might get only a ~500 pixel circle of crisply clear pixels. So if you want screen-comparable resolution you're all set now... if that screen is a 1980's VGA IBM PC. With this wastage, 5K/eye might let you render virtual 1080p screens.
A headset providing both wide fov and this year's "high" resolution would be about 4K/eye. And I'm thinking about modding a narrow-fov drone headset (less lens blur) with two 4K panels, because I'm tired of waiting for the game-focused VR HMD market to get around to screen-comparable resolution.
"But won't 8K require an insane graphics card?" No. The old generation of VR headsets was doing brute force. Foveated rendering greatly reduces GPU load. And frankly, even without it, I've run a VR desktop (non-immersive low-fps with camera-passthrough) on a WMR HMD using a crufty old laptop's integrated graphics. GPU isn't a blocker for higher resolution HMDs.
Doubtful, afaik consoles use hardware upscalers for high-end resolutions like 4k because the hardware would struggle with natively rendering such resolutions, as even PC hardware does.
I’ve been on Xbox since the first Xbox. But I think I’ll switch over to PS when this one comes out!
Why? Because Xbox UI has been deteriorating from bad to completely unusable. Like infuriating! I mostly use it to watch Netflix, prime and occasionally run Kodi and media player and play CoD or some other game. Would it be possible to always have these <10 titles on startup screen? Of course no, you may get a couple of most recent ones, but then you have to navigate to apps (which must be impossible to find if you don’t know where it is), select all my apps, or games and finally find what you needed. <\rant>
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadIt sounds like this will be similar to the way some other sound card manufacturers have created "3d audio" in that you won't need something like a 7.1 system to be able to better portray where exactly a sound is coming from. Stereo headphones will be able to give you a more immersive feeling by having audio be more directional instead of a general area (i.e. left speaker or right speaker).
And if 3d audio is so great, why doesn't everyone just use stereo speakers (maybe with a subwoofer)?
I'm sure some people do use stereo speakers, but headphones are almost a given for professional gaming since it shuts out environmental noise to hear quiet noises in game. Paired with 3d audio it would probably just give better situational awareness. As to how well it will work, I can't answer that.
https://youtu.be/aQH-jwE_kfo
Speakers are much less fussy and a lot nicer in a theater setup, but without feeding directly into your ears you need to actually surround yourself with audio sources (possibly bouncing some with a sound bar).
Stereo headphones all the way. You only have two ears; they can only ascertain direction based on a) the amplitude and phase differences between the sound reaching each ear and b) the frequency and time-domain filtering effects of your outer ear. These effects can be very accurately emulated using a physical head model or digital signal processing. Properly recorded and mixed binaural audio will provide the most convincing spatial effect, because your eardrums can't tell the difference between a binaural recording and actually being in an acoustic environment.
>And if 3d audio is so great, why doesn't everyone just use stereo speakers (maybe with a subwoofer)?
Your living room isn't an anechoic chamber, so you're hearing both the sound of your speakers and the reverberation of your room. You can tell that you're listening to two sound sources positioned in front of you, because that room reverberation provides substantial spatial information about your actual acoustic environment and degrades the spatial information of the recording. You can mount speakers really close to your ears, so you only hear the sound of each speaker with one ear without the colouring effect of your listening environment; we call such an arrangement "headphones".
I've done both, and (for me) it's the opposite. You're probably right for "accuracy of sound", but when gaming having a bunch of powerful speakers making sound effects gives a better "experience". :)
eg You can feel decent sized speakers with your whole body, which you're missing when using just headphones
Headphones provide a worse spatial experience than stereo speakers where the source material has been mixed for speakers; the equation becomes significantly different with flexible spatial formats like Dolby Atmos.
>You can feel decent sized speakers with your whole body
Using headphones with a subwoofer is a workable (albeit highly antisocial) option. You can't feel frequencies above about 150Hz, which is comfortably within the bandwidth of most headphones. You can also fit a low-frequency transducer to your chair, which will provide a similar feel to a powerful subwoofer without annoying the neighbours.
https://soundshaker.com/
Speakers are undoubtedly more convenient and more practical for shared listening, but headphones provide a simply unmatched price-to-performance ratio; to get the best out of a pair of speakers, you need to spend at least as much on acoustic treatment to control the resonance of your listening environment.
Agreed. I'm back to using headphones myself at the moment (moved location recently, not yet set up properly), but I'm really missing my proper sound system setup. ;)
They can, primarily because ear shape varies, and you're going to hear the sounds from different positions based on the differences between the modeled and actual ear shapes. The infamous barber shop recording fails (for me) because it isn't clear what's in front of the user, and what is behind the user.
A great example of why ear shape matters is that ears can tell the location of objects in a vertical space based on the shape of the ear.
That said, I mostly agree with you in terms of the sound quality, especially in terms of price.
Headphones are much better than cheapo speaker setups, but a good 7.1 (or even 5.1) system gives a better experience.
I'd probably put it down to being able to feel the noise with your whole body :) with good speakers, rather than the ears-only noise from headphones.
Headphones simply can't mirror that effect, and you can tell this by simply turning your head while wearing them. If the soundscape doesn't change, it's not going to be accurate in terms of position.
Specifically, it's likely about the inclusion and use of TrueAudio[2], its current encarnation (TrueAudio Next) or a successor of that.
On my own experience with Sennheiser HD600 headphones, these effects can sound real to the point of tricking my mind.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_audio_effect
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_TrueAudio
In games, you usually have mono sound emitters placed in a 3d world and dynamically mix the sound channels but its still mono sound sources. You hear the same sound in all the speakers but only at different volumes.
3D audio most likely refers to newer audio systems that work with binaural of other multi channel sound sources that account for source and listener position and forward direction. These are getting popular because of VR. Its much easier to mix an ambient soundscape as 3D audio and drop it into a game than to place many emitters.
You can also get some binaural effect now with current sound pipelines (VR games do it) but my guess is in this gen its most likely done with code in the CPU instead of hardware acceleration.
The system better be backwards-compatible, consoles these days are pretty much more custom PCs, there shouldn't be a problem with backwards-compatibility. Switching to SSD is also a no-brainer, getting better load times as a result of using better hardware isn't that big of an accomplishment, and you could get that performance increase even with a Ps3 if you swapped out the drives iirc.
The lack of a wow factor is a good thing, IMO. When they try too hard we get weird stuff like the Cell architecture.
It's good to be future-proof, and if you are at a desk you can pretty easily get a screen where the difference is notable. And people are making 8k content, so you want to support playing that on your flashy high-end machine.
But the important part would be the implications for VR. And also that if it can output 8k@60, then it can output 4k@veryhigh.
"Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details: 8K graphics, ray tracing, SSDs, and PS4 backwards compatibility"
So at that point of needing a pretty big SSD, make the console less expensive by only having the SSD, then let the user plug in a cheap external hard drive. Five minutes to transfer a game is pretty reasonable.
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/251038-theres-no-profit-m...
https://attackofthefanboy.com/news/microsoft-small-profit-ma...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/11/20/at-399-r...
Seems like Sony was the only one selling at a slight loss (compared to the PS3's heavy 200+ USD loss per unit) and it's most likely improved for everybody since.
The Apple TV does some really interesting stuff with how it manages large games and files. Too bad it doesn't ship with a controller.
Since the console is very low on writes they can probably make these like 0.3DPWD for fairly cheap at Sony scale.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/exclusive-sony-next-gen-console/
I’m excited. ;)
Newer stuff upscaled from 1080 generally looks fine to my increasingly middle-aged eyes, but content filmed on older cameras looks awful at 4k (Law and Order springs to mind)
https://nofilmschool.com/2013/07/4k-uhd-color-space-gamut-fr...
Personally, I'd like a nice large wall size screen where I can "spread out my work" and read it.
Throw in a Minority Report interface so I'm not stuck with a mouse and keyboard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SFeCgoep1c
> Throw in a Minority Report interface so I'm not stuck with a mouse and keyboard:
Remember the gorilla arm.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html
https://atap.google.com/soli/
I simply said "Minority Report interface" to help people visualize the idea. How about Iron Man's Jarvis? Would you have had a silly little rant over that too?
[Update]
Jarvis video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx7RCJvoCMc
I would think that it’s hard to do those without the gorilla arm problem, since I haven’t seen any without it. If you have, please elaborate.
> Of course, I'd like eye-tracking and voice UI too.
Sure, those are no problem for the arms. But, IIRC, people whose job it is to talk all day have been shown to have a higher rate of vocal cord cancer. But, sure, that’s a different problem.
> How about Iron Man's Jarvis?
The movies (of which your linked clip is a representative sample) essentially show a Minority Report-style interface with a holographic display instead of a large flat display. Nothing about the gestures themselves changes, so from what I can tell, it, too, would have the gorilla arm problem if it were to be used for any length of time.
> Would you have had a silly little rant over that too?
I really don’t think anything I wrote deserved that jab.
-->"But, IIRC, people whose job it is to talk all day have been shown to have a higher rate of vocal cord cancer."
Because nowhere did I say how long I wanted to work. For some reason you're taking your lack of imagination and trying to extrapolate it into an all day affair where I'm holding up my arms.
Btw, I wouldn't mind that holographic display either but I'm willing to settle for an 8k display for now. After 17 years, and zero "Minority Report" gestures, I've learned that these things take time.
Barely, maybe. Gesturing with your arms for that long is hard work. I don’t know what the practical limits would be, but even lecturers who hold long speeches with lots of gestures rest their arms on the podium for a reason, and can continue speaking while resting their arms.
> you're taking your lack of imagination and trying to extrapolate it into an all day affair
On the contrary, you’re taking my writing “for any length of time”, and somehow assuming I meant “all day”. Which I didn’t mean. I only used the phrase “all day” in an unrelated aside about voice interfaces, and only then while referring to a study which (IIRC) specifically was about people who talked all day. But this was unrelated to gesture interfaces, which is why I did not follow this line of inquiry.
My point is that gesture interfaces are very hard work to use for longer periods of time (I’m unsure of the exact number), and if they can only be used for shorter periods, are they worth the hassle to learn? If you have work you need to do which takes longer than your arms can handle, you need an alternate interface anyway, (presumably some keyboard/mouse variation which have proven themselves to be reasonably effective) and if you already have that, why do you want to have to learn the gesture one?
This assumes, of course, that no gesture interface can solve the gorilla arm problem. But there might be one. Case in point: iPads were successful in avoiding the gorilla arm problem even though they are touch interfaces which the “gorilla arm” phrase originally refers to, and iPads avoid the problem by being small enough that people can use one while holding their arms in their lap – essentially while mostly resting their arms. There might be some solution to gesture interfaces which I’ve not yet seen.
> your lack of imagination
That’s twice you’ve now insulted me without provocation. Are you upset about the fact that I question the premise on which gesture-based interfaces are based?
I think you should watch the Soli video again. I’m getting tired of repeating myself.
No affiliation with Google or Soli. I keep repeating it because you seem to to be hung up with the extended arm motion and “gorilla arm”
MIT has done some gesture UI work. Don’t know much about it:
http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/
But all this is irrelevant to the original issue, which is specifically about large-scale arm-based movements as exemplified by Minority Report. I can’t see how those, specifically, can ever be practical.
> I’m getting tired of repeating myself.
Repeating what? I asked you upthread if you had seen any gesture-based interfaces which avoided the gorilla arm problem, and you did not answer.
> No affiliation with Google or Soli.
(Yes, I can see that. I apologize for asking, implying you might have been, when I could easily have looked it up. I deleted the question from my text.)
> I keep repeating it because you seem to to be hung up with the extended arm motion and “gorilla arm”
Well, you’re the one who specifically wanted “a Minority Report interface”. Which I can’t see ever being practical. Google Soli, perhaps, if used in the small, like you describe, with armrests. Maybe. But not Minority Report or Jarvis.
> MIT has done some gesture UI work
From what I can tell, that work looks like it’s all 10 years old. Also, from what I have seen in the past, all efforts like those are essentially about creating nifty-looking models for interaction (with stunning visuals and huge wow-factors), and not ergonomic interactions made to be used for any length of time. Indeed, the entire “gorilla arm” jargon term was entirely about how people simply forgot about how different something is if you’re using it for doing real work for 4 hours as opposed to doing a 5 minute demo (or, as it were, a two-minute movie scene).
And it's ok if you don't see the value in a gesture UI.
I'm not trying to convince you. I'm not really sure why you feel the repeated need to tell me I don't need one.
Where? I don’t see it. On the contrary, you doubled down by saying “Jarvis”, and gave a link, which, as I said previously, is exactly the same style of interface as in Minority Report, and has the same problem. You also said that you thought that the Soli technology could make the Minority Report interface “achievable”.
Later, when we were discussing the Soli interface specifically, you said “I’m only moving my hands. I can still move my hands while resting my arms.”, but you never said that Soli is what you wanted.
So if you, contrary to what you originally wrote, don’t want Minority Report and/or Jarvis, what do you want? Soli? That style might possibly work, but I remain skeptical; I would have to be convinced that Soli does not suffer from the gorilla arm problem, since nothing in the Soli demo video seem to show a comfortable mode of working for extended periods, only spiffy short-term interactions.
""" Sure. That was almost 2 decades ago. We've given it some more thought. https://atap.google.com/soli/
"""
I'm asking for a good gesture UI, or at least a good start that can evolve as we learn. I'm not asking for a specific implementation.
My point is that the tech for minority report exists today (soli, leap, etc.) but the demand for novel mobile device interfaces is stronger than some waving-your-arms interface at a giant desk full of monitors.
Yes; I’m sorry. I did not see that you were not “melling”, the GP poster.
I’m still confused about what your point is. If you simply meant that Soli, etc. might not have the gorilla arm problem, then I am open to the idea, but remain somewhat skeptical. It might work for using a handheld device for a few seconds, but what I’m worried about, and what the GP wanted, was “a nice large wall size screen”, and in that context, doing real work for extended periods, I remain doubtful.
And now stuff like F1 racing is also streamable in 4k.
Here's a couple charts: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0095/4332/files/optimal_bi... https://di2vvsisz3gt1.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2018...
It's possible to design a codec to handle that kind of detail scaling internally, but I don't think it's been a big priority.
[1] (31802160)/(19201080) = 3.3125
Pedantically, 4K is 4096x2160 but UHD has come to resonate as 4K thanks to TV marketing.
However, that means nothing for live streaming as generally speaking "live stream" compression really tends to suck a lot. And as to the above, a lot of devices don't do well with 4k h.265 streams for playback, but getting better.
Also, I really don't think I'd notice going from 4K to 8K for home video, maybe for some gaming, but even then I'm doubtful. Also, I'd expect 8K gaming on even next gen's console to be closer to Wii model quality than what we see in 1080p gaming today.
That's something I kinda wish more game ethusiasts would pick up on. There's not really a such thing as "4K" or "1080P" or whatever; it's more about fill rates and other numbers and the question of how much you can push at 1080P or whatever, vs. what the developer tries to push.
There's actually a couple of PS2 games that push 1080 (can't remember if it's P or i) with the right setup. But obviously, there's a quality stepdown.
There's no particular reason other than lack of hardware outputs the PS3-era machines couldn't push 4K games. They'd just have to be very, very simple games. I recall being impressed in the PS2 era by Katamari Damacy, which seemed to be one of the few games of its era that noticed that if you only allocate like 10 polygons and a teenytiny texture for a game world object you can have a crapton of things happening on the screen, at a high frame rate, and build a game around it. I can only imagine what a full-powered, brand-new Katamari Damacy would look like on even a Switch today.
Though, I still tend to mostly use 720p h.265 for TV watching as, again, it's "good enough" that I often don't notice too much. 65" TV at about 10' away. I do notice from 720p to 1080 and from 1080 to 4k (UHD). It depends more on what I'm watching. Some settings are better on some content, and as I mention I actually like the way h.265 degrades (often blurry in the background) vs blocky h.264. (facial hair for live motion is my guide)
https://support.video.ibm.com/hc/en-us/articles/207852117-In...
https://www.howtogeek.com/338983/how-much-data-does-netflix-...
https://help.yitechnology.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005742328...
You might find this interesting https://trekmovie.com/2019/03/15/star-trek-fan-tests-using-a...
Funny they mentioned NTSC being poor quality - I used to know someone who did work with Philips and he said they'd refer to it as Never The Same Color
Even though this uses a custom GPU, if consoles don't support ray tracing, PC games are unlikely to be designed for it, since most games have cross platform releases.
It's also interesting to me that they're supporting the existing PSVR - The new hardware will really help it have some amazing experiences, and it suggests they're decoupling their VR products from the console releases.
As far as PSVR, the herculean amount of effort required to get something in the vein of backwards compatibility going between PS3 and PS4 makes me think it was designed from the ground up to work with basically everything PS4.
Sony and other hardware makers also sell a lot of accessories, which often have huge margins too. The online services they sell also have big margins.
Selling hardware at a loss is one reason that consoles have always punched much higher graphically relative to price.
If the PS5 comes out for $500, it probably cost Sony around $700 to make it, and this is with getting massive volume discounts (guaranteed CPU and GPU contracts over several years with huge volumes of orders coming in) that your PC can't get.
And then because consoles only have one CPU and GPU combo to program to, you can get a lot more out of the hardware than you can with a PC.
This is why when the PS5 and the new Xbox launch, it'll probably give you better fidelity than a much more expense gaming PC -- and it will only get better visual fidelity for years to come as developers learn to exploit the architecture better.
Here's a 2 year old video comparing a $550 PC (with RX480) to PS4 Pro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HueyUmSHrdo
Also, PS4 Pro specs list its GPU perf at 4.2 Tflops, while a GTX 1080, worth $499 and predating PS4 Pro by half a year has 8.2 Tflops. It's in the ballpark of 3.8Tflops of GTX 1060, MSRP $249.
The PS4 Pro's CPU at 2.13 GHz is also not what one would call punching above your weight. There are cheap i3's more powerful than that.
A console's value is a very dubious proposition if you are in a country which is given a favorable regional pricing by Steam.
Heck, look at what Nintendo has done with Breath of the Wild on the Switch hardware.
It's the same reason people pay a premium for Apple products even when they're strictly less functional - they're nicer to use.
Apple products have quite a few things going for them other than the smooth UX, I remember being surprised that a lot of non-technical people thought that they could not get a virus if they used Macs instead of PCs.
I still run into about one person a year on the internet who still can't understand why we're not all running Cell processors in our desktops, or who still thinks the PS3 has never had its power "fully unlocked", the answer being Sony hyped them well beyond what the tech could actually handle. In the end, it was merely about the level of hardware we'd expect for that amount of money at that time in a console, and was somewhat ahead of the XBox 360 in some ways and somewhat behind in others, not some sort of massive cutting edge next step thing that nobody caught up to for years.
I'd say take Sony's claims with a grain of salt, but that's probably not strong enough; do something more like divide everything they say by 4 or 5 and you're probably getting closer to the truth.
The PS4 (and XB1) are structured like most other PCs. It makes sense the peripherals would still be compatible, and it would be easy to make games backwards compatible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTGnZTDUKd0
Naughty Dog is the studio who can pull it off, on both PS4/PS5, or just PS5.
One key difference being that while the PS5 will be backwards compatible with PS4 games, any PC is backwards compatible with virtually every PC game ever made.
If there's a case to be made for purchasing a next gen console instead of a gaming PC - other than artificial reasons like exclusive titles - I'd like to hear it.
To start with, you’re probably looking at $399 vs $2k.
We always get outlandish supercomputer hype preceding every console generation. It's a story as old as time!
I believe it does, but I bet they didn't pay $500.
I'm sure "8K" in practice just means "HDMI 2.1"
The quality, story, characters, and graphically fidelity are often unrivaled by their contemporaries. God Of War(2018), Horizon Zero Dawn, the Uncharted series, and Shadow of the Colossus (remake) are some of my favorite releases of this generation. I'll gladly plunk down $400+ for their next gen console for more games like that, I don't focus on the tech specs, but rather the experience their platform provides.
I think for the most part that Sony does the former, and I'm fine with that.
Epic has been getting a lock of Flack lately for doing the latter. Games that were already on Steam were taken off Steam because Epic paid for exclusivity. That's just scummy, IMO.
Oh, and Last of Us.
Both those games were magic.
I don’t have time to mess around with PCs and driver updates and what not, and I like sitting on the couch with a controller playing on my TV.
Add the exclusives and that’s enough incentive to spend $300-$400.
That is literally the reason for the tech inclined, and it's not artificial. The politics behind it don't matter; if I want to play X and I can only play it on console Y, guess what I'm going to buy?
Other than that, consoles are still cheaper than building a comparable gaming rig. Not by a huge margin, but still cheaper, and people already ha e nice TVs to play on (so don't ignore the cost of a monitor.) Beyond price, the fact is that building a rig is harder than plugging in a console. I know it's not _hard_, but most people just don't want to deal with it.
This will wind up making for the most interesting console generation since the 32/64 bit era, since the platform differences go beyond hardware specs and release date. M/G's platform/subscription approach seems to be more in line with where the world is going, but remains to be seen if the timing's right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaikai
https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/playstation-now/
In other words, they aren't giving up on local hardware; Microsoft is big enough to do both.
More opinionated point here, but I really think this current generation will go down in history as the most interesting console generation of all time. Its the first generation that's felt like every player is just innovating their fucking heart out and truly pushing what consoles are capable of, while simultaneously releasing literally the highest quality games ever made during any generation. We're in a golden age right now.
With Stadia and, honestly, Apple Arcade kind of competing in the "next generation" of consoles, there are more players than ever, but the narrative will still be driven by Sony and Nintendo. American tech companies get a lot of mindshare, but the reality is that every single Playstation couch console has outsold every single Xbox console, even if you compare cross-generation. PSN is the world's most active gaming community. The reason is the Games. American tech companies get SO DISTRACTED by all this technology and value add services, but American companies just don't get the games right, especially this generation. Stadia can throw money at the problem, but Microsoft has been doing that for years and all they've ended up with is their Three Big Studios (343, The Coalition, Turn10/Playground). Compared to the breadth and more importantly quality of Sony's and Nintendo's studios, the attempt isn't enough. Stadia just can't enter at the 11th hour and expect to do better.
There are a lot of solid boxes that Sony's ticking: backwards compatibility with the previous generation, sticking with physical game copies instead of moving towards a "games-as-a-service" cloud model, updates to hardware that justify the new console's number increment, releasing devkits early to get game devs on board with said hardware, etc.
That being said, as others have mentioned, the support for 8K stupifies me. As far as I understand it, 8K displays are only just now becoming commercial, and only for the highest buyers. I'd much rather have higher, consistent framerates.
Ray-tracing, I'm indifferent to. If they can make it work, great, more reflective windows and puddles for all. If not, then perhaps game devs can choose not to implement it.
Shame there will be no additional information on this at E3. Makes me wonder if they're saving their winning hand for a future round of poker, so to speak.
Edit: spelling
If that's the case, then props for forward thinking on their part.
Recently on a whim I decided to plug in my N64 to a 1080p TV, and I was surprised how terribly the graphics scaled to the higher resolution.
Additionally, developers didn't have a great handle on how the more modern memory hierarchy (read high DRAM latency) affected things yet so a lot of techniques they used sort of fought against the architecture and led to low resolutions, and they used heavy blurring and antialiasing to compensate.
Nothing disappointing, but also nothing surprising/exciting.
There really isn't much revolutionary/big they could do, tough, apart from VR as part of the package.
4K gaming on PC, even with decent hardware, is still somewhat hard to hit comfortable frame rates.
Power isn’t the issue as the Xbox One S is equivalent to a base PS4 and handles 4k discs fine.
I don't see how this could possibly be. Ease of development could mean the difference between your next favorite game existing at all. Or having the funds to become your next favorite game instead of cutting scope into a mediocre game that never got to realize its full creative ambition.
All upstream concerns contribute to the end result that you do care about.
Anything that helps people create AAA-quality games without needing the coffers of Electronic Arts is good for gamers.
Do you have any examples of the complexity of AAA graphics caused a game to either have its scope cut, or not exist at all? The only one remotely close to that is Destiny 1's devtools making created/editing levels difficult. However, that game had more fundamental problems, like needing to support the PS3 in addition to the PS4.
NVidia has a bunch of demos with their newest hard-ware. The "Stormtroopers" demo was rendered in real-time, but on a very high-end >$60k workstation.
I generally think there will be limited urgency to upgrade to 8K any time soon (benefits over 4K seem incremental and we're not close to done w/ that transition yet) in the home, but love that Sony is making a strong stake for technical leadership.
I've just googled: Netflix yearly revenue is 16B and Netflix spent 12B on content.
Just like how TVs come with default settings that mangle the picture quite a lot, and only some people will fix them.
I'm sure all those things are possible, but it's also pretty likely that they're actually producing and distributing content in 4K and Dolby Vision.
But yeah, I think the actual presence of additional dynamic range is pretty noticeable for most well-produced content.
It's just a matter of fact that, for various (many) reasons, people will get 720p streams. Some of these people are paying $3/month for "Premium" with "Ultra HD" and simply do not notice that they are not getting 4K streams. NetFlix would probably rather keep the $3/month, the alternative would be to educate their users about why they are are not getting 4K (can your TV handle it? can your playback device handle it? are they connected correctly? are they configured correctly? do you have sufficient bandwidth? are there problems with your ISP? does your device have the right DRM?) and this is both time-consuming and likely to create a bit of a support nightmare.
I think this is how perfect society should work when marginal cost is zero.
Netflix cannot directly charge proportionally to your income.
But the cost of your TV set is somewhat proportional to your income.
If you have 4K TV then you are rich, and you can afford to pay more. To allow poor people who cannot even buy FullHD TV to pay less.
So everyone can watch movies, poor folks can afford it, and rich people won't mind the price.
In another word, it would be worse (from a society point of view), if the price was constant, but only rich people could use Netflix.
(BTW this is how people pay for government services with taxes: rich people pay more money (even with flat tax rate) but get the same service).
As a very happy PS4 Pro customer, I'm definitely also in the optimistic camp. Heck, I don't even care all that much for the hardware, but I absolutely loved Horizon Zero Dawn and given its a PS exclusive I'll buy the PS5 just because of the next HZD installment.
My plan for 8k is to wait for mass market adoption before buying one and hooking it up to a DRM-box built by a company with foreseeable financial interest in "stimulating" display upgrades during a down quarter.
I miss the idealistic days when hackers held grudges. Don't buy Sony. They are the enemy.
Has any of Sony's next-generation consoles just been "spec-upgraded" versions of previous ones? What a weird comment.
When you say it's next generation and deserving of the title PS5....whatever.
A new os and other bells and whistles doesn't change that. Its just going to use a better SOC.
While I'm not really much of a gamer now I spent a lot of my childhood playing video games and the thought of dedicated home game consoles going the way of arcades makes me sad.
I think I'll finally pick up that Switch I've been planning on...
Granted: If anybody can make it work, it's gonna be Google, but I'm still quite skeptical. For many consumers network bandwidth and traffic volume are still very real issues, and there's not that much Google can do about that on a global scale, at least in the short time-frame.
Long-term they would have to roll out Google fiber on a global scale and pretty much go into the ISP business with full commitment, which I just don't see happening because Google fiber is dead.
In fact, it should probably be forbidden for wasting precious resources for no good reason.
You are right that most folks with 50-65" TVs at 2-3 meters don't benefit from anything higher than 1080p.
VR can be bandwidth intensive. VR immersive-gaming low-end headsets are 60 fps, and high-end are 90 fps. And I've been told 120 fps is a noticeable "like butter" improvement on 90 fps. So a 8K@30 might mean 4K@120.
VR lenses piss away pixels. With a current 1440x1440/eye, you might get only a ~500 pixel circle of crisply clear pixels. So if you want screen-comparable resolution you're all set now... if that screen is a 1980's VGA IBM PC. With this wastage, 5K/eye might let you render virtual 1080p screens.
A headset providing both wide fov and this year's "high" resolution would be about 4K/eye. And I'm thinking about modding a narrow-fov drone headset (less lens blur) with two 4K panels, because I'm tired of waiting for the game-focused VR HMD market to get around to screen-comparable resolution.
"But won't 8K require an insane graphics card?" No. The old generation of VR headsets was doing brute force. Foveated rendering greatly reduces GPU load. And frankly, even without it, I've run a VR desktop (non-immersive low-fps with camera-passthrough) on a WMR HMD using a crufty old laptop's integrated graphics. GPU isn't a blocker for higher resolution HMDs.
Why? Because Xbox UI has been deteriorating from bad to completely unusable. Like infuriating! I mostly use it to watch Netflix, prime and occasionally run Kodi and media player and play CoD or some other game. Would it be possible to always have these <10 titles on startup screen? Of course no, you may get a couple of most recent ones, but then you have to navigate to apps (which must be impossible to find if you don’t know where it is), select all my apps, or games and finally find what you needed. <\rant>