Year One of the New Console Generation: An In-Depth Look
The State of the New Console Generation
After more than a year into the new console generation, the Digital Foundry team revisits their initial expectations and experiences. They emphasize that while supply issues hindered early adoption, the landscape has been defined by a significant convergence of technologies between consoles and PC.
Technological Parallels and Hardware
• The new consoles feature RDNA 2 architectures, enabling ray tracing and other advanced features like variable rate shading and sampler feedback.
• Experts noted that much of this console feature set mirrors technologies that debuted on PC around 2018 with NVIDIA's Turing architecture.
• While the Xbox Series X launched with a raw compute advantage, the PlayStation 5 excelled with its highly efficient SSD and compression blocks.
• There is an ongoing experiment regarding the Xbox Series S, which serves a specific audience for Game Pass despite facing notable technical compromises in resolution and memory capacity.
Launch Experiences and Software
"The crowning achievement thus far for this new generation is that it's sort of brought 60 FPS back to the console space in a meaningful way."
• The launch period was characterized by a reliance on 60 FPS patches for existing libraries, which notably improved user experience compared to previous generations.
• Early console life faced challenges with "hot" releases, such as Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition and Assassin's Creed Valhalla, which suffered from inconsistent performance across platforms.
• Titles like Returnal and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart were highlighted as true next-gen showcases that leveraged the unique capabilities of new hardware, particularly regarding world loading and high-fidelity rendering.
The Future of Development
• The panel identified ray-traced global illumination as a "golden chalice" for developers, making lighting design more automated and efficient.
• Unreal Engine 5 projects like the Matrix Awakens demo provided a glimpse into the future of high-fidelity, real-time rendering, though they raise questions about whether 30 FPS might once again become a standard design choice to accommodate this level of detail.
• Improving frame pacing and exploring 40 FPS modes on 120Hz displays remain key areas for future optimization to maximize visual quality without sacrificing performance.