The HotSpot - Episode 386

IF the game looks nearly as good as that screenshot for this episode then man.. cause that is a NICE looking screenshot.

Alex Navarro: Unmuted Tour

Brad leaving his mic muted has to be in contention for best running gag of 2020.

Completely agree with Jeff and Vinny about performance modes, but you can't put that toothpaste into the tube now.

It's awesome to see Miles blow up in the mainstream.

That's also my gut feeling. If you're not familiar with all the options a modern PC game provides access to and haven't had the ability to make your games look or perform subjectively "better", the definition of which will vary from person to person, a lot of people are going to end up frustrated and annoyed. I think this will be compounded by the fact that many of these games purposely obfuscate what the difference is between a "performance" or "quality" mode for the sake of simplicity.

The closest example I can think of is picking up a PS4 pro and a 4K HDR TV together a few years ago. I boot up my fancy new toys, turn on HDR in my game, and the colors don't look right. They don't look bad, but they're off. Turn off HDR in the game, now they look wrong in a different way. Hours later I'm digging through forum threads with conflicting information on black levels, dynamic contrast, some of my hdmi ports may not support HDR, and on top of that they might be adding input lag?! Between then and the end of the 360 era I only played games on PC, and it was still an exhausting exercise.

Talking about side quests, it feels like Jeff and Brad just gotta skip doing side quests. I did a few years ago and it's great! I'll do some now and then but there's no point in doing them all.

They mentioned burning out on Spider-Man and Ghost of Tsushima this week. Just do some, sprinkle in some main story quests, and dip into the side stuff now and then. Once you start looking at it like a check list it'll just hurt your impressions of good games.

SSDs on video cards began with AMD's "Radeon Pro SSG" like 4 years ago, so it's not some theoretical thing. I think the only reason it existed is because at the time AMD was grasping at straws to find a niche for their GPUs in the growing AI pro/enterprise market and they had to make up for their lack of CUDA+Tensorflow support, as well as the limitations of memory capacity due to using HBM with those chips.

IMO, I don't think having SSDs on a video card for gaming makes a whole lot of sense because you're still ultimately going to be communicating through a PCIe bus via an on-board bridge. Just because the SSD is physically plugged into the card doesn't inherently make it faster. Also if the game install were on that SSD it would mean the CPU needing to share the GPU PCIe lanes anytime it needs something, as opposed to using lanes devoted to storage.

I totally agree with Jeff and Vinny about those performance mode settings.

I game mostly on the PC so I'm very comfortable with settings and menus, that said, I do think the value of a "console experience" where you just put in the game, play it running at 60 and the way it looks is the way it looks, is the big strength of dedicated machines.

I don't get why they want to go out and complicate this.

@shevar: Consoles aren’t powerful enough to just run everything at 60. This was especially true in the 360/PS3 era.

The mid gen refreshes and optional performance modes in the Xbone/PS4 era are much, much better for consumers.

The one hamstring of the new consoles imo is the fact that they are running 1st gen ray tracing capability. They're kind of stuck in a spot where this stuff and other new features are becoming known and/or more prevalent and in a few years these machines might just not be able to keep up with where the games want to go. Although I do think going a little overkill with the SSD now might make sense for the future. If they do release a mid gen upgrade they have already prepared everyone for the higher end faster storage.

I don't see a half-step PS5 "Pro" or something like that. PS4 Pro was needed because the PS4 was such a pathetically weak machine when it launched. The PS5 is capable of being relevant for 5-6 years.

@shevar said:

Play mostly on PC myself I find it even more frustrating that I don't even know what the setting changes, you can eyeball it and pick things out but I want to know what I'm sacrificing for whatever performance gains.

I want to either put the game in and play and not have to think about any of that or be able to tweak every setting to my liking. Being in-between is just confusing and frustrating.

Didn't help that the performance setting on PS4 Pro never seemed to perform all that well in my experience anyway.

I think the PS4 UI was always bad and that’s why none of you like the PS5 UI. The Xbox UI has been good for quite a while now and that’s why you like the XSX UI.

Also my PS4 or PS4 pro UI has never been snappy. It takes forever just to do things like open the settings or open sub menus in the settings. It’s all instantaneous on X1X.

Jeff hasn't seen Spider-Verse?!?! It's a movie about getting up and bombing and such. It's so up his alley!

i want to make a game genie game so badly. oh my god

@haneybd87: yeah. For all the complaints about the Xbox UI, it steadily got better, er, last gen. The PS4 UI was a mess to begin with and it never improved. I was always a bit shocked when people seemed okay with it!

In response to Vinny's question about PC load times and SSD speeds, i'm sure some of this console technology will start appearing but... does it need to?
Bakalar was blown away by Doom Eternal loading in 6 seconds on Series X (presumably that's from title screen to gameplay), so i tested it on my PC, 5 seconds, now Doom isn't the most complex title and every game will have different optimisations, some devs will be able to compile games better for a console than a PC, but SSD's have already cancelled a lot of PC loading time... the problem we have now is log ins and server connections bogging down games like Modern Warfare.

I understand simplifying it and just offering a default experience, but Brad is right that it is always going to be a compromise. What would happen, as with 90% of consoles games, is it would be a 30fps experience.

All this actually does is offer a 4K/ray tracing mode and a 60fps mode (whatever changes are made to accommodate that per game). If you say games shouldn't offer 2 options (bear in mind we are only talking about 2 settings) they'd default to 4K 30fps for every game... and how would that be better for consumers? People who want a better framerate lose out just so that people who don't care have to make a choice.

If I had the choice of Bloodborne at 60fps I'd take it, but I don't have that option. Maybe I would if it were made in 2020. It wouldn't just be that way by default, don't kid yourself.

Brad continuously being a sycophantic apologist for giant corporations like Sony and Bethesda still going strong I see....

You’re allowed to think what you want on this. It’s sensible to have options for graphics just like on PC. But Jesus Christ. Hearing him condescendingly dismiss Jeff saying things like Fallout literally can’t POSSIBLY be better or that it’s normal that AT LAUNCH these systems can’t run last gen games at 60fps across the board still... God. Unbearable.