Vanity Settings and Placebo Options

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Should be a fun time for all. Okay. Yeah. Sorry about that. Alright, uh let's move on to our first question. So this uh question comes from um Patreon Regular Dar Jacques in Brackets Dan. Lads, there's a fresh rumour that Sony is going to release a quote unquote trinity of consoles next generation, not just a PS6 and a KDIS handheld, but a KDIS console as well. K NIS is the code name for the portable APU, by the way. It'll be around a hundred dollars less as the lowest price tier device. It makes so much sense that it's shocking that it never happened with the Switch or Switch 2. I wonder if this uh I wonder if this happens, if it could push Nintendo to do the same and create some quote unquote cheap uh console price competition. Surely this makes more sense now more than ever. It would also be something that Nintendo could do sooner rather than later as doing a a quote unquote handheld only cost down like the Switch Lite is much more reliant on a Dye Schwink and would still have the cost of the LCD battery Joy-Con parts, etc., which is an unswich an unswitch wouldn't an unswitch. That's an invest the Nintendo unswitch, Oliver . Um I mean there's merit to it in the way that there wasn't with the original uh Switch, I would venture to suggest. But it's not it's not really what Nintendo wants to do, I don't think. No, I don't think it's what Nintendo wants to do typically, but I do think it makes a bit more sense this generation actually, because when you look at Switch 2, it's doing a pretty good job at outputting to high-resolution displays, I would venture, with DLSS and similar uh tech in there, it's actually doing a pretty good job. And you could ship an adorable little puck with no Joy-Cons, no screen, no nothing. It could probably be a lot cheaper, I imagine, without all those complexities. And like this user points out, uh a light, I'm not sure if there's a hundred dollars or a hundred fifty dollars of savings in the original switch two design that you could cram into a light and make that work out if you just stripped out some of those Joy-Con some of the Joy-Con complexities and maybe move to a cheaper s,lightly smaller screen. I don't really think you're going to achieve a lot of those efficiencies there. So it seems like a lot easier to go to a home console only device. Um, but perhaps that's not really Nintendo's remit this generation. I'm not quite sure. With the Sony rumor, I think it makes sense, but on the canis console front, I think that's more of a uh speculation from Moore's Law is Dead, I I believe, and not something that's a concrete leak. So I think it's more of just a speculation of something that seems plausible or even possibly likely um at some point, who knows, based off of the information that has been disclosed about the Canis SOC and based off of what we know about the PlayStation 6 and it' relsatively higher end positioning in the market. We don't know very much about PS6 beyond the general high-level capabilities, high-level uh capacities of the SoCs involved, and the relative um, you know, 24 gigs we think on the on the Kenis unit and um and uh thirty gigs we think on the on the center psych unit just based off I think some very simple bus math that anyone could realistically do in the relative uh the the realistic capacities that would be there. So I don't think we really have much insight into exactly how they'll be shipped and what form factors they'll be shipped. I think this would make a lot of sense, but it it depends on what Sony wants to do with it because I think it puts them much further down the line of supporting the PS6 handheld as a full-fledged P6 uh PS6 device and this is a full-fledged PS6 device, rather than kind of like this interesting kind of PS5 hot qua PS4 qua kind of PS6 device that has been hypothesized, and I think that was like the earlier planning for this console, even though it shares a lot of architectural similarities with PS6, though it wouldn't necessarily support all PS6 software. So I'm not sure what route Sony would want to go down. With Nintendo, though, I do think if they just wanted to bump up market saturation, it does make sense cutting out those components. But they didn't do it before, right? Which makes me think maybe not this time, but maybe they could consider it . Hmm, it's an interesting idea. So Alex, the basic contention here is basically they've created both uh uh Nintendo and Sony have created handheld SOCs where it looks as though the outputs of them would actually work uh on a living room TV. I think Switch 2 by and large has kind of borne that out. Sony wants to do a handheld, which opens the door to potentially something quite similar, which is that you can produce a much smaller console with a much smaller SOC and um deliver sort of how can you describe it and a more affordable console I guess my sort of immediate reaction in a kind of like uh glass half empty sort of situation is that Microsoft has tried it and it did n't work? Uh yeah. And I I don't know, maybe Sony's kind of already tried it with PSV to TV. Maybe I'm just remembering that wrong. But I I don't think I also think with twenty-four gigs of RAM uh and the SOC already existing and having to package a controller with it, I'm honestly not sure if this is $100 less. Uh I mean it's it's mainly the same thing, just minus the screen. Um and I feel like that isn't the full cost and they would be maybe even more subsidized than the handheld at that point. I actually don't want to say that I think this is the most realistic option for Sony, especially because then they're launching with three devices . Um and like an you know other prof iles because then it would have different cooling uh than the other device. Uh you know, th they're they would have a different f form factor. They'd be splitting up their uh motherboard manufactur ing. I don't know. I I feel like this this this is not the actually the most realistic thing. And I same with the Nintendo idea here. I think the 2DS uh split in the past . I don't view it as super successful. Um I also think the thing that makes the Switch so interesting is its versatility and just clouding the name with not having that ability just seems like something Nintendo wouldn't do at this point. They already had problems with the Wii U with the clouded name, where everyone thought it was just a different Wii . So I I don't think this saw this all makes any sense. I think this is a lot of uh people would like to see this, but it doesn't there's no support for it, and I don't think it there's a business sense for it either. I do think that Sony does need to figure out a strategy for lower cost consumers, regardless of what happens, because I don't really think you can just have a, you know, PS6 handheld straddling the $600, $700 mark, whatever it might be, PS6 uh straddling a higher figure potentially and then the PS5 console's already elevated to that like $5.99 price point in the US that's already that's a really tough lineup to face. So you'd think that there would be some kind of strategy around the lower end or maybe they just want the PS6 to be kind of an aspirational box to be something that represents a truly next-gen experience and something you'd want to save up for, right? But I think you'd you know you are creating some interesting pressures at the lower end with Nintendo straddling a much lower price point with potentially other offerings of the market straddling a lower price point with the used market. You know, who knows how that will look. But I think there is definitely a conversation to be had about like how do you actually address that more cost-sensitive consumer? Yeah, I think from my perspective, um there's the pus there's the the idea that they might be muddying the waters somewhat if they put out a mini console that's called you know PlayStation 6 or something like that, and it's actual performance level is uh lower than the existing PlayStation 5. That also kind of like presents problems. I'm sure you know stuff like using um whatever the next generation version of PSSR will will kind of like you know level the playing field somewhat. But I kind of think that particularly if it has 24 gigabytes of memory, it would kind of make sense to cost reduce or try to cost reduce the PlayStation 5, uh or to come up with a revised PlayStation 5 design that fits that uh category. Um I just think there's a a a risk of too much segmentation in there. The switch side of things, I just think you know, it's it isn't a switch at that point. Um how much cheaper could they make it if it is significantly cheaper, like a two hundred and ninety-nine um uh dollar console right maybe that would would would shift um that that that could kind of like expand the audience somewhat, but it is still potentially causing um unwanted competition with the actual switch in a way I don't think Switchlight did on the on the first I think the uh sorry, I think the other thing though is as Oliver pointed out that um the reason this is more viable is that you can actually have I mean the the the living room experience was the weakest part of the original switch . It just, you know, just didn't look great. But this does, so potentially it's it's an option. I I just I imagine that kid being like, Mom, can you get me a switch too? And then, you know, she comes back home with the the you know, the console box that doesn't have a screen and he wants he saw his friends at you know, the playground with their Switch twos and he's all sad and like you know, I don't think I don't think Nintendo cares. They want the kids playing with this thing outside and sharing stories on the playground with it. I don't think they were on the bus or you know, on the way to school by walking, but I don't think they want this as a home council like that. Yeah. Right. Okay. That's the last thing Nintendo wants, sadness. No, no . An interesting concept, but I don't think it's gonna go beyond that. Uh study . Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox Wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com/slash student offer. While supplies last ends June 30th, turns at AK Let's move on. Got this question here from Regordless. Bespoke gentleman exclamation point. Yes, which suggests that the PlayStation handheld might be introduced as a lower price entry point into the Sony console ecosystem, uh well, relatively lower price. Um, and the PS6 could be the more premium offering. Meanwhile, the Legion Go 2 costs $2,000 now, and Zotac put their zone Pro handheld release on hold because of the cost increases. What do you think would be a realistic price point for the PlayStation handheld? Cheers. Well, you know, the there's two different things to this. First of all, um whatever Lenovo are doing and Zotac are doing, they're very much beholden to the market conditions of the right now, which means that, you know, they are facing putting out devices that would make a loss, which doesn't make sense. I think the more accurate comparison should be with what Nintendo are doing with with Switch 2, right? And um the reason I suspect that is a better comparison is because um Sony faces a problem in terms of expanding the audience of the PlayStation. I mean, basically, there is a strong argument to suggest that every the majority of people that bought a PlayStation 5 previously had a PlayStation 4, and so they're kind of just, you know, operating on a replacement strategy for their existing user base when really you want to have more people coming into that ecosystem. And I think that was the genius of the of the original switch. You know, it worked as a as a product that did something meaningfully different, that something that people wanted. And I think that 's a a very, very good strategy for SOLID to go down this time around. And what it does mean is that if you are looking to increase your overall total addressable audience, you're likely to invest a bit in that. You're likely to make it happen via subsidies. Remember that Lenovo and uh Zota c won't get thirty percent of every game sold. So you know it's not really a like for like comparison. So the switch to comparison probably a lot more um uh a lot more relevant. Um Oliver. Yeah I think just the fact that Sony is in a position to offer a subsidy is a complete game changer here. Lenovo, Zotec, MSI, Asus, they're not in a position to offer any kind of subsidy. Um, and a PS6 handheld also benefits a lot, I think, from mass production. It's also likely to have a lower end screen in those PC handhelds, I suspect, if I was to venture. I guess I think it'd be more switch 2-like than uh certainly than like the Lenovo Legion go-to, which is quite an extraordinary uh design there. I think it's probably also a less complex design. It's probably a smaller frame, a lower water just OC. I think we're hearing uh reports maybe that it was like 10 watt in the 10 watt range out of the rumor mill. So that would be significantly lower. I could also see them launching with a smaller amount of internal storage, maybe like 512 gigabytes, and then expanding that out with either the new mini SSD standard or uh micro sd express right having some storage expansion on the unit and not really focusing so much on the internal expansion. Um and also, you know, you've got to be thinking about launching in a year and a half, maybe hopefully SSD prices and ramp prices will have stabilized a bit. Um so so I think personally like f six hundred dollars feels like a decent price to me if I was to venture any specific price at this particular moment, which would put it above the switch two, but obviously it has much expanded capabilities for all the switch two, has a lot more RAM than switch two, much faster than switch two, much more modern architecture than switch two. And it is an enthusiast device more than the switch two, but it's also reaching that kind of mainstream console price point. I think that would be a very realistic target for the for the device, keeping in mind especially that it's not it's not really like a PS Vita style device in the PS Vita. Obviously I think it launched for uh 250 American dollars. It's it's it's a higher end, more upmarket, larger device with active cooling, a much more tablet-oriented form factor. Like it is, it is a significantly higher end device, and I think the pricing probably needs to reflect that to some degree, even beyond the conversation about tariffs and wars and price increases and AI and whatever else is going into the equation, I think it's probably a higher end device. Mm-hmm. Alex, what do you think? I mean yeah, I've just uh still sort of uh boggled at the concept of a two thousand dollar leisure go to. Yeah, I don't really know who's buying that . Um that's probably not many people. Yeah. I mean I do think there's probably gonna be uh the the cost of memory and uh the cost of SSDs going up uh will have an effect on that PlayStation handheld price. It'll probably be more than a lot of people would like it would to be as a result of that, in spite of the fact that Sony has the ability to subsidize it. Um, you know, I th I think that's just gonna be reality at the end of the day, probably still cheaper than the PS6, which I think personally is gonna approach, you know, eight hundred US dollars, if not higher. Um so so so I I I see like it's not the same market as all with that Legion Go to, but I still think the the price is going to be affected by the current market conditions. And that's kind of what I really have to say about that. Okay. So um yeah we actually put out a uh survey on the YouTube community tab here asking what the maximum price people would pay for a PlayStation 6. Uh 25% said five hundred dollars. Uh my comment on that would be good luck. It's probably not gonna happen. Um, thirty-four percent of the audience, um five nine nine, uh twenty-six percent, six nine nine, fifteen percent, um eight hundred dollars plus. So forty-one percent would go for anything over 699. I kind of think that's probably going to be the most likely price point based on everything we've seen so far, based on current market conditions, based on what's happening with the PlayStation 5. Um it's interesting that you suggest five nine nine for the handheld there, Oliver, because that would also basically be almost like a replacement product for the PlayStation 5, which I think is quite an interesting uh place to be in. Yeah, things are gonna get pricey, that's for sure. And I think it's all more important than ever that Sony actually tries to expand its total adversable market there. Okay, let's move on. Okay then so we got this question from uh teasing hilarity. Hail and well met, knights of DF exclamation point. I'm interested to know who knighted us, but that's probably a discussion for another time. Not sure if you've been following double o seven first light news, but the Switch 2 version has been delayed until quote unquote later this summer while the other releases remain on time. Is this an encouraging sign of IO Interactive making sure the game is well up to optimised for the platform a la the likes of Elden Ring? Or perhaps a more concerning one along the lines of Borderlands 4. Thank you for your fantastic work and best wishes. Exclamation point. Uh Alex, what do you make of this? I mean, you know, it could be one or the other, really. I mean you just don't know, do you? Sorry, my brain is just like broken by saying Elden Ring and like well optimized. I don't know what that was. I think I was just like is that the truth? I don't even know anymore. Um They've delayed it and and there's reports that the frame rate is better. Okay. Uh in yeah, I think though the indefinite delay of the first light is what I recall most specifically here. Is is it indefinite? Later this summermer. Sum. Wasn't it? Oh, the summer. Okay. Well, my bed there. But uh if I were to guess, this game is ridiculously CPU limited, even on the current generation councils. Uh, I would be very surprised if it maintains like a static 60 on the PS5 . These games uh I've just I referenced the hitmap ones like have a ton of AI in them. And this one is going to allow you to actually explode a lot more of the environment and have more physics at any one given time because the game's design is that way. It's not just a systemic thing that might happen. It will happen. And in this case, I think that is already going to be troublesome on like something like a PS5 CPUIS. I think that is probably the reason for the the switch due delay. And I would not make any promises for the developers about how well it will perform in the end product was because we've seen games that are CPU limited on both Switch 1 and Switch 2 that have a lot of problems, I would argue, and then other games that are less you know CPU limited that really don't. So in a game like this, since I think a lot of the CPU stuff is related to gameplay, maybe it's much harder optimization journey than something that is just turn down how many objects are in the environment, turn down uh the the draw distance of rocks or something like that. I think this is a a challenge probably. Yeah, I think you're right. I do think it is probably more encouraging that they didn't put out the game in a suboptical state, that they are spending more time on it. I think that's that's kind of like a good thing. Uh I concur with you because um here's the thing like Hitman uh World of Assassination isn't actually that CPU intensive. Um however the benchmark has got a CPU intensive area where it's sit set within that manner, I think, within the second mission, and basically all the books are flying out and everything's going haywire. And that is very CPU intensive, but you don't really see it in the game. The the thing about um from what we've seen of 007 first light is that there is a lot of physics involved. You know there is a lot of stuff kicking off and it is fundamentally going to be the same engine obviously one that's been enhanced. So, you know, I would say you're probably right, Alex. It does represent um CPU challenges. Now the question is the extent to which, you know, if it I guess if it runs at sixty on a on a PlayStation five, which, you know, we don't know yet, um, then the you know, it should be there or about thirty on a switch two. I guess that's kind of like you know, back of the envelope stuff based on what we've seen elsewhere. But you know, it's really difficult to definitively answer this question because we've like seen, I don't know, three levels at this point. Yeah. We don't know is the short answer. Oliver. I would say that it's a big if on PS5 being a consistent sixty, because like we've seen PS5 Pro footage of the game in that kind of uncharted like sequence where you're in the plane and all those boxes are moving around and whatnot, all the crazy physicalized bits. And it's like sub thirty. It's well sub-30. It's like probably 17, 15 FPS. That's crazy little. Now obviously that's pre-release footage. That was released several months ago, I believe. Um, but obviously that's not ideal for a game in this condition where you're launching it on Switch 2. Um and I think it's just a bit of a tough ask here potentially. But on the upside, on like the graphics rendering side and not so much the CPU simulation side of things, the game doesn't really rely on ray tracing, I don't think. There's no like continuous LOD system or whatever. You can look at the game's PC specs and they the min spec there is like a GTX 1660 or pretty um pretty meager GPUs that obviously don't support uh ray tracing, quite old GPUs there. So in theory it, seems like it should maybe have more scalability on the graphics side than something like Borderlands 4, which was obviously very problematic on that side, um, just to start with. So yeah, I think that kind of more additive approach to RD potential in this title would lead to some better outcomes, I would suspect on Switch 2, absent the whole kind of like, can this run in a Cortex-A78C cluster at one gigahertz kind of question, which is harder to answer at the moment . Yeah. Absolutely. I guess as always, we'll just need to wait and see. Um, but I'm can't wait to see what this game's uh doing. Uh I've seen it, but I still don't know v much about it, but I am excited about it. Anyway, let's move on. Uh question from perfect underscore organism here. Just watch the crimson chin video. We have a new crimson name, by the way, Cmsrion Crimson Chin. Uh which I believe is um a of some sort of parody character. Uh just make it up. We're not just putting random words after Crimson . Um just watch the Crimson Chin video, and I think I'm right in saying that Xbox Series XX games seem to on average have more screen tearing issues than on PlayStation 5. Am I chatting ball stutter here? And if not, is there a reason for that? And uh I can tell you, perfect underscore organ ism, that there is a reason for that. And it's not a bug, it's a feature. Um basically um the consoles have libraries for like frame rate limiting, um uh you know, for or or kind of like um how they approach V Sync to be more specific. And the Xbox library has a little feature in it, which is to say that if you're slightly late with your frame time, it will flip the buffer later during the screen refresh as opposed to during the blanking period. So, you know, in theory, you know, you've got like 16.7 milliseconds to do a frame at 60 FPS. But if you're at like 16.9 , should you have to wait another 16.7 milliseconds to see that frame, or should you see it sooner? If you actually flip the buffer during uh the screen update, but only do it at the beginning of the screen update, then you actually get to see that frame sooner. So that's that's kind of why it happens. It's it is, I believe, a Microsoft library feature, but other games do it uh on on competing platforms. But there is, you know, Crimson Desert is actually an example of where it will do it on Xbox, but it won't do it on uh PlayStation. And it's okay. I think it's an interesting feature. The extent to which it's actually us able, I'm not sure because if you've got a frame that's slightly over budget, chances are your next frame is going to be slightly over budget as well. So either the tear goes down the screen or you get that um recync stutter anyway as it as it buffers the next frame. Um it doesn't really seem to have been that much of a game changer, but in theory it could lower latency a little bit. But actually I'm just remembering Tom's latency measurements there, where the Xbox is actually slower to respond than PlayStation. So I guess that isn't particularly paying off there. But Alex, this is kind of like a sort of Xbox version of adaptive sync really, isn't it? Yes. More specific version of it. Like I think it because it will should be control it should be for the top half this like the top third of the screen mainly. Whereas my experience with NVIDIA's adaptive sync is uh I think there's less controllability there and you kind of you can get very easily just very simple full mid-screen tears uh in my usage of it. Here I feel like the utility of this option, which may or may not be the default vSync option on Xbox for all I know, actually, when you like call the library, maybe the like recommended one because I might have been the recommended one from the 360 era uh or even the Xbox One era. That's when I think the first time this popped up was Xbox 360. And um yeah I think it has less utility now adays given the prevalence of VR and that extra boost to latency that you get from not having a a a delayed V Sync frame, which is, you know, with triple referring, it' its st's still ill something that you should feel in a controller technically. But the controller's already a latency, you know, squishy device, you know, like it's not that big of a deal, I don't think that one extra buffered frame versus not . So I feel like this has lost its utility. And if anything, it just annoys people when they see screen tearing. So I kind of feel like triple buffered vsync is what I'd prefer most developers use these days. Uh I mean for users that don't have VR screens, yeah. I guess maybe if they have a VR screen, you should be running a different paradigm altogether. Um and not relying on just this per default. So yeah, I kind of feel that way. Cause I also like like this person here, perfect organism. I feel like it is screen tearing is an issue. I I d I think it is not very pretty looking when you see it. Yeah, it's a bit two thousand and late. I thought we're sort of beyond that now. It's like mid I always think of the mid-90s when I see it, because a lot of games in the mid-90s could not be vertical synced, uh especially on PC. They just didn't have that ability, especially like with direct X . And I always think of I always think of mid-90s games, not even like early 2000s, I was forcing V Sync already on every title I could, but mid-90s, Well back in the eighties, the you know the the ZX Spectrum would have screen tearing simply by virtue of the fact that you're just m um bucking about with memory during refresh all the time. It's a big artifact in Daisi or . Oliver, is it time to just see an end to s uh tearing all together? I mean Nintendo doesn't allow it. Yeah, there there are no Switch 1 and Switch 2 games with tearing. Nintendo will not let you ship a Switch while they switch to a game with Tearing, which is pretty cool. Also on the uh Apple platforms and the phones, I know that VSync is enabled as forced by default. When you're tearing in games like this, it indicates you're dropping frames, which you don't want to see anyways, right? So ideally we wouldn't be having this behavior standpoint. But yeah, there are a number of games, uh one that comes to mind would be Doom the Dark Ages, which does tear at the top of the screen in the Xbox consoles, or at least it does in Series S, which does drop frames, but on PS5 when it drops frames, it doesn't do that. We do see that across a variety of games. It's more like a weird quirk at this point, I think, than something that fundamentally shapes the experience because it's not really full screen tearing. For the most part, games are hitting the ref resh targets, and a lot of gamers now are on VR, especially the enthusiast gamers who tend to notice these kinds of problems. I feel like they're generally on VR. So hopefully it doesn't matter too much. And it is, I think, like you pointed out, kind of an anachronistic relic of an era where we didn't have VR and maybe games weren't so keen on hitting that 30 FPS or 60 FPS target so often. And you did have some tearing, um, you know, like in the older uh 360 era tit les where this technique was pioneered like Alex pointed out . I'm intrigued by the phrase ball stutter. I want to use it more in conversation, but the more I think about it the more it makes no sense whatsoever. I don't know what it means. Uh but but thanks for bringing it up. Uh let's move on. Okay, we've got a couple of questions here related to how exciting or rather how not exciting consoles may be at the at the present point. We're gonna kick off with this one from K back , uh, in Block Capitals. Dear Digital Overlords, hear me, exclamation point, please. Uh I suppose the various forms of entertainment, uh I suppose the various forms of entertainment available now do form significant challenges to holding the attention of the masses and bringing in new people into the console landscape. But do you also think that the console world is currently just incredibly dull and lacking any excitement to draw people in, like the golden age? The industry feels like it's lost its cocky swagger and bravado and doesn't really know what to do. Competition next to non-existent. Every console is just a PC stuffed into a box with similar specs. So they're largely the same. Most AAA games look the same without any risks taken, and largely it feels like most uh companies are simply viewing their customers as a cash point from which to extract as much money from as possible. What do you think the solution is? Anxiously Chrono Tfigured has a similar point. Hey, masters of the digital universe, I've been thinking lately about the fifth and sixth uh console generations, how many original experiences they provided, and how it's the antithesis of what's happening now with Unreal Engine 5. Developers mostly had to use bespoke engines, and each piece of hardware limited them in ways that actually boosted creativity. Now most developers have access to an engine that promises a lot, so they go all in with it, often without thinking about hardware limitations. What do you think? Cheers, exclamation point. Um, I'm gonna go to you first on this one, actually, Oliver, because I think there is actually a fair point in this in that um the diversity of games um and the budgets that are going into them. Well, the the the first of all the diversity is kind of like I'd say more limited than previous console generations. But secondly the investment level that's going into specific titles as as as ballooned. We were talking about this with uh Pragm Pragmata in the main direct this week, how Capcom seem to have struck the balance where other people haven't. But I kind of get the idea of what K K Back is saying here. It's been really a long time since there was a console reveal, a console title reveal that was like Assassin's Creed back in 2007, where you're actually seeing a console doing things that we'd never seen before. What do you think? Yeah, I think that in general there is a lot of risk aversion in games. There's so much investment in games. The idea of like pioneering totally new styles or doing totally radical new things with technology. It's kind of a thing of the past, or at least it has been recently. And there's also just the reality that like the uh intricacies and realities of real-time rendering mean that we're kind of hitting a point where it's harder and harder to deliver those really compelling visual leaps. And it's also harder and harder to do it in the hardware sense. And we're seeing enormous maturation in that industry as well. Basically when you're building a console, you have realistically, probably three choices of vendors to go to AMD, Intel, or NVIDIA. Um, realistically, perhaps for some devices you could go to Qualcomm, maybe you could beg Apple to get their graphics IP or whatever, I don't know. But realistically speaking, you have a very limited number of developers, um, a very limited number of vendors to go to, and obviously the developers who are targeting those consoles are using uh similar tech and oftentimes are using commodity engines like Unreal, which impart a certain look, a certain feel, a certain structure on a lot of contemporary games, which is certainly a big issue. I think the solution has to be next generation. It'll come from new rendering techniques, it'll come from advancements in machine learning and things like that. I think it'll have to come from new areas of rendering that are that so far are uh unexplored or underexplored, I would suspect, in contemporary console hardware. Um but yeah, I mean it's it's it's just a hard problem because you have these gigantic games that are made with so much money, um, built on uh rendering paradigms that don't necessarily scale hugely well, and uh built on commodity hardware that no longer surprises people or excites people because you know Mark Cerny is coming out here and basically saying we're just going to do RDNA five everyone, which is also going to be in the PC and also going to be in the Xbox and you're going to like it because we don't really have an alternative. There's no there's no thought of like I remember on the PS4, they were talking about maybe oh we had this exotic design which had like over a terabyte of memory band with their second something like that, over a terabyte per second of memory band, what they had some exotic designs back in the day that they were working on. And certainly like when you look at the design of the graphic synthesiz er or something. The design of that part looks radically different than the design of the PlayStation 5's GPU, just because the context is totally different, the kinds of vendors who can offer that technology are totally different, and the size of the team that you need to develop a product like that is totally different. So just a very different environment for gaming than it used to be. What do you think? Uh is K back uh on the on the money here, Alex, or is he talking ball stutter. Not bull stutter. I think this is something that we have talked about on the channel for years. Um we always say the AMD grab bag is a bit boring for console competition, and let alone what the end product is capable of in your imagination. You know, like I do think the Xbox 360 PS3 era, in spite of all of its stumbles, were so many stumbles, don't don't, don't get me wrong there, at least really excited me , even as a PC gamer at the time. I remember just looking at the spec lists and being like, these are so radically different. And this was really interesting. And I was curious to see what would happen in the end and where real-time graphics would go because they kind of offered slightly different features there, you know, specialty processing versus a generically much better GPU. And now they're you know, very GPU laden , especially game design is very GPU like focused, I would say in a lot of ways, not about accessing the multic ore process processors in a way that affects gameplay design usu ally. Um, and so I feel like that is a level of same making things very same-y across the board, including the risk aversion that Oliver talked about. Um, I regarding so I believe I believe KBAC or Kabak or however you want to pronounce their name is very correct there. Um regarding the second question from Anxiously Chrono Triggered. Um it's it's not at like developers in general, I would say are l making this mistake or something of not caring about hardware limitations like just generically across the board. I think it's also like the type of people who are attracted to different projects or For example, someone who is uh really mindful of hardware limitations and really mindful of the you know discrete technical details of various platforms and really cares about performance in a fine-grained way, well, they're probably not going to be wanting to attach themselves to a project that uses a middleware engine. They probably want to have more control and more actual influence in the final product instead of just you know implementing DLSS plugins or something like that like you do in UE5. You know, they probably want more control there. So they're not going to go to those projects that are just using middleware. They're gonna go to your id techs, they're gonna be scooped by NVIDIA or Apple or something like that . And the people then who are using middleware are typically the ones that actually don't have these concerns in general because that's not what they you know they're design their designers, they're maybe technical artists at, you know, at the highest level. And they're not going to be engine tinkerers. And that's totally fine and I think it's good that UE5 exists for those kind of teams but you know we can't expect every single project that uses UE5 to to go to that depth as a result especially if it is a lower mid to double A project, because the reason why they are double A in the first place is because they can't bootstrap an engine, right? So uh I think that's reasonable. I d I do think it is sad though at the same point because fifth and sixth scen had six sixth gen had a lot of um different types of engines out there trying to do different things and doing things differently and we also saw a lot of like really weird techniques developed during the time that caught on or didn't catch on. And now you know, there's a lot of saminess uh when you see a lot of UE five titles out there. So I do lament it for sure. Yeah. I would like to see one of those moments though where you're seeing a console game do things that you've never seen before. Um, and yeah, I think you know, as I said, the one that stands out to me is like Assassin's Creed when that first was first revealed. I couldn't quite believe it was running on a console. Uh because I hadn't seen it before. And that was cool. And you know, Motorstorm is another one, right? Uh Motorstorm was an interesting one because, you know, it was so well developed from a technical perspective that, you know, I was thinking to myself, maybe the three sixty is more powerful, uh not as powerful as the PlayStation 3 based on this, but uh similar with Uncharted, it was just the the talent of the developers at the end of the day. Um but yeah, that's certainly an interesting point. But on the flip side, you know, everybody's uh you know loving um Claire Obscure Expedition 33, Unreal Engine 5, and out of the box Unreal Engine 5, no real customizations to that as I understand it. It's using blueprints, it's they they haven't like adapted the engine in any way. And yet, you know, um I'd I'd say it I'd venture to suggest it doesn't really look like an Unreal Engine 5 game. It looks differ different, and it's obviously been like incredibly successful . Yeah. Well um and that's a that's a game developed with a small team as well. And I would venture, although I think Alex would have maybe a different perspective on the PC version, I think the console version ran pretty well as far as these these things go. And it allowed them to achieve, you know, close to triple A graphics quality in many areas without the triple A investment, right? Which is kind of the upside of engines like in real. The downside is a developer like Squatch Games with High On Life 2, you know, a lot of the same kind of trade-offs there, but delivering a much less technically polished product, so there can be kind of a flip side to that. Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink or a sweet vanilla. Smooth caramel maybe. Or white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks rapper you buy your groceries. Yeah. Okay. Uh let's move on. I got a question here from Marcus. Hiya, Found Veman. Exclamation point. Would you say it's fair to have a discussion about vanity settings? I'm tired of games offering multiple settings levels that barely seem to affect either visuals or performance at all. Crimson Desert feels like a good example where many settings seem to do very little while one option, like lighting quality, does most of the heavy heavy lifting. At that point are some settings really about meaningful control or just about giving players an alt for a preset to click. Wouldn't low, medium and high often be enough with extra granularity only where it actually matters? I hope you have a great week, exclamation point. Well I hope you have a great week too, Marcus. It's an interesting question about Alex. I guess my counter to that would be the the sheer diversity of PC hardware is such that you know if you've got something like a Steam Deck and you're trying to run Crimson Desert on it, chances are that even those settings that don't do very much when you're sort of like turning them all to low on aggregate probably does make a bit of a difference. I don't know. Yeah, I I think that is the thing . Uh it's if you have like uh you know uh all the PCIe lanes you want, uh uh generically good enough processor, enough uh system memory, and enough VRAM, you know, like these are things some settings are not very affect you know, affected and that's normal. But uh Rich is saying the the Steam Deck offers such a radically different view of like where the bottlenecks are in a PC that it can actually have stuff like aerodic filtering mattering, right? Like something that we don't care about in PC Land. Turn it to 16x. No one gives a damn. One other thing, so I have a lot of opinions here, but uh one other thing to think about is that um certain rendering paradigms are just so much so much more expensive than others that they become the dominating frame time of the entire frame uh cost. So things like if you just have like normal rasterization techniques and then add in ray tracing like Crimson Desert does, right? Like there's the entire lighting is driven by ray tracing. That's the entire lighting of the game. Like it makes sense that it is the most expensive option. And since we know that they're doing ray tracing there for that and they're doing a lot of complex things to make it work. Ray tracing in itself is an expensive operation on the GPU for many reasons. So that setting being the one that is much more effective at controlling GPU frame time makes a lot of sense to me in a game where that is the main thing dominating frame time. But in general regarding vanity settings, I do think it is a real thing developers do. And I think Crimson Desert is a game that is guilty of it in the pre-launch cycle. And we uh warned about it uh in our initial preview video saying that it runs at ultra on a 7900 xdx uh we hinted at the fact that not every game's ultra is the same ultra ? And them saying that it runs at ul tra doesn't really mean too much at the end of the day if you don't take into account like image quality and exactly what's happening under the hood. Because one game's ultra is another game's low. And we see that kind of uh with a less with a game like Crimson Desert, I'd say that is a bit more advanced, but I thought we saw it with a game like Battlefield really well where that game's ultra kill settings or whatever they called them. Ah you know, they d those were like the medium of another game if you looked at stuff like shadow quality. Or Arc Raiders, which I really think had really poor shadow quality in a lot of ways, like like really bad shadow quality. And uh that game was that was cranking it up to ultra or epic or whatever. So I think there is a bit of that and I really do wish consumers could pull up their big boy, big girl, big they them pants and you know, like just play a game and recognize what the settings are and not worry about ultra because everyone that worries about ultra tends to hit complain on Steam forums or on Reddit all the time. Just play the game with with the settings that look good and run well and don't worry about the name of the setting. That would be great . Here's my idea, Oliver. I don't know what you think about this. I mean um, basically developers know what's expensive in terms of each of those settings because they make the call for the console versions and they come, you know, they choose whether it's going to be like hybrids of medium or high or just you know, ultra or whatever. So, you know, I don't understand why there couldn't be a series of, you know, a calibrate button. So you know, you press you press a calibrate, you press the calibrate button, it basically understands what your GPU is capable of relative to what they've already decided on the consoles. And then, you know, they basically come up with recommendations. I guess the the concept of um uh what resolution you've chosen might cause problems there. Or maybe it could actually say we recommend this resolution and these settings for your GPU based on our internal profiling. I do think that, you know, but certainly based on the experience I had with with Pragmato on PC, where it looks like a really good port, except you never know when the uh issue of the eight gigabyte frame buffer limit is going to cause a problem. You know, if if there'd been like, you know, a calibrate button , I would be a lot happier, I think. What do you think? Certainly if there was this option in games to profile your GPU, or even just like look at the GPU family, I think you could probably reasonably assume that any like X70 class card, X80 class card is probably of a similar mileage to another. Like if you're just able to get the GPU ID out there, you know, and uh and do some kind of uh do some kind of inference based off of that, I think that should be fine. But yeah, on P C, I I personally tend to just look at like low, medium, high, ultra, just kind of pick a spot there and not really concern myself with too many other settings. The only exception would be something like a ray tracing toggle, right? Which is a little bit more of a you know potentially there be dragons option, as Alex suggested. But in general, I I think that yeah, people should just be picking low, medium, high, whatever they should be targeting a resolution that looks good in their monitor or is their monitor's native resolution they should be using upscaling. Like there are probably a a number of adages that you could just apply across the board and then just kind of like start with medium for something that's hopefully going to ape the consoles pretty well and just scale it up only if you really have the GPU time to do so. Because medium in most cases is going to give you the visual experience you're you're going to want um with anything below the high end of graphics hardware, I would vent . Okay. Interesting idea. Um just thinking about uh where the optimized settings have landed though, and it's opt it's usually like a a sort of um combination of like ultra, medium, high yeah it's more complicated than that for sure. But ideally. It is more com it's it's yeah, absolutely. Okay. Um let's move on to the final question. Um and uh it's from Dylan. I have a solution for the question of graphic settings on consoles. That's sounds ideal for you, Oliver. And a bunch of settings that don't actually do anything. A place bo. People will have the illusion of control . They can make they can make this do this now. Or they can make do this now. I'm not sure what that means. Exclamation point. YouTube videos and not cause a harm, not cause harm. It's brilliant. The only problem is you would ruin it by telling it everyone. Yeah. Well, it's funny because you know, sometimes you do actually get settings that literally don't do anything. And they actually turn out to be quite time sinks for us because it's like sh surely it's gotta do something. You know, what's what's going on here? Surely I guess Cruise and Desert on Xbox had the uh the V Sync on off toggle that didn't actually do anything at launch. Right? It it just didn't do it didn't do anything. Um I I I don't know. What do you think, Oliver? Placebos illusion of control. There are some placebos in modern games. Probably the biggest one nowadays is the PSSR toggle because I have to test in every game that uses PSSR. Whether the PSSR toggle triggers the new PSSR, whether it was always using the new PSR to begin with. Then there's the V Sync toggles, like you mentioned with Crimson Desert, that was an issue, but it's also an issue with Starfield and PS5. Has the V Sync toggle. It works on Xbox. Doesn't work on PS5 . Don't know how that got through, but it does not do anything on PS5, which is unfortunate. Although as per conversation over here, I don't really think it has a lot of utility necessarily. Uh in a lot of cases , but I think in general this this this question just hurts my feelings. Please please don't do this. Because I think in some cases when you ship all these settings, not only are you confusing the user, but I think you're also just you kind of know that maybe the product isn't fully baked where it's like there's a deflection almost involved and have you tried all the settings permutations and maybe we'll give you options to make the harder compromises yourself instead of making them ourselves as we would with a finished kind of product consolized product of a game. And I think you do see that in games like Crimson Desert a bit or like with Starfield where they there's so many permutations and they kind of know fundamentally with crimson desert, you know, they are very CPU limited. So what kind of compromises do you want to make? What kind of compromises do you want in terms of consistency? Things like that. Likewise for Starfield, right? They know they have hard choices to make and they don't just don't want to make them as the developer in in many of those of those cases. Whereas if you look at a game like Doom the Dark Ages, which I would say is pretty ideal for console configuration, it just has one graphics mode, it's 60 FPS, they're very proud of it, they know how it runs, they know how they want the game to be experienced, they don't want to compromise on fluidity, but they also don't want to compromise unduly on graphical quality, and they know they can deliver a 60 FPS experience that's solid, you know, 99% of the way through. So that would be my preferred approach is just shipping one mode. And if not shipping one mode, then certainly just like shipping modes based on frame rates, right? I think that makes a lot of sense. Because there you're picking visual targets for individual frame rates, thirty FPS, 40 F FPS, 60PS, whatever they may be, and you are making appropriate choices per the frame rate targets that you're setting, and the gamers who are playing your game will have a legitimate interest in different kinds of levels of frame rate fluidity. And I think that preference can be expressed by the gamer and they can make that choice. But you should make choices to what those settings look like for each given frame rate target. I think that makes the most sense for console software. Yeah, there is a kind of semi-placebo setting on um the consoles, which is the dashboard, when you set the resolution on the dashboard, there's a lot of people out there that think that setting the the dashboard resolution sets the resolution of the game. So you lower it and then the game performance gets better. And generally it doesn't. But then kind of uh annoyingly spoiling that argument is you know the games like Hitman to uh Hitman World of Assassination on Switch 2, where actually did change the performance level. And I think actually we have we haven't actually checked it yet, but that we have had reports that changing the dashboard resolution uh on PlayStation 5 changes the resolution of Crimson Desert, which I guess I should look into at some point, which adds further permutations, but also robs you of choice to a certain extent if you know your dashboard is overriding your settings that you've made in the actual g ame. Uh but certainly an interesting thing there. I guess the other placebo of course is um uh when a game developer puts out a patch and uh there's kind of nebulous performance improvement gains in there where nine times out of ten there isn't. And uh then there's sort of uh where they don't I mean the classic one recently was uh Resident Evil Requiem on Switch 2 where Capcom put out a patch that you know didn't really do much. It was just almost like a a maintenance patch almost or a bug control patch. And suddenly a bunch of people thought it was rendering at four K improved hair rendering, which uh uh kind of illustrates that um yeah, placebo is a powerful thing. But yes, uh Dylan, no, this shouldn't happen. And yes, we would expo try to expose it if it did. But it's a it's a it's a crazy question nonetheless. The illusion of control . But that's it. I guess that's the final question, therefore, the end of the show. So please do like, subscribe, share if you enjoyed it, ring bells for notifications, that kind of thing. 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