PS.. is it 5? I think we're on 5 now. PS5

Good god. Are those PS4 models 'slim' or the launch models?

$500 for the disc one which is about £380 but we're getting charged £450 instead. Plus ça change

20% VAT on £380 is £76 so £450 is... 6 pounds cheaper than the US price. Unless that's not how it works?

Ah, possibly.

I've always got confused by the US Sales tax system whenever I've been over there - so will it actually cost more than $500 to buy a PS5 in the States?

It depends on how sales tax works in that state iirc

Generally yes it'll be between $525-550 in the US depending on your locality. I think it'll be $542.60 where I live.

I've been super satisfied with the performance and graphics of my PS4, I'm still not entirely clear what this new one really brings to the table besides ... faster load times? But I suppose it depends on the exclusives. If the PS4 is any standard to go by then yeah, I can totally imagine getting a PS5 eventually for the exclusives, because the exclusives on PS4 rule.

I’m curious, do you have a pro?

My standard 4 has starting to feel sluggish and I’ve been getting frequent FPS drops. I assume it’s some combination of cooling (summer in an attic apartment) and disk issues. The Ethernet performance is also bad and the 802.11 performance is worse (likely attributed to living in a city with massive interference).

A Bluetooth upgrade would also be killer.

Anyway, I assume a lot of people will upgrade for better performance on games they are already playing (Fortnite, Apex, Overwatch, 2K, Madden, whatever). That’s kind of weird.

PC-ification basically

Getting a new graphics card for a desktop PC would cost the same as buying a PS5 or XSX

xpost I have a PS4 Slim, seems fine.

Like, the problems people have with graphics, performance ... when I encounter load times a second too long, or sluggish performance or slowdowns, it really doesn't bother me, because it seems so fleeting. Now, Doom on Switch? *That* bothered me, because it made parts of the game all but unplayable. Like, literally, not the hyperbole I hear referencing PS4 games. I've never seen anything close to that on my PS4. But I don't play online, maybe that's it.

Good god. Are those PS4 models 'slim' or the launch models?

i think thats the launch model if its the same width as the pro which is pretty big

folks, the PS5 is huge

it is sort of comically oversized, yes

the real reason for upgrading is the same as always: eventually some games will come out for a system you don't have and you'll want to play them

having said that, this is literally the first generation ever where i'm actually anticipating the new consoles somewhat instead of merely keeping up with the treadmill.
loading times are one of those things i don't care about most of the time but when they're bad they're *really* grating to the point of putting down a game. i bought a ps4 for bloodborne, played for 2 days, then stopped playing it until they patched the loading

the 3d audio thing also seems really cool but i'l reserve judgment on that until i've actually experienced it. still, it's nice that for once the new consoles feel like worth getting

re: '3d audio' - how is this different from recording in binaural and listening on headphones?

which is possible with current hardware, obv

if i correctly understand binaural recording and what the ps5 and xbox are doing, the principle's the same. and of course it is technically possible with current hardware, the selling point here is the dedicated hardware blocks in the new consoles that supposedly make it easier to implement and with no performance penalty on the rest of the game.

it may end up as just a gimmick, idk, but unlike the battery draining bullshit sony are tacking on the controller (microphone, force feedback) that feels like waggle for the 20's tbh, better audio with just regular headphones is something i can get behind

i assumed it was more a software thing like raytracing but for audio to get more realistic sfx relative to your characters position in the game?

re Bloodborne ... but they did patch it. Lots of games get patched. I haven't tried playing Control on the PS4 yet, but that seems to be one of those games that almost everybody complains about, so I assume no mere patch can fix it. Then again, I've heard plenty of people say they have played it even not on the Pro with no problems, so who knows.

how the audio signals are processed and mixed, really

my understanding is at a layperson’s level and there are good articles about it, but it’s similar to how simulated spatial stuff works in headphones, plus the addition of where audio sources are coming from

in movie audio, someone is deciding in the mixing (or doing tricks when recording the audio) to figure out where the audio is coming from: a car crash is happening behind the viewer to the left, so they put the car crash noises there, and maybe mix the flying debris sounds progressively forward until the debris shows up on screen. in a video game, that positioning might be easy, but then you have the doppler effect, echos, etc that might come into play. all of that calculation can be intensive, especially when mixed with other ambient noises and a lot of tricks are done to half-ass it in video games

the spatial tricks to mix that down to headphones while preserving the sense of location is also computationally intensive, although less so if you have a model to conform to

a lot of games with good audio are using off the shelf audio engines, similar to how there are off the shelf 3d engines, physics engines, etc. I believe Sony is kindly giving games hardware acceleration and some off the shelf features in hardware

sorry, that was a clumsy x-post to Tracer

ah that's interesting and totally makes sense. it's a funny kind of AR in that it's not really 'R' - it's 'videogame'. you're not turning your head, you're turning your character's head inside an imaginary world. but that world is complicated too and full of audio sources! something like these bose headphones/sunglasses have dedicated hardware to take advantage of the (very few) AR audio experiences there are: https://www.bose.co.uk/en_gb/products/frames.html

mh's got it, that's basically my understanding of the thing

xp to josh: yeah they did patch BB to perfectly acceptable levels and i did play it, it's just the perfect example of crossing the threshold of annoyance: i paid 400€ specifically to play one game only to immediately put it down and find something else to play because it was just that unbearable

so for once, a generation change actually has at least one thing to genuinely look forward to, potentially two if 3d audio turns out decent

tangentially, I wonder how well this works if someone is deaf in one ear. do you get any spatial sense with headphones?

a lot of the early VR tricks (shutter glasses, old school red/blue 3d glasses, etc) had a lot of accessibility issues in that a lot of technologies straight-up didn’t work for some people. now that we’re just strapping screens to our faces it’s maybe a bit better

well before we get too excited, i mean.. game developers have been using binaural and stereo panning to create the sensation of real space in their games for awhile. as i understand your post mh, this is just sony doing some of the heavy lifting on developers' behalfs in terms of processing. developers will still need to either record and mix binaurally, or use plug-ins to fake it (some of which have gotten quite good). so - not something really new, just an easier route to get there.

for instance, in Last Of Us 2, i wore headphones exclusively because it was EXTREMELY helpful in knowing where the baddies were.

> developers will still need to either record and mix binaurally

they don't, the game knows where the sounds are coming from, it's the audio hardware that then translates that to the appropriate mix for your speaker setup. sony is focusing on stereo headphones at first with surround speakers to maybe become supported eventually, microsoft as usual have been less boisterous in their claims but they also have dedicated audio hardware in their system

stereo audio is not 3d audio because stereo output is the same on all headphones, what these things are doing is adapting each stereo channel to the person who is listening based on the hrtf. given the exact same game, the signal sent to the speakers from the console will vary depending on the listener in order to better simulate the 3d effect

man i don’t think i get it. the actual player’s actual head doesn’t have anything to do with it, surely?

yes it does, how the brain perceives positioning depends on the microseconds delay between sound reaching one ear and the other, phase differences, volume differences, etc. if a glass breaks to your right, sound reaches your right ear earlier than the left, that's one of the ways you know where it happened. how much longer it taks to reach the left ear depends on your head size

sure, there's nothing stopping game developers from doing that now but they'd have to implement it themselves and divert cpu (gpu?) resources from the game to do it. having it be done automatically by the hardware (supposedly the audio processor in the ps5 is as powerful as the entire ps4 cpu) makes it ubiquitous

to be fair the entire ps4 cpu is a piece of shit laptop cpu that was the best thing available cheap at scale in 2013

another point in favour of the upcoming gen, for once the consoles have actually good cpus

but you don’t turn your head in the game! you turn your character’s head!

and your character might be, say, a bandicoot

it might also be a car, which can't hear, yet the game still has sound?

not trying to be flippant, i'm just not understanding the objection, sorry

let’s say i turn lara croft’s head in tomb raider. if the audio sources have been recorded binaurally - i.e. crackling fire, wind, water drops, gunfire etc - it’s possible for the game to feed that information to my headphones in a dynamic mix that responds to the left stick when i turn lara’s head. my own head has nothing to do with it and the technology exists today. what i took mh’s post to mean was that “3-d audio” will provide a sort of turnkey solution to that dynamic mixing and possibly a suite of plug-ins to use if developers didn’t record binaurally.

i mean simple stereo can also provide a level of spatiality but as you know, proper binaural really is something else and sounds amazing.

Assuming Elden Ring ever comes out, I kind of dread it being released on PS4 and PS5 concurrently. Like, it would be nice not to have to buy a new console of course (and I don't care about graphics very much). But it's going to split the player base, and then I assume someday I'll buy a PS5 for some other game and have to buy ER twice. I almost hope it's PS5-only so I don't have to decide.

Is it the kind of game that can share a multiplayer base? Thankfully developers are moving more in that direction, feel like we're finally starting to live in a world with cross-PC/Xbox/Sony/Nintendo/mobile games slowly

That would be cool, I suppose it's possible? I guess today there are people playing Dark Souls 3 together with different frame-rates (PS4 vs PS4 Pro), so hopefully that's the case.

there's some small-time fighting games that have crossplay between ps3 and ps4 so i assume its easy to do via psn

the fact that the cpus are the biggest upgrade this gen but you can't really scale cpu requirements like you can gpu requirements means we probably won't see the full potential of the new boxes for a few years. i assume stuff like better AI and open world simulation is on the table, but only after the ps4 gets jettisoned

> i mean simple stereo can also provide a level of spatiality but as you know, proper binaural really is something else and sounds amazing.

actually i don't know, i've never experienced it, which is part of why i'm honestly curious about the new audio trickery in the consoles

rather than continue to fail horribly at explaining this (if nothing else because i barely understand it myself), i'll suggest watching the last minutes of cerny's ps5 presentation, despite being essentially a PR piece i think it conveys the basics of what they're trying to achieve rather well

The only person I've ever read go on and on about binaural stuff is Tchad Blake. This is a pretty cool demonstration, even through computer speakers:

https://vimeo.com/143727933

no xbox thread so

BREAKING: Microsoft is planning to buy Zenimax/Bethesda, an industry-shaking acquisition that will give Xbox ownership of Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Doom, Wolfenstein, Dishonored, and more. Story hitting Bloomberg shortly

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) September 21, 2020

$7.5 billion

Some fun facts:
- This is 3x what Microsoft paid for Minecraft/Mojang
- Bethesda and Obsidian are now sister studios. Fallout New Vegas 2 is now actually a possibility
- Microsoft is now releasing two timed PS5 exclusives lol

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) September 21, 2020

so Elder Scrolls 6, Starfield, next Fallout, Doom, Wolfenstein, Dishonored etc would be all day one on Gamepass?
that's a pretty big card to play just before the consoles launch ngl

if they went exclusive, that might force me to three consoles by 2023.