One of the series Iâve missed most since not buying an XBOX One is undoubtedly Forza. Originally Microsoftâs answer to Gran Turismo, I think it has become a better game than its inspiration. Not only that, but the series spun off into something even more up my street, Forza Horizon. I played the original on the 360, didnât get to play the second because of its exclusivity. Iâm playing the third now on PC.
Oddly enough, when I bought it, I also bought the XBox One copy. Itâs part of a new initiative from Microsoft called XBox Anywhere, sort of like Playstationâs cross-buy facility. I donât actually own an XBox One, but I have at least one game if I ever do.
Pretty glorious stuff. One of the compromises that the original had to make was a locked 30 frames per second. 60 would be the gold standard. Itâs running at 4K @ 60FPS on my machine. Itâs very nice.
Truly open world. Things arenât walled off, making for some breathtaking jumps. Itâs like a large scale Burnout Paradise. Itâs got the rewind function from Forza, the handling is bloody lovely. There have been a few occasions this morning when Iâve had to rewind, just taken the characteristics of the car, such as drivetrain, etc, and known exactly how to sort it.
Fantastic stuff. Already being feted as the best driving game ever. Not sure about that, but it is bloody gorgeous.
Only on XBOX One*.
* Not really, and itâs better on PC.
OK, if I havenât got a UHD television and have no plans on getting one, is it worth paying the extra for the PS4 1gb Pro? Or should I stay with the 500gb slim?
Sounds boss, and it is good to see them trying to evolve. I really like this idea.
The second new feature headlining the PS5 controller is adaptive triggers, incorporated into the L2 and R2 buttons at the top rear of the controller. The resistance of these triggers can be programmed by game developers to have more or less âgiveâ depending on the action. So drawing a bow and arrow should feel different to firing a gun, for example, or accelerating a vehicle off-road might take more effort than doing so on a clear patch of asphalt.
You get a lot of white elephant ideas on consoles. Cough. Cough. Kinect.
This is a simple, feasible modification using technology that has been around for years and most importantly, is going to be pretty damn easy to program in to every game.
The rumble on the Switch really is decent, so the haptic feedback (again, something else that has been around for years) is going to be cool too, assuming Sony are operating with similar or better tech available.
For me, theyâve got to do one thing. Make a machine that can do UHD at sixty frames per second. That is going to be the standard for a while. UHD is fucking decent, and while bigger resolutions are on offer, at gaming range on a reasonable sized screen youâre really not going to need any more.
Football on UHD is still blurry, I have a good tv and it canât handle it, not convinced gaming in UHD on certain games will work at the moment, tearing, freezing are still all too apparent in this format, theyâre sending out apologies and patches before the release of games nowadays so Iâm not hopeful. They have never got to grips with the PS4 to be honest.
And resistance triggers is a great way to update your controller every 3 months.
The next generation. The Series X looks like a PC. Donât like the look of the PS5 dev kit. This is likely to change before release - if only to bring down the bill of materials cost.
Certainly true of this generationâs base models. Not as true in other comparisons.
The original XBox was a more powerful machine than the PS2 it was competing against.
The PS3 was more powerful than the XBox 360 in theory. In practise, the only places Sony beat out Microsoft were the exclusives and a lot of the better Japanese studios, such as Namco and Square Enix. In most cases, the 360 version of a multi-platform game looked better because Western coders had trouble getting all the power out of Sonyâs Cell processor.
The XBox One X is more powerful than the PS4 Pro. The XBox One S canât compete with a PS4 on game image quality, but it does play 4K DVDs.
I suspect youâre right on this one. General rule is first to market is technically inferior.
To compare the PS/2/3/4 with any other games console regardless of capability (that means nothing as that is merely what it can do and not what a programmer can do with it) from the same generation is like comparing Russ Abbotâs greatest hits to a Bridge over troubled water.
Theyâre shit.
The best looking PS3 games crapped all over the best looking 360 games. As I said, the first party stuff and Japanese houses were the exception. I think Burnout Paradise was one of those rare Western exceptions where the PS3 was the lead platform.
The 360 was lead platform for most multi-platform games, while with PS3 versions being something of an afterthought. Weâre not just talking lower resolution than their XBox equivalent. The PS3 version of Skyrim had a game-breaking, unfixable bug that kicked in after youâd invested about 30 hours of playtime.
I agree with you. Pound for pound, the PS3 was the better machine on a hardware level. The problem was that only a few studios really knew how to get the best out of it.
One of the advantages that the 360 had was that it was very much like a PC, devs knew how to program for it and had worked out some neat tricks during its period of exclusivity.
PS3 on a hardware level and software, the 4 was more difficult initially than the 1 but it still pisses all over it the end, and PS2? The best of the best nevermind the PS1, Sony have it boxed off. The end.
Interesting, and if this is the case and it supports discs then I will be first in the queueâŚ
Backwards compatibility
The PlayStation 5 is designed to support PS4 games â but itâs still uncertain whether that means through digital versions or if it will play the old discs. The PS4âs virtual reality headset, PSVR, will also be compatible with the PS5.
the PS5 is running on an 8-core AMD Ryzen Zen 2 CPU, and an AMD Radeon RDNA 2 GPU. The latter boasts 10.3 Teraflops of processing power â by comparison, the launch PS4 had only 1.84 TFLOPs, and the PS4 Pro had 4.2. Thatâs backed up by 16 GB of GDDR6 RAM.
The stale old hard disk drive (HDD) has been swapped out for a solid state drive (SSD), with 825 GB of storage space. Thatâs a bit of a strange number, so we suspect that it might be a 1 TB drive with 175 GB already taken up with system data.
This SSD, coupled with the specially designed architecture, should speed up the console dramatically. Because the data is accessible immediately, the system and the games should boot up ultra-fast, and in-game load times between levels or lives should be basically non-existent. Cerny jokes that developers might even have to artificially slow it down, so players donât get confused about whatâs happening.
In numbers, the PS5 SSD has a target bandwidth of about 5 GB per second â a huge step up from the PS4âs 100 MB/s. That means that itâll take just a quarter of a second for the console to load in 2 GB of data, when starting a level for example. It takes the PS4 20 seconds to load just 1 GB.
