PlayStation 5 - Next gen is expensive

[Escape]

5 hours ago, Lyrical Donut said:

Expect a Digital Foundry series where they break down every single framerate hiccup that drops below 30.

 

Let's have a full hour of Digital Furniture with fabric guesswork and leather fanboys.

  

5 hours ago, Gigawatt said:

then TV speakers

 

All the 3D demos I've heard required headphones or rear speakers to project soundwaves in opposing directions. I'm not saying it's impossible to do it with stereo speakers because I don't have enough knowledge to say that, but I can't imagine Doppler effects or the like ever matching real aft-to-fore soundwaves. I know I've never heard a convincing 3D effect from my laptop. Quite happy to be wrong, what with my stereo setup.

 

I've been taking this new audio as being to sound generation what ray-tracing is to light, where it's way more positional with variable instead of preset volumes for effects. 5.1 MKII.

[footle]

7 hours ago, Gigawatt said:

 

In Mark Cerny's tech presentation a million years ago, he suggested it would be coming first to headphones, then TV speakers, before making its way to surround set-ups later.  One of the issues he mentioned is that with headphones each speaker is isolated from the other, however with TV stereo speakers they have to compensate for each ear hearing audio from both speakers, which is obviously compounded (by the factorial?  I'm not an expert on this) as the number of speakers is increased.  The way he was speaking seemed to indicate that the fancy 3D audio stuff might not be there for launch, or if it was it might only be for headphone wearers.  I'm sure someone who paid more attention might be able to give more detail than me?

headphones are a solved problem, and should be there at launch.

tv speakers, you have control over where they are.

random surround setups, you don’t have control over the speakers or their relationship to the viewer. It’s harder.

 

Sound is funny, there was loads of progress on PC twenty years ago, then patents, licensing and the rest meant that everyone just settled for less.

[Chooch]

I wonder if they could use the mic in the controller to do something like Sonos Trueplay. 

[Eighthours]

Even on PSVR there’s a very convincing 3D audio effect with headphones. If this is even better on PS5, then wow.

[Alex W.]

It should actually be very easy for studios who are mixing their games for Dolby Atmos to take that mix and play it through virtual speakers in Sony’s 3D audio system, rather than piping it to actually physical speakers. (If you own an Astro Mixamp or equivalent, a Dolby Headphone converter, that’s just bespoke hardware to do that.) Perhaps Sony will even include that as at a system level, then you’d get it in back compatible games and movies too.

[JPL]

I dismissed headphones last night, as I’ve got a decent surround sound setup, but after all the talk in here and the other topic that I’ve just noticed on next gen headphones, it’s got me a bit intrigued. What will the benefits be over surround sound, assuming this 3D audio comes to that?

 

I’ve only ever used some pretty cheap Turtle Beach ones in the past and I much preferred my current setup, so I’d be interested to hear the argument for headphones.

[Hitcher]

Surely they don't need to do anything fancy for surround sounds systems apart from send the signal and let the system do the rest?

 

Works for every other medium!

[Alex W.]

3 hours ago, Escaped said:

All the 3D demos I've heard required headphones or rear speakers to project soundwaves in opposing directions. I'm not saying it's impossible to do it with stereo speakers because I don't have enough knowledge to say that, but I can't imagine Doppler effects or the like ever matching real aft-to-fore soundwaves. I know I've never heard a convincing 3D effect from my laptop. Quite happy to be wrong, what with my stereo setup.

 

So, there are two ways of doing surround sound. Either you physically send the sound in from different directions, which is how proper surround-sound set-ups with side/rear speakers work; or you play a sound in to each ear that sounds like it's coming from a specific direction, which is how literally everything else works. With a sound bar or headphones, sound isn't actually coming in from different directions despite what fancy graphics with bouncing sound waves in adverts may suggest, the physics just doesn't work that way.

 

When I say "sounds like", I mean literally that. Because your outer ear is a specific complex shape, it occludes, modules and phase-shifts audio differently depending on the direction it comes from, meaning that when it actually enters your ear canal, it sounds like it's coming from a particular direction and your brain recognises that.

 

At the simplest level, virtual surround sound creates a signal for the left ear and a signal for the right ear that each contain all the phase-shifting and occlusion that the outer ear would perform, and then those signals are piped down the respective ear canals. The reason why headphones are more effective than speakers when it comes to virtual surround has nothing to do with direction, it's to do with isolation. With headphones, each ear hears its own completely separate channel.

 

However with speakers, each ear can hear the other ear's signal. So instead of piping in two separate channels directly to the person's ears, you have to use stereo speakers to sculpt a sound-field in part of the room where each ear is going to be given a reasonable approximation of the audio it is meant to be receiving. If you want to do it on even more speakers, then you've got to do an even more complicated bit of sound-sculpting, albeit with more speakers available to do it.

 

Mark Cerny's presentation is actually a really good primer on how this stuff works.

[footle]

11 minutes ago, JPL said:

I dismissed headphones last night, as I’ve got a decent surround sound setup, but after all the talk in here and the other topic that I’ve just noticed on next gen headphones, it’s got me a bit intrigued. What will the benefits be over surround sound, assuming this 3D audio comes to that?

 

I’ve only ever used some pretty cheap Turtle Beach ones in the past and I much preferred my current setup, so I’d be interested to hear the argument for headphones.

the argument for headphones is that you have a speaker attached to each ear. Which means, if you think about it, it’s the same as having VR goggles on: you can control exactly what each ear hears independently, which means with the right head transform function you can make a sound appear to be exactly where you’d expect it to be.

 

above.

behind.

to the left.

below.

10,000ft to your left through four walls.

[Alex W.]

8 minutes ago, Hitcher said:

Surely they don't need to do anything fancy for surround sounds systems apart from send the signal and let the system do the rest?

 

Works for every other medium!

 

I mean for headphones. Right now unless someone licences Dolby Headphone or you pipe the 5.1 mix through a Dolby Headphone converter, the mix you get through earphones is just stereo.

 

Be nice to have system-level conversion of Dolby mixes in to virtual surround.

[Popo]

9 hours ago, Escaped said:

 

RAAAAAY TRACEEER!!! Ray Tracer...

Take it to the big Sega announcement thread. 

[rafaqat]

1 hour ago, footle said:

headphones are a solved problem, and should be there at launch.

tv speakers, you have control over where they are.

random surround setups, you don’t have control over the speakers or their relationship to the viewer. It’s harder.

 

Sound is funny, there was loads of progress on PC twenty years ago, then patents, licensing and the rest meant that everyone just settled for less.

 

The PS5 controller has a mic built in. I wonder if they'll eventually be able to play sound clips through your randomly placed speakers that your controller mic picks up and calibrates the algorithm used to create the surround sound.   That would be pretty cool.

[rafaqat]

29 minutes ago, JPL said:

I dismissed headphones last night, as I’ve got a decent surround sound setup, but after all the talk in here and the other topic that I’ve just noticed on next gen headphones, it’s got me a bit intrigued. What will the benefits be over surround sound, assuming this 3D audio comes to that?

 

I’ve only ever used some pretty cheap Turtle Beach ones in the past and I much preferred my current setup, so I’d be interested to hear the argument for headphones.

 

Try it on your xbox. Choose Windows Sonic in the settings or buy the Dolby Atmos pack and compare it to your surround sound setup.    I'm assuming this Sony stuff is the same kind of thing for headphone and it's making it work with tv speakers that's the real next gen feature?

[JPL]

4 minutes ago, footle said:

the argument for headphones is that you have a speaker attached to each ear. Which means, if you think about it, it’s the same as having VR goggles on: you can control exactly what each ear hears independently, which means with the right head transform function you can make a sound appear to be exactly where you’d expect it to be.

 

above.

behind.

to the left.

below.

10,000ft to your left through four walls.

What do you mean by head transform functions?

 

I can see it working really well with  VR, as the sound can track the same movements as your head, but when you’re gaming on a TV, you’re pretty much in a fixed position, so I’m not seeing the benefits over a good surround sound system.

 

I’ll give it a go on Thursday to see (hear) what it’s all about.

[Alex W.]

2 minutes ago, rafaqat said:

 

Try it on your xbox. Choose Windows Sonic in the settings or buy the Dolby Atmos pack and compare it to your surround sound setup.    I'm assuming this Sony stuff is the same kind of thing for headphone and it's making it work with tv speakers that's the real next gen feature?

 

Yeah, exactly. Sony's big advance here seems to be the push for broad adoption, the technology is largely the same. All three (Atmos, Tempest, Sonic) are ways of saying that sounds have a position in space. You then have some sort of playback set-up involving some number of audio devices, and a lot of maths to translate the intended position to a set of actual sounds that recreate that effect. Sony's really emphasising that they've put a lot of hardware in the PS5 to do that maths, although I am sure Microsoft has done the same on Xbox Series X.

 

In previous generations of audio hardware, there wasn't enough computing power to take a sound with an arbitrary position and figure out how to make it appear on an arbitrary audio set-up. So instead you had to assume a specific number of speakers in particular positions, did the maths based on that and baked it in to a series of separate sound channels. You just played back the sound channels on the respective speakers.

[Alex W.]

13 minutes ago, JPL said:

What do you mean by head transform functions?

 

I can see it working really well with  VR, as the sound can track the same movements as your head, but when you’re gaming on a TV, you’re pretty much in a fixed position, so I’m not seeing the benefits over a good surround sound system.

 

He means the HRTF, the mathematical representation of the effect your head and ears have on sounds coming in from different directions. Your brain recognises those effects on incoming sounds and interprets it as a sense of direction. If you can simulate those effects, you can make a sound seem like it's coming from an arbitrary direction even if it's coming straight in to the ear.

 

The advantage over a surround sound system is simply that you don't have to have physical speakers everywhere, and of course that it continues to work (works better, even) when you're listening on headphones. That's a quality benefit - if you have £1000 to spend on audio, you'll in principle get a far superior product spending £1000 headphones than £1000 of stereo speakers, which will be better again than £1000 of surround sound speakers.

[rafaqat]

13 minutes ago, JPL said:

What do you mean by head transform functions?

 

I can see it working really well with  VR, as the sound can track the same movements as your head, but when you’re gaming on a TV, you’re pretty much in a fixed position, so I’m not seeing the benefits over a good surround sound system.

 

I’ll give it a go on Thursday to see (hear) what it’s all about.

 

I guess a good surround system is going to beat out most of these pseudo surround things.   Most people don't have a good surround system though. I'm intrigued by how this will sound on my tv.  Hopefully it delivers. 

 

Has Sony given any sort of indication how long it'll take to get the TV surround feature?   Like is it in "still doing the research" stage or "coded up, we're testing on lots of different setups"

 

I think the controller mic is central to all this to feedback to the console player position.

[Benny]

Feeling pretty chuffed I didn't waste a load of money on a surround sound speaker setup around about now.

[Alex W.]

1 minute ago, rafaqat said:

Has Sony given any sort of indication how long it'll take to get the TV surround feature?   Like is it in "still doing the research" stage or "coded up, we're testing on lots of different setups"

 

In the PS5 presentation they said they've got it working on headphones to a degree they're happy to ship. You'll go through a tuning process to let it figure out what HRTF to use and then you're away. In time they will expand the range of HRTFs available to improve the results for each listener. On stereo speakers they've got it working, but they want to expand the "sweet spot" you need to sit in between the two speakers. It's clear they don't expect that to be ready at launch.

 

Doing it with multiple speakers is still a work in progress and I get the impression that's years off. If you have a multi-channel Dolby Atmos set-up you already have a system that can play back 3D audio, and although very few games use that I wouldn't be surprised if it competed with Tempest and Sonic depending on Dolby's middleware. I get the impression that once Tempest is working, you won't need Dolby Atmos in your receiver to get 3D audio, the PS5 would do the work and you'd just be piping the appropriate audio bistreams straight to each of the speakers.

[JPL]

@Alex W. That’s interesting. Are you saying Headphones > Stereo speakers > Surround sound?

 

My setup cost a couple of grand and it’s absolutely magnificent with the right source. Plus, it gets more use by more people than just me for playing games. Saying that I’d happily invest in a good set of headphones if the difference worth it.

 

I love how I’ve gone from totally dismissing it to being willing to invest in some quality gear in the space of a few hours. RLLMUK comes good again!

[rgraves]

14 hours ago, Ferine said:

Just to clear this up, as there's a lot of misinformation out there, the PS5 is backwards compatible with PS4 at a hardware level. In other words, it can downclock its components to run almost all PS4 games as they would on actual PS4 hardware.  (I say "almost" because there could be a handful of exceptions, like the PS1 games that didn't work on PS2 despite it effectively having a PS1 in it.)

 

Beyond this it can also run PS4 games without downclocking itself. This is where Sony needs to test things on a game-by-game basis, as the massive performance difference between the two consoles could potentially cause code to break if it was specifically written for a PS4's level of performance. I'd guess that the vast majority of games will work just fine on a full speed PS5, but they need to check for issues in case they can be addressed either via something in the system software or a patch to the game itself.

 

Just to be clear, Sony have confirmed (as far as I'm aware) none of the above. They've mentioned BC, mentioned titles need to be tested to make sure they work, mentioned they want to have lots of games compatible. They have NOT said anything about native "downclocked" BC - people are guessing based on the slide (unless i have missed an official confirmation somewhere), but that's all it has been - guessing. Their comms on that has been a little hazy at best. They said they want BC, said some titles run, said they needed to test more. The end of that sentence in the Cerny presentation was not "but of course, we have native mode as well".

 

Unless you have access to info we don't (or have missed)?

[sid]

I like the concept cerny spoke about regarding auto switching between audio settings and eventual selection being based on your actual in game score / performance etc eg cod k/d ratio

[Alex W.]

26 minutes ago, JPL said:

@Alex W. That’s interesting. Are you saying Headphones > Stereo speakers > Surround sound?

 

Pound for pound, sure. Headphones don't have to push as much air so you can put the money in to quality rather than power; if you're spreading £1000 over 6 speakers instead of 2 each is going to be a worse speaker. But there are other considerations: with headphones you can't share the experience and they're on your head, the current state of virtual surround sound isn't as good as physical surround sound with actual speakers, and so on. If good virtual 3D audio becomes ubiquitous having to use actual speakers will probably seem quaint.

[Alex W.]

22 minutes ago, rgraves said:

 

Just to be clear, Sony have confirmed (as far as I'm aware) none of the above. They've mentioned BC, mentioned titles need to be tested to make sure they work, mentioned they want to have lots of games compatible. They have NOT said anything about native "downclocked" BC - people are guessing based on the slide (unless i have missed an official confirmation somewhere), but that's all it has been - guessing. Their comms on that has been a little hazy at best. They said they want BC, said some titles run, said they needed to test more. The end of that sentence in the Cerny presentation was not "but of course, we have native mode as well".

 

Unless you have access to info we don't (or have missed)?

 

He's reading in to it, although Cerny does only bring up the testing etc. in the context of boosted frequencies. It may be that PS4 games have to run in that boosted state; we don't know that there's a separate low-frequency backwards compatability mode that's more compatible:

 

Quote

Running PS4 and PS4 Pro titles at boosted frequencies has also added complexity. The boost is truly massive this time around and some game code just can't handle it. Testing has to be done on a title by title basis. Results are excellent though. We recently took a look at the top hundred PlayStation 4 titles...

 

...and you know the rest of the quote because people have been debating it for months.

[df0]

The thing I care most about is how well the PS5 handles live services and perpetual updates. Overwatch and Destiny 1 and 2 are just two examples that I know off. that can mess up your evening. No updating equals no playing. The update file is generally small enough for someone with a decent internet connection, it is the copying process that can take anywhere north of half an hour. More than once this caught me by surprise and the raid or whatever had to be postponed until it reached the point where I had to remind myself in the office to remotely connect to my PS4 and manually force an update for said games.

 

I know there's an option for the PS4 to update game updates automatically but that has not worked for me since 2016 or so.

[rafaqat]

56 minutes ago, Alex W. said:

 

Pound for pound, sure. Headphones don't have to push as much air so you can put the money in to quality rather than power; if you're spreading £1000 over 6 speakers instead of 2 each is going to be a worse speaker. But there are other considerations: with headphones you can't share the experience and they're on your head, the current state of virtual surround sound isn't as good as physical surround sound with actual speakers, and so on. If good virtual 3D audio becomes ubiquitous having to use actual speakers will probably seem quaint.

 

I have a feeling that with the TV speakers, pseudo surround would be limited to the player holding the controller too?

[Alex W.]

I figure if the sweet spot is big enough other people could hear it. I’m sure that’s part of why they want it to be larger.

[footle]

4 minutes ago, Alex W. said:

I figure if the sweet spot is big enough other people could hear it. I’m sure that’s part of why they want it to be larger.

 

But it's also fundamentally hard.

There's a reason why your virtual surround bars, or even your surround sound systems, have a microphone that you put in one place to auto-calibrate.

 

Everywhere else is a compromise.

[MansizeRooster]

I think we're going to see a Batman launch title. WB started the hype train for something Court Of Owls-esque ages ago, and then went radio silent. Almost as if a platform holder told them to wheesht and upgrade the game to run on some next-gen hardware.

 

Launch games always sell absolute buckets, so it would make sense.

[df0]

What is Court of Owls?

Also, is Batman still a thing that garners any interest? Genuine question, I'm not being a dismissive prick here.