Comment by MichaelZuo 4 days ago
How would you explain cross PS5/PC releases being much more efficient on the PS5?
e.g. Horizon Forbidden West needing a much better GPU on PC to run at the same level of fidelity as the PS5.
If not for special tuning specific to the PS5’s differences.
(I can imagine Windows bloat and other junk requiring an additional 10% to 20%, but not 30% to 50%.)
Great answer. Denuvo and other heavy anti-piracy tools are also sometimes used for releases on PCs which can seriously impact performance.
> Usually PC ports of console native games re-implement the rendering engine using the PC graphics APIs like DirectX or Vulkan. The re-implementation is probably less efficient and less tuned.
This was true 25 years ago when in house bespoke game engines were more common and consoles weren't basically PCs. In 2024, I highly doubt many cross-platform games are ported at all - its just a different target in Unreal/Unity/etc.
> I highly doubt many cross-platform games are ported at all - its just a different target in Unreal/Unity/etc.
Horizon is running in Guerilla Games' in-house Decima Engine, which is PS5-only for production builds. Ports are handled by nixxes.
Kojima games previously used Konami's in-house Fox Engine, again primarily designed for playstation. Since Kojima left Konami, Kojima games use the Decima Engine as well.
Horizon Forbidden West was ported from PS to PC. Decima is an engine from Sony’s first-party studio, so it's understandable that their development process would lean more towards PS's internal architecture rather than the more common GPUs on the market. Of course, even general-purpose engines can perform better on PS5, AMD, or NV. But, for these engines, they have less information about how customers will use the engines, so there's less infomation can be used to optimize. On the other side, customers using these engines often don’t have enough experience optimizing sufficiently for each platform. None of this is absolute, but I think this logic is reasonable.
For game developers using these engines, if they take optimization seriously, they typically make adjustments to lighting, LOD, loading, and model details or shaders on console platforms to achieve a similar visual effect while meeting the targeted performance goals. This is why you usually get better performance on a console at the same price point compared to a PC, aside from the subsidies provided by Sony.
The comment above is elaborating on x86 micro-architecture, the differences between how the CPU handles x86 instructions specifically.
The overall system architecture is different between PC, which has discrete memory systems for the CPU and GPU, and a very long pathway between GPU memory and system/CPU memory, versus today's consoles which have unified memory for CPU+GPU, and optimized pathways for loading from persistent storage too.
Consolesuse their own graphics APIs, but you would have any vendor you contract with for graphics support your native graphics API and everything would be "fine". PS5 games use GNM/GNMX Playstation proprietary graphics APIs. Usually PC ports of console native games re-implement the rendering engine using the PC graphics APIs like DirectX or Vulkan. The re-implementation is probably less efficient and less tuned.