WEBVTT

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even though arguments between console and pc gamers still happen all the time

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consoles are more pc-like than ever before the xbox series x and series s

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are based on AMD's zen 2 architecture and you can even buy off-the-shelf ssds

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to expand the storage of your playstation 5. but if consoles are so

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similar to pcs now why the heck do ports of console games still have all sorts of

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performance issues when you try to run them on a regular desktop to find out we

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reached out to our friends over at digital foundry and we'd like to thank alex battaglia and richard ledbetter for

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their assistance with this deeper dive as well as some of the footage you're

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about to see one issue might be familiar to you if

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you played horizon zero dawn at launch or final fantasy 7 remastered problems

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with how pcs handle the game's shader a shader is the code that handles how to

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illuminate and color each pixel on the screen on a console the shader is just a

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file that the console loads when the game starts up and because each model of

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console has exactly the same hardware in each unit programmers know how to write

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the shader for that specific hardware configuration

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but because pcs can have nearly endless combinations of processors memory

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graphics cards etc the shaders in pc

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ports are instead recompiled as you play the game so each time you encounter a

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new area or object there's a good chance that the game will stutter while the

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shader recompiles and renders the scene but the good news is that once a shader

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gets recompiled it is saved to your SSD or to your hard drive so your CPU won't

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have to do that extra work ever again however there are other problems that

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can appear over and over again because of differences in how memory works on a

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console versus on a pc modern gaming pcs tend to have more

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memory than consoles it's not uncommon to find 16 gigs of system RAM plus 8 or

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more gigs of vram in a gaming computer

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but modern consoles have a shared pool of typically between 10 and 16 gigs of

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memory in total meaning that games written for consoles often work by

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constantly streaming the necessary data into RAM since there just isn't as much

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of it to work with now pcs could give you better

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performance simply by loading in more assets ahead of time thanks to their

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extra RAM but games have to be recoded to take advantage of this and that would

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be a lot of extra work that publisher timetables may not allow for

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and while this might not create graphical glitches it does mean that

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you're leaving performance on the table even if your GPU is more powerful than

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what you would find in a console god of war is a great example of a title where

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this limitation is visible with the game becoming dramatically slower at

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dedicated loading portals and the fact that pcs have separate system RAM and

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video memory also means that data like textures and geometry information is

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getting shuttled between those two RAM pools quite often which takes time

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generally speaking the CPU has to handle this information including decompressing

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all this visual data consoles on the other hand have just one

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pool of memory where the data goes and they usually have a dedicated

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decompression chip that just handles this visual data lessening the load on

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the CPU the fact that pc cpus have to do this

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extra legwork can you guessed it cost you performance though hopefully the new

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direct storage API for Windows will help alleviate this burden since it offloads

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decompression work to the GPU which wouldn't tax your performance very much

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due to the way that gpus are designed we're just waiting for developers to

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take advantage of this feature in newer titles we'll tell you more right after

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description now it isn't uncommon anymore to see pc processors with 12 16

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or even more threads but console games

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are written with fewer threads in mind even though the new xbox series x has 16

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threads the previous generation of consoles which many games are still

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being made in mind for didn't have

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nearly that many and because it would be a massive amount of effort to re-code

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these games to scale to higher numbers of threads most developers don't bother

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and the gameplay experience suffers as a result far cry 6 is a good example of a

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recent game that suffers from this problem although it can definitely take

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advantage of high-end modern gpus it can still stutter if you're getting a high

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frame rate because the CPU is trying to load assets and it can't use all of its

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threads to do so because developers have been so used to

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coding mostly for a single thread until about the mid-2010s

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this paradigm shift is taking a long time

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now how games use or don't use multi-threading leads us into our last

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topic the directx API on the surface you might think that the

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fact that both the xbox and Windows use directx might make it easier to port

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games between them but the problem is that both directx 11 and directx 12 are

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widely used in game development and they are

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very different from each other under the hood directx 12 gives developers more

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granular control over their games and it's become especially popular with xbox

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titles because as we mentioned before everybody already knows exactly what's

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inside of an xbox so programming specifically for that fixed set of

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hardware isn't too difficult but when those titles get ported over to pc

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many games instead use directx 11 like assassin's creed odyssey for example

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directx 11 doesn't provide as much granular control and instead takes care

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of more tasks automagically that's important because pcs can have such a

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wide range of hardware but it isn't always a good thing more specifically

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directx 11 by default uses only one thread for rendering meaning that games

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that get a direct x11 port released for pc often have poorer CPU performance

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especially on AMD with its directx 11 driver being slower on the CPU

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using directx 12 for pc ports could solve this issue but again because of

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all the different hardware configurations possible on a pc that

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would necessitate a great deal of coding maintenance from the developer

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directx 11 also does not support a feature called asynchronous compute this

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feature allows one part of the GPU to render a scene's geometry while another

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takes care of compute tasks like physics or ambient occlusion

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consoles rely heavily on asynchronous compute to increase performance but

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since so many pc ports are written with directx 11 the result is that many games

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released in the mid-2010s have lower than expected performance especially on

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AMD gpus which historically tend to be designed more with compute tasks in mind

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compared to their counterparts from NVIDIA in fact there were a number of

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games where a gtx 1060 and an rx 580

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performed similarly under directx 11 even though the rx 580 from AMD is a

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more powerful GPU on paper the lack of asynchronous compute is probably playing

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a big role there so yeah there's a lot that prevents our

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pc ports from playing the way that we expect but hopefully as time goes on developers

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will be able to take advantage of new tools to make coding for both platforms

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far less tedious i would say to just try and exercise

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some patience until then but i do think we used up a lot of that on cyberpunk

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2077 and the GPU shortage and this darn

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pandemic subscribe