44:34 Hey, Nightdive Kex engine developer Edward here; I'm not sure what's going on with Still Wakes The Deep and the engine they have, but the GDK on Windows *doesn't* have anything different that requires an entirely different code path. It is unknown why these developers somehow have special requirements, but objectively none exist. Especially in Kex, winstore GDK builds are identical compile targets to Steam and GOG on a system level. You get the same graphics APIs and everything, it even still runs on top of SDL2. There's one exception in that we disable exclusive full-screen due to background pop-ups dialogs (and I'm not entirely sure if that's even still relevant, we should go back and retest that, and other platforms have their own issues with exclusive fullscreen as well) but that has no logical effect on things like DLSS. Their reasoning doesn't really make any sense from my perspective. Edit: Unless the real problem with winstore GDK is actually Epic themselves.
50:41 the frustration of not knowing if a button registers after clicking it was hilarious. The anger of such a simple process being broken is just gold.
theres a lot of problems like that with finished products from microsoft, im just baffled why DF is still in so positively covering MS's pre release, marketing content, where in the end things are often just terrible
This is my most hated GUI element. A button needs to do something when I press it. Either do the thing, or give me a audible tone that says you can't do that, and the type of tone should be why; it's on CD, you have no target, it's been suppressed by a debuff... etc.
That has been my experience when having to open the Xbox app on PC. My only work around, is that I have the game pinned to my taskbar, which is the only way I KNOW my click is being registered and the app automatically opens and then launches the game. Its so pathetic. This is Games for Windows Live-level of crap.
12:30 Another thing to mention with these recent PSP and PS2 emulated releases, if you change the system language to Japanese or Korean you also get the JP and KR releases when they're available
Also, if you paid for any of these Classics digital releases on PSN back in the PS3 era, you get them at no extra charge with enhancements on PS4 and PS5. PS really should mention that. It would be sad if they don't because they don't plan on always honoring the free upgrade.
I think John hasn't checked the PS1, PSP emulated games in a while. PAL/NTSC have been available for a long time and there are a lot of other options they've been added. Not everything has been good, there's a weird default to 4:3 for 16:10 bug, but there have been some good options like analog dead zone, button mapping etc. They've even patched in the PS3 content for PSP Resistance.
Yeah! I've noticed that with recent games. I have to switch to 4:3 16:9. It's like the person doing the emulator likes 4:3 16:10 or something. And Resistance Retribution got it's Infected Mode patched in.
I saw a former Nintendo NST employee (he's now working for another company) talk about how, when he worked at Nintendo, they had a motto: If you are going to make a game that you expect to sell half a million units, budget it so it cost the equivalent of those sales. Nintendo's budget control is crazy - though it helps not being stationed in the US, where each and every role costs a buttload of money (Japan is much cheaper in comparison, due to the vastly lower cost of living).
@@azazelleblack the average wages for Japan is much lower. Housing prices are much lower. There's way less cost for healthcare. The US gets a stupid high labour cost, especially on the coasts. The other day I thought 60K a year, and an American told me "that's too low". In much of Europe, 60K is a really nice wage, and in Japan as well.
@@cyberrb25 In most of the US, 60K is a really nice wage. I live comfortably in a rural part of the US on less than half of that. The problem with looking at these statistics for the US is that we have places like Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the nicer parts of NYC where the income is so high (and thus property/housing prices) that it completely blows out the scales. In MOST of the US housing is relatively cheap. What I said to begin with was that housing in Japanese *cities*, particularly in Tokyo, is very expensive. Yes, outside the cities Japan is cheap, but that's true of almost anywhere.
And with that idea, it's better to predict sales on the lower end, so that you spend less on budget. That way you get a bigger profit when sales exceed your expectations.
The real reason why most games don’t even launch on Windows on Arm is because anti-cheat kernel modules are not yet ported to Arm. Microsoft just announced that 3 of those including BattlEye are coming soon. Valve dealt with the same issues in the early days of Proton, but they eventually got through them.
I was under the impression that these new arm surfaces were going to be trash for gaming anyways. So many compatibility issues to jump through. Otherwise, those new laptops are great for everything non gaming lol.
even still, on the games that work you're getting worse than steam deck performance for 2000 pounds, 2000, you can buy a regular x86 laptop with a 4070 and a bigger, better ultra high refresh rate screen for less than that, even once the compatibility issues are solved the hardware is just useless, pointless if you wanna game
@@elizabethagudelo7179 Its advantage over x86 is that it gets closer to Apple levels of efficiency, at least in non-game workloads. If you don't need that, or can wait for the next round of x86 coming within a year, it's pointless.
Eventually yeah, but still having issues on Valve side sadly. So its an never ending struggle with anti-cheats. So Microsoft is going to lewrn that the hard way too.
The Sony emulation for PS1/2 is baffling for some of their decisions. John is right here. The only thing I can think of is that Sony may have some internal play data from the PS+ service that while people online say they want these classics on PS+, in reality, they aren't played enough or by enough subscribers to make the investment into better emulators.
Idk, I think they phoned it in because none of these people are enthusiasts, and ultimately, they view this as a minor value-add rather than a main selling point. So, getting it ‘right’ just isn’t a priority, or else they don’t even know what getting it right entails when it comes to getting these games looking their best on modern displays. That said, Nintendo, for whom their back catalog is part of their sales pitch/used as an upsell, continues to use a relatively poor emulator for their N64 titles, even after doing relatively good work on the Wii/WiiU VCs. Kind of sad that all of these manufacturers are having their lunch eaten by enthusiasts
It definitely comes down to cost and QA, probably consistency of experience as well. It's known that some EMU enhancements can break games. That might be acceptable to the PC user who's used to tweaking things, but for a console that's unacceptable. Take it a step further, why don't these companies add a reshade like feature to add RT and AO to older games? The more new features that are added to older games, the more testing needed. And if these higher resolutions and new features only work on some old games but break others, that really requires full play throughs of these games to ensure there's no new game breaking bugs. To be fair though, Xbox did do a lot of that leg work for back compat themselves and got enhancements in a fair amount of games. Has MS made that money back though? Hard to say, they certainly earned good will with some gamers but has it actually sold them more consoles?
@saturnFIV3 This is why I think Sly Racoon and Tomb Raider Legends don't uprender. How much time they had with these games. They usually work on three games a month. This month they had six to work on and Sly Racoon and Tomb Raider Legends suffered because of that. Clone Wars has uprendering working correctly and so does Ghost Hunter. So I think it's down to time. Every single PS Classic I've played has uprendering working as intended. Except for Tomb Raider Legends and Sly Racoon. So it's down down to they didn't have enough time to work on certain games.
If your son or daughter is going away to collage make sure you buy them a Qualcomm powered PC. The Surface looks all shiny and cool, so they'll be really happy with it, but that night when they decide they're going to waste time playing videogames on their fancy new computer, they'll come to find studying is the better option :^)
@@mtrxishere3772 Hence the "glorified" ;) Though there were some high end Chromebook models (like Pixelbook), I wouldn't be really surprised to see one pop up with a Snapdragon X inside
@@BrianM78 You let that one swoosh right over your head. You can use retroarch on XSX and XSS and play PS2 games at higher framerate, resolution, and quality than the PS5 releases. You don't have to cope so hard to defend Sony.
@@BrianM78that's because the studios specifically ported the games for the PS5. It's funny in some ways, especially with eg Hi-Fi Rush and Pentiment and how those ports worked, but it's not even remotely equivalent to the Series S being able to play consoles' worth of PlayStation games that the flagship PlayStation console can't play.
@@nintendo1889xThey should have improved it massively by now, as it is, it's like running a ps2 emulator on a mid to low range android phone, which is clearly illogical considering ps5's hardware
@@WllKiedSnake Hahaha absolutely punishing! Thats why I am trying to get informed how to use the thing lol! I've been just doing nearest neighbor and BFI for the most part! Would like more info on scanlines and masks!
@@WllKiedSnake I like a sharper image.... Coming from the Mclassic and its just too smooth and messes with the colors! I herd the 4k Gamer Pro is even worse in that regard.
@user-jq9rw9xy8e The Mclassic uses 4x SMAA so it's sharper. Even uses a sharpening filter. The image looks better than it would without it. And if you have a LG G2 and think it's to dark. There is a setting called Game Black Level in the game optimiser settings. Turn that up a bit to improve the black levels. And using the 4k Gamer Pro with the Mclassic is fantastic! For PS2 I set it to medium sharpness and it looks pretty good! With PS3, 360 and Switch have it set to low as those are 720p to 1080p systems. But yeah! I like the Mclassic on it's own even. But with the 4k Gamer Pro upscaling what the Mclassic does to 4k and sharpening the image a little more. They make games look great! Adjust the Game Black Level though a bit though if you can and games will look as they should.
For Starfield for Series S, If it's at the same FSR 2 percentage as Series S at 1440p, the 720p resolution is likely running at a native resolution of 800x450. That's likely why it looks so... rough. It's about 62.5% of the target resolution.
It strikes me that Microsoft used to have a UI that was ideally suited to handheld devices, why they haven’t resurrected the Metro UI format for gaming scenarios is beyond me. Maybe there’s something I’m not aware of here, but im under the impression it’s that Metro is still around in windows 10 as an option. No clue about 11, I stopped being a home windows user years ago, but they’ve dropped the ball big here. It was a good phone UI and could be a great handheld UI
Microsoft did so much better a job of backwards compatibility/legacy hardware. Wasn't perfect by any means but they at least guaranteed that OG Xbox games would be upres and work well. It's a huge huge shame they stopped the BC effort. So many great games that could be brought forward still
Yeah it's called a PC, which is why the PC platform will always have the biggest and best software library and back catalogue ever. If people and stupid execs haven't realised by now hardware lives and dies by its software. Make emulation a priority and you'll be financially rewarded.
I'm glad that Microsoft has prioritized so much effort with back compat. I'm quite sure that the work load was strenuous. Sony could do way more with back compat if they wanted to, but it's obvious their priorities are set on the newer stuff. It would be a good thing if Sony did more, but I kind of don't blame them for the less effort given to the past.
With how the PS2 Emulation games seem to be so far for PS5, I sincerely hope it does end up getting fixed down the line. But one thing I am hoping for those PS2 Classics is the Original PS2 God of Wars being put onto PS5 because those games need some preservation cause they are awesome.
As much as I'm happy to see new PS2 games it's kinda weird that they haven't made that many improvements to the emulator for the PS5, but I wonder if that's due to the rewind function. It was a surprise to see the rewind function in PS2 games considering that it is something rare in console emulators of this generation (Dreamcast, PS2, Game Cube and Xbox) because it requires a lot of hardware, specifically RAM. Heck, even Nintendo disabled the rewind function on Nintendo 64 games on the NSO because of that.
A couple words about ARM laptops: I haven't got an X Elite device yet (waiting for 5G versions) but I've got an SQ2 Surface Pro X since 2021. I haven't bought it as a gaming machine and I never expected it to be a gaming machine (same for X Elite), but I found Ori and the Blind Forest to run well enough. The reason I got it was the 4G modem, battery life and overall dimensions (especially weight). All other software I usually use (development tools, browsers, messaging stuff, basic photo editing, virtualization, dockers etc) works flawlessly. The problem with X Elite and seems to be twofold: GPU seems to be rather disappointing (drivers especially, also both Vulkan and OpenGL are not natively supported), but the other issue is how the emulator works: it's a JIT, it's recompiling as it goes, so basically that means you can expect a CPU equivalent of shader stutter until native ARM games are built, which I think explains the huge spikes in frame time.
what are the chances that game devs build native arm games? the m macbooks have a 2x to 3x faster gpu than the x elite and apple has already sold millions of them.... Apple shipped 22M Macbooks in 2023 alone. Game devs ignored that. You think they'll spend millions to rewrite their game engines to make arm games for pc's that might or might not ever be successful? Unity games, maybe? Unreal, perhaps. Anything else, not gonna happen. And it takes years to write an engine... Games in development for the next 3 to 5 years aren't going to be ARM
@@thisnowthen I looked up a page and it basically just has for UE4 append “ -Architecture=arm64” to make an arm game. There are games that started on mobile and went to PC (farlight 84) and vice versa (pubg) without too many birth throes, I'm sure it mostly comes down to a resource balancing act. The problem is the compatibility with x86 on a Windows which might never be patched.
The people that actually want to play those titles will emulate on PC or play on og hardware. Sony knows this and makes the games playable but nothing spectacular on ps4/ps5
@Gravy1255 You are right. I don't mind some of my ps2 and ps3 disc working on the PS5 with emulation. Like how Xbox did with their backward compatible emulator on series X, I have some Xbox and 360 physical games, and they run great on series x.
"If you were an Activision-Blizzard studio, Alex, which one would you be?" Alex, with zero hesitation: "King." Already off to a rip-roaring start this week, gents.
I had Bubsy 1 back in the day. I agree with Rich, it was poor. The kind game that even as a bored kid with nothing better to do, I still wouldn't play it.
You seriously have to question Qualcomm's wisdom in launching at these prices. They don't have the cultist following that Apple does to force a migration to ARM but they seem to think they do. Any interest in ARM that I've heard from those interested over the last few years were hopeful of an _affordable_ alternative to the ever increasing prices of laptops. Early reviews and sales numbers are lackluster to be generous, (not allowing reviews pre-launch was a MASSIVE red flag) and when they inevitably have to cut prices to move them it will just appear that they're trying to move damaged goods. The _worst_ thing they could have done was launch at these laughable prices and it's going to massively stunt any penetration into the PC market they were hoping for. It would be like if Intel launched Arc at $500+ for the prestige of owning an Intel GPU. That only works with brainless Apple cultists.
I'd bet a lot of money was spent on R&D of Recall, AI features and the NPU instead of focusing on getting the core features right. It's insane to think that a 3 trillion company doesn't do any market research to find exactly what matters to people.
Is not a gamer centric device, and the $2000 laptop you'll get with a dgpu would be much heavier, louder, and would have a max battery life of 3 to 4 hours. This thing can do 22.
Alex always seems to have problems with things I dont see on gamepass and some games. With game pass you need to make sure the app is updated which is a weakness but sometimes steam will not launch a game on first download and you need to browse to the local files and run it once from there, so steam is not error free depending on the game.
I've never had an issue launching a Steam game. Meanwhile I re-downloaded Forza Horizon 5 the other day and the only way to get it to run was to locate the exe and run as administrator. Just opening via Xbox app the game immediately closes. Back when Gears 4 and Forza Horizon 3 launched I had to completely re-install Windows 10 because of how buggy UWP can be. I would say that Microsoft easily has the worst game platform on PC although it has improved over the years.
@@Phil_529 Lucky you, others have had problems running games on Steam. Atlas refused to run and I had to reinstall it. Most of the issues Alex brings up about PC Game Pass stem more from his ignorance of how PC Game Pass is tied to the Xbox consoles. PC Game Pass shares the same achievement list and has Xbox cloud saves. So while yes, you could change the games to the Steam versions, that would break the cloud saves so that when you try to play them on an Xbox console or your phone (using cloud gaming), your save wouldn't be there anymore. You would get a lot of people up in arms if they changed to the Steam versions of PC Games because not only would you lose all of your cloud saves, but you would also lose all of your cross buy titles. The other issue with switching to the Steam versions is that this is a subscription service, so when someone ends their sub they would still be able to play the game.
At the PPI we're looking at, 720p seems like a better play for the Switch successor. This would also allow for better battery life, which is a more notable value to a player taking full advantage of the portable mode.
We've been saying that for almost 10 years. I really hope this is true. AMD has done a good job with power efficiency though. Intel not so much. Neither can still close the gap with ARM.
@@mechanicalmonk2020 What's the efficiency worth when half the programs you use don't work or games you wanna play don't even start. And if they do work they perform poorly. And I have my doubts about all these efficiency claims too, because people have tested it with very odd setups like 150 nits of brightness, local video playback instead of streaming, no bluetooth or wifi usage. I don't use my laptop like that.
Few Nintendo IPs that could surprise for Switch2: FZero , Kid Icarus (3ds iteration was fantastic), Star Fox.... They could also bring new IPs and of course make use of their 3rd party studios to maybe make some smalloer or medium sized games that feel unique and fresh in relations to the Switch 2 hardware. You know.. doing the opposite of microsoft: utilizing maybe their smaller studios to create smaller games to have something directly ready for launch and sell their hardware.. not close them down.
Unpopular opinion of cutscenes in games: There are WAY too many. You cant keep up any kind of tension or story arc like in a 2hr movie. Make less cutscenes in general and then maybe add a handful of prerendered cutscenes that are stunning. Like with old FF Games. Way fewer cutscenses.. less dialog.. but good ones to progress the story.
@@Egurius3 what i meant was "they" cant keep up story arcs, e.g the developers. OF course well written tv shows can but you need time good actors, setting, backstory etc.. its a lot of things .. i would argue that in games: not so much writing that comes to gether in said way, in my opinion only GodOfWar had some great writing that makes sense even across two games
The official classic PlayStation emulation seems so throwaway that it has the vibe of Jim Ryan’s “they looked ancient, why would anyone play this?” quote. Either commit to an initiative of strong emulation development and game support or just don’t do it. Edit: Assuming that Implicit Conversions were the contract developers behind the emulation efforts, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are limited in aspects like time and budget. Hopefully they can take feedback and get help from Sony to improve on what’s possible.
They definitely need to get the glitches ironed out. That said, this is better than PS Now or locking some of the newly released games, like Resident Evil 1, behind the Premium subscription paywall. I’m all for letting people buy PS2 games again, especially ones where the original copies are ridiculously expensive.
To be fair to Jim Ryan, he was talking about Gran Turismo specifically which, yeah, for a genre based around fidelity and realism and as a fan of that genre I kind of have to agree. That quote always gets misrepresented as though he was talking about old games in general.
The Steam Linux layer is a different animal (from ARM). The underlying hardware in gaming PCs is still correct for the original game code--X86 CPU and Nvidia or AMD GPU. Not saying it's trivial by any means, but it's certainly far closer to the native environment for those games than Windows running on ARM hardware.
Then take a look at what Apple has to contend with on the Mac with their GPTK tool: x86->ARM, DirectX->Metal, win64->macOS. The fact that games running through so many translation layers on an M3 device can still outperform Qualcomm's offerings, even though Windows is THE OS for games is inexcusable.
As much as the Microsoft and xbox stores are fraught with a plethora of problems to the point I never use it now, the game pass specific problem on PC is you are renting the application where on Steam you purchase it, so Microsoft have to have measures in place to stop you just copying the game directory away and keeping it after your sub expires or they remove the game from the service. Exactly what they do in the background I've no idea but it surely involves DRM and security settings (like the restriced app directory). Sadly they also do this when you buy games via thier store which kills the store dead for me and makes modding a headache. Microsoft really doesn't care about any of this as it never improves, and should never have released miming a mobile store to begin with. Steam isn't perfect at all but the basic aspect of accessing and managing your game installs (even moving the directory) and having a library interface with options for lists or thumbnails is easy with little friction.
Yup, this is a central issue. Not to excuse them of the other issues (no feedback on whether a click registered, poor performance, etc) but the whole concept of gamepass requires safeguards against what you described that make it almost impossible to be a storefront as seamless and convenient as Steam. Another annoying thing with gamepass is you must have an internet connection to access it, whereas steam has no such requirement (unless the game itself has a launcher that includes DRM like take twos launcher for Red Dead 2 and GTA 5.
And it has ALWAYS been a mistake to buy a non-x86 based PC. We went through this with MIPS, DEC Alpha, and PowerPC in the mid-90s. An ARM-based Windows machine doesn't excite me at ANY price. It will ALWAYS have compatibility problems. Frankly I'm shocked that you consider this ARM-based Surface a "PC" and that you expect it to be compatible from day one with x86 software. Clearly you guys have been stuck for so long in console-land that you have no idea what PCs really are.
Will you guys cover the Riven game? I'd love to see an analysis and comparison between the PC(VR) and Quest 3 versions, as John alluded to in an earlier DF direct! I guess VR is a pretty small niche for you guys to dedicate videos to, but it's interesting from a tech perspective.
The xbox app on PC is awful. Every time I try to launch a game, im told that the app needs to be updated. I click "update now" and am taken to a windows update app, where I have to search (manually) through a list of optional updates for the xbox app and its dependencies. Often the download doesn't start for an indeterminate amount of time, but when it does eventually finish, I restart the xbox app and am inevitably told again that I need to update. Usually restarting the PC fixes the problem, and im finally able to play the game, but at this point were talking about at least 15-30 minutes of time spent on something that, in any normal app, would be a single click.
You would completely mitigate that issue if you had automatic Windows updates. I've never had to get a Windows update to update Game Pass on PC. While it is your choice not to enable automatic updates, those same updates affect how PC Game Pass functions as it's classed as part of Windows now.
I just noticed a couple days ago that my Wii U gamepad stickers were slimy/sticky. A post on Reddit recommended cleaning the stick surface with isopropyl rubbing alcohol and that really did the trick.
The benefits of the PC platform being on x86 forever really show with backwards compatible gaming. I can still load up my original copy of Starcraft in my disc tray, install it and play it. Currently none of the big 3 console manufacturers allow you to play old games from before 2000 with the disc. Hell, Series X is the most capable one and even then the earliest game you can play on it is from 2001? And even then it's only a small portion of the og Xbox and 360 library.
It's not *as* true as people like to say; Windows' support wobbles quite a bit, especially around earlier DX titles, and you often should be using a fan patch or Glide driver or the like. But there generally *is* a way...
Rich!? 2000 pounds!??! That’s way too heavy for a laptop!!?? You are buff and mighty to be lugging that bad boy around!! Best of luck with the RMA return
Listening to the conversation regarding the MS Surface and all the issues with the Windows/Gamepass store has me wondering how they are going to pull off a handheld system!?
Thank you for covering the 60 fps mods for Xbox Series S. I saw them but wasn't sure to even try them or not, in case something went wrong. But i love the idea of playing Starfield at 60 fps. Wish Bethesda worked on official update for Series S version.
Windows on ARM gaming. Both Windows on ARM and Apple use emulation to run X86. The problem is that AVX is still under patent so it is not emulated today. Any games that use AVX or have stupid DRM (that can't be emulated) won't work on Windows on ARM or MacOS with Whiskey. Now you know why Intel loves to add more instructions on the CPU = get 20 years patent.
You can technically use any resolution. This mod is only the ini file used on PC with the value for the resolution changed. I could just set it to any resolution or I assume any resolution as I only tried 16:9 aspect ratio ones so far.
I gave up on PC Game Pass a while ago. The fact that the Microsoft releases often don't have feature parity is a big downside for me. The Microsoft Store versions of games don't even support tools like Reshade without tedious workarounds.
That was over 5 years ago. In that time period ARM has become a lot more viable for the traditional PC experience. Apple has showed it can be viable. I'll always appreciate x86 for its compatability but it really can't compete with Arm in terms of power effeciency
@@saturnFIV35 years is an understatement; it was over 10 years ago. Anyway, I don’t think ARM itself is in question so much as Microsoft’s ability to match Apple’s success with it.
These issues with Game Pass builds are just one more reason why MS will struggle to build interest for the service on PC. Poor integration with controller mapping via SteamInput (ought to be as simple as 'add non-Steam game') is already enough of a roadblock here for me personally
Rich - I've just ordered a Lenovo "Ideapad Pro 5 gen 9 (14" AMD)". £845 from the UK Lenovo business store (anyone can use this) gets you... an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS / 780M iGPU, 32GB DDR5 6400MHz RAM, 1TB SSD, 2.8K OLED 120Hz display. It's an aluminium bodied, conventional laptop (so only a 180 deg lay flat hinge) without touchscreen. Power efficient, great battery, plays games well for iGPU. You'll get 40fps+ in Baldurs Gate 3 at 1080P low. It even has a Co-Pilot button if you're not scarred for life 😅 There is a 2 in 1 convertible version that might suit you better if you want touchscreen and bendy action (!). Either that or wait for the new generation of AMD 300 Series Strix Point APUs launching mid July for extra gaming grunt from an iGPU...
They should introduce something like some people did with the N64 Rom decompiler, so that then became native versions. That would be way better than emulation.
im gonna have to remember "it's powershell time baby" considering i use it pretty much every day for work. gonna be saying that mentally in my head every time now.
Another problem with gaming on Windows on ARM is that Microsoft’s Prism compatibility layer doesn't implement AVX. There are quite a few recent releases that downright won't work because of that.
I platinumed Sly on PS5. It plays very well but it's blurry. Possibly a step down from the PS3 collection in terms of image quality which is hilarious.
Other than emulation bugs, it should be more faithful than those HD ports, which alongside the Jak and Ratchet HD game collections, introduced a lot of visual bugs and other oddities.
Yea its a downgrade, just played it today with my sister on ps5 and we had shared ps2/3 with those games Still we had fun and even tried some speedrunning and the ps5 version is around 40s slower than bcps3 with ps2 version!
There are a lot of Series S owners who would love this Starfield update. Rich didn’t show the plethora of other mods that alter visuals to achieve higher framerates. This type of scalability is more than just academic, it’s trusting the average console owner's intelligence that they understand what they’re doing like how PC players understand. More options are always good and I hope we can get to the point where every game with a PC port and that’s on console lets you do this. Because if it’s on a PC, there’s really no excuse why it shouldn’t be on the console version. We’ve already seen this with cases like the last Saints Row game or Ark with its numerous options.
It would be great to have a comparison between the Microsoft Surface with the Snapdragon and a Macbook Pro or even Air with the M3 chip, test it with Baldur's Gate 3, and see how it performs on both machines
The fact that Forza Horizon 5 doesn't work on the "Copilot Laptop" just kills me and is part of why I'm so cynical when it comes to Microsoft. This is one of your Flagship first Party titles. Its developed by a Microsoft Game Studio, published by Microsoft, running on Microsoft Windows with Microsoft Surface Hardware, yet it doesn't work. I'm pretty sure nobody at this company ever talks with anyone outside of their division. I really think the Windows Codebase is just such a shitshow and Microsoft can't implement anything Major which requires some low level stuff properly.
It's admittedly not a good look, but who else has to manage and support something like windows? I'm amazed it works as well as it does most of the time.
They're a trillion dollar enterprise. Their shit should work full stop. No "oh windows is complicated". It very well is complicated but they've got all the resources on planet Earth to get it figured out.
I’m not sure these are supposed to have a gaming focus-the main marketing I’ve seen is for lower noise and higher battery life (which they are, but it’s not as much of a leap as the M1 was, in large part because x86 has also improved since late 2020, when the M1 launched). The x86 translation performance is impressive even with game, and the trouble here besides for DRM is that the GPU in these SoCs is still kind of weak. If they improve on that front, it gets much more interesting That said even if they weren’t thinking about gaming to start with, it would be very silly for them to continue not prioritizing it-not while Apple is making a big and kind of technically impressive gaming push
you deserve it if youre using a surface for gaming, they absolutely suck at it. they're hipster tablets with slightly stronger hardware, honestly instead get an ipad with a keyboard for the same price. MS keeps pulling this shit people keep buying it.
@@GalmLikePalm it's not just complicated. It literally supports more hardware configurations than can be counted and is used to run basically the entire world. If they waited to launch windows on arm until every windows game ever functioned properly on snapdragon it would probably never come out. I'm sure they'll fix Forza horizon 5.
WindowsCE runs on ARM, MIPS, x86, PowerPC and basically everything. NT also has a history of non x86 versions like MIPS, PowerPC and especially Alpha. This is not really something new for Microsoft.
I think at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter how the ps1, ps2 and psp games run on the ps5, people will still buy it. Heck, Sly Cooper already became the best-selling classoc game on the system. Not to mention some people who did the ps2 emulator on pc worked on this.
Games releasing within a year of launch on Switch 2: New 3D Mario, Animal Crossing, Fire Emblem, 1 New IP, Metroid Prime 4, and there has to be something Mario Kart related.
The bad PS2 and PSP emulation is making me think of the famous Gabe Newell quote. Why would I pay Sony money for bad emulation when good emulation is free? Sony has a worse service than the pirates so guess what path I'd take if I wanted to replay some PS2 or PSP. (Yes emulators are legal, the ROMs to play on them are not, you know what I meant, go "well ack shully" somewhere else)
I've only seen uprendering issues with Sly Racoon and Tomb Raider Legends. Clone Wars and Ghost Hunter uprender correctly. Daxter was patched the other day. Maybe this frame pacing issue was fixed.
Game pass on pc is broken. So many games I can’t play and I have a 4090. It’s good to hear other people are having problems to I thought I was the only one. I think I’ll cancel my game pass until they fix it.
I guess machine learning could give consoles a much longer cycle moving forward so after the 5PRO, the main enghancements are just tied to RT/ML/AI magic to assist the upgraded CPU/GPU, but what we really want is that Marix Demo at 60fps@4k and alot more interactivity in the world. Simulate things, they create fun on their own
Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft just consistently screw up with backwards compatibility and game preservation, it boggles my mind. They just need to do the following: - Offer disc based backwards compatibility (where applicable) with true emulation like on PS3 for PS1 games where possible (this avoids licensing issues doing it the Microsoft way of recompiling the game to x86). You give me a good way to play my disc based games on your future hardware and I will keep buying your platform and into your ecosystem. - Resolution increase with nearest neighbour scaling. Makes the games look good on modern displays. - Optional filters and optional perspective correct texture mapping (PS1 - fixes texture wobbling). There are some good filter options available via other emulation on PC/Upscalers. - For the love of god, no bilinear filtering (added blur to the image) - Option to remove borders (NSO) or enable anamorphic widescreen - Make what titles they can available for purchase digitally and have those purchases transfer with you to future consoles (NSO, PS, Xbox). This has started to happen with the companies but we have also seen both Sony and Nintendo make it so you have had to repurchase titles (Wii to Wii U, PS3 to PS4). - Offer 'enhanced' versions over the regular BC version. Similar to Xbox's 4k/FPS Boost titles. - Offer Trophy/Achievement patches. Make them purchasable if need be. - Where possible, allow for online multiplayer in titles that historically had it available. Microsoft already does this to an extent but has blocked the ability for XBL to be used on OG Xbox titles. - Offer wireless versions of classic controllers that work on both current and retro hardware. Nintendo has already started doing this, why not tap into the Retro market and create official wireless controllers for the retro consoles too? Getting an official Dualshock 3 is almost impossible these days and wireless controllers for the N64, PS1 etc would be great. These corporations often really need to do better. Why pay for higher tier subscriptions if you offer a subpar experience compared to the 'free' solution? Offer a better service, offer better backwards compatibility and game preservation and you'll see the rewards.
@@ekoreko9795 Sure, I wouldn't expect it all at once but it's definitely something they can work on over time. There's money to be made and if they stick with the x86 platform, (ARM for Nintendo) they can take the work they've done forward with them. It's just a lack of interest that's disappointing.
why is microsoft on this list? thheye done more for bc recently than any other console, they even connected every generation xbox via lan and played crimson skies multiplayer
Independent emulator developers do a better job of game preservation than Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft combined. If you care about old games just get a PC and you can play almost anything pre-PS4/Xbox One, and even then there are PS4 emulators in early development so it's just a matter of time. If Sony doesn't port Bloodborne to PC soon we'll be able to play it via emulation and Sony misses out on a lot of money.
Wouldn't disc-based bc require having the original hardware built in? That would be only way to ensure every game will run properly as no one would be certifying each and every title for release. I could be wrong though. -on your point about purchases carrying over, Sony actually are doing a pretty good job currently. You can buy almost all the new classic games individually, and if they were available on PS3/Vita and you bought them in the past, they are honoring that purchase. I really wish Nintendo would let you buy the classics from their service. -There's been a push for trophy support on most classic games on PS+, which is cool but I don't think it should be mandatory. But almost every single newly released classic has trophies. -I swear Nintendo released a wireless N64 controller, it might just be a Nintendo Store exclusive though. Your other points I agree with completely.
Which of the games are native arm64 and which are ran using Intel emulation? It wasn't quite clear from my watching of the section. I'd expect the emulation to be hit or miss but I'm curious about the native performance.
its the third Windows for Arm attempt they had the Surface RT which had Windows 8 for Arm which sucked and Microsoft blocked other apps for so its practically useless now after they closed the Windows Store for Windows 8 then they had another one that ran on Windows 10 for arm and this is the third one which is Windows 11 for Arm.
Is it just me or is the missing RGB cycle on the background hex pattern making Episode 168 feeling cold. I do like the simple white frames around the camera inserts, but please bring back the color.
Would be nice to see you guys doing a face of between this new ARM Surface vs Macs with their GPTK2, which essentially is x86 games running on ARM through a translation layer. I would bet GPTK2 still runs way better than " native" Windows ARM.
I hope one day good quality translation layers are just a normal part of Windows and Linux meaning that all software is agnostic to the instruction set they're running on. I would love for the desktop CPU market to open up beyond the hegemony of Intel and AMD.
"Dark Souls 3 is not exactly a highly challenging game"
- Richard Leadbetter, Pro Gamer
Richard "cooler than ice" Leadbetter
woah! I'm sure the Elden Ring DLC is super-easy as well!
Obviously he meant for the hardware to run, but I had a good laugh too.
Super easy, barely an inconvenience.
DF no hit run soon maybe
44:34 Hey, Nightdive Kex engine developer Edward here;
I'm not sure what's going on with Still Wakes The Deep and the engine they have, but the GDK on Windows *doesn't* have anything different that requires an entirely different code path. It is unknown why these developers somehow have special requirements, but objectively none exist. Especially in Kex, winstore GDK builds are identical compile targets to Steam and GOG on a system level. You get the same graphics APIs and everything, it even still runs on top of SDL2.
There's one exception in that we disable exclusive full-screen due to background pop-ups dialogs (and I'm not entirely sure if that's even still relevant, we should go back and retest that, and other platforms have their own issues with exclusive fullscreen as well) but that has no logical effect on things like DLSS. Their reasoning doesn't really make any sense from my perspective.
Edit: Unless the real problem with winstore GDK is actually Epic themselves.
50:41 the frustration of not knowing if a button registers after clicking it was hilarious. The anger of such a simple process being broken is just gold.
theres a lot of problems like that with finished products from microsoft, im just baffled why DF is still in so positively covering MS's pre release, marketing content, where in the end things are often just terrible
This is my most hated GUI element. A button needs to do something when I press it. Either do the thing, or give me a audible tone that says you can't do that, and the type of tone should be why; it's on CD, you have no target, it's been suppressed by a debuff... etc.
That has been my experience when having to open the Xbox app on PC. My only work around, is that I have the game pinned to my taskbar, which is the only way I KNOW my click is being registered and the app automatically opens and then launches the game.
Its so pathetic. This is Games for Windows Live-level of crap.
@@enjoylife6374 I don't know where you got that. They seem to pretty fairly cover everything.
12:30 Another thing to mention with these recent PSP and PS2 emulated releases, if you change the system language to Japanese or Korean you also get the JP and KR releases when they're available
Just changing the language works? Thought you would have to go into a JP account no?
@@DuckAlertBeats nope, all regions are included in the package, at least for the most recent classic releases
@@Foas Cheers for the heads up on that
Also, if you paid for any of these Classics digital releases on PSN back in the PS3 era, you get them at no extra charge with enhancements on PS4 and PS5.
PS really should mention that. It would be sad if they don't because they don't plan on always honoring the free upgrade.
10:43 Lego Star Wars on PS5 is the PSP version, not PS2.
Are you Adam Buxton preparing a new Bug show?
I think John hasn't checked the PS1, PSP emulated games in a while. PAL/NTSC have been available for a long time and there are a lot of other options they've been added.
Not everything has been good, there's a weird default to 4:3 for 16:10 bug, but there have been some good options like analog dead zone, button mapping etc. They've even patched in the PS3 content for PSP Resistance.
Yeah! I've noticed that with recent games. I have to switch to 4:3 16:9. It's like the person doing the emulator likes 4:3 16:10 or something. And Resistance Retribution got it's Infected Mode patched in.
I saw a former Nintendo NST employee (he's now working for another company) talk about how, when he worked at Nintendo, they had a motto: If you are going to make a game that you expect to sell half a million units, budget it so it cost the equivalent of those sales.
Nintendo's budget control is crazy - though it helps not being stationed in the US, where each and every role costs a buttload of money (Japan is much cheaper in comparison, due to the vastly lower cost of living).
Cost of living in Japanese cities is higher than in (most) American cities, though?
@@azazelleblack the average wages for Japan is much lower. Housing prices are much lower. There's way less cost for healthcare.
The US gets a stupid high labour cost, especially on the coasts. The other day I thought 60K a year, and an American told me "that's too low". In much of Europe, 60K is a really nice wage, and in Japan as well.
@@cyberrb25 In most of the US, 60K is a really nice wage. I live comfortably in a rural part of the US on less than half of that. The problem with looking at these statistics for the US is that we have places like Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the nicer parts of NYC where the income is so high (and thus property/housing prices) that it completely blows out the scales. In MOST of the US housing is relatively cheap. What I said to begin with was that housing in Japanese *cities*, particularly in Tokyo, is very expensive. Yes, outside the cities Japan is cheap, but that's true of almost anywhere.
And with that idea, it's better to predict sales on the lower end, so that you spend less on budget.
That way you get a bigger profit when sales exceed your expectations.
tbh limitations breed innovation , no budget means no restraints and there are many examples when that comes out badly.
The real reason why most games don’t even launch on Windows on Arm is because anti-cheat kernel modules are not yet ported to Arm. Microsoft just announced that 3 of those including BattlEye are coming soon.
Valve dealt with the same issues in the early days of Proton, but they eventually got through them.
I was under the impression that these new arm surfaces were going to be trash for gaming anyways. So many compatibility issues to jump through.
Otherwise, those new laptops are great for everything non gaming lol.
even still, on the games that work you're getting worse than steam deck performance for 2000 pounds, 2000, you can buy a regular x86 laptop with a 4070 and a bigger, better ultra high refresh rate screen for less than that, even once the compatibility issues are solved the hardware is just useless, pointless if you wanna game
I was always under the impression this was geared towards students or people that work in the field.
@@elizabethagudelo7179 Its advantage over x86 is that it gets closer to Apple levels of efficiency, at least in non-game workloads. If you don't need that, or can wait for the next round of x86 coming within a year, it's pointless.
Eventually yeah, but still having issues on Valve side sadly. So its an never ending struggle with anti-cheats. So Microsoft is going to lewrn that the hard way too.
1:14 Alex genuinely made me laugh when he quickly just blurted out "King!" Well done mate :)
The Sony emulation for PS1/2 is baffling for some of their decisions. John is right here. The only thing I can think of is that Sony may have some internal play data from the PS+ service that while people online say they want these classics on PS+, in reality, they aren't played enough or by enough subscribers to make the investment into better emulators.
100% if people are serious about playing them. Probably have og hardware or emulating on pc
It's odd as Ghost Hunter and Clone Wars do uprender. But Sly Racoon and Tomb Raider Legends don't.
Idk, I think they phoned it in because none of these people are enthusiasts, and ultimately, they view this as a minor value-add rather than a main selling point. So, getting it ‘right’ just isn’t a priority, or else they don’t even know what getting it right entails when it comes to getting these games looking their best on modern displays.
That said, Nintendo, for whom their back catalog is part of their sales pitch/used as an upsell, continues to use a relatively poor emulator for their N64 titles, even after doing relatively good work on the Wii/WiiU VCs. Kind of sad that all of these manufacturers are having their lunch eaten by enthusiasts
It definitely comes down to cost and QA, probably consistency of experience as well. It's known that some EMU enhancements can break games. That might be acceptable to the PC user who's used to tweaking things, but for a console that's unacceptable.
Take it a step further, why don't these companies add a reshade like feature to add RT and AO to older games? The more new features that are added to older games, the more testing needed. And if these higher resolutions and new features only work on some old games but break others, that really requires full play throughs of these games to ensure there's no new game breaking bugs.
To be fair though, Xbox did do a lot of that leg work for back compat themselves and got enhancements in a fair amount of games. Has MS made that money back though? Hard to say, they certainly earned good will with some gamers but has it actually sold them more consoles?
@saturnFIV3 This is why I think Sly Racoon and Tomb Raider Legends don't uprender. How much time they had with these games. They usually work on three games a month. This month they had six to work on and Sly Racoon and Tomb Raider Legends suffered because of that. Clone Wars has uprendering working correctly and so does Ghost Hunter. So I think it's down to time. Every single PS Classic I've played has uprendering working as intended. Except for Tomb Raider Legends and Sly Racoon. So it's down down to they didn't have enough time to work on certain games.
If your son or daughter is going away to collage make sure you buy them a Qualcomm powered PC. The Surface looks all shiny and cool, so they'll be really happy with it, but that night when they decide they're going to waste time playing videogames on their fancy new computer, they'll come to find studying is the better option :^)
Might as well buy them a mac if you don't want them playing games.
That's basically a glorified Chromebook, which is what they're already used to (and the Chromebook can also run Steam, IIRC)
@@jorge69696 But then you'd have to spend twice as much. 😉
@@equinoxe3d CPU performance is way higher than any chromebook
@@mtrxishere3772 Hence the "glorified" ;) Though there were some high end Chromebook models (like Pixelbook), I wouldn't be really surprised to see one pop up with a Snapdragon X inside
ah Elden Ring Switch 2 port day 1.
Returns of switch 2 for repairs will be at the all time high
When Xbox Series X runs PS2 games better than PS5, that's comedy in itself.
Just as PS5 runs MS games and many current gen games better than the Series X. Comedy in itself. Both systems could do better.
@@BrianM78 You let that one swoosh right over your head. You can use retroarch on XSX and XSS and play PS2 games at higher framerate, resolution, and quality than the PS5 releases.
You don't have to cope so hard to defend Sony.
@@BrianM78that's because the studios specifically ported the games for the PS5. It's funny in some ways, especially with eg Hi-Fi Rush and Pentiment and how those ports worked, but it's not even remotely equivalent to the Series S being able to play consoles' worth of PlayStation games that the flagship PlayStation console can't play.
@@XhoowieX That's because the PS2 emulator on the PS4 is objectively dogshit, there's no ifs and buts about it. They do the bare minimum.
@@nintendo1889xThey should have improved it massively by now, as it is, it's like running a ps2 emulator on a mid to low range android phone, which is clearly illogical considering ps5's hardware
I hope a dedicated Retrotink 4k video is in the pipeline! 🤞
That price though!
@@WllKiedSnake Hahaha absolutely punishing! Thats why I am trying to get informed how to use the thing lol! I've been just doing nearest neighbor and BFI for the most part! Would like more info on scanlines and masks!
@user-jq9rw9xy8e I just use a Retrotink 2x Pro, a Mclassic and a 4k Gamer Pro all combined and it does tie job.
@@WllKiedSnake I like a sharper image.... Coming from the Mclassic and its just too smooth and messes with the colors! I herd the 4k Gamer Pro is even worse in that regard.
@user-jq9rw9xy8e The Mclassic uses 4x SMAA so it's sharper. Even uses a sharpening filter. The image looks better than it would without it. And if you have a LG G2 and think it's to dark. There is a setting called Game Black Level in the game optimiser settings. Turn that up a bit to improve the black levels. And using the 4k Gamer Pro with the Mclassic is fantastic! For PS2 I set it to medium sharpness and it looks pretty good! With PS3, 360 and Switch have it set to low as those are 720p to 1080p systems. But yeah! I like the Mclassic on it's own even. But with the 4k Gamer Pro upscaling what the Mclassic does to 4k and sharpening the image a little more. They make games look great! Adjust the Game Black Level though a bit though if you can and games will look as they should.
I think it's great for S owners to have options, not everybody has disposable income to spend on more powerful systems John 😊
Give or take a few days, Series X only cost around $.39 a day to own if you bought it at launch.
When I bought mine they required all the money at one time though. @@shifu9276
@@shifu9276Huh?
@shifu9276 who budgets like that?
Work harder $500 is a little extra overtime.
Rich shaking his head as soon as Bubsy is mentioned. He ain't having it. 😂
For Starfield for Series S, If it's at the same FSR 2 percentage as Series S at 1440p, the 720p resolution is likely running at a native resolution of 800x450. That's likely why it looks so... rough. It's about 62.5% of the target resolution.
27:41 - the laughter 🤣🤣😂😂🤣🤣😂😂🤣🤣
i know right made me so happy to see alex lose himself in joy lmao
Rich is pretty smooth with those jokes
It strikes me that Microsoft used to have a UI that was ideally suited to handheld devices, why they haven’t resurrected the Metro UI format for gaming scenarios is beyond me. Maybe there’s something I’m not aware of here, but im under the impression it’s that Metro is still around in windows 10 as an option. No clue about 11, I stopped being a home windows user years ago, but they’ve dropped the ball big here.
It was a good phone UI and could be a great handheld UI
Microsoft did so much better a job of backwards compatibility/legacy hardware. Wasn't perfect by any means but they at least guaranteed that OG Xbox games would be upres and work well. It's a huge huge shame they stopped the BC effort. So many great games that could be brought forward still
I think the most impressive thing is their 360 emulation. It's on another level.
Yeah it's called a PC, which is why the PC platform will always have the biggest and best software library and back catalogue ever. If people and stupid execs haven't realised by now hardware lives and dies by its software. Make emulation a priority and you'll be financially rewarded.
Xbox back compat is a triumph that took thousands of hours of Sony fan comments to suppress.
I'm glad that Microsoft has prioritized so much effort with back compat. I'm quite sure that the work load was strenuous. Sony could do way more with back compat if they wanted to, but it's obvious their priorities are set on the newer stuff. It would be a good thing if Sony did more, but I kind of don't blame them for the less effort given to the past.
you know i think ps5 and series x might be the last console generation if china manages to attack taiwan
With how the PS2 Emulation games seem to be so far for PS5, I sincerely hope it does end up getting fixed down the line. But one thing I am hoping for those PS2 Classics is the Original PS2 God of Wars being put onto PS5 because those games need some preservation cause they are awesome.
Have you noticed that Clone Wars and Ghost Hunter uprender but Sly Racoon and Tomb Raider Legends don't? It's odd!
As much as I'm happy to see new PS2 games it's kinda weird that they haven't made that many improvements to the emulator for the PS5, but I wonder if that's due to the rewind function.
It was a surprise to see the rewind function in PS2 games considering that it is something rare in console emulators of this generation (Dreamcast, PS2, Game Cube and Xbox) because it requires a lot of hardware, specifically RAM.
Heck, even Nintendo disabled the rewind function on Nintendo 64 games on the NSO because of that.
Are there any other emulators that offer rewind? So far as I know, only Syrup Engine does this.
Love your unique style, never change!
Always enjoy tuning in lads!
A couple words about ARM laptops: I haven't got an X Elite device yet (waiting for 5G versions) but I've got an SQ2 Surface Pro X since 2021. I haven't bought it as a gaming machine and I never expected it to be a gaming machine (same for X Elite), but I found Ori and the Blind Forest to run well enough. The reason I got it was the 4G modem, battery life and overall dimensions (especially weight). All other software I usually use (development tools, browsers, messaging stuff, basic photo editing, virtualization, dockers etc) works flawlessly.
The problem with X Elite and seems to be twofold: GPU seems to be rather disappointing (drivers especially, also both Vulkan and OpenGL are not natively supported), but the other issue is how the emulator works: it's a JIT, it's recompiling as it goes, so basically that means you can expect a CPU equivalent of shader stutter until native ARM games are built, which I think explains the huge spikes in frame time.
what are the chances that game devs build native arm games? the m macbooks have a 2x to 3x faster gpu than the x elite and apple has already sold millions of them.... Apple shipped 22M Macbooks in 2023 alone. Game devs ignored that. You think they'll spend millions to rewrite their game engines to make arm games for pc's that might or might not ever be successful? Unity games, maybe? Unreal, perhaps. Anything else, not gonna happen. And it takes years to write an engine... Games in development for the next 3 to 5 years aren't going to be ARM
@@thisnowthenprob indies, as they could run them on mobile too
@@thisnowthen I looked up a page and it basically just has for UE4 append “ -Architecture=arm64” to make an arm game. There are games that started on mobile and went to PC (farlight 84) and vice versa (pubg) without too many birth throes, I'm sure it mostly comes down to a resource balancing act. The problem is the compatibility with x86 on a Windows which might never be patched.
DUCKSTATION, PPSSPP, PCSX2 and RPCS3 are the best emulators. Sony still can't make an better PS2 and PS3 emulator for the PS5 😅.
The people that actually want to play those titles will emulate on PC or play on og hardware. Sony knows this and makes the games playable but nothing spectacular on ps4/ps5
@Gravy1255 You are right. I don't mind some of my ps2 and ps3 disc working on the PS5 with emulation. Like how Xbox did with their backward compatible emulator on series X, I have some Xbox and 360 physical games, and they run great on series x.
Mednafen/Beetle > Duckstation
"If you were an Activision-Blizzard studio, Alex, which one would you be?"
Alex, with zero hesitation: "King."
Already off to a rip-roaring start this week, gents.
That's where the big money is made 😂 as far as profits.
I had Bubsy 1 back in the day. I agree with Rich, it was poor. The kind game that even as a bored kid with nothing better to do, I still wouldn't play it.
will you make a "cromulent" and a "sporfoken" t-shirt? I been waiting for those.
The mention of PS5 Professional: ✅
£2000? 🤯 Insane pricing for such low performance compared to x86 CPU's with Discrete GPU's at even a third of the price. 😖
You seriously have to question Qualcomm's wisdom in launching at these prices. They don't have the cultist following that Apple does to force a migration to ARM but they seem to think they do.
Any interest in ARM that I've heard from those interested over the last few years were hopeful of an _affordable_ alternative to the ever increasing prices of laptops. Early reviews and sales numbers are lackluster to be generous, (not allowing reviews pre-launch was a MASSIVE red flag) and when they inevitably have to cut prices to move them it will just appear that they're trying to move damaged goods. The _worst_ thing they could have done was launch at these laughable prices and it's going to massively stunt any penetration into the PC market they were hoping for.
It would be like if Intel launched Arc at $500+ for the prestige of owning an Intel GPU. That only works with brainless Apple cultists.
I'd bet a lot of money was spent on R&D of Recall, AI features and the NPU instead of focusing on getting the core features right. It's insane to think that a 3 trillion company doesn't do any market research to find exactly what matters to people.
These are definitely early adopter prices, but as you say, I'm not sure if it will survive out of the early years with the current landscape
Is not a gamer centric device, and the $2000 laptop you'll get with a dgpu would be much heavier, louder, and would have a max battery life of 3 to 4 hours. This thing can do 22.
@@zodwraith5745 Qualcomm didn't set the SL7 price, Microsoft did. You can buy these Snapdragon X laptops for as little as a grand.
6:20 Some of the mods are actually Achievement friendly. Not all but the offical ones are.
Alex always seems to have problems with things I dont see on gamepass and some games. With game pass you need to make sure the app is updated which is a weakness but sometimes steam will not launch a game on first download and you need to browse to the local files and run it once from there, so steam is not error free depending on the game.
I've never had an issue launching a Steam game. Meanwhile I re-downloaded Forza Horizon 5 the other day and the only way to get it to run was to locate the exe and run as administrator. Just opening via Xbox app the game immediately closes.
Back when Gears 4 and Forza Horizon 3 launched I had to completely re-install Windows 10 because of how buggy UWP can be. I would say that Microsoft easily has the worst game platform on PC although it has improved over the years.
@@Phil_529 Lucky you, others have had problems running games on Steam. Atlas refused to run and I had to reinstall it.
Most of the issues Alex brings up about PC Game Pass stem more from his ignorance of how PC Game Pass is tied to the Xbox consoles. PC Game Pass shares the same achievement list and has Xbox cloud saves.
So while yes, you could change the games to the Steam versions, that would break the cloud saves so that when you try to play them on an Xbox console or your phone (using cloud gaming), your save wouldn't be there anymore. You would get a lot of people up in arms if they changed to the Steam versions of PC Games because not only would you lose all of your cloud saves, but you would also lose all of your cross buy titles.
The other issue with switching to the Steam versions is that this is a subscription service, so when someone ends their sub they would still be able to play the game.
At the PPI we're looking at, 720p seems like a better play for the Switch successor. This would also allow for better battery life, which is a more notable value to a player taking full advantage of the portable mode.
When next gen AMD and Intel laptop CPUs show up they're gonna render Qualcomm utterly obsolete.
We've been saying that for almost 10 years. I really hope this is true.
AMD has done a good job with power efficiency though. Intel not so much. Neither can still close the gap with ARM.
@@mechanicalmonk2020 What's the efficiency worth when half the programs you use don't work or games you wanna play don't even start. And if they do work they perform poorly.
And I have my doubts about all these efficiency claims too, because people have tested it with very odd setups like 150 nits of brightness, local video playback instead of streaming, no bluetooth or wifi usage. I don't use my laptop like that.
Excellent stuff lads, thanks for the insights.
Why do you always read out the same people’s questions, doesn’t anyone else write in?
Few Nintendo IPs that could surprise for Switch2: FZero , Kid Icarus (3ds iteration was fantastic), Star Fox.... They could also bring new IPs and of course make use of their 3rd party studios to maybe make some smalloer or medium sized games that feel unique and fresh in relations to the Switch 2 hardware. You know.. doing the opposite of microsoft: utilizing maybe their smaller studios to create smaller games to have something directly ready for launch and sell their hardware.. not close them down.
1:14:12 "Rich says in-the-here-and-now" drinking game.
No thanks, I don't want to die
🧐A slick rework of the background assets!
Rich... sporting that "bespoke" shirt
Unpopular opinion of cutscenes in games: There are WAY too many. You cant keep up any kind of tension or story arc like in a 2hr movie. Make less cutscenes in general and then maybe add a handful of prerendered cutscenes that are stunning. Like with old FF Games. Way fewer cutscenses.. less dialog.. but good ones to progress the story.
You've never played Yakuza have you
You haven't watched many tv shows have you?
@@Egurius3 what i meant was "they" cant keep up story arcs, e.g the developers. OF course well written tv shows can but you need time good actors, setting, backstory etc.. its a lot of things .. i would argue that in games: not so much writing that comes to gether in said way, in my opinion only GodOfWar had some great writing that makes sense even across two games
@@Gravy1255 I have.. not my cup of tea, but i agree that the story was great.. gripping setting and characters
> You cant keep up any kind of tension or story arc like in a 2hr movie
Marvel has made billions of dollars doing just that with their movie series.
The official classic PlayStation emulation seems so throwaway that it has the vibe of Jim Ryan’s “they looked ancient, why would anyone play this?” quote. Either commit to an initiative of strong emulation development and game support or just don’t do it.
Edit: Assuming that Implicit Conversions were the contract developers behind the emulation efforts, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are limited in aspects like time and budget. Hopefully they can take feedback and get help from Sony to improve on what’s possible.
They definitely need to get the glitches ironed out. That said, this is better than PS Now or locking some of the newly released games, like Resident Evil 1, behind the Premium subscription paywall. I’m all for letting people buy PS2 games again, especially ones where the original copies are ridiculously expensive.
Games look and run great, Sly is now one of the best review games of all time on PlayStation Store.
To be fair to Jim Ryan, he was talking about Gran Turismo specifically which, yeah, for a genre based around fidelity and realism and as a fan of that genre I kind of have to agree. That quote always gets misrepresented as though he was talking about old games in general.
If they can't do at least as good as DuckStation then it's a waste of time
Ghost Hunter and Clone Wars uprender correctly. But Sly Racoon and Tomb Raider Legends don't.
UWP has been broken since it launched with windows 8. Apps and data saved on a encrypted hidden folders also add to the problem.
25:46 "touched upon"? ... more like "touted repeatedly" 🤣
27:35 That was a diabolical cackle 😅
The Steam Linux layer is a different animal (from ARM). The underlying hardware in gaming PCs is still correct for the original game code--X86 CPU and Nvidia or AMD GPU. Not saying it's trivial by any means, but it's certainly far closer to the native environment for those games than Windows running on ARM hardware.
Then take a look at what Apple has to contend with on the Mac with their GPTK tool: x86->ARM, DirectX->Metal, win64->macOS. The fact that games running through so many translation layers on an M3 device can still outperform Qualcomm's offerings, even though Windows is THE OS for games is inexcusable.
@DanielTiecher Are you saying you can play Windows games on a MacBook? And that they run better than on Microsoft's Qualcomm Surface tablet?
@@cube2foxexactly, these windows arm cpus need game developer support
As much as the Microsoft and xbox stores are fraught with a plethora of problems to the point I never use it now, the game pass specific problem on PC is you are renting the application where on Steam you purchase it, so Microsoft have to have measures in place to stop you just copying the game directory away and keeping it after your sub expires or they remove the game from the service. Exactly what they do in the background I've no idea but it surely involves DRM and security settings (like the restriced app directory).
Sadly they also do this when you buy games via thier store which kills the store dead for me and makes modding a headache. Microsoft really doesn't care about any of this as it never improves, and should never have released miming a mobile store to begin with.
Steam isn't perfect at all but the basic aspect of accessing and managing your game installs (even moving the directory) and having a library interface with options for lists or thumbnails is easy with little friction.
Yup, this is a central issue. Not to excuse them of the other issues (no feedback on whether a click registered, poor performance, etc) but the whole concept of gamepass requires safeguards against what you described that make it almost impossible to be a storefront as seamless and convenient as Steam. Another annoying thing with gamepass is you must have an internet connection to access it, whereas steam has no such requirement (unless the game itself has a launcher that includes DRM like take twos launcher for Red Dead 2 and GTA 5.
Modding on PC Game Pass games has been possible for years so no idea what you're talking about on that point, but the rest of your comment is correct.
My PC runs PS2 games far better than any PS5 ever will. It also runs Sony exclusives these days too. Why would anyone own a console?
And it has ALWAYS been a mistake to buy a non-x86 based PC. We went through this with MIPS, DEC Alpha, and PowerPC in the mid-90s. An ARM-based Windows machine doesn't excite me at ANY price. It will ALWAYS have compatibility problems.
Frankly I'm shocked that you consider this ARM-based Surface a "PC" and that you expect it to be compatible from day one with x86 software. Clearly you guys have been stuck for so long in console-land that you have no idea what PCs really are.
Will you guys cover the Riven game? I'd love to see an analysis and comparison between the PC(VR) and Quest 3 versions, as John alluded to in an earlier DF direct! I guess VR is a pretty small niche for you guys to dedicate videos to, but it's interesting from a tech perspective.
The xbox app on PC is awful. Every time I try to launch a game, im told that the app needs to be updated. I click "update now" and am taken to a windows update app, where I have to search (manually) through a list of optional updates for the xbox app and its dependencies. Often the download doesn't start for an indeterminate amount of time, but when it does eventually finish, I restart the xbox app and am inevitably told again that I need to update. Usually restarting the PC fixes the problem, and im finally able to play the game, but at this point were talking about at least 15-30 minutes of time spent on something that, in any normal app, would be a single click.
You would completely mitigate that issue if you had automatic Windows updates. I've never had to get a Windows update to update Game Pass on PC.
While it is your choice not to enable automatic updates, those same updates affect how PC Game Pass functions as it's classed as part of Windows now.
I just noticed a couple days ago that my Wii U gamepad stickers were slimy/sticky. A post on Reddit recommended cleaning the stick surface with isopropyl rubbing alcohol and that really did the trick.
Love how Rich corrects Alex on PS4 Pro/PS5 Pro when he previously referred to Metroid Prime 4: Beyond as Metroid Prime 2.
The benefits of the PC platform being on x86 forever really show with backwards compatible gaming. I can still load up my original copy of Starcraft in my disc tray, install it and play it. Currently none of the big 3 console manufacturers allow you to play old games from before 2000 with the disc. Hell, Series X is the most capable one and even then the earliest game you can play on it is from 2001? And even then it's only a small portion of the og Xbox and 360 library.
It's not *as* true as people like to say; Windows' support wobbles quite a bit, especially around earlier DX titles, and you often should be using a fan patch or Glide driver or the like.
But there generally *is* a way...
Rich!? 2000 pounds!??! That’s way too heavy for a laptop!!?? You are buff and mighty to be lugging that bad boy around!! Best of luck with the RMA return
The ViRGE actually had pretty solid image quality in 3d, it was just SO SLOOOOOOOW.
The crew bespoking very good in this one.
1:12:50 A surprise appearance of Subliminal Alex 😂
Listening to the conversation regarding the MS Surface and all the issues with the Windows/Gamepass store has me wondering how they are going to pull off a handheld system!?
Thank you for covering the 60 fps mods for Xbox Series S. I saw them but wasn't sure to even try them or not, in case something went wrong.
But i love the idea of playing Starfield at 60 fps. Wish Bethesda worked on official update for Series S version.
Windows on ARM gaming. Both Windows on ARM and Apple use emulation to run X86. The problem is that AVX is still under patent so it is not emulated today. Any games that use AVX or have stupid DRM (that can't be emulated) won't work on Windows on ARM or MacOS with Whiskey. Now you know why Intel loves to add more instructions on the CPU = get 20 years patent.
The S3 Virge was a good addition to the Monster 3D!
A gaming performance comparison between ARM windows laptop and Macbook would be cool
You can technically use any resolution. This mod is only the ini file used on PC with the value for the resolution changed. I could just set it to any resolution or I assume any resolution as I only tried 16:9 aspect ratio ones so far.
I gave up on PC Game Pass a while ago. The fact that the Microsoft releases often don't have feature parity is a big downside for me. The Microsoft Store versions of games don't even support tools like Reshade without tedious workarounds.
I wonder what John thinks of GAME in the UK saying they will no longer be selling physical games.
The Surface RT laptop was Windows on Arm and it bombed horribly.
That was over 5 years ago. In that time period ARM has become a lot more viable for the traditional PC experience. Apple has showed it can be viable. I'll always appreciate x86 for its compatability but it really can't compete with Arm in terms of power effeciency
@@saturnFIV35 years is an understatement; it was over 10 years ago. Anyway, I don’t think ARM itself is in question so much as Microsoft’s ability to match Apple’s success with it.
Still have mine and it still boots and still works
One Love!
Always forward, never ever backward!!
☀☀☀
💚💛❤
🙏🏿🙏🙏🏼
These issues with Game Pass builds are just one more reason why MS will struggle to build interest for the service on PC. Poor integration with controller mapping via SteamInput (ought to be as simple as 'add non-Steam game') is already enough of a roadblock here for me personally
Rich - I've just ordered a Lenovo
"Ideapad Pro 5 gen 9 (14" AMD)".
£845 from the UK Lenovo business store (anyone can use this) gets you... an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS / 780M iGPU, 32GB DDR5 6400MHz RAM, 1TB SSD, 2.8K OLED 120Hz display.
It's an aluminium bodied, conventional laptop (so only a 180 deg lay flat hinge) without touchscreen. Power efficient, great battery, plays games well for iGPU. You'll get 40fps+ in Baldurs Gate 3 at 1080P low. It even has a Co-Pilot button if you're not scarred for life 😅
There is a 2 in 1 convertible version that might suit you better if you want touchscreen and bendy action (!).
Either that or wait for the new generation of AMD 300 Series Strix Point APUs launching mid July for extra gaming grunt from an iGPU...
They should introduce something like some people did with the N64 Rom decompiler, so that then became native versions. That would be way better than emulation.
im gonna have to remember "it's powershell time baby" considering i use it pretty much every day for work. gonna be saying that mentally in my head every time now.
GTA5 on Switch 2 isn't such a crazy idea, after all 3DS got an exclusive game made for that platform Chinatown Wars.
MS person
- and the reason for returning the laptop is?
Richard
- this cannot run Crisis, period.
Another problem with gaming on Windows on ARM is that Microsoft’s Prism compatibility layer doesn't implement AVX. There are quite a few recent releases that downright won't work because of that.
I platinumed Sly on PS5. It plays very well but it's blurry. Possibly a step down from the PS3 collection in terms of image quality which is hilarious.
Did you check out Clone Wars and Ghost Hunter? They do actually uprender to a higher resolution. But Sly Racoon and Tomb Raider Legends don't.
Other than emulation bugs, it should be more faithful than those HD ports, which alongside the Jak and Ratchet HD game collections, introduced a lot of visual bugs and other oddities.
@@johnconnorpliskin7184 I agree the Ratchet collection was atrocious. But Sly and especially Jak were very good ports as far as I remember.
Yea its a downgrade, just played it today with my sister on ps5 and we had shared ps2/3 with those games Still we had fun and even tried some speedrunning and the ps5 version is around 40s slower than bcps3 with ps2 version!
There are a lot of Series S owners who would love this Starfield update. Rich didn’t show the plethora of other mods that alter visuals to achieve higher framerates. This type of scalability is more than just academic, it’s trusting the average console owner's intelligence that they understand what they’re doing like how PC players understand. More options are always good and I hope we can get to the point where every game with a PC port and that’s on console lets you do this. Because if it’s on a PC, there’s really no excuse why it shouldn’t be on the console version. We’ve already seen this with cases like the last Saints Row game or Ark with its numerous options.
@@istealpopularnamesforlikes3340bro you are wrong
It would be great to have a comparison between the Microsoft Surface with the Snapdragon and a Macbook Pro or even Air with the M3 chip, test it with Baldur's Gate 3, and see how it performs on both machines
In a bizarre twist of fate, running games on linux is better than running games on Windows using ARM. It's an odd situation, to be sure.
The fact that Forza Horizon 5 doesn't work on the "Copilot Laptop" just kills me and is part of why I'm so cynical when it comes to Microsoft. This is one of your Flagship first Party titles. Its developed by a Microsoft Game Studio, published by Microsoft, running on Microsoft Windows with Microsoft Surface Hardware, yet it doesn't work. I'm pretty sure nobody at this company ever talks with anyone outside of their division.
I really think the Windows Codebase is just such a shitshow and Microsoft can't implement anything Major which requires some low level stuff properly.
It's admittedly not a good look, but who else has to manage and support something like windows? I'm amazed it works as well as it does most of the time.
They're a trillion dollar enterprise. Their shit should work full stop. No "oh windows is complicated". It very well is complicated but they've got all the resources on planet Earth to get it figured out.
I’m not sure these are supposed to have a gaming focus-the main marketing I’ve seen is for lower noise and higher battery life (which they are, but it’s not as much of a leap as the M1 was, in large part because x86 has also improved since late 2020, when the M1 launched). The x86 translation performance is impressive even with game, and the trouble here besides for DRM is that the GPU in these SoCs is still kind of weak. If they improve on that front, it gets much more interesting
That said even if they weren’t thinking about gaming to start with, it would be very silly for them to continue not prioritizing it-not while Apple is making a big and kind of technically impressive gaming push
you deserve it if youre using a surface for gaming, they absolutely suck at it. they're hipster tablets with slightly stronger hardware, honestly instead get an ipad with a keyboard for the same price. MS keeps pulling this shit people keep buying it.
@@GalmLikePalm it's not just complicated. It literally supports more hardware configurations than can be counted and is used to run basically the entire world. If they waited to launch windows on arm until every windows game ever functioned properly on snapdragon it would probably never come out. I'm sure they'll fix Forza horizon 5.
WindowsCE runs on ARM, MIPS, x86, PowerPC and basically everything. NT also has a history of non x86 versions like MIPS, PowerPC and especially Alpha. This is not really something new for Microsoft.
They also tried Arm support with Windows RT, but it failed.
Early Windows CE handhelds often ran on Hitachi Super-H as well, and then we had the Dreamcast port.
Haha, I like that Richard has "bespoke" on his t-shirt...
the ps2 emulator also has an issue with only being 8 directions on the analog stick instead of 360 degrees. So basically the analog stick is a dpad...
It's... not difficult to give retro games a good treatment, yet Sony just keeps refusing to do it somehow
I think at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter how the ps1, ps2 and psp games run on the ps5, people will still buy it. Heck, Sly Cooper already became the best-selling classoc game on the system. Not to mention some people who did the ps2 emulator on pc worked on this.
Games releasing within a year of launch on Switch 2: New 3D Mario, Animal Crossing, Fire Emblem, 1 New IP, Metroid Prime 4, and there has to be something Mario Kart related.
The bad PS2 and PSP emulation is making me think of the famous Gabe Newell quote. Why would I pay Sony money for bad emulation when good emulation is free? Sony has a worse service than the pirates so guess what path I'd take if I wanted to replay some PS2 or PSP.
(Yes emulators are legal, the ROMs to play on them are not, you know what I meant, go "well ack shully" somewhere else)
I've only seen uprendering issues with Sly Racoon and Tomb Raider Legends. Clone Wars and Ghost Hunter uprender correctly. Daxter was patched the other day. Maybe this frame pacing issue was fixed.
Game pass on pc is broken. So many games I can’t play and I have a 4090. It’s good to hear other people are having problems to I thought I was the only one. I think I’ll cancel my game pass until they fix it.
I guess machine learning could give consoles a much longer cycle moving forward so after the 5PRO, the main enghancements are just tied to RT/ML/AI magic to assist the upgraded CPU/GPU, but what we really want is that Marix Demo at 60fps@4k and alot more interactivity in the world. Simulate things, they create fun on their own
Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft just consistently screw up with backwards compatibility and game preservation, it boggles my mind.
They just need to do the following:
- Offer disc based backwards compatibility (where applicable) with true emulation like on PS3 for PS1 games where possible (this avoids licensing issues doing it the Microsoft way of recompiling the game to x86). You give me a good way to play my disc based games on your future hardware and I will keep buying your platform and into your ecosystem.
- Resolution increase with nearest neighbour scaling. Makes the games look good on modern displays.
- Optional filters and optional perspective correct texture mapping (PS1 - fixes texture wobbling). There are some good filter options available via other emulation on PC/Upscalers.
- For the love of god, no bilinear filtering (added blur to the image)
- Option to remove borders (NSO) or enable anamorphic widescreen
- Make what titles they can available for purchase digitally and have those purchases transfer with you to future consoles (NSO, PS, Xbox). This has started to happen with the companies but we have also seen both Sony and Nintendo make it so you have had to repurchase titles (Wii to Wii U, PS3 to PS4).
- Offer 'enhanced' versions over the regular BC version. Similar to Xbox's 4k/FPS Boost titles.
- Offer Trophy/Achievement patches. Make them purchasable if need be.
- Where possible, allow for online multiplayer in titles that historically had it available. Microsoft already does this to an extent but has blocked the ability for XBL to be used on OG Xbox titles.
- Offer wireless versions of classic controllers that work on both current and retro hardware. Nintendo has already started doing this, why not tap into the Retro market and create official wireless controllers for the retro consoles too? Getting an official Dualshock 3 is almost impossible these days and wireless controllers for the N64, PS1 etc would be great.
These corporations often really need to do better. Why pay for higher tier subscriptions if you offer a subpar experience compared to the 'free' solution? Offer a better service, offer better backwards compatibility and game preservation and you'll see the rewards.
That's too much work for something very very few actually care about, sucks but it's the way it is
@@ekoreko9795 Sure, I wouldn't expect it all at once but it's definitely something they can work on over time.
There's money to be made and if they stick with the x86 platform, (ARM for Nintendo) they can take the work they've done forward with them.
It's just a lack of interest that's disappointing.
why is microsoft on this list? thheye done more for bc recently than any other console, they even connected every generation xbox via lan and played crimson skies multiplayer
Independent emulator developers do a better job of game preservation than Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft combined.
If you care about old games just get a PC and you can play almost anything pre-PS4/Xbox One, and even then there are PS4 emulators in early development so it's just a matter of time. If Sony doesn't port Bloodborne to PC soon we'll be able to play it via emulation and Sony misses out on a lot of money.
Wouldn't disc-based bc require having the original hardware built in? That would be only way to ensure every game will run properly as no one would be certifying each and every title for release. I could be wrong though.
-on your point about purchases carrying over, Sony actually are doing a pretty good job currently. You can buy almost all the new classic games individually, and if they were available on PS3/Vita and you bought them in the past, they are honoring that purchase. I really wish Nintendo would let you buy the classics from their service.
-There's been a push for trophy support on most classic games on PS+, which is cool but I don't think it should be mandatory. But almost every single newly released classic has trophies.
-I swear Nintendo released a wireless N64 controller, it might just be a Nintendo Store exclusive though.
Your other points I agree with completely.
It'd have been great if they angled the answer to Q1 to be entirely about beauty products instead of the expected and sensible tech answer.
Which of the games are native arm64 and which are ran using Intel emulation? It wasn't quite clear from my watching of the section. I'd expect the emulation to be hit or miss but I'm curious about the native performance.
For Snapdragon elite, I am wanting to try linux and box86, I think it could perform better.
its the third Windows for Arm attempt they had the Surface RT which had Windows 8 for Arm which sucked and Microsoft blocked other apps for so its practically useless now after they closed the Windows Store for Windows 8 then they had another one that ran on Windows 10 for arm and this is the third one which is Windows 11 for Arm.
Is it just me or is the missing RGB cycle on the background hex pattern making Episode 168 feeling cold. I do like the simple white frames around the camera inserts, but please bring back the color.
The dang windows store fixes don't even work half the time.
New tshirt idea: "Very smooth release cadence"
Would be nice to see you guys doing a face of between this new ARM Surface vs Macs with their GPTK2, which essentially is x86 games running on ARM through a translation layer. I would bet GPTK2 still runs way better than " native" Windows ARM.
I hope one day good quality translation layers are just a normal part of Windows and Linux meaning that all software is agnostic to the instruction set they're running on. I would love for the desktop CPU market to open up beyond the hegemony of Intel and AMD.