Hey, I just read your post about console development and the engineering effort it takes to use the extra bells and whistles a console provides. I was wondering if you had any knowledge or theories why more games haven’t taken advantage of features like sampler feedback streaming. Memory always seems to be a stretched resource on consoles and this feature is claimed to improve memory utilization by over 2x. It seems like taking advantage of console specific hardware happens less these days outside of something like VRR or PSSR on the PS5 pro. Thank you for taking the time with this and many other questions. Love your posts.

boynextdoornews

Thanks for reading and your kind words. I'll be the first to say that I'm no graphics programmer, so I can't really say anything to the specifics and utilization of a specific feature. That said, I'll try to address your question the best I can. Generally, there are two core reasons that we don't utilize specific hardware features that we could potentially use:

First - it's usually because we're still supporting last-gen hardware that doesn't necessarily have this feature, so we need to be more careful about where we spend our performance optimization resources. Getting last-gen performant is a much bigger undertaking than getting current-gen performant. Spending a bunch of engineering time optimizing this feature that doesn't help our game on last-gen consoles would likely be better spent on finding optimizations that help across the board, especially if the last gen still has a lot of players. This particular reason phases out over time, as more and more last-gen players convert to the new generation, but it's a really big issue in the first two or three years after the launch of a new hardware generation.

Second - it's usually because not all of the hardware that we're targeting supports that particular feature. The PS3 had their special SPU Cell processors that nobody else had, which meant that any work done to optimize games to run on those Cell processors was totally wasted on the PC, X360, or Wii. This is totally fine if we're targeting PS3 as an exclusive title, but it's not very resource-efficient if we're aiming at the roughly 40/40/20 split between PS3/X360/PC that most multiplatform AAA games saw at the time.

You probably noticed that the calculus here is primarily "Will this effort translate to significant gain across all of our target platforms?" We only have so many graphics engineers (some of the most expensive and sought-after roles in the game industry!) and they only have so much time to work their magic. We try to ensure that whatever we task these folks with is the most efficient use of their limited time. That's the real answer - we only have so much time/resource to spend over the course of development, so we try to get the most we can out of what we have.

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