How will Elite Dangerous use 'next-gen' gaming tech?

[TheSisko]

With the release of the next-gen consoles next year, we will have hardware assisted raytracing and SSDs which can be used to load datasets in on the fly (like Virtual RAM) as standard. Similar tech is of course, available for PC now and has been for some time, at a price - which will only reduce over time.

So, how can the game improve using this 'new' tech? Will for instance, we get rid of the transition from super-cruise to normal speed when gliding in towards a planetary surface? Will SSD read speeds help out here? Can the lighting be improved using hardware ray tracing?

Or am I hoping for too much? We still don't have HDR support, on any platform.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

What has ray-tracing to do with supercruise transition to thruster space?

 

[Rat Catcher]

With the release of the next-gen consoles next year, we will have hardware assisted raytracing and SSDs which can be used to load datasets in on the fly (like Virtual RAM) as standard. Similar tech is of course, available for PC now and has been for some time, at a price - which will only reduce over time.

So, how can the game improve using this 'new' tech? Will for instance, we get rid of the transition from super-cruise to normal speed when gliding in towards a planetary surface? Will SSD read speeds help out here? Can the lighting be improved using hardware ray tracing?

Or am I hoping for too much? We still don't have HDR support, on any platform.

The pessimistic part of me mutters that enhancing the graphics in the game will be a 'no-no' as the lowest common denominator of recommended hardware will be the baseline, and FDev are unlikely to make the gulf between platforms too deep... (not only consoles but minimum spec PC's also)

Otherwise I'd love to see lots of new 'shiny' bits added, but I did build my PC with gaming (and video creation) in mind so have plenty of 'horsepower' available to use

 

[Rubbernuke]

You'll see parity with PC graphics with the new consoles, with more elephant bum ripple shadows for the base console owners.

In short more options for the top end.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

We'll get high definition elephant butt leather. I'd love to see graphics in ED be brought in line with other console games.

 

[Mengy]

It depends on what the "New Era" is. If it is a rewrite of the game's core then they might be building it to utilize some modern graphics routines and capabilities too, things that are coming with the next gen consoles or DX12. If the New Era is just some new modules tacked onto the current game then it likely won't take any advantage of next gen stuff, and it would also assuredly break the game in a myriad of ways both new and old.

Without more info we can't tell anything unfortunately. So the answer is we don't know diddly squat.

 

[govny]

and SSDs which can be used to load datasets in on the fly (like Virtual RAM) as standard

I think for ED this features is usless. ED doesn't have many data to load, it is almost procedurally generated.

 

[Cosmo]

It depends on what the "New Era" is. If it is a rewrite of the game's core then they might be building it to utilize some modern graphics routines and capabilities too, things that are coming with the next gen consoles or DX12. If the New Era is just some new modules tacked onto the current game then it likely won't take any advantage of next gen stuff, and it would also assuredly break the game in a myriad of ways both new and old.

You make a lot of assumptions. By adding new graphics bells and whistles ED could fully utilize next-gen console hardware capabilities. This would only be available on the PS5, new Xbox and high end PCs.

 

[Jukelo]

The supercruise transitions are all to do with the network, not your local hardware. The delay is due to the matchmaker finding other players to match you with, and then for all the respective clients to handshake and sync data.
An SSD makes it marginally faster to load assets such as stations and ground bases, but it's not really noticeable and something the game could easily load in the background on the fly as you're approaching anyway even off a hard drive, and doesn't noticeably affect transitions.

 

[Dagwit]

My suspicion is that ice planets (and much of whatever else was supposed to come in 2018) were dropped because they couldn't get the effects they wanted to run at adequate speed on the current generation of consoles.

This suspicion was only intensified by a remark Dav Stott made on the recent 'Five Years of Elite' livestream: he said that the challenge of doing the burning stations was getting them to work on consoles.

There's also, of course the 'coincidence' of the New Era launch coinciding with the launch of the new generation of consoles; I suspect not only will the game run better on them, there may be some content at least that only runs on next-gen consoles and relatively powerful PCs.

As far as ray tracing is concerned, when I was doing research for buying a new computer I came across the following two comments, though I can't vouch for their being gospel:

The next-gen consoles would be no more powerful in ray-tracing terms than the current RTX cards;
The current RTX cards can deliver a ray-tracing solution of sorts, but not at the resolutions and framerates that gamers would like.

So if ray-tracing does appear in the New Era, I'd expect its use to be optional; Frontier won't want to disappoint those who want to run their consoles through a 4k TV at decent framerates.

The consoles are also said to be going to have memory management at a speed that will leave even top-end PCs far behind. But as to what that might mean for ED, I have no clue.

 

[Codger]

Honestly, I’m not expecting much of anything. A few new assets, maybe some QOL changes that break other stuff. Maybe a new type of mission or scenario that doesn’t really work very well.

You know, same thing we’ve been getting for years. Why would it change?

I’m happy with that, but I’m expecting much whinging here.

 

[avow555]

New tech means nothing as the game will need to still run on the base equipment.
I'd rather they worked on providing a much fuller game environment and actually implementing some very long awaited features.

 

[Vedmo]

I was hoping to find some info about bio-engineered hamsters in this thread...

 

[TheSisko]

Yes, I've got multi-quote to work properly! Great way to start the new year!

What has ray-tracing to do with supercruise transition to thruster space?

Erm, nothing? But the way I worded that I can see why you'd think I was implying it does.

The supercruise transitions are all to do with the network, not your local hardware. The delay is due to the matchmaker finding other players to match you with, and then for all the respective clients to handshake and sync data.

Even in Solo? No need for matchmaking there.

My suspicion is that ice planets (and much of whatever else was supposed to come in 2018) were dropped because they couldn't get the effects they wanted to run at adequate speed on the current generation of consoles.

This suspicion was only intensified by a remark Dav Stott made on the recent 'Five Years of Elite' livestream: he said that the challenge of doing the burning stations was getting them to work on consoles.

There's also, of course the 'coincidence' of the New Era launch coinciding with the launch of the new generation of consoles; I suspect not only will the game run better on them, there may be some content at least that only runs on next-gen consoles and relatively powerful PCs.

As far as ray tracing is concerned, when I was doing research for buying a new computer I came across the following two comments, though I can't vouch for their being gospel:

The next-gen consoles would be no more powerful in ray-tracing terms than the current RTX cards;
The current RTX cards can deliver a ray-tracing solution of sorts, but not at the resolutions and framerates that gamers would like.

So if ray-tracing does appear in the New Era, I'd expect its use to be optional; Frontier won't want to disappoint those who want to run their consoles through a 4k TV at decent framerates.

The consoles are also said to be going to have memory management at a speed that will leave even top-end PCs far behind. But as to what that might mean for ED, I have no clue.

I'm struggling to see what's there with burning stations that would have trouble running on fixed hardware to be honest. As a non-game developer I'd love to know.

As for ice planets/consoles....there are lots of games on consoles (especially first-party exclusives) that are doing a lot more with the hardware. Maybe its time for Frontier to use DX12 (and whatever equilvalnt the PS4/5 uses) in their Cobra Engine. If the graphical effects are an issue, they can scale them back or omitt them, its not been an issue on consoles for this and every other game out there which has also been released on PC.

I'd be surprised if Frontier delayed releasing the New Era for consoles. Surely PC is by far the biggest platform for this game and should take priority, and they certinaly didn't delay Horizions on PC until they got it working on the original Xbox One.

 

[TheSisko]

I was hoping to find some info about bio-engineered hamsters in this thread...

In time. All in good time.

 

[Barking_Mad]

The consoles are also said to be going to have memory management at a speed that will leave even top-end PCs far behind. But as to what that might mean for ED, I have no clue.

Had a conversation with some devs about this over Christmas (Unfortunately I was drunk so I don't remember the details!) but yes, the SSD speeds will make a massive difference for games that are dependent on it. The main concern was that the SSD wouldn't be large enough. I did try to glean more details of the specs but they were very hush, hush about it!

 

[Misty_Dark]

Even in Solo? No need for matchmaking there.

Yes, you are still getting your solo instance from the solo instance server.

That these servers are different from the multi-instance servers could easily be noticed back in the days when board hopping was a thing... As Open/PrivateGroup would frequently share the mission lists as you ended up on the same instance server, but they would never share the mission lists with solo.

 

[babelfisch]

New tech means nothing as the game will need to still run on the base equipment.
I'd rather they worked on providing a much fuller game environment and actually implementing some very long awaited features.

They changed the minimum requirements before. DirectX 11, 64 bit, better hardware. Next gen might be the perfect opportunity to improve graphics and technology and selling a few more copies for the new consoles. The question is what would happen to PS4 Xbone users? FDEV didn't support Horizons for Apple and older PCs, so I wouldn't be surprised when not all features of a new expansion will be available on the current generation. They might even drop support for it completely in 1 or 2 years.

 

[TheSisko]

They changed the minimum requirements before. DirectX 11, 64 bit, better hardware. Next gen might be the perfect opportunity to improve graphics and technology and selling a few more copies for the new consoles. The question is what would happen to PS4 Xbone users? FDEV didn't support Horizons for Apple and older PCs, so I wouldn't be surprised when not all features of a new expansion will be available on the current generation. They might even drop support for it completely in 1 or 2 years.

They would be fools to do that. The current install base for the original PS4 + XB1 is around 145 million. Not all of those console owners are going to upgrade to next-gen consoles, or have even upgraded to the mid-generation consoles (PS4 Pro/Xbox One X).

Are Frontier really going to say 'ta ta' to the majority of 145 million console owners? People keep suggesting that future features for Elite Dangerous won't be available on base consoles, yet 6 years into the game, not one original gameplay feature on PC has been omitted on console (and that's excluding third-party PC add-ons like recolouring the HUD).

 

[Darth Ender]

switch to vulkan and stop playing with this direct x nonsense.

make additional eye candy optional ( not available when not possible) Then players who can take advantage of it, can choose to and nobody has to be sad that their platform is being negatively impacted by eye candy they dont want or can't use.

A ton of effort and time and money went into VR and an obscenely small portion of the population plays with it. So it's not like there's not precedent for including features only a small subsection will be able to use. Things like raytracing which will be cross-manufacturer soon can be implementd to give laser beams and stars better lighting effects. etc etc.

But the most important thing is to convert the engine to vulkan and get away from .net 4.0 and move to .net core which is better supported in proton (since they seem unwilling to do a proper port to linux). My framerate in proton is not hitting below 11ms and it makes an otherwise seemless linux vr experience a bit less than optimal (something my hardware would otherwise have no issue with doing on a vive hmd and a 3900x and amd 5700xt setup)