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Discussing Next Gen Hardware, Cross-Platform Struggles, and GDC with a Game Developer (Patreon)

Published:
2024-03-29 20:55:42
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

The next episode of Broken Silicon will see us be joined by a Veteran of the Video Games Industry who has had experience working on major franchises like Saints Row, The Elder Scrolls, Lego Racers, and Mortal Kombat. He is somebody that self-describes himself as "The guy people go to when something is broken and nobody else can fix it".

He has spent time working on games for PC, N64, and basically all XBOX and PlayStation consoles between the PS1 and XBOX 360 eras. He has a ton of "war stories" about developing for all of these different pieces of hardware, what the strengths (and weaknesses) truly are between various consoles, and he just got back from GDC where he got the opinions of many other Game Devs about recent hardware developments!

Needless to say, you can ask this guy anything regarding any consoles, game development, and upcoming AMD/Intel/Nvidia hardware! This episode will be heavily steered by you submissions, and you have until the end of Sunday to submit them! Be concise, use good grammar, and be respectful to have your submissions below considered for the show!

https://www.mobygames.com/person/16255/hal-bouma/credits/

Comments

Prior is the theme 999

Hello guest, as someone who worked on the saints row series what are your opinions on how it unfortunately turned out?

Mark Smith

Have multi-platform games diminished a game developer's ability to tap into the "secret sauce" of particular hardware?

Prior is the theme 999

What exactly do people come to you to fix? Are you a jack of all trades that can fix code, animations, or find that one plant that is taking up too much memory because of where it’s placed?

Prior is the theme 999

In your opinion what did Sony get right coming into the new generation that Microsoft didn’t. How can Microsoft turn the ship or have we as a whole not given them enough time yet?

Kinihun25

Hey Tom and Guest, I really would want to get your opinion on modern games. I feel that the majority of games being released now were as good as games released between 1998-2012. I am a 90s kid so it could be just blamed on Nostalgia and the fact that I am growing older but my Uncle who was in his 30s in the 90s would agree that games just don't feel as fun as they were. Can you explain why that is the best way you can or are we just imagining it?

Prior is the theme 999

What was the most challenging system you had to develop for? And what was the best?

thanos AIAS

Could the future PC architecture compete with a 32 GB PS6 APU and the SSD streaming directly to the GPU?

SaltyInternetPirate

Hello, Hal. What is your most hated software stack to work with? I don't mean just the language, but also version control, libraries and general ecosystem or lack thereof.

CompressedAIBlocks

Hey Tom and Hal. What do you think the weakest point of current consoles is? They have alright CPUs and GPUs, and very fast I/O, custom audio etc but I still find besides maybe Sony first party studios you get a lot of games in the 1080p-1440p that struggle to maintain 60 FPS, which isn't a high frame rate or high resolution targets anymore. Some games, such as FF16, even drop to as low as 720p on the PS5. Is this due to a weakness in hardware design, software issues (like game engines and/or APIs) or is this because of the developers themselves?

CompressedAIBlocks

Hal. What has been your favourite franchise/IP to work on?

Prior is the theme 999

As a developer, how true or close are we to the statement that periodically floats around that FSR will be the industry standard, the same way free sync inevitably beat out g sync. I don’t see it happening anytime soon but people believe it will since it can be supported everywhere and mobile is in the works too apparently.

CompressedAIBlocks

Hal. What are your fellow developers thoughts on a PS5 Pro with specs that are seemingly very tame in comparison to the previous mid gen upgrades?

Cleansweep

What were the technologies/systems that game developers at this year's GDC excited for, and what were the ones they were NOT excited for? And was there any overlap between them?

Prior is the theme 999

How challenging has it been to accommodate the Series S knowing that it is THE Xbox console of this generation. Honestly how do you think GTA 6 will run on it.

QuickJumper

Hello guest and Tom. Can you compare based on what Nvidia released so far the chiplet technology behind Blackwell and MI300, possibly MI400 if Tom has more info. How do their approaches compare and who's more behind and why in your opinion? (If anyone from comment section also knows about this topic please reply to my comment)

CompressedAIBlocks

Hal. As someone who works in the game development field what are your thoughts on emulation? Obviously we've seen a lot of Nintendo in the news because of the Switch and 3DS emulators. Do you share this opinion with them or do you think they're a necessity for game preservation?

Cleansweep

Of all the consoles you worked on, which one had the most interesting pipeline/dev kit to work with?

Travis Gooding

Is AMD betting on Sony with the PS5 Pro to get developers to start properly optimizing and utilizing Dual issue VOPD instructions?. I feel like there’s a LOT of potential performance sitting on the table that’s just waiting to be utilized. It’s felt like AMD always ships hardware before software support. Intel ARC has tons of Teraflops but their initial 3d mark benchmarks were based off hand optimized custom shaders which is why the actual performance of the cards is drastically different compared to the ~3070ti level performance people expected. I’ve heard Nvidia has been Scalar since Turing, but doesn’t Ampere have dual dispatch or is that a more limited implementation than from what they tried to do with Kepler.

TwistedRancor

What's the weirdest hardware or driver bug that you had to work around?

Hugo Ander Kivi

How difficult is it to make cross platform games and what challenges have you faced in regards to that?

Deadeyes

I'd like to see if your guest has anything to add about why texture filtering is almost universally very low quality in console games despite the current generation being so similar to PCs where 16x anisotropic is basically free.

Leeroyer

Hi Tom and guest, Consoles used to differentiate a lot from PC, back then playing video games, until the PS3 era, was a vastly different experience, e.g platform games were a massive genre in consoles, on PC FPS, first-person shooters not frames/sec and RTS were the main hits, not even mentioning the console's exclusives, now they merged to a very similar path/experience apart from Nintendo. What do you think led to this trend? Do you think this trend will persist? Do you think it was because of how different those 2 worlds were regarding the hardware approach for each platform or do you think it was something else? Thank you!

Leeroyer

Hi guest, I'm a mobile game developer and to deal with the limited resources available like RAM size we need to get creative sometimes, can you tell us how hard or tricky was to deal with developing a game for a system like N64 or the OG PlayStation? How did their specs compare to the regular "gaming" PC back then in terms of CPU and graphics horsepower and RAM?

Leeroyer

Hi guest do you think having ray tracing hardware support is kind of similar to when we started having T&L, Transform and Lighting, hardware support with the Nvidia Gerforce 256 back in 1999? I still remember when I tried to play GTA 3 or VIce City, I can't 100% remember, on my old Radeon 8500 back then but I couldn't because my GPU lacked hardware T&L support, do you see that happening now? Like in a year or two every game requiring hardware raytracing support? Do you see a similarity in those 2 scenarios? How long do you think AMD will still be behind Nvidia in this regard, I remember when Tesselation was introduced AMD struggled a bit until they caught up.

Lucas

Hi guys, do you think there is any chance of the Switch 2 getting an upgrade in internal storage? Even if it is just an empty slot and I can pop in an m.2 myself, the cartridges and MicroSD are way too slow to require a dedicated decompression block.

QuickJumper

Hey guest and Tom which hardware in your opinion was best and worst for it's time and why? Try to compare the hardware to hardware of the pc's in that time for better context.

10GHz Netburst

The move to temporal AA and supersampling has caused a lot of recent games to be less sharp visually and has introduced a lot of ghosting artifacts as well, this appears to be particularly noticeable in UE5 games from smaller studios, but it's also quite apparent in the likes of Cyberpunk. What is the role of game Devs in optimising these temporal features and what are the feelings on the dev side about the tradeoffs these solutions make?

Chris Rijk

If you were in charge of setting the specifications for the PS5 Pro, what would you have done differently and why? (feel free to treat the below as a follow-on or as separate question, whichever works best) If you were in charge of setting the specifications for the “Vita 2” or whatever the upcoming PlayStation portable will be called, what would you do and why?

Chris Rijk

Let’s say you were starting a new game development company - would you create your own game engine or use a third party one? If you think that using a third party game engine would be better, why do you think so many companies continue to use their own custom game engine? Do you think it would be better for the industry to consolidate down to a smaller number of game engines?

Chris Rijk

Do you think the current generation Xbox could have matched the PS5 in sales with a better hardware design or do you think the gap is more down to other factors? Do you think better software for the console itself or better developer tools could have made a big difference?

Chris Rijk

What do you think are the right lessons to take from the success of Helldivers 2? What do you think are the wrong lessons? On a side note, I’ve seen a lot of players and reviewers say that the lack of predatory monetization tactics caught them by surprise and made them realise just how bad it has gotten. Going forwards, perhaps gamers will be much less forgiving of such predatory tactics from new games.

Christian Visconti

Hi guest, what do you forsee that will come in the next 5/10 years in games/computer technology that will revolutionise hardware requirement in PC,consoles, handhelds and games in general?