Forza Horizon 5

[moosegrinder]

None of us are expecting any surprises though, right? We're not expecting the reinvention of the wheel or anything? I'm going in with the mindset of 4, but more of it and somewhere different. The only PITA is I have to uninstall 4 to fit it on the Series.

[Boothjan]

1 minute ago, moosegrinder said:

The only PITA is I have to uninstall 4 to fit it on the Series.

 

Yeah, likewise - it's ridiculous how few games fit on the internal and no way I'm forking out several hundred quid for an extra drive.

[MattyP]

10 minutes ago, moosegrinder said:

None of us are expecting any surprises though, right? We're not expecting the reinvention of the wheel or anything? I'm going in with the mindset of 4, but more of it and somewhere different. The only PITA is I have to uninstall 4 to fit it on the Series.

Indeed. It will be fun and something new to look forward to playing. But no surprises... at least it will run on my PC.

[MattyP]

9 minutes ago, Boothjan said:

 

Yeah, likewise - it's ridiculous how few games fit on the internal and no way I'm forking out several hundred quid for an extra drive.

MS are releasing a 512GB expansion for sub £140? Suppose getting hold of one maybe interesting though given the current state of everything at the moment.

[moosegrinder]

The 1tb often comes on offer for about 140. Amazon said mine was 'undeliverable' which means someone fucked up the dispatch or some cunt robbed it.

[Boothjan]

I still think that's a LOT of money for extra storage.  I've got a 5TB external that I just use to keep games I'm not currently playing regularly.  Not ideal but it'll do for now.

 

I've never actually loaded up a game from the external to play on my Series X - I'm guessing that if they're enhanced for SX, those features won't work unless it runs from the internal?

[moosegrinder]

Yeah anything that's an X/S game needs to run from the internal bar 1 or 2 exceptions.

[Boothjan]

I guess that's the one downside to Game Pass - I've usually got about 4-5 games I play regularly but that's usually enough to fill the internal, especially if they come in at over 100GB which the likes of Gears 5, Halo 5, Flight Simulator and FH4 currently are.

 

Almost done with Avengers so that's 100GB+ freed up.

 

First world problems and all that!

[Super Craig]

Hopefully it'll be like the Switch where the Micro SD prices came down to the point where it's not too bad in a year or two.

[5R7]

33 minutes ago, Boothjan said:

I still think that's a LOT of money for extra storage.  I've got a 5TB external that I just use to keep games I'm not currently playing regularly.  Not ideal but it'll do for now.

 

I've never actually loaded up a game from the external to play on my Series X - I'm guessing that if they're enhanced for SX, those features won't work unless it runs from the internal?

 

Its really not, in compartive terms to the same tech, it really is the actual price for drives of that spec and size in NVME gen4. 

And unlike sony, MS actually guarantee games installed on it will run the same as the internal drive.

And no, you cannot play X/S exclusive or (some) enhanced games from and external clunker/ext ssd.

 

But yeah, a cheap clunker can do for just storage of stuff not being played easily enough. Or an SSD with a usb cable will give you massive load speed benefits of bone games that you play direct from it.

[scoobysi]

Based on the DF video, part of the problem is the install size of the S and X version is the same. I assume the S version could be considerably smaller without the 4K textures?

[Boozy The Clown]

It was a 1 hour preview build not the final game. 

[Super Craig]

The full versions are out for preload. That's where the install sizes are coming from.

[BitterToad]

On 24/10/2021 at 12:01, scoobysi said:

Considering 30fps in a racer is madness when you have the choice.

See I'd normally completely agree but Forza Horizon 4 played really well at 30 on One X and the visual upgrade was sort of worth it. I'm on an S so will be going 1080/60 all the way for 5 but I thought the 30FPS mode was pretty good in 4. It's certainly not the Spiderman "you'd be mad to play it at 30 because the game is much much worse" I'd have thought it would be. 

[Shimmyhill]

7 hours ago, BitterToad said:

See I'd normally completely agree but Forza Horizon 4 played really well at 30 on One X and the visual upgrade was sort of worth it. I'm on an S so will be going 1080/60 all the way for 5 but I thought the 30FPS mode was pretty good in 4. It's certainly not the Spiderman "you'd be mad to play it at 30 because the game is much much worse" I'd have thought it would be. 

 

I had. To uninstall FH3 as its unplayable at 30fps even tho when it came out I played It on a one s and loved it, FH4 at 60fps ruined it for me so while DF are saying the 30fps in FH5 is magic they do still say it plays better at 60!

[moosegrinder]

Well it will be, but they also say the reason it plays so well at 30 is because of the reduced controller lag Playground have worked on implementing.

 

Tbh I've got no idea what they're talking about as I've never noticed anything like that 

[womblingfree]

19 hours ago, Super Craig said:

The full versions are out for preload. That's where the install sizes are coming from.

Woke up this morning to a 103GB “Update”. 

 

Monstrous!

[scoobysi]

1 minute ago, womblingfree said:

Woke up this morning to a 103GB “Update”. 

 

Monstrous!

Pre-load was worthwhile then!

[womblingfree]

2 minutes ago, scoobysi said:

Pre-load was worthwhile then!

Utterly pointless. 
 

Felt good at the time though.

[moosegrinder]

Don't preloads say "xxxgb" but then check how much of that you have already then add the rest?

[HarryBizzle]

Eurogamer did a recent series of articles on the environmental impact of digital games (and gaming in general), and long story short, I think I’m going to stop doing these preloads that are weeks in advance. You often have to replace or redownload huge portions of whatever it is you’ve downloaded and it’s just a complete waste of resources. It’s not just the server and bandwidth costs, but the cost of cooling data centres, etc. 

[RubberJohnny]

That sounds dumb, all those data centres are carbon-neutral, and the environmental cost is way less than with physical, I've just looked up that article and it spends an awful long time trying to avoid mentioning those.

[HarryBizzle]

40 minutes ago, RubberJohnny said:

That sounds dumb, all those data centres are carbon-neutral, and the environmental cost is way less than with physical, I've just looked up that article and it spends an awful long time trying to avoid mentioning those.

Me think you no read good. 
 

 

Quote

Should I buy games on disc, download games, or stream them?

 

Aslan's summary (which you can read in more detail on page 2 of our main article) is: it depends. There are three key variables at work. How big is the game in terms of gigabytes, how long do you want to play it for, and what device are you going to be playing it on?

 

Generally, discs are out - there's only one ultra-specific scenario (which already relies on all kinds of averages by necessity, given the natural scope of the study) - where disc-based gaming is more efficient.

 

Quote

Microsoft, which runs its own cloud services for Xbox, including Xbox Cloud Gaming, and has a partnership with Sony for usage of its Azure cloud services too, was cited as improving steadily, scoring B overall. Previously Microsoft had claimed that its data centres were already 100 percent renewably powered, but was in fact mostly relying on Renewable Energy Certificates for this rather than actual new renewable energy fed into the grid. The company then changed that to a more open approach that measures the amount of renewable energy directly powering its data centres. At the time, its new short-term target in 2016-2017 was to source 50 percent renewable power for its data centres by 2018.

…

 

In 2020, Microsoft, for instance, unveiled overall plans to be "carbon negative by 2030", acknowledging again that its use of RECs isn't enough. "This is an area where we're far better served by humility than pride," the company wrote. It'll achieve this, in part, by shifting to "100 percent supply of renewable energy" for all of its data centres, buildings and campuses by 2025, using power purchase agreements to source that energy. In order to be carbon negative by 2030, the company has promised to remove more carbon than it emits by using NETs (negative emissions technologies), "potentially including afforestation and reforestation, soil carbon sequestration, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCs), and direct air capture (DAC)." The company will also publish annual environmental sustainability reports - here's the first, 96-page report published in 2020.

They also cover how neither AWS nor Google’s data centres are 100% renewable, either. Not that it would make it any less pointless if they were. 

[RubberJohnny]

I mean I did read it, they bring up the one study about the environmental costs of discs and then completely avoid mentioning it's conclusions to focus on downloads vs streaming.

 

It really feels like it's just written as an anti-streaming piece but their main argument (environmentalism) affects discs way more and they're just ignoring that bit or pretending it's not relevant because it gets in the way.

[scoobysi]

1 hour ago, RubberJohnny said:

That sounds dumb, all those data centres are carbon-neutral, and the environmental cost is way less than with physical, I've just looked up that article and it spends an awful long time trying to avoid mentioning those.

What’s the point of millions of people downloading something just to download it again though? It’s an utter waste of resources, whether they claim it’s carbon neutral or not.

[HarryBizzle]

12 minutes ago, RubberJohnny said:

I mean I did read it, they bring up the one study about the environmental costs of discs and then completely avoid mentioning it's conclusions to focus on downloads vs streaming.

 

It really feels like it's just written as an anti-streaming piece but their main argument (environmentalism) affects discs way more and they're just ignoring that bit or pretending it's not relevant because it gets in the way.

They say that discs are almost never better. What more do you want? Did you even read the bit I quoted for you?

[deerokus]

A lot of physical copies just unlock a huge 50gb+ download anyway, especially anything which is smart delivery.

[MattyP]

Guessing physical is pretty much a waste of time these days.. as soon as its put onto disk its effectively out of date and will have a huge patch waiting for you. Didn't the Xbox do the odd thing of copying the whole disk over ("installing" it)) and then do a massive patch too? Gave up buying physical Xbox games on disks years ago waste of plastic. 

[Pob]

Physical discs are a red herring anyway, no-one was talking about that. They were talking about the waste of pre-loading a game, then having the full 100GB+ install updated prior to launch anyway.

[MattyP]

39 minutes ago, Pob said:

Physical discs are a red herring anyway, no-one was talking about that. They were talking about the waste of pre-loading a game, then having the full 100GB+ install updated prior to launch anyway.

And that is a waste of bandwidth too...  Not sure why they have to almost send the whole package down again for download when changes are made. Suppose its just easier and depends how the game deployment package is built. Crazy though. Everything these days seems to have huge patches it was quite an eyeopener the other week whilst messing around with my old 360 and a game patched... here we go I thought... 4MB and 5 seconds later I was playing.... Things were better in the old days...