It's the "before DLSS" that I took objection to.
Let me quote Richard Leadbetter from Digital Foundry in a recent video
The reason that these performance comparisons tend to go in circles is because, as the only Nvidia console, the sorts of comparisons that have worked for the last 20 years
just don't apply anymore.
TL;DR if you want to use some direct comparison between consoles, the NG gets stomped by the last gen pro consoles and all the current gen consoles. But that's ignoring NG's special technologies. If you include NG's special technologies, it fares much better but things like "As powerful as" or "50% of" become ridiculous statements that don't hold water anymore. Nintendo will be able to make first party games using those technologies that absolutely blow the last gen out of the water, while ports that seem "equivalent" need compromises.
Bad analogy: the Switch is a butter knife, the PS4 is a steak knife, the PS4 Pro is a chef's knife, and the NG is a steak knife plus a Vitamix high powered blender. If you're making salsa, the NG is the best set of tools. If you're carving a turkey, the PS4 Pro is.
Imagine you had a version of
Death Stranding for consoles that let you tweak the settings the same what that the PC does. You install it on PS4 Pro and NG. You make the settings match identically between the two, with the NG docked. The PS4 Pro will absolutely stomp all over the NG. It just will. The PS4 Pro will have better frame rates, and there will be some settings high enough where the PS4 Pro looks gorgeous, and is perfectly playable, and the NG is brought to its knees.
This is the traditional way of comparing the power of these machines. When we say "50% of a Series S" most people mean, and most people hear, something like this. "You will need to cut resolution by 50%
or frame rate by 50%, roughly, to get this game to run like the Series S visuals, and if that's not acceptable (because the res or frame rate would be unplayable low) you will need to make other kinds of setting cut as well, like turning off shadows, or reflections, or texture quality, or anti-aliasing."
But RTX technologies - the ones that are in the NG -
completely change this dynamic. Let's go back to our tweakable
Death Stranding for a second. Let's tweak our settings till we get a nice, steady 30fps on PS4 Pro. And for the sake of simplicity, let's assume that NG is getting 15fps.
Well, NG can do DLSS, an option that simply doesn't exist on PS4 Pro. Let's leave every other setting untouched, and add that. Boom, 30fps. Except the games are no longer pixel identical. DLSS looks different than PS4 Pro's checkerboarded 4k. Does it look worse? No. Does it look better - also no! There are chunks that are superior, like high detail foliage. There are places where it looks worse, like motion artifacts when an object moves quickly.
Digital Foundry has a whole 18 minute video comparing the two, but I think the differences are ultimately
subjective.
Does that mean the NG is as powerful as PS4 Pro? Because if you're using the traditional mindset, that's not true, and bad ports will certainly reflect that. But good ports will look
comparable. is that close enough to say "PS4 Pro docked?" Maybe? But it gets weirder.
Because obviously we've given NG the upper hand by letting it use modern upscaling, but not letting PS4 Pro. So what happens when you throw FSR2 in the mix? Well, if you just look at the numbers, like we used to, then PS4 Pro starts stomping again. But if you look at the image on screen, they suddenly look very different.
DLSS is a vastly superior upscaler. The pixel differences are suddenly much greater, and they'll
never match. Do I need to use less upscaling - and lower frame rate - with FSR to get it closer to DLSS? Well, depends on the game and how much I care about temporal stability versus high frequency detail versus frame rates. There will no longer be one consistent answer. And this applies to
every console comparison currently. Series S, even Series X and PS5 will simply be facing a whole different set of trade offs.
And all of this is just replicated again with Ray Tracing! Hardware ray tracing is a feature the PS4 Pro doesn't have at all. How do I talk about "well the PS4 Pro version runs 60fps, but the NG version has ray traced shadows." Which is more powerful? It's kind of a meaningless question at that point, and it's about preference, and what the developers are choosing to do with the hardware.
And there is
yet another complication to this whole situation
the PS4 Pro and the Series S have never, and will never be used to their full potential in a game. The PS4 Pro, by licensing agreement with Sony, will never have an exclusive. The Series S, for the same reason with Microsoft, will never have an exclusive.
This is why I can confidently say that "PS 4 Pro like games will be the expectation" - because all those experiences are also possible on PS4, and all PS4 Pro got, for the most part, was resolution increases, something DLSS can do handily. Any halfway decent PS4 Pro port should match resolution, frame rate, and settings on NG.
In the case of the Series S, it is only receiving cut down Series X games. That puts it in a wildly different place. There will be some games where cutting them down to the Series S's size pushed the engineering to the limits, and DLSS isn't powerful enough on it's own to close that gap.
Starfield is likely in that boat. On the other hand, you have games like
Control, where Ray Tracing is disabled on Series S, but might be possible on NG. "50% of a Series S" is suddenly an insane sentence, it doesn't describe anything actually happening in reality.
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