Dirt 5 Technical Director David Springate was recently featured in a two-hour-long GameOnDaily live stream about the launch of next-gen consoles. During the lengthy conversation, the developer revealed that the racing game recently released by Codemasters (now about to be acquired by Take-Two Interactive) will get an overhaul of the PS5 haptics.
I’ve seen a lot of people say ‘I want to pick up Dirt 5 on PS5 because of the haptics. It’s really interesting to me because I’ve seen a lot of people I hang out with on various forums, and I hang out in the Dirt 5 Discord…I’ve seen a lot of people say they really like the PS5 haptics. We’re not happy with it, so we’re going to be revisiting our haptics, even though I’ve not seen anybody say I hate the haptics in Dirt 5, we are not happy with it so we’re going to go back and redo it.
This is interesting because Springate had previously praised the PS5 haptics featured in the DualSense controller. It looks like he realized that what went into the shipped game could be way better, and it’s definitely good news for PlayStation 5 gamers as they’ll get an even better handling experience once this is added to Dirt 5 via a future update.
The conversation then veered off towards Xbox Series X and whether Dirt 5 could receive further improvements thanks to the optimization of the so-called Velocity Architecture. Springate claimed to have done tests that show getting 10 GB in two seconds of raw I/O throughput and said the Xbox Series X could possibly do better than that.
We look at all of these things all of the time. I can’t promise which stuff is going to come in future patches, because we have to balance loads of different things, but it might. That’s the best I can do. In terms of fast storage on Series X, I think that hardware is great, I worked on it with Microsoft early on and provided some feedback to them. I looked at the speed that we could get from it, you can get 10GB in two seconds in my personal early tests, it may well be able to do way better than that.
And that was without the compression in the hardware, that was just raw.
When asked why Microsoft would advertise the lower 2.5GB/s figure for raw I/O throughput, he explained that’s without optimizing for fast storage.
The way to get the most out of fast storage on all platforms is to make many requests at once. You want to load five hundred textures, forget loading one texture, you want to load them all. That then gives some challenges to how you lay out your data. You need to know where they’re going to go in memory, you need to know what is it you need before you ask for it. That’s a challenge, it’s not hardware, it’s not the API from Microsoft or Sony, it’s an engineering challenge. We’re very close, we’ve done loads of testing, it’s not something I’m gonna come to saying it’ll come in a patch but it’s something I’m very interested in personally.
To read our Dirt 5 review, jump here.