[Allegedly Leaked]Battlefield 4 Sticks 720P/60 FPS on Next-Gen Consoles

[DJ12]

Why then are publishers allowed to release their games only on 360 or ps3 as surely that is an unfair business practice too?

I doubt its the case ms and ea have such a deal, but I cannot see it lasting if there is one. Soon as ps4 hits 10 million and those users start picking up pro evo rather than fifa because it looks far better ea will stop doing it.

At the end of the day its all about money. If there are no used games on the Xbox ea's bean count predictors will see more money in that platform, when these bean counters see otherwise things will change.

(Of course this post is on the assumption there is a noticable power difference)

 

[Cjail]

Why then are publishers allowed to release their games only on 360 or ps3 as surely that is an unfair business practice too?

What do you mean?
Publishers are allowed to release games wherever they choose (PC, consoles, android devices, etc..)
Deals of exclusivity and agreements can be made to ensure that X titles form X publisher will come on X machine but it's not like EA is only allowed to release a game on PS3 or 360: they release games on PS3 & 360 because the money is there.

If MS agrees with EA/DICE to hod back the PS4 version of BF 4 then it's a clear case of unfair business practice.

 

[London Geezer]

Why then are publishers allowed to release their games only on 360 or ps3 as surely that is an unfair business practice too?

I doubt its the case ms and ea have such a deal, but I cannot see it lasting if there is one. Soon as ps4 hits 10 million and those users start picking up pro evo rather than fifa because it looks far better ea will stop doing it.

At the end of the day its all about money. If there are no used games on the Xbox ea's bean count predictors will see more money in that platform, when these bean counters see otherwise things will change.

(Of course this post is on the assumption there is a noticable power difference)

It's all about competition laws. EA can decide whether to release a title on each console (no one will ever 'force' them to release on both, it will always be their decision). However if they do decide to release on both platforms, any clue that EA had a deal with either party as a way to make the other port look bad, could be used as evidence.

That is of course a very blurred line, since bad ports are usually bad ports for completely different reasons (lack of time, lack of system resources etc). So proving that MS and EA agreed to make the PS4 version look bad would take a lot - pretty much real evidence that the deal actually happened.

These days i'd be very, very surprised if any of these companies had any interest in getting into this sort of practice. It's better to have a deal with EA to release 'exclusive content' on each platform, which would not constitute unfair business practice.

 

[DJ12]

No one suggested they would make a version worse than the other just one that could be better wasn't.

I doubt ea not making the ps4 version 1080p (if that is what the power difference allows) is going to be seen as an unfair business practice

 

[Rangers]

i have seen fanboys on youtube claim the the reason multiplatforms arent better on ps3 is because ms wont allow it.

so yes, plenty of delusion.

 

[welshrat]

No one suggested they would make a version worse than the other just one that could be better wasn't.

I doubt ea not making the ps4 version 1080p (if that is what the power difference allows) is going to be seen as an unfair business practice

Agreed, and it was only a thought (probably a stupid one at that), but I doubt making the game equal across both would be seen as unfair business practice. I was simply speculating based on the rumor of the 1.2tf GPU and the supposed agreement between EA and Microsoft.

 

[Hecatoncheires]

This is what Timothy Lottes of Nvidia said about the rumored PS4 specs (with only 4GiB of GDDR5 back then):

"I think some developers could hit 1080p@60fps with the rumored Orbis specs even with good AA. (...) Ultimately on Orbis I guess devs target 1080p/30fps (with some motion blur) and leverage the lower latency OS stack and scan out at 60fps (double scan frames) to provide a really great lower-latency experience." Source

How likely will we see this double scanning method in next gen games? The PS4 ist rumored to have a Display ScanOut Engine. Can this fixed function accelerator be connected with what Lottes described in his blog?

 

[milk]

For this generation most publishers were averse to having their games perform significantly better on one plataform versus the other for market reasons. It's been noticed that when one platform significantly outperforms the other graphic or performance wise, the total sales of the game suffer. Its best to cap it to the lowest common denominator and have better sales at the cost of one or two visial effects here and there. It becomes even worse when both platforms have their share of trade-offs that are very obvious like Much lower Res shadows on PS3 but much better post processing, in cases like this the games just sells less across the board. Yet, devs thirst for improving their game's visuals despite those limitations has been astounding. Reaching the level of parity they have up to now on this gen is not a trivial acomplishment, those systems have vey different strenghts and weaknesses and making games look as similar as they do now with comparable framerates and resolution is nothing short of amazing, it costed a lot of time and effort and wasn't just like "ops, they look the same, how nice". I don't know if the same will stand with durango and ps4 if durango is much less performant. I'd guess if the gap is too long then no, but I won't be surprised if many games end up looking the same on both platforms. Probably will happen with multiple high profile games at least on the beggining of the gen just to say on the safe side.

 

[Davros]

what are "double scan frames" (i did google)

 

[Hecatoncheires]

what are "double scan frames" (i did google)

I don't know, that's why I'm asking.

I only found this article written by Richard Leadbetter but I'm not sure if he and Lottes are talking about the same thing.

 

[Averagejoe]

Is it possible that there is indeed some agreement between EA and Microsoft and DICE cannot be seen to do a 1080p game on PS4 when Durango GPU is only 1.2TF and cannot manage the same ? Pure speculation on my part but surely the resolution is GPU limited and not CPU.

MS demanded parity on 360 on their agreement..

It would not be far off if something like that happen again and actually some developers byte for it..

Killzone 4 already is running at 1080p 30 FPS.

 

[Butta]

I'm surprised that they didn't go to some in between resolution such as 1280x1080? This would have no doubt improved image quality. Through in some FXAA or something and I think people would have been more accepting of this than 720P.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Killzone 4 already is running at 1080p 30 FPS.

Just so you realize 30FPS is not 60FPS.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

But again, your explanation is to extreme in my opinion and that is what I try to explain to you. The difference of needed computing resources to get 720 or 1080 is imo not that large that one version of the game would look like 'pong' and the other like 'avatar'.

It is 2.25x the pixels. While going to extremes isn't going to happen (Pong <-> Avatar) there is going to have to be some compromises made. You'd have to either reduce the FPS in order to match the visuals or significantly cut down the visuals to maintain the FPS.

Look at this for example. I hate bringing up the same link over and over again, but it does drive home the point.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5625/...-7850-review-rounding-out-southern-islands/11

Just going from 1920x1200 to 1680x1050 with a Radeon 7850 gives you an increase in FPS of ~25%. Or to put it another way. You lost ~20% FPS by increasing pixel count by ~31%.

If they had benchmarked BF3 at 720p on that system it likely would have been around 100 FPS.

So, if anything, this should indicate that BF4 on PS4 should look absolutely amazing at 720p/60. There's a good chance it might actually be able to match PC visuals at that resolution, whereas at 1080p there was going to have to be some significant compromises made in terms of what features to cut in order to make it run at 1080p/60.

Regards,
SB

 

[Silent_Buddha]

MS demanded parity on 360 on their agreement..

I'd imagine both companies "encouraged" (neither company demanded) parity. The most recent example was Aliens: Colonial Marines. Where if you followed the soap opera of what happened to the PC version, it came to light that it was so castrated due to performance limitations of the PS3 and that to maintain parity of platforms the final game had to be limited to what could be done on PS3.

Apparently they recently released a 4 GB patch that should restore some of the graphical features that had to be cut from the PC version.

Regards,
SB

 

[Orion]

i have seen fanboys on youtube claim the the reason multiplatforms arent better on ps3 is because ms wont allow it.

so yes, plenty of delusion.

on neogaf some members claimed ms has an official policy that they won't allow a worse version of a game to be released on their console.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Why are those members to be believed?

 

[DJ12]

Because they're saying stuff 'we' want to believe god damn it. (which is true for everything stolen from neogaf that is posted here)

 

[Orion]

Why are those members to be believed?

right here a member just said microsoft demanded parity. So I assume they're getting their info from somewhere.

 

[AlphaWolf]

right here a member just said microsoft demanded parity. So I assume they're getting their info from somewhere.

People say lots of things. They could be getting their info from their rectum.