Console Performance - a resolution and frame rate database

[polynomial]

(Disclaimer: I wanted to PM a mod to make sure that posting this type of thread is acceptable, but unless I’m going mad I don’t have permission to send a private message to anybody? I can’t see any rules in the FAQ that posting this breaks, so hopefully it’s ok; if not, please do as you wish with it. I’ve lurked since the PS2 days if that counts for anything, I remember when Shifty Geezer had less than 10k posts)

As a result of threads like http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?p=1676919#post1676919 and the recent furore over next-gen (current-gen?) rendering resolutions, and as a web developer with some time to kill and wanting of a project, I have put together a small community driven database for console game resolutions and frame rates. I’m not industry affiliated in any way, so hopefully posting this here is acceptable.

www.consoleperformance.com

The site is now in a kind of open beta. The idea behind it broadly breaks down into two parts. Firstly, data such as publishers, developers, games and game versions are submitted by the community and then up-voted or down-voted. Up-voted data can then be added to the site by a moderator or admin. The aim of this part is to store accurate and objective details, reflecting much of the same information in the B3D thread above, but stored in a relational database rather than as flat data. The second part is the subjective one: game versions can have their ‘performance’ voted on with a simple grading system that aims to reflect the smoothness and responsiveness of gameplay for a specific version of a game.

If the idea catches on I can see lots of potential for the data in the future. Directly comparing individual game versions or even entire platforms is obvious, but things like graphs and statistics tracking how resolution and frame rate changed over a platform’s lifespan could also be interesting and would be trivial to generate. I think there is a lot of scope in the future to do interesting things, and of course having an easily searchable resource to find this information out in a pinch is always useful before making a purchase, especially for owners of multiple platforms.

Anyway, I’ve written too much already – why have I posted here? The site has been in gestation in my head for a month or so and some feedback would be fantastic, either negative or (hopefully) positive. I am also desperately in need of some help building up the database. Finding and verifying the information takes time and although I will continue it’d be great if the community got involved so it gets done more rapidly and I can switch back to doing more development.

Thanks for reading, thanks for looking and please consider replying, signing up to the site or contributing if the idea interests you!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Sadly, my only contribution for this endeavour of yours is to say that I think resolution counting makes little sense any more, as you've no doubt read from me before on this board. Games are made of lots of buffers at different resolutions. How do you count the singular resolution metric then? The pixel-counting of the front-buffer resolution is IMO misleading and I'm not particularly fond of the pursuit of these kind of metrics.

 

[polynomial]

Sadly, my only contribution for this endeavour of yours is to say that I think resolution counting makes little sense any more, as you've no doubt read from me before on this board. Games are made of lots of buffers at different resolutions. How do you count the singular resolution metric then? The pixel-counting of the front-buffer resolution is IMO misleading and I'm not particularly fond of the pursuit of these kind of metrics.

Thanks, I don't except the site to be for everyone and I'm not convinced I've created anything of value anyway. Granted, it is undoubtedly a simplification - the question I suppose is whether it is an over-simplification? In the site's defence it tracks more than just resolution and although the subjective parts store far more ambiguous data than the size of the front buffer I can still see usefulness even there.

For the average gamer who owns platforms A and B, do you think there is some merit to being able to see at a glance that a potential purchase runs at 1080p on platform A but is rated with average performance, but runs at 1600p with excellent performance on platform B? Even the choice of which to purchase in that case is subjective, but the aim is to combine the technical and subjective data into a more digestible form.

 

[Phil]

I just only had a quick glance, but have a suggestion that should be easy to implement:

When you type in a search, you seem to be comparing/searching for strings with spaces and/or symbols. As an example; Someone searching for "Kill Zone" will not find the game, as it's stored as "Killzone...".

To make the search bar more accessible, I'd add a simplification process to exclude all spaces, symbols and possible numbers and limit the search to lower cased letters in order to broaden the search and make it less [user] error prone.

 

[polynomial]

I just only had a quick glance, but have a suggestion that should be easy to implement:

When you type in a search, you seem to be comparing/searching for strings with spaces and/or symbols. As an example; Someone searching for "Kill Zone" will not find the game, as it's stored as "Killzone...".

To make the search bar more accessible, I'd add a simplification process to exclude all spaces, symbols and possible numbers and limit the search to lower cased letters in order to broaden the search and make it less [user] error prone.

Great suggestion, thank you. I just implemented a basic phonetic search which should side step the whole punctuation issue entirely while adding some other useful traits to the search engine. Even typos produce useful results now: searching for 'rise son of rome' returns 'Ryse: Son of Rome'.