Current Generation Games Analysis Technical Discussion [2023] [XBSX|S, PS5, PC]

[BitByte]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1716684986303033715

Talk about being disconnected from reality. It’s almost as if economic factors aren’t considered when making such irresponsible statements.

Firstly, this is 2023 not 2007. Using the 3 year gap indicated, the difference a 3070 and 4070 is not large(20%), neither is the difference between the lower tier cards. The generational price performance between the x80 series is basically negative. Yet somehow going from a 3070 to 4070 takes you from 540p medium to 1080p high in a traditional raster? Like already, that’s ridiculous.

The uproar regarding the drop of older cards is not coming because people don’t want to upgrade. It’s coming due to ridiculous pricing and serious greedflation in the GPU space. Furthermore, the GPUs from just 3 years ago have been rendered borderline unplayable. 540p60fps is borderline unplayable. If you look at the available upgrades at a sensible price, ie the 4060,6700xt, etc, you’ll get an unplayable experience in this game. So to play at 1080p 60fps, you need to spend $500 to $600 if you own a GPU that’s equivalent to a 3070 or worse.

Also for a game where you slow walk through wide corridors and engage in clunky combat, the lack of scalability is laughable. The cherry on top is that for the scope of the game, the graphics are really not special at all.

Finally, it’s hypocritical to make this argument when earlier in the year, he was arguing about the “unjustifed” vram requirements in TLOU remastered. It reeks strongly of hypocrisy. If the developers could provide scalability in that game, Remedy could have done it here.

 

[Scott_Arm]

NVIDIA just published the performance numbers for Alan Wake 2 with max Path Tracing, at native 4K the 4090 can do 30fps. With DLSS3.5 it can do 134fps. Even a 4060Ti can run this game fine at native 1080p.

NVIDIA Reveals Alan Wake 2 Game Performance: 4K 120+ FPS With GeForce RTX 4090 With DLSS 3.5 & Path Tracing

NVIDIA has published first GeForce RTX 40 GPU performance numbers of Alan Wake 2 which features full path tracing & support for DLSS 3.5.

wccftech.com

wccftech bothers the hell out of me. They never seem to link back to sources. Was this info given to them or does it come from an nvidia published article?

 

[troyan]

So, nVidia claims that a 4090 gets 89 FPS in 1080p with Pathtracing. Fort Solis, another 3rd person shooter, gets only ~87 FPS in 1080p: https://www.dsogaming.com/pc-performance-analyses/fort-solis-pc-performance-analysis/

Still someone here who thinks that UE5 is not totally unoptimized for a modern nVidia GPU? How it is possible that real time Pathtracing is as fast as a rasterizing engine?!

/edit: Here is Starfield in 1080p on a 4090: https://www.dsogaming.com/pc-performance-analyses/starfield-pc-performance-analysis/

87 FPS. We are now at a point in which unoptimized rasterizing engines get beaten by a Pathtracing engine. Dont know what is more impressive: Lovelace and nVidia's software stack or the game industry releasing these engines and games...

 

[Scott_Arm]

@troyan Are those worst case in all three, average or best case? What exactly are you comparing?

 

[ILikeFeet]

wccftech bothers the hell out of me. They never seem to link back to sources. Was this info given to them or does it come from an nvidia published article?

Alan Wake 2 Launches October 27th With Full Ray Tracing & DLSS 3.5: Get The Ultimate Experience On GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs

Also, DLSS 2 is now available in Ikonei Island: An Earthlock Adventure, and Shadows of Doubt.

www.nvidia.com

 

[Liandry]

NVIDIA just published the performance numbers for Alan Wake 2 with max Path Tracing, at native 4K the 4090 can do 30fps.

To be honest AW2 doesn't look like game what should use so much power.

Even a 4060Ti can run this game fine at native 1080p.

This sounds like a joke.

 

[dobwal]

nevermind

 

[Scott_Arm]

When Cyberpunk came out I don’t remember people being hyper concerned about how it would run on a seven-year-old rtx 780.

Gpu pricing has definitely changed people’s expectations. Unfortunately not every game is going to target low end hardware. A game like Alan Wake wouldn’t scale down art-wise. At some point if you compromise the rendered environment you compromise the whole experience. Pc gaming is unfortunately going to be an expensive hobby relative to the current generation of consoles.

 

[troyan]

@Scott_Arm
i just used the numbers from DSOG. Dont think they benched in a fight or use worst case scenes.

 

[RobertR1]

When Cyberpunk came out I don’t remember people being hyper concerned about how it would run on a seven-year-old rtx 780.

Gpu pricing has definitely changed people’s expectations. Unfortunately not every game is going to target low end hardware. A game like Alan Wake wouldn’t scale down art-wise. At some point if you compromise the rendered environment you compromise the whole experience. Pc gaming is unfortunately going to be an expensive hobby relative to the current generation of consoles.

Having been a fan of both for decades the cost to performance ratio factor has always favored the consoles until the very end of the generation when they’re just heavily dated. So this is nothing new. It’s the same stuff each gen.

New consoles get launched, PC gaming cost to performance ratio drops dramatically, queue pc gaming dead chants. Etc

 

[arandomguy]

Having been a fan of both for decades the cost to performance ratio factor has always favored the consoles until the very end of the generation when they’re just heavily dated. So this is nothing new. It’s the same stuff each gen.

New consoles get launched, PC gaming cost to performance ratio drops dramatically, queue pc gaming dead chants. Etc

I don't feel the trajectory this generation is comparable to the past. The rate of price scaling in terms of value has really cratered on the consumer side and the price of entry for console+ gaming on the PC side has gone up.

Last gen consoles debuted in Nov 2013 at $400 (really for both, Xbox had the Kinect). We had essentially well beyond console GPUs with no compromise just 1 year later with the GTX 970/R9 390 at $330 for both. The RX 480 used in the PS4 Pro was launched in June 2016 (slightly under 3 years), even the 8GB version was just $240. The GTX 1060 6GB came out in July at $250. If you're wondering about the consoles price trajectory the PS4 Slim was $300 MSRP and $250 with Black Friday sales for 2016.

What about even prior to that? 8800GT was launched Oct 2007 at $250 which was well beyond the Nov 2005 and Nov 2006 consoles in both capability and performance (maybe 2x if not more).

Current generation consoles launched in Nov 2020 and so we just now approaching the 3 year mark. What are equivalents to the above GPUs releative to the consoles? There's no thing remotely close in terms of the value perspective. Even worse is while we can argue whether or not it should be the case but the relaity is that the memroy staganation and cost of entry of 8GB+ GPUs does both limit the selection and/or raise cost just to tmake sure there is no compromise against the consoles.

Yes the consoles have also not dropped in pricing either but $450 (PS5 Slim price) in the PC space is not buying you a GTX 1060 and RX 480 equivalent, and you won't even be getting console matching GPUs below $450 (outside of the outgoing 6700 XT clearances cases).

 

[metacore]

With much higher power consumption on top off that. Delta beetween typical high end rigs and consoles has grown too. Playing few hours everyday and after a year, such diffrence in power consumption consumption could net you price of console subscryption.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Yes the consoles have also not dropped in pricing either but $450 (PS5 Slim price) in the PC space is not buying you a GTX 1060 and RX 480 equivalent, and you won't even be getting console matching GPUs below $450 (outside of the outgoing 6700 XT clearances cases).

Under $450, yeah. The 4060, especially when you consider DLSS, is definitely comparable to the consoles in power at $300...if it only weren't for that damn vram limitation, which means you will be running lower quality textures than the console ports in several games. If the entry point was 12GB, then the situation would be far better.

$500 things look quite a bit better with cards like the 7800XT (and where the 4070 should be priced). But definitely 3 years in, I agree this generally not just 'more of the same' as in the past 2 gens, the stipulation though is that things on the AI front, such as image reconstruction with DLSS and ray tracing/DLSS3/the potential of ray reconstruction, gives the PC an advantage you can't just measure in terms of rasterized framerates. But the advantages those bring are still limited to a handful of games so far, at least where they're that pronounced.

 

[arandomguy]

Under $450, yeah. The 4060, especially when you consider DLSS, is definitely comparable to the consoles in power at $300...if it only weren't for that damn vram limitation, which means you will be running lower quality textures than the console ports in several games. If the entry point was 12GB, then the situation would be far better.

$500 things look quite a bit better with cards like the 7800XT (and where the 4070 should be priced). But definitely 3 years in, I agree this generally not just 'more of the same' as in the past 2 gens, the stipulation though is that things on the AI front, such as image reconstruction with DLSS and ray tracing/DLSS3/the potential of ray reconstruction, gives the PC an advantage you can't just measure in terms of rasterized framerates. But the advantages those bring are still limited to a handful of games so far, at least where they're that pronounced.

GPU configuration is for sure playing apart into this along with the lack of memory density scaling.

I do wonder with AD106 a what if in terms of a 192-bit bus with 3 GPCs at x10 SMs without the cache increase (as 18 Gbps would still give 20% more bandwidth over RTX 3060). Without the margin/inventory pressure issue (due to mining over stock) if that would've been priced at $330 (slightly cut) if we could still get 25%+ over RTX 3060 with new features that would be a much lower price barrier of entry on the PC side.

But conspiracy wise I do wonder how much opportunity cost played into product decisions for this gen. Maxwell and Pascal and others had an opportunity cost last gen in terms of being "good enough" for too cheap and too early.

 

[GhostofWar]

With much higher power consumption on top off that. Delta beetween typical high end rigs and consoles has grown too. Playing few hours everyday and after a year, such diffrence in power consumption consumption could net you price of console subscryption.

This isn't actually true if your comparing like for like, yes you can suck down more power when shooting for the moon but for example i've been playing lies of p lately max settings at 1440p with a frame cap at 90fps on a 4090 system and the power draw for the gpu is 110w and the cpu is topping out at 90w. If we include whatever else the rest of the system is using it wouldn't be over 240w and this is at settings slightly above console and 50% higher framerate.

 

[pjbliverpool]

With much higher power consumption on top off that. Delta beetween typical high end rigs and consoles has grown too. Playing few hours everyday and after a year, such diffrence in power consumption consumption could net you price of console subscryption.

There are many total cost of ownership factors to be considered with this just being one of them. Certainly the price of new hardware is higher on the PC. But total cost of ownership if measured over time on the basis of upgrade costs and including subscriptions, game costs, additional capabilities etc... still isn't wildly different.

For me it's the breadth of games and experiences that is the true differentiating factor of PC gaming these days, over and above the potential performance advantages.

 

[Nesh]

Talk about being disconnected from reality. It’s almost as if economic factors aren’t considered when making such irresponsible statements.

Firstly, this is 2023 not 2007. Using the 3 year gap indicated, the difference a 3070 and 4070 is not large(20%), neither is the difference between the lower tier cards. The generational price performance between the x80 series is basically negative. Yet somehow going from a 3070 to 4070 takes you from 540p medium to 1080p high in a traditional raster? Like already, that’s ridiculous.

The uproar regarding the drop of older cards is not coming because people don’t want to upgrade. It’s coming due to ridiculous pricing and serious greedflation in the GPU space. Furthermore, the GPUs from just 3 years ago have been rendered borderline unplayable. 540p60fps is borderline unplayable. If you look at the available upgrades at a sensible price, ie the 4060,6700xt, etc, you’ll get an unplayable experience in this game. So to play at 1080p 60fps, you need to spend $500 to $600 if you own a GPU that’s equivalent to a 3070 or worse.

Also for a game where you slow walk through wide corridors and engage in clunky combat, the lack of scalability is laughable. The cherry on top is that for the scope of the game, the graphics are really not special at all.

Finally, it’s hypocritical to make this argument when earlier in the year, he was arguing about the “unjustifed” vram requirements in TLOU remastered. It reeks strongly of hypocrisy. If the developers could provide scalability in that game, Remedy could have done it here.

I don't get the complains about consoles being the problem for PC gamers. Supporting consoles for prolonged periods means support for a wider range of GPUs for prolonged periods as well, than just the higher end, plus the high end can enjoy significantly higher performance too (assuming the devs optimize their games well for PC).

Usually the PC gamers that face the biggest problem is when a GPU manufacturer comes up with a new line of (generational leap) GPUs with new features, and all games take advantage of those, thus making their old GPUs outdated and unsupported fast. But these are expected and usually appear around the 6-8 years down the line.

Someone could say the same for console buyers who bought their console 2-3 years before the next gen arrives.

I would say the pricing of PC GPU's is the biggest problem here too.

 

[Subtlesnake]

To be honest AW2 doesn't look like game what should use so much power.

This is for max pathtracing with 3 light bounces.

 

[DavidGraham]

To be honest AW2 doesn't look like game what should use so much power.

But it does, see here.

 

[Seanspeed]

There are many total cost of ownership factors to be considered with this just being one of them. Certainly the price of new hardware is higher on the PC. But total cost of ownership if measured over time on the basis of upgrade costs and including subscriptions, game costs, additional capabilities etc... still isn't wildly different.

For me it's the breadth of games and experiences that is the true differentiating factor of PC gaming these days, over and above the potential performance advantages.

Yea, as frustrated as I am with the GPU pricing situation, I've struggled to decide to just get a PS5 instead cuz the value proposition of consoles has gotten quite a bit worse nowadays, too. Raised game prices, the push for digital, the need for paid subscription to play multiplayer, increasingly expensive controllers that are still as unreliable as ever, fewer actual console exclusive titles and lack of lowering of prices over time(heck, they're even going up!).

So this keeps me in the PC gaming sphere for the time being, even though I'm loathe to actually upgrade just yet. The pricing for Lovelace GPU's in particular is just one of the most scumbag things I've ever seen in this industry. I am thankfully very patient and have tons of existing games I can still play and enjoy for a good while yet. If I have to just be super late to the party to get any kind of decent value, that's what I'll do.