Performance in and of itself isn't the issue. The titles in 2004 that were demanding were offering a visual experience that was far beyond prior games. These newer titles, despite the tech they are pushing, look worse than prior titles that run much better.
oh yea false equivalencies and what nots. You mean the same virtual textures that was talked about in 2008 built on the work of John Carmack with mega textures? That virtual textures right?oh yeah the lazy devs of today would never achieve anything like “stencil shadows” or “release a demo after the fact that uses hdr intemediate buffers”. Virtual texturing, virtual geometry, real time gi with both screen space and world space caches, gpu driven rendering, fine grained per tri real-time culling… all kids stuff by comparison I guess.
If you want to talk about familiarizing yourself with the techniques, I would suggest implementing a hl2 era forward renderer in dx9 and then implementing literally any modern technique in dx12 or vulkan.
Yes, which shipped in the 2010s, not “the late 90s or early 2000s”… Rage (an extremely impressive game!) was also widely maligned by players for running too slow, having too low res of textures, etc. Modern techniques like virtual texturing are more difficult than older approaches.
You’re joking right? After dismissing the work of the 3d graphics pioneers of yesteryear, you’re now trying to play semantics on when the feature shipped in the game like that’s the point I was trying to get across? Nice straw man but if you want to straw man better, you’d have actually used the period when they actually started working on implementation. Obviously you wouldn’t do that because it only draw attention to your massive own goal. Like I said, go familiarize yourself with some of the impressive accomplishments of the pioneers of that era so that you can discuss the topic intelligently.
Technology doesn't scale with man-hours. You can throw more artists and generate more art, but you can't arbitrarily throw more software engineers and get more out of complex system. The reason previous geneerations of hardawre were tapped so hard was it was the work of one or two people who new every line of code and every byte of RAM. That's not possible any more. Complexd, relatively inefficient systems have to be linked together.
Meaning what? DEva aren't as good, or the market does respond as well to complex systems as it does pretty visuals?
It's fine to criticise the product objectively. It's not fine to make unfounded assumptions about the reasons why and what the devs are doing. If a local councillor makes a dumb decision about traffic, we can fairly judge them as dumb, but if a game engine doesn't work as we imagine it should without any experience how to obtain performance from the hardware+software stacks they are presented with, we can't fairly point to the devs as being inadequate.
By that arbitrary standard virtual geometry/Reyes approaches are 90s tech, half life 2 and doom 3 are from the 60s-80s, along with todays Monte Carlo path tracing… every rendering advancement is a refinement, advancement, and optimization of work that stated decades earlier, sometimes by the same individuals.
github.com
And yet companies do it all the time…. There is a tipping point where you start to get negative progress due to too many cooks in kitchen. However I think the additional man hours are needed as the scope of the project increases. At least, that is my experience. If it wasn’t needed, why are the teams not the same size as they were in the ps360 era?
Yet certain YouTube outlets often celebrated on here speculate on developer reasoning all the time…. So is it ok for them to do it?
Using your own logic against you, if we can’t criticize a dev due to lack of knowledge, we also can’t criticize a local councillor for the same reason. What do we know about council business after all?
I don’t think anyone is saying devs suck but we are criticizing their implementations. Personally, I do not think the level of talent is as high as it was in the past for a variety of reasons. For example, better paying options with better work life balance is one of those many reasons. At the end of the day, your work is a reflection of you. If a group of devs release a product that performs poorly and looks poorly, it’s not controversial to see criticism. If they release a string of consecutive products that look and perform poorly, it says a lot about the a lot about the group…. Thats just life I guess and no one is immune from it. Everyone is subject to criticism.
Ahh so now you acknowledge that devs in that era did something of note? Anyway, of course there’s no break in continuity. The early 90s and 2000s is when we saw a rapid adoption and of 3d graphics in games. This is why the era gets so much reverence because a whole host of pioneering was needed to get 3d games working on the hardware of the time.
I don’t agree with this at all. I think what determines the state of a product is craftsmanship not complexity. If it were complexity, all studios should release shoddy work however, this is not the case. Some studios refuse to release products that don’t meet a certain standard of quality. Nintendo for example, or certain Sony studios, Id tech, etc. Then we have other studios who have no regard for craftsmanship…. EA studios like respawn for example, Bethesda, CD Projekt Red, etc.
Is it really unreasonable to consider titles like Immortals to offer a subpar visual and performance experience and not a good candidate for comparison to titles like Far Cry and Doom 3?
Compare budgets, talents, studio development time etc. just because they are priced the same doesn’t mean they have equal investment
Just keep in mind that id and Crytek are dev studios known to push technical boundaries. Ascendant Studios is a new studio comprised of many former Telltale Games devs. Telltale was the opposite end of the tech spectrum (relatively unambitious 3D [not that there’s anything wrong with that] point and click adventures games vs. cutting-edge FPS games). id and Crytek licensed their game engines. Telltale did not (save for one game).
