Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2022]

I agree. Whenever you look at PC game sales versus consoles. PC is almost always way behind, but is part of that is because the vast majority of PCs are just incapable of running PC games (and not console versions of games) them remote PC could take off.

Nvidia and Google must both data that supports this, otherwise why do their services even exist.

 

Depends on what games your looking at. Also, most console user base is either on PS4/switch/OneS level hardware. DF shared a article not long ago, theres more gpu's sold that are atleast as capable than PS5/XSX/XSS consoles combined.

 

It does depend on the game. Solitaire runs on pretty much anything. Rimwold, which is a 2D game, doesn't even run well on many Intel integrated graphics solutions.

And sure, many GPUs are sold that surpass last generation consoles but they are often used for non-gaming applications, like being used for accelerating Photoshop or video encoding and have literally nothing to do with gaming.

How does that help?

 

I just think claims like these;

Dont make all that much sense. Theres over 100 million PS4's out there, many switch consoles and Xbox one's aswell. Most pc's used for gaming are going to be atleast as powerfull as those, probably more so.
Regarding PS5/XSX, as already covered by Alex, theres more GPU's out there that are more capable than there are PS5/XSX/XSS. Your claims therefore do not make much sense to me.

And as has been discussed before, the pc gaming market is bigger then the most popular console (Playstation).

 

There are a wide range of PC games, from literal Dwarf Fortress with ASCII graphics up to Cyber Punk. The most popular selling Steam games will not run well (or at all) on the vast majority of PCs sold in the past few years because most PCs sold are budget-friendly laptops not designed to run games well.

To be clear, despite there being vastly more PCs sold than consoles, the reason PC games are almost always sell less than console games is because there are less people buying PC games. Companies like Activision, EA, Ubisoft and Rockstar all report this exact same thing.

Whilst graphics hardware on PCs that can be upgraded can be better than current gen consoles, they are not representative of capabilities of PCs actually being used by gamers. Look at the Steam hardware survey. When you talk about the PC market, you are also including über cheap laptops with 4Gb or 8Gb of RAM because of a lot of manufacturers still selling those, and also including companies that sell great PC hardware to people who will never play any game on the hardware because a Nvidia 3090 will greatly improve Photoshop performance and that's the PC's primary role.

It's kind of meaningless. Nvidia GPUs are super popular in servers farms and will never run games so sales of these are irrelevant.

 

Hows that all that much different to all those PS4's and switches out there for example? Surely now most pc's are atleast as capable as most consoles out there (vast majority isnt PS5 and XSX/XSS).

Again depends on what games. There are more pc gamers then console gamers, hence the large intrest there to expand to that platform.

The steam hardware survey issue has been discussed before. Anyway, as per the DF report, there are more dedicated gaming GPU's out there (sold) than all current gen consoles combined. Thats not evening counting laptops, which are a huge amount aswell, probably as large as dedicated gpu numbers.

Il contradict that with most PS5's out there not being used for those AAA titles made by those studios you talk about (

 

The Steam hardware survey and PC games sales suggest otherwise. If the majority of PCs are both capable and being used to play PC games, why do major publishers generally report lower sales on PC versus console?

Lobbying in "AAA titles" which you hadn't previously mentioned and nor had I doesn't help a coherent conversation. You're shifting goalposts. but this doesn't really change anything; AA or AAA games, the major publishers - Activision, EA, Microsoft, Take-Two, Ubisoft are reporting multi-platform titles selling more on consoles than PC. You have to move into very traditional PC tiles like RTS and strategy to find exceptions.

By all means link some data but it's been posted so much I'm surprised you are even contesting this. Here is Ubisoft in 2021 the other publishers all tell a similar story.

 

Yeah this is true in the west, esp in AAA titles
where its not true are crappy titles (on PC you can publish any old shit, on console you cant, some exceptions like this PS tiger game I forget) or browser games, which does bring the PC some way up to console level sales in pure dollar terms ( true not in the west, but remember in a lot of countries, consoles are a very small minority, its mobile > PC > console )

 

@zed yup - folks need to be at least comparing like with like, not ASCII Rogue / Dwarf Fortress sales versus The Last of Us on PlayStation because it's meaningless.

 

Agreed. PC gamer is a broader base of users than console gamers. Encompassing a whole range of games with varying hardware performance requirements.

A person who plays solitaire 4 hours a day on their PC isn’t the same type of gamer as your average console owner.

Furthermore discrete GPUs volumes aren’t indicative of the number of PC gamers who are analogous to console gamers. There are a lot of gpus sold for crypto mining and other non gaming purposes. Most people aren’t buying those high end Macs with discrete gpus to play your average PC title. 3D and video producers love discrete gpus for a good reason. Discrete gpus have too much utility outside of gaming to easily use those figures in simple calculations to determine the size of the PC gaming market. You know the type of PC gamer that regularly indulges in $50 games or in the very least indulges in games that initially had $40-50 dollar price tag or spends a non-inconsequential amount on microtransactions or subscriptions.

 

Yup, there was a time when PC AAA game sales was closing the gap with console games, but that stopped a few years ago. Looking at recent Fiscal Year reports for some publishers that breakout PC games sales shows that PC game sales have declined roughly in proportion to the rise of crypto mining combined with higher GPU pricing.

Indie and AA games sales OTOH has continued to grow (which is the only reason that PC gaming continues to grow), which is not unexpected as they are far less reliant on having the latest and greatest powerful GPUs and thus don't require purchasing exhorbitantly priced graphics cards.

I do wonder if AAA PC game sales would have continued closing the gap with console game sales for AAA publishers if GPU prices hadn't started sky rocketing right around the launch of the RTX 2k series cards. It had already started to slow when crypto took off during the GTX 1k graphics card generation, but it really slowed significantly with the RTX 2k generation.

Regards,
SB

 

@Dictator about your TAA-ness of DLDSR comment, I've seen disocclusion artifacts when using it (that I don't see with regular DSR, or without it) so they might be doing some temporal filtering. Probably not a lot you can do without accurate motion vectors but it's definitely doing something

 

Im going to try to touch this slightly, but you also have to consider that the PC is one platform against multiple consoles with those sales. Pretty sure for some games like CoD the PS comes ahead, but the difference would be smaller atleast.

 

Really strong sharpening effect in DLDSR at 0% smoothing. I didn't notice it in FC4 but good to know that smoothing helps without blurring the image too much.

I know 1080p is easier to demonstrate but it would've been nice to see results on a 1440p monitor. I suspect the results would've been closer between DLDSR 2.25x and DSR 4x at the higher target resolution.

 

Gof of War seems to have a lot of oversparpening. The ringing artefacts and overshapred textures make it look unpleasant to the eye. This also makes the elements in the game look more like 2D cardboard.

 

The developers already responded to the thread on Steam about the issue.

Sounds like it will be fixed eventually, which is great to hear.

 

Upscaling solutions forcing sharpening on us is one of my bug bares. Its the reason I use the games inbuilt upscaler over FSR in Horizon Zero Dawn. I'd much rather a slightly softer stable image, than a super sharp noisy one.

 

Same here - also "bugbear".