Wow, you have high standards. You want a $400 console to outperform and/or be as advanced as a $500 video card that comes out one year later?
True, but I think we all enjoy your posts. Besides, we can't blame ourselves for going off topic when the subject is virtually shelved...Again, pretty off-topic though I suppose
No, obviously not! (But yes I do have high standards - aren't I allowed to?
) Like I said, I'm not making an economic argument. I'm merely addressing the claims that consoles are better than PCs for some span of time after they come out... this is normally simply untrue and even if there are arguable cases (maybe the 360, but was it really overall better than high-end PCs when it came out? Hard to say...), it's a pretty short time span!
Right but even with those advantages (and targeting one architecture is a *huge* advantage) they still don't produce noticeably superior graphics to PC games. They're just so much slower that even cleverness can't close the gap.
Sure, but that's the cost of portability, and increasingly just the cost of fewer resources for the dedicated PC SKU.
Well TBH I really am getting a *whole* lot more pixels. The fact that they aren't always "better" is just because the developers find it easier to jack up the resolution vs. developing specific ways to make "prettier" pixels using that power. And if Cypress/DX11 were the real baseline for a game, the console simply couldn't compete. We're barely getting out of DX9-level engines on the PC here... I can *easily* produce shadows for instance that the consoles can't even dream of on Cypress and still have performance to spare.
Sure but that has *nothing* to do with the hardware... that's just "constraints breed innovation". It doesn't change the fact that Cypress has vastly more power and flexibility than Xenos even given the disadvantages of the portable PC APIs. It's merely the economics that make it infeasible to develop a Cypress-focused engine for instance, but even those are changing as DX11 becomes a reasonable baseline target.
I'd say the most impressive rendering stuff in consoles is the tiled deferred rendering using the SPUs in Uncharted, Blur, etc. (enabled primarily by the fast CPU-GPU bus which PCs don't have), and now a single DX11 GPU can do that much faster and more flexibly without using the CPU at all.
I agree in general, but 720p isn't enough at least for the display devices and viewing distances I'm used to
1080p probably is.Well for the most part you can do that... I don't think there's any games that look significantly worse on PC than consoles, and there's not that many exclusives with graphics that are head-and-shoulders above the multi-SKU games IMHO. Uncharted 2 is probably the one exception, but those levels of graphics are definitely achievable on a modern PC.
I guess we're into mostly qualitative stuff here, but I'd say Batman AA is a decent example of a similar game that looks great in motion and running it on even a midrange PC @ 1080p w/ AA shows a noticeable bump vs. the console versions. God of War 3 looks pretty good for sure, but it's as much art as tech really... if you watch there's pretty heavy use of LOD (in the titan sections) and restricted camera paths to achieve said visuals. It's more that they simply elect to avoid effects that alias badly - which is a great choice obviously - than doing anything really special technically.
True to some extent, but again... at 720p Cypress can basically do 4x SSAA on these games nowadays!!
I was just playing it the other day and that's a bit of an over-statement (this image for instance displays the usual specular and geometric aliasing, blocky polygons and low-resolution, poorly-filtered textures, poor/missing shadows). Still, they avoid high specular exponents, excessive normal maps and apply a pretty aggressive depth of field post-process (in addition to an edge-aware blur I think) which avoids/hides most of the bad aliasing problems of modern games.
You're at best making comments on particular engines/games though... do you know of even a single multi-platform SKU that looks significantly better on the consoles/worse on the PC?
Yeah we can both definitely agree with that, but that's just economics. There's tons of power available there but not really the market to make good use of it. And as Marco notes, the tides are turning for the better somewhat in the aliasing discussion, etc.
Agreed, and 2Mpixels means a lot of oomph/pixel on Cypress too :smile:I agree in general, but 720p isn't enough at least for the display devices and viewing distances I'm used to
Nothing that looks significantly worse on the PC, sure (and I think that covers the same point you make later), but nothing that looks significantly better either. I come back to Xenos vs Cypress and not having that bigger oomph/pixel exploited on the PC. I agree to some extent that it's just an economics thing, but there have been large sums spent on PC exclusives in the last few years that didn't make the same tech and art choices as Uncharted or GoW3 and blow people away visually for the power available (and that includes making smart choices about what's visible on screen and being smart in the asset pipe before the engine even gets a hold of it).
Great! I'd love to see someone like Carsten or Damien prove it (and make the argument that you should use the GPU to render the game in that fashion on that hardware too, versus less IQ at higher resolution).
The image (that I cut for brevity in my reply) is telling as a still, but it's hard to notice the shadow aliasing and texture resolution in motion. All developers could learn something from that (and do per-situation tuning of assets and performance to get high aggregate IQ at high framerate). I can somewhat agree with you that it's not *that* impressive technically, and more of the magic in motion is from the art and production. Be interesting to see what Christer thinks of that actually :smile:
Good, I'd love a swing back in the direction of better per-pixel IQ on the PC, and better use of the $400 GPU I paid good, hard-earned money for. Hypothetically, if there's ever a spare $1M to spend on a game, for whatever reason, I'd rather that go into IQ R&D at this point in the respective generations on PC and console than almost anything else.
Agreed, although there have been good games. Battlefield BC2, Batman AA, Far Cry 2 and a few others look pretty great on PC IMHO. They obviously look good on consoles too (and that's a credit to the development teams) but they do look better at the higher PC resolutions with more textures and filtering.
Sure. I'm not sure just raw super-sampling is the best use of the FLOPS in the long run for better overall IQ, but it's a simple one in the short term.
Agreed, I'd be especially interested to hear if they realistically think there's anything being done that couldn't be accomplished on a high-end PC with a DirectX 11 video card (and what those things are!).
You're gonna piss off the "gameplay > graphics" crowd who seems to think that quality for these subsystems is directly determined by money
Last thing I want is to feed that silliness more!You're gonna piss off the "gameplay > graphics" crowd who seems to think that quality for these subsystems is directly determined by money
Yeah exactly. I am not one of said people, but there are a lot of them and they are easily summoned
These are the people who think that every bit of effort put into graphics is a bit that makes the gameplay worse.
Yet in motion it's a completely different story.
As long as you count shaders as an art asset.
I will agree with this. It's definitely nicer in motion and I chose that picture just to highlight that the tech isn't actually significantly better than PC games, etc. They use it well though and it does look great in motion.
OT
I know it's fashionable for PC fans to piss and moan about what "low tech" consoles have done to PC gaming, but in reality it seems that PC games just don't sell that well anymore, certainly not anywhere near the numbers that console games sell. It's probably hard for PC exclusive devs to recover the cost to develop a game that "can only be done on PCs" because not many would buy it. So you end up with ~$1500 worth of uber CPU/GPU/RAM that just sits there underutilized.
