Next-gen console > Current PC? (at launch)

[Orion]

From that comment I can tell your a console gamer (dont worry guys I have the holy water ready)
And with that viewpoint your in a minority of 1 here. I doubt you can buy a lcd monitor with such a low res and the first thing you learn about lcd's is your run them at native res otherwise they dont look good.

God of War did look spectacular on my 1080p TV, and I'm sure it didn't run at 1080p.

barely perceptible - seriously ???

With regards to IQ not field of view, of course a triple monitor rez is going to provide a noticeable difference in field of view, but the frames of the monitors kind of take part of the immersion out of it.

 

[pjbliverpool]

1TF is not that much of a difference. It's only 50% faster.

3 TFLOPS is 63% more than Orbis and about 94% more that Durango. But of course 3 TFLOPS isn't particularly high for the PC with the GCN architecture. I doubt it would be enough to achieve parity with the top end single GPU PC's.

I personally find 720p with some AA to provide more than sufficient IQ, with anything more being barely perceptible. I also find 30fps to be acceptable for most genres. So I wouldn't consider the pc experience to be the way its meant to be played, more like minor boosts to IQ and framerate that are barely perceptible.

Although I don't consider myself an image quality whore, I do strongly disagree with this. I recently tried a few games on my TV at 720p so that I could try out TV based 3D (which only supports 720p at 60fps) and I found the image quality to be pretty horrible after 1080p on the same TV.

With regards to framerate, I can be quite happy with 30fps but I'll take 60fps any day of the week. In fact far from these things being barely perceptable they actually seem to be two of the biggest points of contention between consoles gamers when comparing cross platform games with many console gamers pointing to 1080p/60fps as gaming nervana. Some people may disagree but a lot certainly place a great deal of value on this level of experience.

Regarding how consoles will compare to pcs, I suppose they'd surpass midrange configs as they're coded to the metal. Compared to highend rigs they might not fare that badly considering the resolution(1080) and framerate(30) are likely to be far lower than what's usual for such rigs.

Some people might consider that fairing badly. Or swap resolution for 3D which is some ways is comparable to a doubling of resolution.

I wouldn't consider 1080p at 60fps in full 3D close to 30fps 1080p in 2D.

 

[Davros]

God of War did look spectacular on my 1080p TV, and I'm sure it didn't run at 1080p.

probably less than 1280x720

With regards to IQ not field of view,

Higher resolution improves iq

 

[swaaye]

Orion has a point that hits on the reality of the modern multi-platform game industry and its audience, but it looks like you guys will miss it. As usual.

 

[Davros]

give us a clue

 

[swaaye]

Quadrillions of PC gamers have defected to the little toy machines because of the utter failure of our illustrious developer people to make sufficiently glorious use of our 200W video cards.

Though I have faith in Chris Roberts.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Actually a big number of PC displays sold, possibly half of them, are 1366x768 which is very near 720p. That's 90% of laptops plus the really cheap desktop monitors.

I have a 1280x960 100Hz display before me and it looks fine. Didn't play much yet because I'm on early Steam linux and my vid card is very outdated (it has the same tech as the RSX if you know what I mean) but even very old or simple graphics look fantastic.

I think if current gen ran e.g. Quake 3 at 720p, the IQ would be very fine. Real AA, aniso, solid 60fps, everything clean and not noisy, but have them do modern graphics with everything bump mapped, dynamically lighted, shadowed etc. brings on a lot of noise, plus the framerate sucks and the res is actually 600p (we used to play at 600p and call that 800x600!), anisotropic filtering isn't here (because we're cheap, and/or some algorithms don't even allow it).

With next-gen console resources I think it would be a matter of cleaning up that 720p. Have the shadows use 4x more data, algorithms taking 4 or 16 samples instead of 1 or 4 to do something, bring back aniso, have 720p as a minimum not a maximum, higher res textures. As for the framerate there will be a lot of 30fps games, sure, and that's not particulary good.

 

[Davros]

I can run q3 at 999fps possibly more the frame counter only has 3 digits

 

[swaaye]

With next-gen console resources I think it would be a matter of cleaning up that 720p. Have the shadows use 4x more data, algorithms taking 4 or 16 samples instead of 1 or 4 to do something, bring back aniso, have 720p as a minimum not a maximum, higher res textures. As for the framerate there will be a lot of 30fps games, sure, and that's not particulary good.

It also would have been interesting if the current consoles had been used to make really awesome 480p. But HDTVs made that impossible because 480p looks terrible on them.

I imagine that we'll see a mix of 1080p and 720p. It's difficult to spot the difference from the couch, especially if aliasing is managed and I can't imagine it won't be with tech like SMAA available now.

 

[pjbliverpool]

It would be nice to never ever see plain bilinear filtering again. I saw that on quite a few 360 games. That and lack of vsync. Not that people seem to care or even know what it is.

And that is kind of Orion's point - not many people care about little extras. Unless the game is unarguably superior on PC, as in it looks like a different game and it also plays much better, there is no way PC gaming will even hit their radar.

3D. When it works well, that is very much unarguably better and a totally different experience. Not that I'm suggesting without 3D PC gaming has nothing to offer but it's certainly an avenue worth considering.

 

[swaaye]

What if I can't stand 3D movies?

I'm only interested in something like the new VR helmet probably. That Oculus Rift product. It sounds like really something else. I experimented with the early VR setups in the '90s and yeah bring on a quality modern edition of that.

 

[pjbliverpool]

What if I can't stand 3D movies?

I'm only interested in something like the new VR helmet probably. That Oculus Rift product.

Yeah VR would be much better still but 3D gaming (using two seperate frames ala 3D Vision) is far better than TV/Cinema based 3D IMO.

Still if you don't like it in films then maybe you won't like it in games. I'm coming from a a background of loving 3D movies (and TV).

 

[swaaye]

I am probably going to jump on the Oculus Rift when it is available. TR's impressions really sounded awesome.

 

[Blazkowicz]

I played 3D, on a CRT monitor with the H3D glasses (they came out in 1998 and were still being sold a decade later in another brand!), one of the main issues was what you look at is low contrast and blue-tinted. So, I had Far Cry 1, a very colorful and awesome looking game, which was one of the few games to suffer absolutely no bugs but it had that "playing with sunglasses" effect. Another issue was playing at 800x600 (to get 120Hz) and AA not working in any game but still, I was losing the pretty colors and bright scenery.

A few years later, when nvidia had renamed their driver tech "3D Vision" and was pretending it was new, I tried it for a minute (a buddy had it at a lan party) and it still looked blue and dim just like the 90s tech, but higher res. This made me lose interest, even though I was deeply interested in it years before the 3D movie and 3D vision fad.

That said it was awesome, if a bit impractical (prescription glasses + H3D glasses sucks!). Quake 1 is incredibly fun when you play with the grenade launcher (and sucks incredibly when looking at wall torches, with huge ghosting)

 

[Davros]

I thought 3d vision monitors cranked up the brightness to compensate

 

[swaaye]

I followed 3D and VR tech when it first showed up in the 90s as well. I have used the Forte VFX1 helmet with Mechwarrior 2 and Flight Unlimited. I even liked Virtual Boy but it was too expensive lol. But I have never used shutter glasses. I read about the caveats and they turned me off to the tech.

I am totally pumped about that Oculus Rift because it uses modern tech and the guys working on it are obviously about games. And then Carmack said it was great, and the TR guys couldn't stop using it.....

Hey can a 3DTV emulate Virtual Boy accurately?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I am probably going to jump on the Oculus Rift when it is available. TR's impressions really sounded awesome.

It's tempting but I'm only going to do it if the majority of AAA games support it. After having spent thousands of dollars in the past on various VR solutions, I'm a bit pessimistic about its adoption right now.

Still it does look decent and that's one thing I miss about my old VR glasses (can't remember what they were called, grrrr.) that I had which were easily worn on airline flights. They were low resolution, something like 320x240 or something along those lines but were decent for watching movies on airline flights. This was before LCD displays (late 1990's) when you only got movies on international flights on those big screen projectors. /shudder

Regards,
SB

 

[pjbliverpool]

I thought 3d vision monitors cranked up the brightness to compensate

Lightboost monitors do (introduced with 3dvision 2). The darkening of the image does my head in on the TV but lightboost completely does away that. IMO there's no difference between playing with the glasses on or off in terms of brightness.

Colours do change slightely but you only really notice by flicking between the images, It's not as though they're biased towards a red, green or blue tint, they just change slightly.

 

[Arwin]

So will the PS4 be out before graphics cards with 8GB of GDDR5 is one of the questions that can answer the OP

 

[swaaye]

Wow a console generation that finally doesn't skimp on the RAM. That is pretty awesome indeed.