Watching that video, there are fairly noticeable differences in texture resolutions and jaggies. But I see your point. It isn't 10yrs different. That's direct-to-metal programming though. Games developed directly for PC seem to offer more for less, and I would never go back to 30fps gaming *shudder*
Graphics
- Thread starter Craterloads
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That is true (although Kiizone SF footage does look amazing), raises the question though. Is it worth it for the incremental increases we will see from now on. With so much more horsepower you would expect something like a Titan to be able to actual photo realism .
indeed. Is it worth it?
I guess it's a case of paying the premium for the best possible experience. Be it graphically or FPS and this is where that 680 or Titan shines. It offers the best experience, although appears (on screenshots) to not be leaps and bounds over the low end I do find it very noticeable.
On a similiar note I bet a new Panasonic Plasma owner would not swap his £2000 set to a mid range LG LCD, but the screenies and youtube video's will have you believing there is little difference.
If you were to ask 100 gamers what they actually want from this next generation of console hardware, 1080p & 60fps will be up there as top answers. Oh you might get less jaggies as answer too. Hardly the most exciting of prospects from early 2005 to 2014 onwards into the next 8 year lifespan.
I remember wanting just bigger sprites like they had in arcade machines.
I guess it's a case of paying the premium for the best possible experience. Be it graphically or FPS and this is where that 680 or Titan shines. It offers the best experience, although appears (on screenshots) to not be leaps and bounds over the low end I do find it very noticeable.
On a similiar note I bet a new Panasonic Plasma owner would not swap his £2000 set to a mid range LG LCD, but the screenies and youtube video's will have you believing there is little difference.
If you were to ask 100 gamers what they actually want from this next generation of console hardware, 1080p & 60fps will be up there as top answers. Oh you might get less jaggies as answer too. Hardly the most exciting of prospects from early 2005 to 2014 onwards into the next 8 year lifespan.
I remember wanting just bigger sprites like they had in arcade machines.
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Titans aren't even that powerful anyway, the reason they seem to be is because when contrasted against the GTX670 and 680 they do kick the crap out of them. This is largely because the GTX670 and 680 had been gimped with 2GB of VRAM and low memory bandwidth. This is what makes the biggest difference between Kepler 6 series cards and the GK110 Titan.
That aside, I think one of the main issues is that some people just haven't got an eye for quality so as graphical quality increases, their ability to perceive the differences diminishes.
So it's not really a case of games haven't really improved, you're just struggling to actually perceive the changes. I realise that might sound and come across as extreme condescending, but that's how it is.
Texture quality is just a case of VRAM, they don't require much in the way of computational power.
Maybe if you asked 100 PC gamers what they wanted out of consoles, which is always going to be incredibly biased and frankly irrelevant. I imagine if you asked purely console gamers they would ask for what they actually purchased their console for, good fun games they can play alone and with friends and some other stuff they can do to justify their purchase, not some technical jabber that doesn't in any real way effect their experience.
Textures are a memory issue, they take up a hell of a lot of space.
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It holds up pretty well. Lets be honest.
It's called diminishing returns.
Also, because the games you are playing are built using engines designed to accommodate this 8 year old hardware.
If you'd have done any searching around you'd see that the graphical fidelity/quality of next generation of games is mindblowing. There is even photo realism in games out now, provided by the mod community of course (e.g. ICEnhancer for GTA 4. Photo realism in a video game released 5 years ago using an engine made 7 years ago).
SquareEnix Luminous Engine:
CryEngine 3
Unreal Engine 4
Also, because the games you are playing are built using engines designed to accommodate this 8 year old hardware.
If you'd have done any searching around you'd see that the graphical fidelity/quality of next generation of games is mindblowing. There is even photo realism in games out now, provided by the mod community of course (e.g. ICEnhancer for GTA 4. Photo realism in a video game released 5 years ago using an engine made 7 years ago).
SquareEnix Luminous Engine:
CryEngine 3
Unreal Engine 4
Yeah this is true, but for those concerned about the graphical advances, like the original poster. We'll ask 100 PC Gamers what they want
Guess that changes the answers too. So who the hell wants 1080p and 60fps?Yeah this is true, but for those concerned about the graphical advances, like the original poster. We'll ask 100 PC Gamers what they want
For consoles? Yeah I wouldn't mind it, wouldn't make a damn bit of difference as to what games I play on consoles but it wouldn't be a bad thing.
they take up a hell of a lot of disk space to
I'd guess we would need to invent a faster type of memory as well GDDR
they take up a hell of a lot of disk space to
That depends on whether they're compressed or not, most games come with compressed textures which are uncompressed as the level is loaded.
Soldato
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It's called diminishing returns.
Also, because the games you are playing are built using engines designed to accommodate this 8 year old hardware.
If you'd have done any searching around you'd see that the graphical fidelity/quality of next generation of games is mindblowing. There is even photo realism in games out now, provided by the mod community of course (e.g. ICEnhancer for GTA 4. Photo realism in a video game released 5 years ago using an engine made 7 years ago).
SquareEnix Luminous Engine:
CryEngine 3
Unreal Engine 4
+1
After a number of triangles, you don't really see much improvement, especially on relatively simple characters, so you can dedicate that extra power to render more units or better environments. Just imagine Mount and Blade on Cry Engine.
On what Chris Roberts does now, extra polygons will matter. I think that ones is truly one of the next gen games.
PS: Better textures in Skyrim don't take that much space on HDD, just "some" on system RAM and vRAM... and also don't require much GPU power.
PS: 2 Metro LL has some beautiful lighting, however some of the texture are just awful. Crysis 3 is much better all around.
and with higher resolution textures comes less compression unless the textures repeat a lot unlike in real life
This 10 year comparison isn't fair, though.
What you should also do is compare the games that are coming out on console now, with the games that came out 10 years ago for the console.
The difference is staggering. We are seeing the effects of 10 years development, but it's development in software engineering techniques. Since the consoles hardware wasn't changing, the devs had to find ways of getting more and more performance from that hardware, and the optimisation they are capable of now is very impressive indeed.
Meanwhile, PC has been a constantly changing sea of hardware that hasn't had access to the same optimisation - in fact, for most console developers, the PC version is an afterthought, built to the same specifications as the console version, and not taking advantage of what the PC is really capable of.
And yet, PCs are still considerably more capable. Maybe with the new consoles, we'll see PCs showing more of what they are capable of, with console and PC hardware so similar. That might not last though - as the consoles will stay fixed in hardware for 5-10 years, and pcs will probably diverge from that standard sooner or later.
1080p = 2073600 pixels
720p = 984960 pixels
To render at 1080p is to render more than twice as many pixels as at 720p. And even then, consoles are running at 720p with sub 720p textures which are then scaled up and even then, you have to put with the games crashing along at sub 30 FPS and bloody screen tearing all over the place. I tried to play the 360 version of Alan Wake on the last vessel I was working on (Steam blocked me from gaming on my laptop). In a slow paced game like Alan Wake I could have put up with the sub 30 FPS when sitting a few yards away from a large screen and using gamepad to control game...but tearing...urghhhhhh.
Interestingly enough, the one console shooter game where the devs have always aimed for 60FPS, is the CoD series. They acheive this both by keeping things simple and by lowering textures and scaling up. The fact that all the competing console shooters are basically all running at sub 30 fps, i believe is a huge factor behind CoD mass success, even if the fans of the series don't even know it. I game on PC, so my arcade multiplayer shooter of choice is BF3, which pi$$es all over MW3 or BLOPS2 on PC. I am not alone in this estimation as BF3 on PC is massively more popular than any CoD PC title ever has been. If I was a console gamer however, I would be playing CoD, as the 60 fps gives me that appealling smoothness that I am looking for whereas BF3 runs like a lagging screen tearing train wreck and I couldnt bring myself to play it.
Yeah.
For the OP to say there hasn't been any change is pretty mental imo. Comparing BF3 on consoles and PC is like comparing coal and diamonds, then trying to say they are pretty much the exact same thing cos they are both made out of carbon. Screenshots don't come close to telling the whole story either.
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All textures in games are pre-compressed (as in compressed colour space) with some special exceptions where compression is too detrimental. The majority of game engines use DXTn compression which significantly reduces the memory needed while maintaining an acceptable quality. An uncompressed 24-bit 512x512 texture uses 768KB of space but when compressed it becomes 131KB. Whether on the HDD or in VRAM it's uses that same amount of space.
That is because it is highly impractical for developers to optimize their code to the same sort of standards they do for console hardware for the many hardware options and configurations available to PC users.
You have at most two different GPU/CPU configurations to optimize your code for in the console market.
Whereas for the PC, you have a vast majority of GPUs and CPUs with varying power, architecture, VRAM etc, along with the number of configurations they can be run in. It would be extremely resource intensive for video game developers to optimize their code for each and every GPU and CPU available, which isn't worth the effort considering the effort to reward ratio involved.