No, but is only logical. If it would have been easy, then already we would have had a lot of games with major differences compared to their consoles versions and while some do offer high resolution textures, other improvements are not that significant as it would need to be for it/them to be a next Crysis. Just dialing settings to 11 won't help, it will mean just over use of some setting that kills performance without giving much back - like tessellation in general (Crysis 2), overuse of AA and tessellation in Hairworks (TW3) and so on. Even "simple" stuff like a low lvl api (DX12 and Vulkan), which would enable a lot of lower specs PC to potentially get better performance, is ignored or implemented badly.
Should I even mention the sound and how much is ignored?!
Think of all the presentation of new games at events such as E3 and the downgrade that follows. All of them should run ok(ish) on higher end PCs. Why not release it like that if it would be easy to have all the assets, all the game at such high level of quality.
![Smile :) :)](/styles/default/xenforo/vbSmilies/Normal/smile.gif)
Sure, Microsoft and Sony would not be happy to have their toys in a bad light, but for sure that can't be the case with
every game that went through this - cough The Witcher 3 cough
Latest game on Cry Engine that I've played, Kingdom Come Deliverance, they say that Ultra settings are for "next generation of hardware", but in all honesty, there isn't much difference between medium and ultra even while standing still and actively looking for it, while during gameplay, that kinda goes away... anyway. The difference in performance however, between ultra shaders and shadows vs. medium is quite significant - btw, they've also downgraded the global illumination from the Alpha/Beta.
What Ultra should have been is at least the level of global illumination from the prelaunch version, better physics (cut down trees, tall grass that moves real time with the wind and whatever passes through it - similar to Crysis 3, but there the grass was moving at a lower fps), proper volumetric clouds, fog (both to be affected by wind), buildings that could be destroyed or catch fire, etc. None of that happened. Just that performance went down while not gaining much in return.