Next gen game performance

[Omaeka]

I was thinking (rare!) and this generation of games has seen so many titles that just don't look all that good, yet required absolutely insulting PC specifications to run. I personally don't believe there is a single game out at the moment that couldn't be optimized to run flawlessly on a 1GB card, let alone top of the line hardware.

Will the next generation of games get even worse and demand way more than this generation, and render every conventional graphics card obsolete? Will the developers stop being lazy and work hard for optimization or are we going to be forced to buy cards with this kind of grunt in order to game:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-034-PN&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=

Thoughts?

 

[Omaeka]

I can't even think about a PC exclusive that looks amazing either, except Legend of Grimrock, so the only people who can push the envelope on what's possible are the huge companies like Crytek/Ubisoft/Bethesda etc. who, from what you've both said, are rumored to be moving away from the platform?

Pretty worrying really, especially when a good PC costs so much.

 

[Omaeka]

CDProjeckt will hopefully deliver!

Bohemia Interactive will deliver!

CCP will continue to deliver.


Who even cares about the rest? >.< I'm surprised you'd mention crytek or ubisoft now days though... What on earth have they brought us?


Looking at the leaked specs of the next consoles... They just sound identical to 5 year old mid range PCs in a fancy case. While they wont be pushing any boundaries it may hint at much smoother and most importantly effective crossplatform porting. I damn well hope so.

CDproj will probably be alright, but The Witcher 2 is overrated graphically IMO, Bohemia have ArmA 3 running on a very high end PC at 16fps from what I heard? CCP... who?

As for console specs, lets look at the 360/PS3... they are mid range 2004 PC power, yet can produce games that run smooth, which when made on PC run like ass and look just as bad, so what are 2008 PC spec'd games going to be like when a 670 can't even run Assassin's Creed 3 maxed when it's the card the game was designed around!.

As for what Ubisoft have bought us; Far Cry 3 and Assassin's Creed 3 look amazing considering they were engineered for 8 year old hardware. Crytek created SSAO and made the best looking game of all time.

 

[Omaeka]

Thing is though, developers never have issues making games for PS3 & X360, and those are two different hardware set ups, so how can it be so hard to make games for AMD/Nvidia/Intel? That's only 3...

 

[Omaeka]

There are dozens of different models of graphics cards for each, and dozens of different drivers. And that's just the graphics cards. Different motherboards, amounts of ram, operating systems. There are literally thousands of different hardware setups, not just 3

All RAM works the same, all Motherboards work pretty much the same, and on top of that neither effects gaming performance all that much, if at all. As for graphics cards, you only really need to open the door for the companies and they'll do the rest with drivers, however tons of games only work on one card or neither, because they just slap the game onto windows pretty much CTRL+C and paste, they don't even bother looking at how the hardware does things and changing their code around for it to work. Hopefully the consoles will behave more similarly to PC's than before so it'll be easier for the lazy B's to slap it on our platform but the consoles are just APU's and little microchips for the graphics like before.

 

[Omaeka]

Yeah I know it is more difficult but it's nowhere near what people make it out to be. Developers and fans alike sit there making out they have to spend months and months 'optimizing' for 3570k's, 2500k's, 670's,580's, 6850's, 7950's, Athlons, Phenoms, 8350's etc. etc. but they don't. If a game works on a 4850, it'll work on every model above even better, and that's pre-driver optimization. If it runs on an i3 it'll run just as well on an i5/i7 and so on. There are CPUs to program for which aren't all that different in the way they act, there are pre-CUDA and CUDA NVidia cards to code for, and AMD which has retained almost identical architecture since the Radeon went HD.

As for RAM, most people have 4GB+ and for the ones who don't there should be lower resolution textures. You see if the developers actually bothered to make uber high res textures in the first place, it'd take 5 minutes to compress them and add them in as lower settings or for consoles, but they don't, they make them low resolution for consoles and then either don't bother upping them for PC or take ages doing so. Developers are so blind to that platform as they think everyone pirates etc. that they cba, really annoying.

As the guy above said, consoles blow big time. They are fine as they make gaming accessible for people and compliment gaming with titles like DmC and whatnot but just look what they've ended up causing... crappy running games on far superior hardware, lazy developers, exclusives, clouded PC sales that put the publishers off and so on.

 

[Omaeka]

Yes generally speaking if a game works (i.e. performs acceptably) on C-spec hardware it will typically also work on A-/B-spec hardware. But that maybe isn't taking advantage of the faster hardware; people running 2013 systems seem to want something better than 2008 visuals/physics/AI etc. The number of people on here moaning about lack of DX10/11 support for example.

Regarding the texture sizes, if your target platforms and biggest markets have a fixed about of RAM, wouldn't it make sense to create appropriate textures for those platforms? The "5min" compression job you describe probably takes a long longer when you have to factor in everything else (keeping multiple sizes in your source repositories, making sure that any changes are applied across all sizes, increased QA effort making sure that there are no problems, increased storage required on media, adding in the options to change it, documenting the differences, deciding what processes you are going to use etc etc - basically introducing a big layer of admin that many developers would view as an inconvenience). I read somewhere, and possibly I misinterpreted this, that even when developers do release a high res texture pack for PC sometimes they screw it up (Skyrim?)

I'm not at all that bothered if my game only runs 30fps higher than a card half the power or something, all that matters is that PC games continue to release and run above 35fps. Go look at Dark Souls, that game feels better at 30fps than Assassin's Creed 3 does at 50. If it's done right all games could be capped at a low framerate and still feel beautiful. Of course that'll step on the toes of the Elitists who demand 100fps, but who cares? The real gamers won't mind.

Sure our graphics cards may have more computing power than everything in the new generation consoles combined but if that isn't fully utilized it's not the end of the world, the important thing is that they run at all, especially with the graphical advancements of 4x more powerful hardware over the last generation. As for admin etc. then companies are thick mate, you can compress 8184x textures down to 256x using a simple tool for Skyrim/Oblivion/Morrowind. If they can't just make high resolution textures and then compress them 2 or 3 times and keep an archive of all the resolutions and fit them into the games accordingly then it shows how useless they are.

Talking about the future, Agni's Philosophy Demo runs at 60FPS in 1080p on a GTX680. I think that shows that current gaming cards are not that bad.

What do you mean 'not that bad'? Current gaming cards are the most powerful pieces of hardware out, it sounds like you're saying current PC hardware isn't as powerful as next gen console hardware?

You okay there mate?

Just looked at that Agni's philosophy and while it does look good, an actual game of that visual quality should run flawless on a 680, it should run at a 100fps, but lazy developers are lazy.

Go look at Gearbox and their implementation of PhysX on Borderlands 2 to see exactly how crappy a developer can be. PhysX on max consumes over 90fps, hahaha.

 

[Omaeka]

I was referring to this mate

Indeed but every game should give quality like that on current PC hardware easily, Square Enix are a different beast to most developers, can't say I've played a game from them which didn't run well.

The Elder Scrolls VI will be a great example, just look at how **** that'll run when it comes out, gonna be lols.

 

[Omaeka]

It's not a question of whether it can be done, it is a question of whether they consider it worth the effort. Such things are of no benefit to their core market (consoles) so the question they will be asking themselves is "how many extra sales would this generate us on PC versus the cost (money, time) of implementing it?". If they have a publisher cracking the whip and saying "WE NEED THIS GAME OUT FOR HOLIDAY SEASON" then things like that are sure to fall by the wayside as they are simply a nice to have rather than an essential fundamental of the game. Releasing a game without high res textures is not going to make-or-break a studio; failing to meet a delivery date on the other hand could do.

It shouldn't take more than a few hours to do it though, in a few games we, the user, can do it in seconds with a simple program and have several archives of different resolutions we can slap on the games whenever we want and change the resolutions almost on the fly. Honestly mate if a developer can't do something like that at all they are useless and deserve zero sales.

The Elder Scrolls games seem to have a community to do all the work anyway - why go to all the trouble when you can get others to do it for free?

Hahaha I suppose but this is what is wrong with developers, Bethesda being a perfect example. They'll release trash on the consoles because the audience doesn't know any better and then CTRL+V the trash onto PC because the community will fix it. Such lazy developers man.

 

[Omaeka]

Didn't Skyrim ran well on all hardware? Oblivion was sure a little resource hog, but in all fairness, it also had an improved IQ over Morrowind. Almost every game out there has a few settings to play with that give a huge leap in performance at little image quality expense. Metro 2033 runs great on all HW, it gave around 30FPS on medium settings DX10 (possibly DX11, not sure), 5040x1050 on a HD6850 in it's benchmark. But, if you have the power, upping the settings to DX11 very high, tessellation, 4xAA (in my opinion DoF only makes it look worse), all this @60FPS, results in an incredibly immerse feeling into that world.

Nah, I've never had a smooth Skyrim experience on tons of hardware, FX4100 w/ a 6850, i5 w/ a 6850, i5 w/ a 7950. All of them stuttered quite abit which was annoying. Haven't tried the 670 yet, but all of The Elder Scrolls games have ran like **** on the hardware of their time though, despite having lesser visuals than games that run much smoother.

As for Metro 2033, that is actually the best visual game I've played compared to performance, I maxed it at 1200p with everything but DoF on and it ran smooth on a 6850 a while back, I was so impressed.

In order to advance, there is a need for better hardware. All games may be "console ports", but I seriously doubt consoles can push the IQ as high as a high end system does and I doubt recent "console ports" are looking as "good" as they've looked from the beginning of this console cycle onwards. Skyrim looks better than Oblivion, BF 3 looks better than BF 2/BFBC 2, FC 3 looks better than FC 2 and so on.

There isn't a need for better hardware on our end though, everyone on this forum pretty much has better rigs than the new consoles, yet there is a need for us to get even better hardware to run what is basically the same thing?

C'mon mate.

The problem with some gamers, is that they expect awesome visual and gameplay quality but they don't want to upgrade for that.

Upgrade for what though? You really think the consoles on their next gen hardware could ever produce something that a 670GTX doesn't have the power to run?

Seriously mate, my rig should be able to run everything that the consoles produce at 50% better IQ at a decent framerate. But it won't, because sucky developers are sucky.