5 ms·

Dangit, I do want to play Cyberpunk maxed in 4k. Sorry kids, I guess you'll have to take a gap year before you can go to college, daddy's gonna upgrade.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
I will add that, IMO, if it's possible for any gpu to play a just-released game at maximum settings at a high resolution at 60+ fps, the developers haven't set the maximum quality settings high enough. Leave some headroom for future GPUs, or allow players who e.g. prefer a ludicrously high draw distance at any cost to make that choice and dial down the resolution to compensate. Most games don't meet this bar, and I think gamers who expect to be able to set every slider to the max and go to town—yes, even on a $2K GPU—are mostly responsible.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  I disagree that developers should spend valuable engineering time on producing games that can’t be run. Spend that time making other games instead, or squashing bugs (looking at you, cyberpunk!) and maybe keep a backlog of future features to patch in when the hardware gets there.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    I agree! When it comes to graphics, just make them look great with current (and not uncommon) hardware. When most gamers have upgraded hardware capable of substantial differences games can keep selling remasters if people care. I'm fine with nearly all gamers getting a better experience even if that means the tiny fraction of gamers who can and are willing to spend insane amounts of money on the best of all possible video cards are not able to take full advantage of their crazy hardware in most games.
  - Retric 4y ago
    It’s actually cheaper to build a game with higher graphics settings and then let people tweak the settings vs trying to optimize a game for hardware you can’t actually test with in development. On top of this you can release some awesome screenshots from settings that aren’t actually playable at release. This is especially beneficial when deadlines slip and suddenly consumers have a lot better hardware than you where expecting.
  - gambiting 4y ago
    As an actual gamedev - no real extra engineering time is spent on this - during development all textures and assets are usually produced in 8K or higher anyway, it's only during the data packaging step that everything gets downscaled to whatever was selected by tech art. There's a reason why my workstation has 256GB of ram - just loading up the main world of the game easily takes 100-150GB because everything is in such extreme quality. Same applies to visual effects - usually in development you will run all effects at full resolution to test how it all works. Releasing an "extreme" preset that no consumer PC can really run yet is just a matter of leaving those higher-quality assets in + enabling those full resolution options for VFX. Allowing users to use ray tracing at full resolution(something which will kill any GPU on the market) requires just adding an extra config option - there's very little engineering time required. QC will need to do a full pass of these options, but in the grand scheme of things tested that's not a huge deal.
    - mjrpes 4y ago
      Will that substantially increase size of game on disk?
      - gambiting 4y ago
        I mean, it can - but that's also a solved problem. Look at far Cry 6 - you want HD textures that require at least 12GB of vram? No problem, it's just an optional download.
- jandrese 4y ago
  There is a limited set of knobs a developer can add without increasing their development costs. If you ship a set of "ultra mega extreme" textures that will only be usable with future hardware you are still bloating the download by many gigabytes, probably dozens or even hundreds. If your dev team says they can make even better shadows but not on today's hardware then is it really worth the development effort to create them now? You can multiply particle effects to crazy amounts but that ends up looking silly.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    To be clear, I'm just asking for extreme draw distances, higher resolution shadows, and full quality textures. If that would require significant engineering, I stand corrected! I can certainly see how install size would be a concern with textures. I find it difficult to return to games such as Assassin's Creed II because of their muddy textures and low draw distances. These issues feel like something that could have been avoided with just a tad more forward thinking! There are also games like Quantum Break which (at least at launch, not sure if it was ever fixed) included mandatory upsampling which the user couldn't disable. The reason given was that the game wasn't designed to be playable at native resolution, and no current hardware would be able to run it that way.
    - ynx 4y ago
      Yes. Extreme draw distances: large open-world games or those with very long, content-intensive environments need to resort to tricks to unload parts of the world that are not visible or quickly accessible. Extreme draw distance can mean keeping orderS of maginitude more objects resident, which could mean a lot more materials loaded, more draw calls, more VRAM usage, or more swap. Higher resolution shadows: Hard shadows tend to look bad, soft shadows tend to perform bad, and worse with more lights. It takes a lot of deep GPU knowledge to do these in a visually convincing and high quality manner. The difference between "good enough" and "perfect" will easily cost you double digit fps at a minimum. Full quality textures: As with the draw distance caveat, implementing LODs is rather work-intensive. Some people will tell you that you can automate it, and they're half-right. If you are looking for top-notch game quality, that absolutely does not cut it, but if you're not trying to go the extra mile it can be serviceable. Games are super inconsistent in how far they push technology vs push the art, but there is rarely a "turn the dial to 11" knob ready to turn. The production requirements and technical limitations mix in unpredictable ways. Other times, games push ridiculously far in certain directions that later become mainstream, and execute well enough that, after they are copied into other mainstream games, they feel deficient - not in spite of their success, but as a direct result of it!!
cercatrova 4y ago
College isn't that cheap unfortunately.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

I will add that, IMO, if it's possible for any gpu to play a just-released game at maximum settings at a high resolution at 60+ fps, the developers haven't set the maximum quality settings high enough. Leave some headroom for future GPUs, or allow players who e.g. prefer a ludicrously high draw distance at any cost to make that choice and dial down the resolution to compensate. Most games don't meet this bar, and I think gamers who expect to be able to set every slider to the max and go to town—yes, even on a $2K GPU—are mostly responsible.

Godel_unicode 4y ago
I disagree that developers should spend valuable engineering time on producing games that can’t be run. Spend that time making other games instead, or squashing bugs (looking at you, cyberpunk!) and maybe keep a backlog of future features to patch in when the hardware gets there.
- autoexec 4y ago
  I agree! When it comes to graphics, just make them look great with current (and not uncommon) hardware. When most gamers have upgraded hardware capable of substantial differences games can keep selling remasters if people care. I'm fine with nearly all gamers getting a better experience even if that means the tiny fraction of gamers who can and are willing to spend insane amounts of money on the best of all possible video cards are not able to take full advantage of their crazy hardware in most games.
- Retric 4y ago
  It’s actually cheaper to build a game with higher graphics settings and then let people tweak the settings vs trying to optimize a game for hardware you can’t actually test with in development. On top of this you can release some awesome screenshots from settings that aren’t actually playable at release. This is especially beneficial when deadlines slip and suddenly consumers have a lot better hardware than you where expecting.
- gambiting 4y ago
  As an actual gamedev - no real extra engineering time is spent on this - during development all textures and assets are usually produced in 8K or higher anyway, it's only during the data packaging step that everything gets downscaled to whatever was selected by tech art. There's a reason why my workstation has 256GB of ram - just loading up the main world of the game easily takes 100-150GB because everything is in such extreme quality. Same applies to visual effects - usually in development you will run all effects at full resolution to test how it all works. Releasing an "extreme" preset that no consumer PC can really run yet is just a matter of leaving those higher-quality assets in + enabling those full resolution options for VFX. Allowing users to use ray tracing at full resolution(something which will kill any GPU on the market) requires just adding an extra config option - there's very little engineering time required. QC will need to do a full pass of these options, but in the grand scheme of things tested that's not a huge deal.
  - mjrpes 4y ago
    Will that substantially increase size of game on disk?
    - gambiting 4y ago
      I mean, it can - but that's also a solved problem. Look at far Cry 6 - you want HD textures that require at least 12GB of vram? No problem, it's just an optional download.
jandrese 4y ago
There is a limited set of knobs a developer can add without increasing their development costs. If you ship a set of "ultra mega extreme" textures that will only be usable with future hardware you are still bloating the download by many gigabytes, probably dozens or even hundreds. If your dev team says they can make even better shadows but not on today's hardware then is it really worth the development effort to create them now? You can multiply particle effects to crazy amounts but that ends up looking silly.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  To be clear, I'm just asking for extreme draw distances, higher resolution shadows, and full quality textures. If that would require significant engineering, I stand corrected! I can certainly see how install size would be a concern with textures. I find it difficult to return to games such as Assassin's Creed II because of their muddy textures and low draw distances. These issues feel like something that could have been avoided with just a tad more forward thinking! There are also games like Quantum Break which (at least at launch, not sure if it was ever fixed) included mandatory upsampling which the user couldn't disable. The reason given was that the game wasn't designed to be playable at native resolution, and no current hardware would be able to run it that way.
  - ynx 4y ago
    Yes. Extreme draw distances: large open-world games or those with very long, content-intensive environments need to resort to tricks to unload parts of the world that are not visible or quickly accessible. Extreme draw distance can mean keeping orderS of maginitude more objects resident, which could mean a lot more materials loaded, more draw calls, more VRAM usage, or more swap. Higher resolution shadows: Hard shadows tend to look bad, soft shadows tend to perform bad, and worse with more lights. It takes a lot of deep GPU knowledge to do these in a visually convincing and high quality manner. The difference between "good enough" and "perfect" will easily cost you double digit fps at a minimum. Full quality textures: As with the draw distance caveat, implementing LODs is rather work-intensive. Some people will tell you that you can automate it, and they're half-right. If you are looking for top-notch game quality, that absolutely does not cut it, but if you're not trying to go the extra mile it can be serviceable. Games are super inconsistent in how far they push technology vs push the art, but there is rarely a "turn the dial to 11" knob ready to turn. The production requirements and technical limitations mix in unpredictable ways. Other times, games push ridiculously far in certain directions that later become mainstream, and execute well enough that, after they are copied into other mainstream games, they feel deficient - not in spite of their success, but as a direct result of it!!

cercatrova 4y ago

College isn't that cheap unfortunately.