4 ms·

That, and a PC is an incredibly inefficient gaming machine. Developers squeeze more out of consoles than PCs. An RTX 4090 has 5x the TFLOPS of an Xbox Series X

That, and a PC is an incredibly inefficient gaming machine. Developers squeeze more out of consoles than PCs. An RTX 4090 has 5x the TFLOPS of an Xbox Series X but maybe it's twice as good on a cross platform Windows/Xbox game.

ferongr 3y ago
Nah, with equivalent graphical settings and resolution, the PC would manage at least 3 times the framerate. Unsteady 30FPS with terrible frame pacing is nothing that consoles can brag about.
- dangus 3y ago
  Something to keep in mind is that modern consoles do deliver many games in 60fps (and some in 120fps), while many PC gamers are targeting even higher frame rates that have diminishing returns and possibly aren’t even compatible with living room TVs that rarely exceed 60Hz and never (to my knowledge) exceed 120Hz. When it comes to the typical 1080p resolution target, it’s really easy to hit 60FPS with very mediocre hardware in most current AAA games without sacrificing much if any visual fidelity. Owning a PC might give you the ability to bump the resolution or turn on inefficient enhancements like ray tracing, but someone sitting on a couch playing on a 60Hz $350 Costco TV isn’t going to experience a difference. As an example, with the Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty benchmark, you’ll hit 60FPS average at 1080p Ultra settings (ray tracing off) with previous-generation mid-range hardware like the RTX 3060 or RX 6600. And of course this is without doing a single bit of console-specific optimization. Shooter and esports examples like Call of Duty and Overwatch 2 are designed to be frame rate optimized and easily deliver a 120fps experience on modern consoles. What consoles can do beautifully is give you a solid 75-100% of the “graphical fidelity to the casual observer” while being far weaker than a more expensive PC. The console market isn’t really like the early 2000s where a crunchy 30fps was a more common expectation.
  - opan 3y ago
    The Switch specifically still runs many games at 30fps that were 60 on other consoles, such as Nier Automata.
  - nullindividual 3y ago
    Forza targets 30fps on the XBX when RT mode is enabled. 30fps is not an uncommon target for consoles today. There are no compatibility concerns with refresh rates:fps. And there are TVs but more importantly monitors that exceed 120hz. COD doesn’t reach a steady 120 fps on consoles — a VRR display is helpful with the fps dips as low as 60 fps.
- wiseowise 3y ago
  Anything to back that up, except broscience?
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    "5x the power on PC should give you 3x the performance" isn't exactly broscience, and while it's not sourced neither was the claim they're responding to.
waythenewsgoes 3y ago
I don’t think the problem is necessarily PCs being inefficient. IMO it is more likely that it is simply much harder to optimize for random hardware combinations that people run, and that there is a lot of pressure on devs to optimize console gameplay (likely at the expense of optimizing PC gameplay, perhaps devs also see less of a need to since most PCs are better equipped than consoles anyhow, that and deadline pressure)
highwaylights 3y ago
Part of this is having to design for an amorphous target, whereas a console is a very known quantity for tuning resource usage (far beyond what you can put in a settings menu). The other side of this is that the consoles have technology far in advance of PC’s that people are unaware of because for whatever reasons they wrongly chose a long time ago to decide that GPU’s were all that matters. As one example: the PS5 (Kraken) and XS (Velocity) have dedicated decompression and storage access hardware that allows access to the NVME without chewing up CPU cycles. This is massive for resource loading and not something that currently exists in the PC world. Even where some amalgam of it might exist soon via DirectStorage, it’ll not be ubiquitous, so it can’t be designed in to the core of PC versions of games because not everyone will have it. This is a pretty critical difference when you see it in a game like Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart or Spiderman 2. There’s no equivalent that would allow those games to be ported to PC without significant compromises. Even texture streaming is dramatically faster than on the highest end PC. I can dig out the tests on this if anyone cares to see it, but reading from a gen 4 NVME at 7GB/s takes something north of 80% CPU usage on a 5800x if memory serves. Talk starts at 4 minutes: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KasVMOMWM-4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KasVMOMWM-4
- nullindividual 3y ago
  Games can absolutely have a happy path for DirectStorage. Not sure why you believe incorrectly that DS cannot be incorporated “in the core”. Forspoken does use DS on Windows. No need to wait for the future.
  - highwaylights 3y ago
    They really dont have a happy path. Incorporating an API is not at all the same as being able to base the product around that feature. Forspoken can’t base the design around instant load times, because most PCs don’t have DirectStorage over ultra-fast NVME drives. Even those that do, don’t have coprocessors to read from the drives, meaning they’re eating up massive amounts of compute to read that fast. Not even a little bit the same as the situation on the PS5.

ferongr 3y ago

Nah, with equivalent graphical settings and resolution, the PC would manage at least 3 times the framerate. Unsteady 30FPS with terrible frame pacing is nothing that consoles can brag about.

dangus 3y ago
Something to keep in mind is that modern consoles do deliver many games in 60fps (and some in 120fps), while many PC gamers are targeting even higher frame rates that have diminishing returns and possibly aren’t even compatible with living room TVs that rarely exceed 60Hz and never (to my knowledge) exceed 120Hz. When it comes to the typical 1080p resolution target, it’s really easy to hit 60FPS with very mediocre hardware in most current AAA games without sacrificing much if any visual fidelity. Owning a PC might give you the ability to bump the resolution or turn on inefficient enhancements like ray tracing, but someone sitting on a couch playing on a 60Hz $350 Costco TV isn’t going to experience a difference. As an example, with the Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty benchmark, you’ll hit 60FPS average at 1080p Ultra settings (ray tracing off) with previous-generation mid-range hardware like the RTX 3060 or RX 6600. And of course this is without doing a single bit of console-specific optimization. Shooter and esports examples like Call of Duty and Overwatch 2 are designed to be frame rate optimized and easily deliver a 120fps experience on modern consoles. What consoles can do beautifully is give you a solid 75-100% of the “graphical fidelity to the casual observer” while being far weaker than a more expensive PC. The console market isn’t really like the early 2000s where a crunchy 30fps was a more common expectation.
- opan 3y ago
  The Switch specifically still runs many games at 30fps that were 60 on other consoles, such as Nier Automata.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  Forza targets 30fps on the XBX when RT mode is enabled. 30fps is not an uncommon target for consoles today. There are no compatibility concerns with refresh rates:fps. And there are TVs but more importantly monitors that exceed 120hz. COD doesn’t reach a steady 120 fps on consoles — a VRR display is helpful with the fps dips as low as 60 fps.
wiseowise 3y ago
Anything to back that up, except broscience?
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  "5x the power on PC should give you 3x the performance" isn't exactly broscience, and while it's not sourced neither was the claim they're responding to.

waythenewsgoes 3y ago

I don’t think the problem is necessarily PCs being inefficient. IMO it is more likely that it is simply much harder to optimize for random hardware combinations that people run, and that there is a lot of pressure on devs to optimize console gameplay (likely at the expense of optimizing PC gameplay, perhaps devs also see less of a need to since most PCs are better equipped than consoles anyhow, that and deadline pressure)

highwaylights 3y ago

Part of this is having to design for an amorphous target, whereas a console is a very known quantity for tuning resource usage (far beyond what you can put in a settings menu). The other side of this is that the consoles have technology far in advance of PC’s that people are unaware of because for whatever reasons they wrongly chose a long time ago to decide that GPU’s were all that matters. As one example: the PS5 (Kraken) and XS (Velocity) have dedicated decompression and storage access hardware that allows access to the NVME without chewing up CPU cycles. This is massive for resource loading and not something that currently exists in the PC world. Even where some amalgam of it might exist soon via DirectStorage, it’ll not be ubiquitous, so it can’t be designed in to the core of PC versions of games because not everyone will have it. This is a pretty critical difference when you see it in a game like Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart or Spiderman 2. There’s no equivalent that would allow those games to be ported to PC without significant compromises. Even texture streaming is dramatically faster than on the highest end PC. I can dig out the tests on this if anyone cares to see it, but reading from a gen 4 NVME at 7GB/s takes something north of 80% CPU usage on a 5800x if memory serves. Talk starts at 4 minutes: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KasVMOMWM-4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KasVMOMWM-4

nullindividual 3y ago
Games can absolutely have a happy path for DirectStorage. Not sure why you believe incorrectly that DS cannot be incorporated “in the core”. Forspoken does use DS on Windows. No need to wait for the future.
- highwaylights 3y ago
  They really dont have a happy path. Incorporating an API is not at all the same as being able to base the product around that feature. Forspoken can’t base the design around instant load times, because most PCs don’t have DirectStorage over ultra-fast NVME drives. Even those that do, don’t have coprocessors to read from the drives, meaning they’re eating up massive amounts of compute to read that fast. Not even a little bit the same as the situation on the PS5.