6 ms·

I disagree - current gen console aren't enough to deliver smooth immersive graphics - I played BG3 on PS first and then on PC and there's just no comparing the

I disagree - current gen console aren't enough to deliver smooth immersive graphics - I played BG3 on PS first and then on PC and there's just no comparing the graphics. Cyberpunk same deal. I'll pay to upgrade to consistent 120/4k and better graphics, and I'll buy the games. And there are AAA that make and will make good money with graphics being front and center.

Ntrails 1y ago
>aren't enough to deliver smooth immersive graphics I'm just not sold. Do I really think that BG3 being slightly prettier than, say, Dragon Age / Skyrim / etc made it a more enticing game? Not to me certainly. Was cyberpunk prettier than Witcher 3? Did it need to be for me to play it? My query isn't about whether you can get people to upgrade to play new stuff (always true). But whether they'd still upgrade if they could play on the old console with worse graphics. I also don't think anyone is going to suddenly start playing video games because the graphics improve further.
- keyringlight 1y ago
  Two aspects I keep thinking about: -How difficult it must be for the art/technical teams at game studios to figure out for all the detail they are capable of putting on screen how much of it will be appreciated by gamers. Essentially making sure that anything they're going to be budgeting significant amount of worker time to creating, gamers aren't going to run right past it and ignore or doesn't contribute meaningfully to 'more than the sum of its parts'. -As much as technology is an enabler for art, alongside the install base issue how well does pursuing new methods fit how their studio is used to working, and is the payoff there if they spend time adapting. A lot of gaming business is about shipping product, and the studios concern is primarily about getting content to gamers than chasing tech as that is what lets their business continue, selling GPUs/consoles is another company's business.
- rafaelmn 1y ago
  > Do I really think that BG3 being slightly prettier than, say, Dragon Age / Skyrim / etc made it a more enticing game? Absolutely - graphical improvements make the game more immersive for me and I don't want to go back and replay the games I spent hundreds of hours in mid two thousands, like say NVN or Icewind Dale (never played BG 2). It's just not the same feeling now that I've played games with incomparable graphics, polished mechanics and movie level voice acting/mocap cutscenes. I even picked up Mass Effect recently out of nostalgia but gave up fast because it just isn't as captivating as it was back when it was peak graphics.
  - adlpz 1y ago
    Well this goes to show that, as some other commenter said, the gamer community (whatever that is) is indeed very fragmented. I routinely re-play games like Diablo 2 or BG1/2 and I couldn't care less about graphics, voice acting or motion capture.
  - Forgeties79 1y ago
    > Absolutely - graphical improvements make the game more immersive for me Exactly. Graphics are not the end all be all for assessing games, but it’s odd how quickly people handwave away graphics in a visual medium.
    - kbolino 1y ago
      Maximal "realism" is neither the only nor even necessarily the best use of that medium.
      - Forgeties79 1y ago
        When did I say anything like that? When did anybody in this thread?
        kbolino 1y ago
        I don't know what these words mean to you vs. what they mean to me. But whatever you call the visual quality that Baldur's Gate 3, CyberPunk 2077, and most flagship AAA titles, etc. are chasing after that makes them have "better graphics" and be "more immersive", whatever that is, is not the only way to paint the medium. Very successful games are still being made that use sprites, low-res polygons, cel shading, etc. While these techniques still can run into hardware limits, they generally don't benefit from the sort of improvements (and that word is becoming ever more debatable with things like AI frame generation) that make for better looking [whatever that quality is called] games.
        Forgeties79 1y ago
pjmlp 1y ago
Being an old dog that still cares about gaming, I would assert many games are also not taking advantage of current gen hardware, coded in Unreal and Unity, a kind of Electron for games, in what concerns taking advantage of existing hardware. There is a reason there are so many complaints in social media about being obvious to gamers in what game engine a game was written on. It used to be that game development quality was taken more seriously, when they were sold via storage media, and there was a deadline to burn those discs/cartridges. Now they just ship whatever is done by the deadline, and updates will come later via a DLC, if at all.
- formerly_proven 1y ago
  Unreal and Unity would be less problematic if these engines were engineered to match the underlying reality of graphics APIs/drivers, but they're not. Neither of these can systematically fix the shader stuttering they are causing architecturally, and so essentially all games built on these platforms are sentenced to always stutter, regardless of hardware. Both of these seem to suffer from incentive issues similar to enterprise software: They're not marketing and selling to either end users or professionals, but studio executives. So it's important to have - preferably a steady stream of - flashy headline features (e.g. nanite, lumen) instead of a product that actually works on the most basic level (consistently render frames). It doesn't really matter to Epic Games that UE4/5 RT is largely unplayable; even for game publishers, if you can pull nice-looking screenshots out of the engine or do good-looking 24p offline renders (and slap "in-game graphics" on them), that's good enough.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Pretty much it.
  - Uvix 1y ago
    The shader stutter issues are non-existent on console, which is where most of their sales are. PC, as it has been for almost two decades, is an afterthought rather than a primary focus.
    - 1y ago
flohofwoe 1y ago
Just get a PC then? ;) In the end, game consoles haven't been much more than "boring" subsidized low-end PCs for quite a while now.
- rafaelmn 1y ago
  PC costs a lot and depreciates fast, by the end of a console lifecycle I can still count on developers targeting it - PC performance for 6+ year hardware is guaranteed to suck. And I'm not a heavy gamer - I'll spend ~100h on games per year, but so will my wife and my son - PC sucks for multiple people using it - PS is amazing. I know I could concoct some remote play setup via lan on TV to let my wife and kids play but I just want something I spend a few hundred eur and I plug into the TV and then it works. Honestly the only reason I caved with the GPU purchase (which cost the equivalent of a PS pro) was the local AI - but in retrospect that was useless as well.
  - randomNumber7 1y ago
    Oh yeah it's great to play PS4 games while the thing runs with the noise of a vacuum cleaner.
  - theshackleford 1y ago
    > by the end of a console lifecycle I can still count on developers targeting it And I can count on those games still being playable on my six year old hardware because they are in fact developed for 6 year old hardware. > PC performance for 6+ year hardware is guaranteed to suck For new titles at maximum graphics level sure. For new titles at the kind of fidelity six year old consoles are putting out? Nah. You just drop your settings from "ULTIMATE MAXIMUM HYPER FOR NEWEST GPUS ONLY" to "the same low to medium at best settings the consoles are running" and off you go.
wiseowise 1y ago
> current gen console aren't enough to deliver smooth immersive graphics They were enough since PS4 era to deliver smooth, immersive graphics.
gnulinux996 1y ago
> current gen console aren't enough to deliver smooth immersive graphics The Last of Us franchise, especially part 2 have been the most immersive experiences that I have had in gaming. This game pretty much told me that the PlayStation is more than capable of delivering this kind of experiences. Now, if some of those high budget so-called AAA games cannot deliver not even a fraction of that - I believe - is on them.

Ntrails 1y ago

>aren't enough to deliver smooth immersive graphics I'm just not sold. Do I really think that BG3 being slightly prettier than, say, Dragon Age / Skyrim / etc made it a more enticing game? Not to me certainly. Was cyberpunk prettier than Witcher 3? Did it need to be for me to play it? My query isn't about whether you can get people to upgrade to play new stuff (always true). But whether they'd still upgrade if they could play on the old console with worse graphics. I also don't think anyone is going to suddenly start playing video games because the graphics improve further.

keyringlight 1y ago
Two aspects I keep thinking about: -How difficult it must be for the art/technical teams at game studios to figure out for all the detail they are capable of putting on screen how much of it will be appreciated by gamers. Essentially making sure that anything they're going to be budgeting significant amount of worker time to creating, gamers aren't going to run right past it and ignore or doesn't contribute meaningfully to 'more than the sum of its parts'. -As much as technology is an enabler for art, alongside the install base issue how well does pursuing new methods fit how their studio is used to working, and is the payoff there if they spend time adapting. A lot of gaming business is about shipping product, and the studios concern is primarily about getting content to gamers than chasing tech as that is what lets their business continue, selling GPUs/consoles is another company's business.
rafaelmn 1y ago
> Do I really think that BG3 being slightly prettier than, say, Dragon Age / Skyrim / etc made it a more enticing game? Absolutely - graphical improvements make the game more immersive for me and I don't want to go back and replay the games I spent hundreds of hours in mid two thousands, like say NVN or Icewind Dale (never played BG 2). It's just not the same feeling now that I've played games with incomparable graphics, polished mechanics and movie level voice acting/mocap cutscenes. I even picked up Mass Effect recently out of nostalgia but gave up fast because it just isn't as captivating as it was back when it was peak graphics.
- adlpz 1y ago
  Well this goes to show that, as some other commenter said, the gamer community (whatever that is) is indeed very fragmented. I routinely re-play games like Diablo 2 or BG1/2 and I couldn't care less about graphics, voice acting or motion capture.
- Forgeties79 1y ago
  > Absolutely - graphical improvements make the game more immersive for me Exactly. Graphics are not the end all be all for assessing games, but it’s odd how quickly people handwave away graphics in a visual medium.
  - kbolino 1y ago
    Maximal "realism" is neither the only nor even necessarily the best use of that medium.
    - Forgeties79 1y ago
      When did I say anything like that? When did anybody in this thread?
      - kbolino 1y ago
        I don't know what these words mean to you vs. what they mean to me. But whatever you call the visual quality that Baldur's Gate 3, CyberPunk 2077, and most flagship AAA titles, etc. are chasing after that makes them have "better graphics" and be "more immersive", whatever that is, is not the only way to paint the medium. Very successful games are still being made that use sprites, low-res polygons, cel shading, etc. While these techniques still can run into hardware limits, they generally don't benefit from the sort of improvements (and that word is becoming ever more debatable with things like AI frame generation) that make for better looking [whatever that quality is called] games.
        Forgeties79 1y ago

pjmlp 1y ago

Being an old dog that still cares about gaming, I would assert many games are also not taking advantage of current gen hardware, coded in Unreal and Unity, a kind of Electron for games, in what concerns taking advantage of existing hardware. There is a reason there are so many complaints in social media about being obvious to gamers in what game engine a game was written on. It used to be that game development quality was taken more seriously, when they were sold via storage media, and there was a deadline to burn those discs/cartridges. Now they just ship whatever is done by the deadline, and updates will come later via a DLC, if at all.

formerly_proven 1y ago
Unreal and Unity would be less problematic if these engines were engineered to match the underlying reality of graphics APIs/drivers, but they're not. Neither of these can systematically fix the shader stuttering they are causing architecturally, and so essentially all games built on these platforms are sentenced to always stutter, regardless of hardware. Both of these seem to suffer from incentive issues similar to enterprise software: They're not marketing and selling to either end users or professionals, but studio executives. So it's important to have - preferably a steady stream of - flashy headline features (e.g. nanite, lumen) instead of a product that actually works on the most basic level (consistently render frames). It doesn't really matter to Epic Games that UE4/5 RT is largely unplayable; even for game publishers, if you can pull nice-looking screenshots out of the engine or do good-looking 24p offline renders (and slap "in-game graphics" on them), that's good enough.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Pretty much it.
- Uvix 1y ago
  The shader stutter issues are non-existent on console, which is where most of their sales are. PC, as it has been for almost two decades, is an afterthought rather than a primary focus.
  - 1y ago

flohofwoe 1y ago

Just get a PC then? ;) In the end, game consoles haven't been much more than "boring" subsidized low-end PCs for quite a while now.

rafaelmn 1y ago
PC costs a lot and depreciates fast, by the end of a console lifecycle I can still count on developers targeting it - PC performance for 6+ year hardware is guaranteed to suck. And I'm not a heavy gamer - I'll spend ~100h on games per year, but so will my wife and my son - PC sucks for multiple people using it - PS is amazing. I know I could concoct some remote play setup via lan on TV to let my wife and kids play but I just want something I spend a few hundred eur and I plug into the TV and then it works. Honestly the only reason I caved with the GPU purchase (which cost the equivalent of a PS pro) was the local AI - but in retrospect that was useless as well.
- randomNumber7 1y ago
  Oh yeah it's great to play PS4 games while the thing runs with the noise of a vacuum cleaner.
- theshackleford 1y ago
  > by the end of a console lifecycle I can still count on developers targeting it And I can count on those games still being playable on my six year old hardware because they are in fact developed for 6 year old hardware. > PC performance for 6+ year hardware is guaranteed to suck For new titles at maximum graphics level sure. For new titles at the kind of fidelity six year old consoles are putting out? Nah. You just drop your settings from "ULTIMATE MAXIMUM HYPER FOR NEWEST GPUS ONLY" to "the same low to medium at best settings the consoles are running" and off you go.

wiseowise 1y ago

> current gen console aren't enough to deliver smooth immersive graphics They were enough since PS4 era to deliver smooth, immersive graphics.

gnulinux996 1y ago

> current gen console aren't enough to deliver smooth immersive graphics The Last of Us franchise, especially part 2 have been the most immersive experiences that I have had in gaming. This game pretty much told me that the PlayStation is more than capable of delivering this kind of experiences. Now, if some of those high budget so-called AAA games cannot deliver not even a fraction of that - I believe - is on them.