Be Excellent To Each Other

How long does it bother you for if you are watching a DVD / non-HD channel?

Text and stuff does look much better, though.

It bothers me enough that I don't watch anything less than 720p these days Haven't watched a DVD in years, and 99% of TV viewing is in HD.

The boy was playing GTAV on a 21" screen with the xbox plugged into a scart lead the other day. I thought I'd suddenly developed cataracts or had a stroke or something. Then I accused him of breaking the TV, and messed about with the settings and stuff. Then I looked at the back of it and saw that connected and was like "omg, how do you even know what a scart lead is?"

That's all have to add.

I don't think a direct comparison between film and games really works. Film footage of real life stands up much better to lower resolutions whereas computer generated artifacts massively benefit in the jump from 480 to 720p. I'm not as convinced that it needs to rise much further above 720 (for the moment at least) and that maybe in the current gen there could be overall improvements made in other areas of games if the extra power wasn't funneled towards higher resolutions; but the idea that games would be fine at 480p is just batshit crazy.

I think your opinion of batshit crazy is pretty batshit crazy.

You're all aware that we have different eyes and different brains with different perceptions of images? Experiences of variation in framerate and resolution are somewhat subjective.

Shh, Science, you're getting in the way of an argument.

You might have, Mr Fancy Pants Individuality, the rest of us are single gestalt entity sharing one set of organs. And I still think Grim's wrong, that's how wrong he is.

Grim... is clearly not wrong. In this case.

Most of the classic arcade games up until the 360 and PS3 based boards came out were 480p.

That's less an argument so much as it's a statement, care to unpack it a bit?

Blah blah. Graphix Smaffix.

The reasons consoles are exciting is that the developer of the game can continue to develop the game until it runs exactly as they want it too*, and then it runs exactly the same on my console.

Thats actually pretty unique, and opens up a whole avenue on design, mechanisms and immersion, thats just not possible on a flexible system. Getting all snobby, it allows you to deliver your artistic vision to the player as it was intended.

I think it plays a role on why indie games on the PC are often so much stronger as works. They are primative enough (retro 2D etc) that the parity between your experiences and the designers is preserved.

The only argument against this is basically - 'thats not a problem, if your PC is at the edge of the bell curve' - which misses the point completely.

* or time allows :(

PC only devs can use the Valve hardware survey results to easily target a low end that pretty much covers the entire market.

I know that doesn't nullify your point entirely, but for the majority of games I think it does.

Surely, that argument only applies to games that are exclusive to one single console?

EDIT: And the same goes for the argument about coding "closer to the metal".

No, as the same applies across consoles of similar power. You can write a game for PS4/XBone and have dedicated teams polishing them up for 3-4 months at the end and get two very similar quality products. Chuck a PC in the mix and you basically have to cater for kit that can barely cope with last-gen code too and that requires everything from redoing all the game assets, shaders, etc.

It is of course possible to write nicely scalable games. However, the expense & effort involved makes it not worth pushing the top end in these cases, so you get the all-platform-bland-fests that are basically just a bit shinier on better hardware, but the core game has to be designed so it runs on the very lowest spec, so that gives a low ceiling to CPU/logic complexity right there...


Talking of logic, anything multiplayer, or that has replays, will (90%+) be logic-locked to 30Hz for reasons of stability/predictability*. In good engines, the rendering will be separated - and for powerful hardware (if the dev. had time/money to do it) the animation may even run at the graphics thread rate. So things might look 'slightly smoother' if it refreshes at 60Hz. However, as for actual interaction (movement, aiming, etc), it is still actually running at 30Hz internally, and no hardware can change that. Any perception of being more responsive is audiophile level self-delusion. Screen refresh does give a different 'feel' - 30Hz is more cinematic (good for moodiness), 60Hz is crisper and more 'real', but the high fidelity of computer graphics over HDMI significantly middies the waters here, and in my experince, a good screen filter FX system does far more to set the tone & feel than refresh rates.

*The fastest twitch games may lock it to 60Hz logic updates, but this only works if the game itself is significantly lighter on CPU load than many of its peers - which brings in a whole host of other issues with regards to shinies & review scores...

To a certain extent yes. And I'ld posit that it shows when you compare platform exclusives to multiplatform games to a great extent.



As n approaches 1, you tend towards the developers vision of how the game should behave. As n approaches infinity you increasingly lose that vision.

And all old games are shit, so point proved.

So are you actually saying that there are games for PS3/Xbox 360 doing things that are entirely impossible on PC, logic-wise? Really? I think you are going to have to give a very specific example in order for anyone to buy that. Particularly since most games come out on PC anyway.

Oh, and 60fps isn't 'slightly smoother', it's twice as smooth. Whether you care or not about that difference is another matter.

Well it's twice as many frames per second but it's diminishing returns, 30fps is still smooth and 120fps would not appear twice as smooth again, it would appear to be more or less the same. But I fully agree that 60fps is a lot more pleasant to look at. Everything just seems more alive somehow.

I know it's probably only in my head, but I really think I could sit down in front of my PC playing Counter Strike and tell you if it's running at 60FPS or 99FPS.

Clearly I should make a THING that tests people.

I don't know how to make sure it's running at the right speed, though. Also, what if they've only got a 60hz monitor?

Graphics takes CPU processing to do, the more open the world, the more work the CPU needs to do in terms of visibility etc. to get a frame that draws fast enough. the limit on this is the worst view in the whole game, usually from a corner of the map high up seeing everything, and that is the upper bound for CPU cost for graphics. AI/logic/animation is largely independent of screen complexity, and that has to be small enough to squeeze under the worst case graphics load.

All hardware has quirks - some things it does really well, some it does poorly. It is easy to write an exclusive game that exploits these quirks to get super-shiny & stylised effects. However, anything like that is very hard to port to another platform, and PCs are the worst to try to port to. I spent a good year porting Devil May Cry 3 from PS2 to PS3, and we had to cut back things there even! The PS2 was very very good at fill rate and reading/writing to offscreen buffers. But with the rise from 480p->720p, as well as hardware costs for flushing the pipelines to let you use your render target, we ended up having to cut & change some of the effects that hardware 8 years older could chuck around.
There was one effect (I forget which sadly) which was actually physically impossible to do on modern hardware as it used an obscure quirk of the PS2 alpha blending to pull off. That game was 5-6 years after the console release, by the time the graphics guys were complete experts in the hardware, and could benefit from knowing exactly how the target hardware performed.

I didn't do a huge amount on PS3, but the experts were doing things like rendering the base scene with the graphics hardware, dumping it back in main memory, then using 4 or more of the SPU cores to do the final blending/deferred lighting/post fx. That kind of technique is again utterly impossible for a PC to do with any sort of performance.

Edit: At 99Hz, you get some 'tearing' if the refresh rate is 60 or 75Hz - you would notice it at the edges of buildings when you turn the camera fast. It is because the top of the screen is one frame, then the next frame is presented halfway down the screen, and if the camera has moved/turned in this time - the raster line where the change occurs will be visible. Apparently this is still better than locking them to 60Hz or whatever...

I don't doubt that there are effects done on consoles that can't be ported directly to PC. And we all know PCs relatively quickly evolve to the point where they do things the consoles can't. I had the impression you where talking about game logic suffering on PCs, though.

Anyway, my point is simply that if the new consoles can't/won't (for whatever reason) run to the standard I like (which happens to include 60fps and minimal control lag), then I don't need them - except possibly for the exclusives.

Hey, 3D Deathchase is still the best game ever, so who cares?

Bloody Spectrum fanboys, trolling every thread...

I hate to say it, but most last-gen games didn't do 60fps either - smoke & mirrors, my friend...

Logic-wise, it is all a matter of scale. The graphics hardware covers how the pixels look, but the animation, particles, AI, visibility, etc. are all CPU based. On a console, you know you have x number of cores at y gigahertz, but for a PC game you have to cope with a dual-core 2GHz

At the end of the day, go by whether the game feels fun and engaging - not by FPS, poly counts, or any other penis-length comparisons that get the fanboys excited. None of it matters, and design decisions & techniques make far more difference to the feel & playability than any of this gumph.

I know that, which is why I'm not keen to move on with consoles. Burnout Paradise ran beautifully, though, so it was clearly possible, when the developers went for it.

For me, games running smooth as butter and responding quickly is a very important part of that. All I have to do, as I mentioned previously, is to compare two games like Rallisport Challenge 2 and Sega Rally, and I know which is more fun to play, and why.

So 20 fps is fine too? How about 10? Or is just that your view of what is acceptable happens to be different to someone else's?

I think it's a bit of a fucking given that people care predominantly about other aspects of games but discussing how frame rates affect how a game feels seems perfectly reasonable to me.

I reckon 10 fps would fine for Football Manager.

Ah - but racing falls into the fast action 'twitch' category.
Sports games have trivially simple graphics (limited arenas & participants) so need effort to make slower than 60Hz these days.
RPG & open world games fall firmly in the 30fps & rich environments camp, added to which the lower framerate gives a more cinematic feel.
Movie cash-in license games are also pretty much all 30Hz due to shininess overload.

It's all a balance - the faster you run, the less shinies you have, simple as that. Different genres have different standards, and as time goes on, people squeeze more shinies into the same time - so the quality progresses for all genres.

Sorry just catching up with this now and I see it's all moved along somewhat.

Just to try and address a few key points, I readily accept that it's possible to get more out of consoles than the 'equivalent' PC (and indeed have done in this thread more than once), but I also maintain there's a limit to what you can squeeze out of the hardware, especially with the PS4/XBone where the hardware is all effectively off-the-shelf PC components. There are no exotic SPUs or 'Emotion Engine' chip for developers to get to grips with, just a £100 AMD graphics card.

(And as Eurogamer noted the other day, the XBone doesn't even function correctly as a fucking media player at the moment, so let's not get too carried away with innate console advantages such as where everyone gets the same thing. In this case a Netflix app that doesn't work properly. For everyone.)

I also don't buy this idea that there's much in the way of stuff on the consoles that's fundamentally impossible on the PC, sure there are clever hardware tricks that are unique to the console in question, but I'm sure there are other ways to achieve the same (or very similar) effect. (I see the DirectX API point has already been made, and AMD will be debuting their Mantle API later this year which they are claiming I believe will be a 'closer to the metal' approach compared to DirectX.)

I've been reading the face-offs at Eurogamer for the entire last generation and from memory, never once has the observation been made that the 360 or PS3 does something that the PC version doesn't, and indeed that's gone the other way too, the PC version has had more shinies and often 60FPS versus 30FPS, but nothing that the console versions outright couldn't achieve because of some amazing hardware quirk.

I expect that parity to be even more evident in the current generation, with the XBone/PS4/PC versions being broadly identical, and the PC brute-forcing itself to 60FPS where the console versions are stuck at 30FPS, and adding on the extra shinies.

With the greatest of respect to Mr Dom you're quoting examples from the PS2 and PS3 era, both of those machines were pretty exotic custom hardware designs from Sony so it made sense that there was a lot of power to unlock - and in the case of the PS3 of course they famously sold the thing at a loss for a long period of time, a state of affairs they were determined not to repeat this time hence the far more standard hardware - and that's not the case this generation, although of course things will get better over time.

The other key difference this time of course is that both new consoles are looking pretty underpowered right out of the gates compared to even a modest mid-range gaming PC (which admittedly will still cost more than the consoles would), whereas the 360 and PS3 pretty much wiped the floor with everything when they were released, if you wanted to play a game like Ridge Racer 6 in native 720p at 60FPS, you bought yourself a 360 (as I did) because the PC to do that just flat out didn't exist.

They're not off the bloody shelf.

Am I wrong in enjoying my PS4? If I am, then fuck you, you're not the boss of me. If I'm not then, who cares?

What? How is that... What?

They're not exactly bespoke chunks of magic, though. They're just standard graphics cards.

The xbone has that lump of.custom ram between the CPU and gpu for a start.

Also an end, I've not been paying attention.

How is this "debate" allowed to continue for so long? Why can't some PC folk accept that some people aren't interested?

Some people are interested - just because you're not doesn't mean everyone isn't.

I mean, half of your posts are about the PC/Console debate

If you're into this sort of thing this is the thread for this sort of thing. We've sandboxed it.

Indeed it has (ESRAM I believe it's called), but it's not helped the XBone in terms of resolution, detail levels and/or textures, or framerates so far - where in nearly every single cross-platform title it's giving up one, or two, or all three of the above elements to the PS4.

That's not to say they won't be able to get more out of in the future (although I'm sure I've read somewhere that they can't stick a full 1080p framebuffer in there or something, because there isn't enough of it) - but in the here and now it isn't doing XBone any favours.

Remember, we're already in a situation where a £100 graphics card can punch as hard as the PS4 when paired with a half-decent CPU and 8GB of RAM, so the developers are going to have to start pulling some rabbits out of hats to maintain platform parity with even a pretty low-end PC moving forward from here.

doesnt matter if it helps or not, it unequivocally proves the 'off the shelf' hand waving to be false, even more than the fact they're custom.APU formulations presumably without PCI express or anything else that off the shelf components come with. Ps/2 ports and whatever.

It just *really annoys* me. I have no stance or side of the fence. I dont play games on the pc, 360 or ps3 I do have, never mind intend to buy anything newer. I'm being better about it all, but that I can't leave.

and gah, no matter how I try to write it it comes off like I'm going to set the isle of man on fire, when it's a niggling niggle.

I think Grim... should make a seperate entry on the Board Index, so it goes General Discussion, Archived Stuff, Pointless PC vs Console Shittery. And enforce it so all Pointless PC vs Console Shittery goes in its proper place.

It's not censorship, its simply categorisation.

I'll make a subforum for "pointless comments made by people that can't read thread titles" if you like.

Make a Sport one too, while you're at it.

Well it does, that's sort-of the point - not one misquoted sentence from one post in the very big thread.
I've no doubt that the usage of it (and other bits both consoles have) well improve, but the ESRAM does seem rather small.

That is indeed what I was getting at although I can see why Bik would be frustrated at my 'off-the-shelf' comment when it's not entirely true -

(I wasn't intending to cause you any such annoyance Bik, I was simply stating the broader truth that the current generation of consoles are probably as close as has ever been seen to an off-the-shelf PC architecture (albeit with their own quirks), maybe with the exception of the original XBox, and certainly a long way removed from the exotica of consoles such as PS2/PS3, or the Saturn looking further back than that which had dual-RISC processors (way ahead of its time) which were only really utilised by Sega's own developers and too late for it to really make much difference to the console's fate. And lest we forget that even the 360 was based around a tri-core Power PC architecture, which was arguably responsible for finally making multi-core code optimisations the norm. PCs had been sporting dual-core CPUs for some time by this point but no one had really made much use of them in games.)

- but the core point must remain that if the end result is no improvement in the quality of the games then it's all for nothing.

To go back to the original point of it not "feeling" as special as last time, I certainly agree.
I remember when I first saw Project Gotham running on a 360 and being pretty blown away. There were cool new things like playing your own MP3s in the games and cheevos were a mark of genius.

This time, the technical jump seems pretty poor comparatively - I understand that it's harder and harder to make graphical leaps like the current/last gen did, but there don't seem to be any cool new features this time.

Watchdogs and The Division looked cool (the latter especially hits the level of graphical detail which made me sit the hell up and pay attention) but, of course, neither of them are out yet.

Most tellingly, I've not bought one yet, and I fucking love shiny new consoles. I've got an OnLive console, for God's sake!

While I totally agree about the fact that shifting lots of pixels around fast doesn't make a good game, I really think that this latest generation of consoles should be able to run at 60FPS in full HD without being overly troubled. I'd be interested to see if the people who designed the XBone architecture thought that it could, or thought that it wasn't necessary.

And if we all really believe that graphics make no difference to the game (like AnonX) then why bother releasing new consoles anyway?

I spend money on anything, so if I've not bought one yet, it can't be a very compelling story.

Craster speaks the truth.
When's the last time you had a phone contract expire before you upgraded, Cras?