Did you just put DR3 and Ryse together and said that they both don't make good use of desktop GPU/CPU's?
Ryse is one of the best looking games on PC right now (tech wise) and it runs pretty damn good for how it looks.
It's nowhere near as bad as DR3 and it's just plain wrong to lump those 2 together.
Well according to digital Foundry you can hit 60fps easily at 1080p which is a plus for PC.
But if you try to go beyond that is where performance issues arise and hitting 30 is your best bet.
It's at this higher resolution that we began to run into performance issues that brought our frame-rate down, necessitating a 30fps lock for a consistent update. It's clear now why Crytek went out of its way to note that the 4K experience is designed for 30fps when using high-end GPUs, but thanks to the beautiful post-processing and a superb motion blur implementation, it still looks excellent at the 'cinematic' frame-rate.
So trying to go beyond XBox's performance in image quality takes a shit on performance anything beyond 1080p.
Anti-aliasing options are disappointingly limited though, something that is especially surprising following the wide selection available in Crysis 3. As it stands there are just two levels of SSAA available alongside Crytek's improved implementation of SMAA T1X. That said, Crytek's in-house version of SMAA is really quite impressive to behold, delivering results not unlike Nvidia's TXAA, but with a fraction of the performance cost.
Still, it may prove a bit too soft for some PC gamers' tastes, leading us to examine the available SSAA options. Available in 2x (1.5 x 1.5) and 3x (2 x 2) configurations, super-sampling definitely has the expected effect on both image quality and performance. At 1080p using the normal preset, we were able to achieve a stable 30fps with minor dips to complement the excellent image quality, though 60fps is almost certainly going to require a multi-GPU set-up. Going further, we tried bumping that up to 2x2 SSAA with using the highest possible settings at 1440p (basically 5120x2880) - this produces a breathtakingly clean image, but performance tumbled to around 7fps on our primary set-up. It looked absolutely unreal even at slideshow speeds - giving us some insight into how the latest CryEngine scales given enough horsepower.
Proving that if you have the a decent rig you can have console like performance, but going beyond that is disappointing and to even try to have extreme image qualit at 4k resolution you need a SLI or corssfire setup, that to my knowledge may not even have a profile for.
So those titans, or dual 780ti's in Sli won't be utilized and that sucks if you put that kind of money in your rig.
At this point we should keep in mind that Ryse was developed originally for a closed platform, with initial statements from Crytek even suggesting that the game would never see release on the PC. As a result it's clear that the game was not designed with scalability in mind to the same degree as its predecessor, Crysis 3. The difference between the low and high settings appears strikingly minor at a glance, while the difference between normal and high is subtle to the point that it's nearly undetectable without close examination. The focus here appears to be on getting the most out of existing assets through increased precision and less aggressive LOD (level of detail) management.
RYSE:SON OF ROME DF article
Here they even explain how the engine was made for closed console not PC like Crysis 3 was. Crysis 3 showed huge gains in it's image quality and graphical settings compared to it's console counterparts. Since PS3/XB360 were dx9.
But the consoles out now have the API's to handle most DX11 type features, hell doesn't xbox one have DX11.2 support?
So unless Ryse utilizes DX12 features, or advanced tessellation I don't see giant leap compared to it's console origins.
When I compare AVP, Tomb Raider, Sleeping Dogs, MAX Payne 3 from console to PC it's night and day because some of the DX10,DX11 features only available on PC that make good use of PC architecture. But when a game is built from the ground up in a closed platform instead of the other way around like Crytek's previous entry's I don't see the advantages.
I see a better version definitely with the 60fps option at 1080p. So performance is way better on PC, but image quality suffers.
ANd that's a shame.
Because always thought better image quality and performance always made it worth it for me on PC.
Your right, I shouldn't have lumped Ryse in with Dead Rising 3.
But then again it's nothing real special of a game to begin with, and advanced features dont seem to make large gains outside of resolution and frame rate.