It's almost like Crysis never existed or something.
And why are you arguing as though hardware isn't necessarily what makes a game better looking when it is? Aesthetics are the overall look or "art style" of the game, but that's just the starting point. To push polygons, AA, AF, and framerates, you do need more powerful hardware. That's a bit more than a few sprites and shaders. You can have a game looking good without trying to raise the graphical boundaries, but it would still look (or run) better on stronger hardware. You'd have to be blind to say that any cross-platform game looked better on a console than it did a PC, and the majority also run much better at the same resolutions. Barring shitty ports of course.
Agreed, and there's Star Citizen which looks jaw dropping and it's still in pre alpha with no proper AA implementation. Seriously anyone who starts these threads should just link to Star Citizen from now on, end the argument on page 1. Not to mention that nearly every multiplatform title will look better and age better on PC thanks to scalable graphical options and not mention Nvidia perks.
On another note, CPU and GPU prowess isn't just about pretty graphics, look at Total War and the thousands of foot soldiers and cavalry plus siege weapons and ships it's pushing at one time in a single map, that would be nigh impossible on the CPU that the PS4/X1 are using without unplayable framerate.
OT: Yes, it's going to get worse. Whatever comes after Volta will probably be notably superior to the 2018-2020 S/M tv boxes, even in the med-low end. AMD's financial situation could make for an interesting/depressing landscape within the next 5 years.
Also, downplaying IQ and frame rate, as "not a big deal" when talking about advanced pc power, or "having the best graphics," is head shakingly naive. Hit up the Dolphin/PCSX2 thread or the PC shots thread to see what pristine IQ does for a game. Make a trip to a Microcenter/Fry's to try a 120hz/144hz monitor. Icing isn't all there is to a cake.
While PC's might outperform consoles, they don't outperform them in sales, which means that the PC hardware isn't ever truly used to it's potential.
Sure, a Titan might destroy a PS4 in power, but answer me this:
Does the PC currently have any game on the level of Bloodborne, The Order, or Infamous when it comes to graphics?
Only Assassin's Creed that I can think of - and that is a game that only looks like that because it was developed for next gen consoles, as obviously there would never be an exclusive AC game on PC.
And so far, nothing came out as impressive as The Order on any other hardware. Or Bloodborne for that matter.
I get the Order: 1886 being mentioned, but are you blind with Bloodborne and Infamous?
Bloodborne is a looker for its art style, not for the fidelity it outputs. Not only did other multi-plat AAA games outperform it on the PS4's release, but the PC versions go even further. Bloodborne is a neat game with good art, but fidelity wise it is nothing special in AAA land where even the last yearly CoD crushes it.
Infamous: Second Son is pretty solid, and renders way more on the screen than Bloodborne...but outside animation-quality Dragon Age: Inquisition outerperforms it. Upcoming open-world games look to go even further.
The Order: 1886 is only notable for its visuals, because it's the first linear as hell next-gen AAA game. Most everything else has been larger levels to full on open-world. Benefit to smaller contained spaces, you can make each individual thing look better...because less things will be seen, and you can break up content with loading over constant drawing in of assets.
I see titles like the Witcher 3 and Batman:Arkham Knight, where individual assets or effects on screen may not look as good, but the degree to what I see rendered all at once far more impactful.
I get the Order: 1886 being mentioned, but are you blind with Bloodborne and Infamous?
Bloodborne is a looker for its art style, not for the fidelity it outputs. Not only did other multi-plat AAA games outperform it on the PS4's release, but the PC versions go even further. Bloodborne is a neat game with good art, but fidelity wise it is nothing special in AAA land where even the last yearly CoD crushes it.
Infamous: Second Son is pretty solid, and renders way more on the screen than Bloodborne...but outside animation-quality Dragon Age: Inquisition outerperforms it. Upcoming open-world games look to go even further.
The Order: 1886 is only notable for its visuals, because it's the first linear as hell next-gen AAA game. Most everything else has been larger levels to full on open-world. Benefit to smaller contained spaces, you can make each individual thing look better...because less things will be seen, and you can break up content with loading over constant drawing in of assets.
I see titles like the Witcher 3 and Batman:Arkham Knight, where individual assets or effects on screen may not look as good, but the degree to what I see rendered all at once far more impactful.
Yeah I almost spit my water out when I skimmed him mentioning Bloodborne as an example of consoles eclipsing PC graphics. I mean I love Bloodborne. Its my GOTY and the artistic hand with which it was crafted makes it beautiful from that perspective. But technically? Graphically? LOL. The aliasing alone really hurts the graphics.
Modded Skyrim, maxed out Crysis 2 or 3, Ryse and Star Citizen all eclipse anything on consoles right now.
Consoles don't need to be more powerful than PC's they just need to be more powerful than the previous generation of machines they are replacing, which they are.
Contrary to other opinions, I actually do think it is likely the next console generation will have a much narrower gap between the top of the line PC's at the time and the future console.
I think so for 2 reasons:
1.) This gen really came about at a poor time. Console manufacturers needed to meet desired wattage limits at the same time GPU's were at the peak of wattage creep. So it severely limited how far up into the GPU hierarchy Sony or Microsoft could go and likely created the CPU compromises we see. With wattage rates coming down and continual energy efficiency pressures from governments likely continuing to drive it into the future, I think this issue will not be a barrier next gen the way it was this gen.
2.) Oculus Rift and 4k. Both will require some beefy hardware to produce performance at an optimal level. If Oculus is the hit the industry is thinking it will be and forecasters predict it can be, Sony and Microsoft will likely be modeling their next ben consoles around virtual headsets. Which may also give them cover to raise prices to compensate.
Consoles don't need to be more powerful than PC's they just need to be more powerful than the previous generation of machines they are replacing, which they are.
"In1993, three years later, 486 PCs SX/DX PCs and Amiga 1200 still could not match the 3-year old flagship console with it's Giga-power."
Doom, a HUGELY successful game almost everyone who owned a capable PC played, disproves that easily. As does Strike Commander. Obviously you prefer 2d games but there's no way you can argue that what the NeoGeo was doing wasn't technologically far behind compared to what was happening on the PC in 1993. Or 92. X-Wing with it's sprawling, dynamic space battles was on a completely different level.
I've always been puzzled by the 'consoles are holding back pc' argument. The vast majority of PCs use integrated graphics no? Take away consoles and the 'mainstream', 'lowest common denominator' or whatever derogatory term you want to use becomes these PCs. The enthusiast gaming market is small enough already thanks to mobile. PCs and consoles are long past being in the same competitive market.
I've always been puzzled by the 'consoles are holding back pc' argument. The vast majority of PCs use integrated graphics no? Take away consoles and the 'mainstream', 'lowest common denominator' or whatever derogatory term you want to use becomes these PCs. The enthusiast gaming market is small enough already thanks to mobile. PCs and consoles are long past being in the same competitive market.
"In1993, three years later, 486 PCs SX/DX PCs and Amiga 1200 still could not match the 3-year old flagship console with it's Giga-power."
Doom, a HUGELY successful game almost everyone who owned a capable PC played, disproves that easily. As does Strike Commander. Obviously you prefer 2d games but there's no way you can argue that what the NeoGeo was doing wasn't technologically far behind compared to what was happening on the PC in 1993. Or 92. X-Wing with it's sprawling, dynamic space battles was on a completely different level.
Doom, a HUGELY successful game almost everyone who owned a capable PC played, disproves that easily. As does Strike Commander. Obviously you prefer 2d games but there's no way you can argue that what the NeoGeo was doing wasn't technologically far behind compared to what was happening on the PC in 1993. Or 92. X-Wing with it's sprawling, dynamic space battles was on a completely different level.
The NeoGeo couldn't have pulled off Doom or X-wing. Definitely not. The PC's versatility allowed for wildly different software engines and software renderers. The new CDROM drives and superior sound cards gave it access to higher quality sound effects and music, awesome vhs-quality motion video and cheap enough media to store it all across 4 or 5 or 7 or 10 CDs!). I will readily admit it.
NeoGeo was a hyperspecialized hardware tailored to make run the few types of games available in the arcades in 1990, and nothing else. Neogeo has a much less diverse kind of games [...]
On the opposite PC were very brute force generic hardware relying on the power of its CPU to make games run. From that, you could have 3D games and simulations, and many games in that genre, whereas inferior for 2D games
I don't remember the PS2 beating the PC in 2000 at all in terms of graphics and performance. In the graphics department, they seemed about equivalent, but after around 2002, there wasn't even any competition. The PS2 was already behind.
this is debatable but you're right that it was a close thing. I have no objections to the terms "about equivalent" that you chose.
Until this most recent gen, due to how long the last was, not much has changed since then either. A mid range PC will look and play games about as well (if not marginally better) than the latest and greatest gaming console. Then six months later clearly be in the lead, while six months after that there's no competition; and the PC just keeps gaining ground through the rest of the generation.
So you think there is no trend? This is the dispute I'm having with many in this thread. They keep reiterating the old "Since time immemorial, PCs were always better gaming platforms than consoles and always will be. Forever. Amen".
It seems overly simplistic. Wouldn't it make more sense that things change and there are trends to be observed and extrapolated from to predict the future?
Hell, even in the mid 90s this trend was the same. The PSX could not play the original Doom anywhere near as fluidly as how the PC original played, and on top of that, PC had many games that were much more expansive than anything that could be done on the consoles at the time. I also remember getting both Hell and Wing Commander for the 3D0, and they actually looked and played kind of crummy compared to the original versions. Really, this thread has me scratching my head, because I really can't remember any time where a console was truly more powerful than a PC for gaming. The main issue is that the platforms usually had distinctly different kinds of games on them.[/QUOTE]
Yes and yes. But none of this contradicts what I said in the OP, using exact years. Ok, so PCs ran Doom better, the PS1 ran Toshinden and many other 3D games much better than my pentium@100Mhz,16MB RAM/1MB Cirrus Logic GPU . It isn't until the 4MB 3D accelerators came out that PCs crushed it. I'm ignoring other factors such as quality of ports.
Bold and Emphasis mine. Mid 90s would be 95 or 94 or 97. I made my cutoff 1993 for 2D games and 1996 for 3D games for a reason
The NeoGeo may not have been able to run those games BUT those fighting games you screen-capped look graphically unappealing and utterly unimpressive to me (and my younger self). Clearly visually and technically inferior to SNK games.
Virtua Fighter 2 was the first 3D fighter to look "better" than 2D ones. It was released in 1994 on AM2 hardware.
. I also have no doubt sales figures for those games were poor, especially compared to Doom, which actually looked impressive, or their SNK/Capcom 2D competition of the day.
As wazoo explained earlier in this post, the NeoGeo was customized for 2D games, and those were the games that people wanted to play in 1993.
*"better" as in more visually striking to the majority of players.
The NeoGeo couldn't have pulled off Doom or X-wing. Definitely not. The PC's versatility allowed for wildly different software engines and software renderers. The new CDROM drives and superior sound cards gave it access to higher quality sound effects and music, awesome vhs-quality motion video and cheap enough media to store it all across 4 or 5 or 7 or 10 CDs!). I will readily admit it.
I'll let wazoo answer the rest:
Completely agree. I've edited a small part at the end to remove a euphemism, but basically, that was the point I wanted to make.
this is debatable but you're right that it was a close thing. I have no objections to the terms "about equivalent" that you chose.
So you think there is no trend? This is the dispute I'm having with many in this thread. They keep reiterating the old "Since time immemorial, PCs were always better gaming platforms than consoles and always will be. Forever. Amen".
It seems overly simplistic. Wouldn't it make more sense that things change and there are trends to be observed and extrapolated from to predict the future?
Hell, even in the mid 90s this trend was the same. The PSX could not play the original Doom anywhere near as fluidly as how the PC original played, and on top of that, PC had many games that were much more expansive than anything that could be done on the consoles at the time. I also remember getting both Hell and Wing Commander for the 3D0, and they actually looked and played kind of crummy compared to the original versions. Really, this thread has me scratching my head, because I really can't remember any time where a console was truly more powerful than a PC for gaming. The main issue is that the platforms usually had distinctly different kinds of games on them.
Yes and yes. But none of this contradicts what I said in the OP, using exact years. Ok, so PCs ran Doom better, the PS1 ran Toshinden and many other 3D games much better than my pentium@100Mhz,16MB RAM/1MB Cirrus Logic GPU . It isn't until the 4MB 3D accelerators came out that PCs crushed it. I'm ignoring other factors such as quality of ports.
Bold and Emphasis mine. Mid 90s would be 95 or 94 or 97. I made my cutoff 1993 for 2D games and 1996 for 3D games for a reason
true.
The NeoGeo may not have been able to run those games BUT those fighting games you screen-capped look graphically unappealing and utterly unimpressive to me (and my younger self). Clearly visually and technically inferior to SNK games.
Virtua Fighter 2 was the first 3D fighter to look "better" than 2D ones. It was released in 1994 on AM2 hardware.
. I also have no doubt sales figures for those games were poor, especially compared to Doom, which actually looked impressive, or their SNK/Capcom 2D competition of the day.
As wazoo explained earlier in this post, the NeoGeo was customized for 2D games, and those were the games that people wanted to play in 1993.
*"better" as in more visually striking to the majority of players.
Uh, yes they did. The ibm dos port of mk2 performs absolutely as well as the arcade board.
Ok, so PCs ran Doom better, the PS1 ran Toshinden and many other 3D games much better than my pentium@100Mhz,16MB RAM/1MB Cirrus Logic GPU . It isn't until the 4MB 3D accelerators came out that PCs crushed it.
Put a 1 mb diamond edge 3d with 4 mb if ram and a pentium 66 with the pc port of toshinden and it obliterates the psx version. This was at launch. Your cirrus logic gpu doesnt make the game look better because its unsupported.
The NeoGeo had better looking 2D games and was therefore the better 2D gaming machine. In practice. Maybe you're right about the theoretical performance of a 386DX.
Uh, yes they did. The ibm dos port of mk2 performs absolutely as well as the arcade board.
Put a 1 mb diamond edge 3d with 4 mb if ram and a pentium 66 with the pc port of toshinden and it obliterates the psx version. This was at launch. Your cirrus logic gpu doesnt make the game look better because its unsupported.
Toshinden launched on PC in 1996. 2 years after it came out on PS1.
The Diamond Edge did not exist in 1994. It came out in July 1995. (And it came with 2MB. Later versions upped it to 4MB).
I don't know if a p66 with a Diamond Edge actually obliterated the PS1 version. I doubt there is any footage of that on youtube. But If you're right, then the PCs reclaimed the performance upper hand in 1995, not 1996. Fair enough.
Uh, yes they did. The ibm dos port of mk2 performs absolutely as well as the arcade board.
Put a 1 mb diamond edge 3d with 4 mb if ram and a pentium 66 with the pc port of toshinden and it obliterates the psx version. This was at launch. Your cirrus logic gpu doesnt make the game look better because its unsupported.
Your answers display the core problem with PC gaming. What % of gamers do you think actually had that PC set up or even knew what was/wasn't supported hardware wise to play those games? Less than 1% I would say is likely.
And even if the games performed ok, they didn't play well. Because there were no decent input devices/peripherals/controllers at the time that played as well or as responsive as the console/arcade versions
Pretty sure that the DOS port doesn't run at 60Hz like the arcade game does though, didn't they run at 30? I know Mortal Kombat 1 on DOS does. Also, the DOS ports display slightly less colours and run at slightly lower resolutions than the arcade games. But both Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 on DOS were some of the best home ports of the game that didn't use emulation. MK II is actually better on the PC than it is on PS1. Though I think the Saturn version came close but ran at 60Hz. The only things that weren't arcade perfect were the soundtracks, as they used MIDI.
one genre that was better on computers for 2d were pinball games
Even in early 90s Pinball Fantasies and Epic Pinball had 60 fps and crystal clear sound. Pinball Dreams had 70 fps. I hadnt experienced such smooth scrolling in any other console or arcade.
Those games were only feasible on Amiga and PC. So capapibilities were there.
Your statement was "not a single game on PC looks as good as most of the currently available PS4 exclusives". I submit that Ryse and AC:Unity on PC look easily superior to the vast majority (or, in fact, all, taking IQ into account) PS4 exclusives. Also, GTA V on PC looks massively superior to any open world game on PS4, and Project CARS at highest settings easily outdoes Driveclub in a large variety of graphical aspects.
That's 4 games, and I need just one to disprove your statement.
And I really have no idea why I'm even entertaining you.
If you factor in resolution and framerate I agree that no console game comes close to PC games, but if we would just judge the visuals I think its safe to say that no racing game on PC can compete with Driveclub and no character action game on PC can compete with The Order.
I seriously don't the get the comparisons to Ryse on PC. Ryse is a phenomenal looking game on ultra on PC, but compared to The Order it is clearly inferior. This becomes evident when playing around in photo mode.
I get when people enjoy high framerates and therefore find 60+FPS games more appealing than 30FPS ones, but high framerates don not change the fact that certain 30FPS games are visually superior.
I'm not a programmer and I have no idea how taxing stuff like Driveclub droplet simulation on the windshield is, or the cloud simulation, or the global illumination. Maybe its all just cheap effects with good art and maybe games like Project Cars have a weather system that is more taxing for the hardware and there more technically impressive, but what Driveclub does just looks MUCH better and that is what counts for more me when I talk about tech and hardwarepower.
When I have the Ps4 delivering Driveclub and a 5 times more powerful PC delivering a visually inferior racing game at 4k, I am more impressed with the Ps4s offering (only visually speaking, lets not bring the other qualities of games into this because it really has no bearing here)
To me most of the stuff that is prominent in PC games is just diminishing returns in full effect.
Huge amounts of hardwarepower are spent on higher FPS, increasing the smoothness but only having minimal effects on visuals. Huge amounts are spent on high quality AA or even supersampling just to get minimally better IQ. etc.
To me this becomes especially apparant when I see multiplats on console and then again on PC on a righ thats like 3 times as powerful as a console and only shows minor visual improvements but overall displays the same visuals
So yeah, it might very well be that other games are technically superior to Driveclub and The Order, but these to games excel where it counts and the end result therefor looks better than what other games offer.
I think car models are a good example here. I read somewhere that PCars' models have up to 300k polygons. Driveclub has less than that(don't recall the number, but it was less) but this is a difference I just don't see on screen. Maybe if I would zoom to some screws on the car in photo mode I'd see better screws in PCars, but thats it.
But what I see in Driveclub is impressive GI, an unrivaled weather system, distractingly beautiful particle simulation on the windshield and impressive environments and foliage.
And in PCars all that looks worse.
And I don't care that foliage in Driveclub is just rotating sprites and therefor probably not very taxing for the hardware, but it just looks better than anything I've seen in any other racing game.
And don't get me started an The Order... I had high hopes for this game because I loved all of ReadyAtDawn previous games, and then it turned out to be an utter turd and I was very vocal about it on this forum, but visually its the new benchmark for character action games in my opinion.
I think Driveclub and The Order are the best looking games out there and I think if you judge them solely by visuals there can be no debate about that.
And I think we can admit that while at the same time recognizing that PCs can be way more powerful than any next gen console and that of course means that games like Driveclub and The Order could be on PC and have the same visuals but run at a higher framerate and resolution and be superior to the Ps4 versions, but they aren't and no game that is on PC matches the visuals in these games. There could be better looking games on PC, but there aren't.
I think Driveclub and The Order are the best looking games out there and I think if you judge them solely by visuals there can be no debate about that.
And I think we can admit that while at the same time recognizing that PCs can be way more powerful than any next gen console and that of course means that games like Driveclub and The Order could be on PC and have the same visuals but run at a higher framerate and resolution and be superior to the Ps4 versions, but they aren't and no game that is on PC matches the visuals in these games. There could be better looking games on PC, but there aren't.
Some of your performance history is a bit off. PCs have been technically superior to consoles for many years.
Recently, there's stuff below an i7 and Titan spec that can out-perform a PS4.
How much would those part cost though? I mean you can buy a beast graphics card but you don't wanna bottleneck it. So you got to get a good processor. And if your processor don't match the mobo socket you gotta get a new mobo and possibly ram. If your comp is 3-4+ years old and you want to upgrade to play max even with already having os you are still looking at 600+. That's expensive venture especially how quick PC games need changing parts to keep up with max resolution. I bought a gtx 770 2 years back from amazon for 300 I think but that card already can't max out some new games.
That's expensive venture especially how quick PC games need changing parts to keep up with max resolution. I bought a gtx 770 2 years back from amazon for 300 I think but that card already can't max out some new games.
Not specifically picking on you, but this comes up a lot;
Why is playing everything at Ultra settings at maximum possible framerate and resolution the comparison benchmark for "better than on console"?
Not specifically picking on you, but this comes up a lot;
Why is playing everything at Ultra settings at maximum possible framerate and resolution the comparison benchmark for "better than on console"?
If I am spending money to upgrade PC I am not gonna settle for low-mid settings.might as well buy a console then. Most people already have a PC for everyday use.
Would love to see something like the 360 launch again where the GPU was using tech not available to consumers and was better than some of the best PC's on the market at the time.
If I am spending money to upgrade PC I am not gonna settle for low-mid settings.might as well buy a console then. Most people already have a PC for everyday use.
Okay. that makes no sense to me at all.
"If I have to compromise, I might as well buy an entirely new hardware platform and software library than use what I already have at anything other than everything maxed out"
Yeah, I just don't understand how someone could look at Driveclub and at ProjectCars and come to a different conclusion than me.
Btw. what else are we supposed to do when talking about graphics? Not everything about graphics is measurable and objectively comparable and I touched on that in my post.
We can look at resolution, framerate and maybe polycount and we'll have hard facts and no debate about who wins, but the winner won't necessarily be better looking then the rest because graphics are more than just measurable parameters.
More powerful hardware also means a lot more than just better graphics.
I for one am looking forward to a DX12 Total War game that taps in PC's more powerful CPU's and GPU's. The new RTS from Stardock with like tens and tens of thousands of units! Larger, denser RPG worlds to explore, etc.
I just got done playing Ryse today. Holy shit that game is massively imoressive, like ridiculous lighting. There is nothing in that game that is cheap or stands out as them cutting corners somewhere to keep performance up; everything about it is ridiculously impressive. I actually went out of my way in places to find something poorly done, a texture, some lighting, some low polygon details.....they just didn't exist and while the game is fairly linear, some of the areas aren't all that small, some have huge amounts of vegetation and geometry and lots of characters on screen. Very impressive.
Crytek are wizards, their engines are amazing. Surprised very few people use their engine and those that do often dont get anywhere close to what the in house team can do.
Yeah, I just don't understand how someone could look at Driveclub and at ProjectCars and come to a different conclusion than me.
Btw. what else are we supposed to do when talking about graphics? Not everything about graphics is measurable and objectively comparable and I touched on that in my post.
We can look at resolution, framerate and maybe polycount and we'll have hard facts and no debate about who wins, but the winner won't necessarily be better looking then the rest because graphics are more than just measurable parameters.
It subjective, too subjective in my opinion to make definite conclusions. For example some people prefer great looking water, some notice more physics, others particles and others post-processing effects.
But i can agree that generally Sony exclusives nail down art and blend it, very well probably the best in the industry, with tech.
But if You are tech oriented person and can see imperfections in effects, particles or geometry its not obvious which game is better graphically.
There is no doubt that console games get better technically as the generation gets older. We only have to compare Oblivion to Skyrim to see this. I understand that in a few years time the XBO and PS4 should be much more graphically capable.
But is this the case?
As the architecture of current gen consoles is so similar to PCs I don't foresee such technical improvements as the generation ages.
But for PC, in a few years time 4k will be more common as prices for top end graphics cards come down.
This makes me think that the current generation of consoles will not be around as long as the last.
PS5 in 5 years time? who knows...
Crytek are wizards, their engines are amazing. Surprised very few people use their engine and those that do often dont get anywhere close to what the in house team can do.
