This thread is not to shit on current gen, on the contrary I think video game graphics are good enough and the focus should be on interactivity, NPC realism, better fluid and physics simulations, environment destruction, I hope devs work on breaking down the artificial barriers which which break immersion and make the limitations of modern games obvious.
There was a reason why Phil Spencer was creating the expectation that this gen is “how games feel” and his emphasis on improved framerates, he knew the visual leap is smaller and he was right.
Here are some comparison,
The leap from sunset overdrive to a rift apart, killzone shadowfall to returnal is smaller then killzone 3 to shadowfall , god of war 3 to ryse etc
Ps.
I know not all these games are of similar launch periods but it applies to launch titles like ryse and shadowfall just as much as the other games.
The reason why the jump from 360/ps3 to x1/ps4 was so big was largely because of PBR.
That same fundamental shift will likely not been seen again until game development moves away from typical rasterization in favour of full path tracing.
The resolution jump is impressive, but resolution is only one component of visuals, a perfect example of this is the SeriesS despite being a 1080p console it will have better visuals the the xbox one x.
60fps and ssd are nice, but its more like shifting from console to PC with the same generation. Its not like generational leap from the past where there was some fundamental shift in how games are made and rendered.
This generation is going to be great, but its important to aknoledge that so far it seems different to prior gens.
I am basing this on a rift apart and returnal, so i hope im wrong and the 2nd and 3rd waves of next gen games show a visual improvement like we saw from prior gen.
I hope we get metro exodus enhanced global illumination combined with environments from that quixel megascans demo and character models very close to the hellblade 2 teaser. I hope we get that.
There’s probably tons of fair reasons this is the case, my first two thoughts are the following:
Diminishing returns as level of detail increases
Bruno’s point about performance being more of a priority
If a game looks like it’s from 2045 but is a shooter with sluggish controls and 30 fps, it’s a hard pass for me. Seems like as 60fps becomes more the norm, a lot of people are quickly going from “I can’t even tell the difference between 30 & 60” to the same sentiment as me.
I agree, while Xbox One and PS4 didn’t have the best hardware, Devs pushed techniques to make visuals better and better this gen to the point that it feels like next gen games aren’t all that far from the best looking games at the end of this gen. But I do think that as new techniques for visuals are mastered and implemented along with improvements on performance, this gen is going to outstrip last gen quickly.
We were 1 month into a gen when ryse and shadowfall came out.
Also theres no need to be defensive, criticism and observation of less positive things is not necessarily a bad thing.
Sony and other pubs will try and say a PS5 versionnof a 2d space Invaders is the most next SSD+ varible daulsensed 10tflop whizzbang thing ever, they want to sell you stuff and I can guarantee those at game publishers + platforms know what im talking about (as phil spencer does) so they will try and convince that something is the most next gen thing ever.
Lets not be so gulable. The new gen is great, but lets not be so easily manipulated by marketing.
But its 6 months into the gen. There is no way you can make a blanket statement saying it will be the smallest visuals leap gen. By the end of the gen we may even have crazier things.
I think the added performance makes up for the small bump in visual quality. But I’m fairly sure the next Rockstar game, the UE5 Gears 6 game or whatever Naughty Dog puts out next will look stunning.
You are generally correct, insofar as the difference between Pro consoles last gen and the current gen stuff is fairly modest graphically. Even accounting for more efficient graphical architectures we’re talking about something like a 2.5x increase in performance from PS4p → PS5 and X1X → XSX. Yeah it’s big compared to base console from last gen, although still not amazing by some historical standards depending on your comparison points, but we already got those upgrades, you can’t stuff the genie back into the lamp, and we are already accustomed to the same high resolutions that the new systems target.
This does not mean we won’t get mindbogglingly good looking games. Just that a large part of the improvement will be coming from the development side, not the improved hardware side. Consider that the best looking games from last gen - Gears 5, TLOU2, Doom Eternal, God of War, RE2 Remake - already look basically like current gen games graphically, standing head and shoulders above the average game release last gen. People will still come up with amazing looking new games, but a lot of that will come down to massive budget productions from very talented studios, not the average game released. I don’t think the median game this generation for the first 2-3 years will be majorly better looking than the peak of last generation, except in a few superficial small ways (higher pixel count, or whatever).
Philosophically, I think we hit diminishing returns with the PS3. Diminishing returns does not mean you don’t get new improvements, it doesn’t mean you don’t get major new improvements, it just means that in order to get those improvements, you need to pump more resources in per unit of improvement. And I think nothing will top the PS1/ N64 / Saturn → PS2 / XB / GC / DC jump, which was just a staggering increase in rendering quality, average performance level, and resolution all at the same time. In a lot of cases you saw a jump from 240p 20-30fps to 480i or 480p 60fps while also pushing like 15x more triangles, massively higher res textures, texture filtering, and so on. It was just mind blowing to witness. We just never got anything like that again imo. Every new graphical leap we have now comes with rapidly inflating development costs, time to produce, and so on.
We already had 4K/60 games in 2017 so…resolution isn’t really a wow factor. Especially since some games are not even hitting that.
The leap from PS360 to PS4/XBOX was a 11x FOLD RAM increase in usable memory. This gen its only 2.7x fold. SSDs are good for eliminating load times, but you can’t draw more than 2.7 x the fidelity in a single frame because the ram pools aren’t large enough.
Ray tracing is hard to see to 99% of gamers…I’m a graphics whore and even I can’t point it out…and even when you can, its not the be all and end all…its just nice and shiny.
Seems some people are not used to new gens. Every new gen in the first year or so the leap does not seem like much, then as the gen goes on the leap increases dramatically.
This gen both consoles have very little in the way of bottlenecks, both have good CPU’s/GPU’s and fast SSD’s
By the time this gen is over the leap in graphics from the best of last gen will be huge.
I dont know man, ryse and shadowfall were pretty huge leaps despite being launch titles.
However this gen does seem similar to the leap from Xbox to 360.
The hardware leap is actually really good, 4-5x the CPU, about 10x more powerful GPU and the SSD is probably the equivalent of 100gb ram paired with a disc based HDD.
I think the reason for a smaller leap is diminishing returns, hopefully it will get significantly better.
Your numbers are not taking into account that last gen consoles needed to have the next 30 seconds in RAM according to Cerny. Therefore the 5GB couldn’t be used just for one frame.
Next gen consoles come much closer to the goal to have all the RAM available for just one frame, thanks to SSD, SFS and more. Thus the multiplier is much greater than you suggested.
Sorry but this is way too early to be making this kind of thread. Comparing Uncharted 3 and 4 alone is a bit disingenuous because of the fact that the latter released nearly midway into the PS4’s lifespan. The hardware delta, when considering all aspects for Xbox One to Series S/X is actually quite large, and there are several hardware components and software efficiencies that are going to widen the gap further than just the specs suggest. Watch this space.
