Why aren't next-gen consoles producing super graphics already?

This was done by modding a 7 year old pc game...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT6U4vIgX9w

Why does a game (albeit modded) released 7 years ago look better than anything consoles are giving us so far? Yea I know CURRENT pc's are always going to be more powerful than consoles, but I honestly can't understand why most games are being outdone by a game so old.

Maybe because modern consoles aren't really much more powerful than your average PC anymore? THey don't even have the benefit of exclusive hardware accelerators or whatnot (and didn't since the first Xbox's era, at least).

The fact that the game is old is irrelevant in this case: you can even mod a 5 yo version of GZDoom with ridiculously high-res textures and overload it with effects that couldn't be handled at all by any PC 5 years ago, but could be today, and call it "super advanced".

With 3D engines, in general, what you see is always a practical compromise between the engine's true capabilities and what current hardware can run.

To make a comparison, I've never seen a contemporary game looking as good as the "game demos" they used in the 3DMark tests: e.g. no 2003 game looked really as good as "Battle of Proxycon" in 3DMark2003, and no 2001 game had the detail of the "Lobby" in 3DMark2001. Why? Because those were benchmarks made to stretch the graphics' capabilities, not produce a game that would actually be fluently playable on the average system for its day.

New consoles keep up with PC, not beat them. The graphics will probably get better for new consoles as the years go one. Once devs figure out how to use a processor meant for AI to graphics like they did with PS3. Stupid enemies? Sure you bet, let's make those graphics better!

My $350 PC bought at the start of this year keeps up at a higher resolution than next gen consoles. People that told me I'd need a $2,000 PC to run games at their highest settings. Dopes.

Maes said:

Maybe because modern consoles aren't really much more powerful than your average PC anymore? THey don't even have the benefit of exclusive hardware accelerators or whatnot (and didn't since the first Xbox's era, at least).

The fact that the game is old is irrelevant in this case: you can even mod a 5 yo version of GZDoom with ridiculously high-res textures and overload it with effects that couldn't be handled at all by any PC 5 years ago, but could be today, and call it "super advanced".

With 3D engines, in general, what you see is always a practical compromise between the engine's true capabilities and what current hardware can run.

To make a comparison, I've never seen a contemporary game looking as good as the "game demos" they used in the 3DMark tests: e.g. no 2003 game looked really as good as "Battle of Proxycon" in 3DMark2003, and no 2001 game had the detail of the "Lobby" in 3DMark2001. Why? Because those were benchmarks made to stretch the graphics' capabilities, not produce a game that would actually be fluently playable on the average system for its day.

But isn't Crysis the exception to the rule though? I remember even top of the line machines struggling with that monster at release. In fact even today you need a fairly beefy machine in order to run it at max settings with the highest resolution. I am currently playing crysis warhead with a very high-end machine that I bought not even a week ago at 1440p, and my framerate is still only 50-60fps (rarely going almost to 40 when a lot is going on).

the adult 'gamers' need to grow up and be realistic...
Most gamers on the planet are running the newest games with reduced quality settings because their pc cant handle it... to give an example ; last week i almost died in laughter with a total biscuit review about the new farcry where he said his pc could NOT handle the game so the quality settings where around mid-range... and then he started to complain about the texture quality on the rocks and walls.

the playstation 4 has an eight core APU, the graphics on the ps4 are above what many people their pc can handle... not everybody can buy a pc ''masta rayce'' computer worth 6000 ''dollaz or yurowz''. This is not 2004 where a 600 dollar computer with a 2 gigahertz single core cpu and 500 megabyte of memory was put against the ps2 its drastically lower specs...

if modern 2000 dollar computers cant handle the latest assasins creed at maximum, or the latest farcry... yes, what a shame when people pay one time for an 700 dollar console running everything at a superb comfortable image quality. Ah the luxery and saved money... And it can play movies and put the internet on your tv to ?

Yeah I started to get sick of Total Biscuit. I think with Advanced Warfare he briefly examined the wall. Yep examine walls when people don't play with their nose against the wall. Then he and other reviewer (I mean first impressionists) began to review companies and not games. Not to mention complaining about not getting a review copy for their first impressions.

His PC can handle anything, he's bragged about. If he wasn't recording. That's why some players record to a separate PC or recorder. If I remember correctly he says everything is recorded on one PC.

They are.

FireFish said:

if modern 2000 dollar computers cant handle the latest assasins creed at maximum

The reason the latest Assasins creed runs poorly is because it's a shit port. And are you sure Totalhalibut ever said anything about not being able to run FC3 at good settings? Because I am pretty sure he has a killer pc.

BTW, that story about "multi core APUs" must stop. Yeah, you can put 8 or 16 cores on a chip, but AFAIK, memory bandwidth hasn't scaled up 8 or 16 times to go with it, on ANY platform.

Only if all memory became "register grade" and was built-in the CPU/APU...but by the time that's viable, "regular" memory will be so incredibly cheap, that there would still be the temptation to use it for storing ridiculously large datasets that would overrun even the best "register-grade" memory, hence creating a memory hierarchy all over again.

hardcore_gamer said:

The reason the latest Assasins creed runs poorly is because it's a shit port. And are you sure Totalhalibut ever said anything about not being able to run FC3 at good settings? Because I am pretty sure he has a killer pc.

farcry 3 is a bit old to be previewed a while ago, and to receive a wtf episode.

@maes ;
thats just admitting modern pc's and consoles share the same bottleneck...

Afaik they're using a mainstream class graphics card from 2 generations ago already. This explains why games can't even hit 1080p.

hardcore_gamer said:

The reason the latest Assasins creed runs poorly is because it's a shit port. And are you sure Totalhalibut ever said anything about not being able to run FC3 at good settings? Because I am pretty sure he has a killer pc.

Its odd that AssCreed would have such a poor port with a 5th or 7th edition game? None of the others had shit ports. While I would say its UBIsoft's way of thanking PC gamers for throwing a fit that they couldn't play as women in a PC game that would be far fetched. Who doesn't want to play as a woman in an online game nicknamed 'AssCreed?' Then suddenly it becomes a whole new play experience.

hardcore_gamer said:

This was done by modding a 7 year old pc game...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT6U4vIgX9w

Why does a game (albeit modded) released 7 years ago look better than anything consoles are giving us so far? Yea I know CURRENT pc's are always going to be more powerful than consoles, but I honestly can't understand why most games are being outdone by a game so old.

Honestly, what's in that video looks like shit (due to not-quite-high-enough-resolution resources), and the "next-gen" (aka current gen) consoles DO look at least as good as that.

Art direction and execution is more important than photorealism anyway.

Another factor to consider - even if you've got the horsepower to render in uber detail, you still need uber-detailed assets to make use of that horsepower, and that requires tons of time investment on the part of artists and whatnot who create those assets. The more powerful consoles get, the longer it takes to create a world that can give the level of detail those consoles can handle. Plus there's the extra time needed to learn the ins and outs of the new consoles, to make the most use of them.

For example, when the 360 first came out, a lot of games didn't look a whole lot better than their original Xbox counterparts - because you were comparing games at the beginning of one cycle to those at the end of the next, and designers hadn't yet mastered the new tools they had.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRTsl1jCqq8

Why aren't next-gen consoles producing super graphics already?

I'm not sure but why focus on super graphics? I'm assuming you mean more of typical resources: textures, polygons, shaders, and that sort of thing. I personally would rather gameplay and rewards be focused on. And I don't mean those damn trophies and online shit like that; I'm talking multiple endings, unlockable secrets, alternate paths, telling me I'm cool, and that sort of thing. I also would rather have voice acting null in RPG's, so I can have better connection with the game, games's characters and storyline.

hardcore_gamer said:

Why does a game (albeit modded) released 7 years ago look better than anything consoles are giving us so far?

Because shallow gamers have defined "realism" as higher resolution textures and more wrinkly normal maps, and literally nothing else.

FireFish said:

the adult 'gamers' need to grow up and be realistic...
Most gamers on the planet are running the newest games with reduced quality settings because their pc cant handle it... to give an example ; last week i almost died in laughter with a total biscuit review about the new farcry where he said his pc could NOT handle the game so the quality settings where around mid-range... and then he started to complain about the texture quality on the rocks and walls.

the playstation 4 has an eight core APU, the graphics on the ps4 are above what many people their pc can handle... not everybody can buy a pc ''masta rayce'' computer worth 6000 ''dollaz or yurowz''. This is not 2004 where a 600 dollar computer with a 2 gigahertz single core cpu and 500 megabyte of memory was put against the ps2 its drastically lower specs...

if modern 2000 dollar computers cant handle the latest assasins creed at maximum, or the latest farcry... yes, what a shame when people pay one time for an 700 dollar console running everything at a superb comfortable image quality. Ah the luxery and saved money... And it can play movies and put the internet on your tv to ?

Buuuullshiiiii~t. Far Cry 4 was released with a poorly optimized PC port which you couldn't run properly without the latest NVidia drivers that were released after the game was out (assuming you're using an NVidia card, of course), and even then it had massive stuttering issues that could only be fixed by forcing the game to use shitty textures through a config file. Only this week they released a patch that fixes the stuttering issue for most people, although some have reported even worse performance. That's got absolutely nothing to do with hardware performance and all with shitty PC port programmers at Ubisoft Kiev.

Personally, I can now run FarCry 4 on very high settings constantly at 60-90 fps on a $1k machine. Your consoles with lots of super slow cores will never get anywhere close in performance because Amdahl's law's a bitch. That's science, unlike your MULTIPLY CORES BY HURTZ TO GET POWARRR -maths.

I guess there's always hope thet "Unlimited Detail" will make a comeback?

They're kidding themselves if they think they can get their fancier version of voxels to market in an accessible, attractive and actually useful form anytime in the near future. I suppose it's worth researching and developing new ways to do 3D tech, but these guys seem kinda like they're just taking money to show off voxels.

None of it seems like it would make content creation any easier.

In fact, they stopped marketing this tech as the Next Big Thing in gaming or even CGI long ago, and recycled it as a tech for displaying large geodatasets or something, which probably was for the better.

Who the fuck cares about hyper realistic graphics anyway, if graphics aren't the main focus then that's a good thing.

Another thing to consider, nowadays, a lot of games are designed for simultaneous release of the exact same thing on PC, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii U. When this happens, it seems likely that the game's graphical quality and design is being "bottlenecked" by the fact that it has to be able to run on PS3 or Wii U.

With enough talent thrown at a project, all kinds of crazy shit is possible. Have any of you heard of .kkrieger, by any chance?

Jodwin said:

Buuuullshiiiii~t. Far Cry 4 was released with a poorly optimized PC port which you couldn't run properly without the latest NVidia drivers that were released after the game was out (assuming you're using an NVidia card, of course), and even then it had massive stuttering issues that could only be fixed by forcing the game to use shitty textures through a config file. Only this week they released a patch that fixes the stuttering issue for most people, although some have reported even worse performance. That's got absolutely nothing to do with hardware performance and all with shitty PC port programmers at Ubisoft Kiev.

Personally, I can now run FarCry 4 on very high settings constantly at 60-90 fps on a $1k machine. Your consoles with lots of super slow cores will never get anywhere close in performance because Amdahl's law's a bitch. That's science, unlike your MULTIPLY CORES BY HURTZ TO GET POWARRR -maths.

My cores hurtz powarrr maths ?
You clearly failed to read the only message in my post that came down to accepting consoles as a viable cheap platform while providing current age modern graphics beyond many people their computers, And if your 1K machine can run FarCry4 on very high settings then you might just be running at playstation 4 quality anyways. I did not mention the cores to claim great power, mentioning them is needed to show consoles changed, and are changing.

These companies also need to look after a viable market and a way to survive, this means reaching middle-range and high-range pc's and the consoles to keep their income up. The middle range will be what most people have, A 400 to 800 dollar new or second hand computer or an apple product they saved for two years up front... What evil is this console, as it provides an affordable home computer entertainment system yet to show its true potential.

Linkrulezall said:

Have any of you heard of .kkrieger, by any chance?

amazing how they could do that so many years ago... i remember not being able to run it on the pc's i could use around 2005 for some reason.

Maes said:

I guess there's always hope thet "Unlimited Detail" will make a comeback?

I remember that graphics card company and its videos zooming in on the gravel to see it. That was 4 or so years ago if I remember.

geo said:

I remember that graphics card company and its videos zooming in on the gravel to see it. That was 4 or so years ago if I remember.

I also remember some people like Notch calling it a scam.

hardcore_gamer said:

I also remember some people like Notch calling it a scam.

It felt like a scam. Not to offend Australia but, when I think technology leaps, I don't think Australia. (waits for someone to prove me wrong).

While it looks great. I really need video games to feel like video games. I don't need the realism.

geo said:

graphics card company

I don't even remember it as such: their implementation was purely (or at least heavily) software-based, IIRC, and besides, none of the existing hardware drawing primitives could be used with their octree-based rendering.

About the scam accusations, they were more due to the detail/scenes they shows being repetitive while the tech behind them was actually pretty simplistic: just read as many points as you can from a very large storage, and try rendering them cleverly. Which is utterly unsuitable for games (with the current drawing primitives, I repeat, aka polygons and textures), but might work for visualization of large static datasets, In fact, Euclideon "reinvented" itself by moving to the GIS market.

FireFish said:

And if your 1K machine can run FarCry4 on very high settings then you might just be running at playstation 4 quality anyways.

I'm fairly sure PS4 can't run it at +60 fps on 1080p. I could easily max the settings, but that would drop the performance to the peasantry 30-40 frames per second, which I find unplayable. So sure, in theory any console can easily put out the same graphical fidelity that TB's monster box can, but that doesn't mean they would do that on a playable speed.