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Lamen here: Why do pc games simply do not blow out console games graphically?

Elysium44

Banned
Judging by how the ps5 and xsx marketed themselves as 4k beast machines and got 80 million sales off of that it's safe to say that people do somewhat care.

Though I do agree that 4k is pretty mid and that ai upscaling solutions are the way to go from here... a hardware solution that is also best experienced on pc through Nvidia graphics
I think a lot of it is marketing. If people are told something will be four times more detailed and better, and ray tracing will make an incredible difference, people believe it. But in reality, the benefits have been greatly exaggerated, and the trade-off is huge.
 

Puscifer

Member
It's production costs and diminishing returns. Games have looked good enough to me since last gen, so I'm more interested in frame rate and responsiveness. I'd rather have a 120fps PS4-looking game than a 30fps PS5 game.
Pretty much, especially with the use of photogrammetry these days you can get a lot more out of hardware than ever. There's moments in Death Stranding on PS4 and Detroit Become that are bizarre in how real they look at the moment, makes you realize why you never wanna hit uncanny valley.

But I'll still take the increases you gain from PC regardless, I just like the experience of kb/m and higher frame rates. I also could never play stuff like Divinity and XCOM on consoles, controllers are just too clunky. There's also stuff that you can power against the console version like Yakuza 6, what a dumb choice to cap the series at 30 again
Its worth noting that budget and talent are a much more constraining factor than hardware. Many games go for simpler graphics because it is cheaper that way

Also, gameplay is king. Developing a graphical monster like Alan Wake 2 does not necessarely mean you'll get your money worth's back.

I mean it's their fastest selling game to date, so. I would've loved some RT in the port of horizon.
 

DragonNCM

Member
I know a 4090 has like 80-90 teraflops of processing power vs the PS5's 8-10 teraflops. A 4090 cost about 3x what a ps5 does alone so it should be much more powerful. With that said, Why do we not see the difference? Yes I know a 4090 can run similiar looking games at increased framerates but why do we not see eye melting graphics.

Throwing all the numbers out of the WIndows, I am going to use the tools I was born with the eye test. I look at Playstation games like Ratchet and Clank remake, Horizon Forbidden West, Dark Souls remake, even the Resident Evil 4 remake and others that visually can go toe to toe with what the pc has to offer. Why? The pc is clearly superior and it's price point reflects that but why do I not see the Vastly improved visuals? I get it that on pc one has to develop for the lowest common denominator but there are always some studios who are going to push the envelope.
Because games are not made for only 4090......DOH......
What you think....how many games will you sell" for only 4090"?
Developers need to make money for their next game & pay bills.
WHY THEY DONT MAKE ONLY FERRARIS !!!
 

Guilty_AI

Member
But I don't think that took all that much effort to begin with, game is basically automated raytracing brute force.

Console version sucks.
With high graphical fidelity comes other necessary investments, from quality animation, mocap and VA to proper texture work and possibly multiple set pieces.

Path/ray tracing certainly does help in the dev process, but it can only do so much to create a graphical benchmark. No one would say Quake 2 RTX looks better than TLoU2.
 

Senua

Gold Member
I think a lot of it is marketing. If people are told something will be four times more detailed and better, and ray tracing will make an incredible difference, people believe it. But in reality, the benefits have been greatly exaggerated, and the trade-off is huge.
Or people actually have eyes and can see the difference themselves. Have you had any experience on a high end PC or are you just going off youtube videos too?
 

64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
If a game came out for PS5 now it has to run at 400% the resolution so all the extra horsepower which could have gone on producing four times more detail and realism is instead wasted on a resolution bump,
Do you see how detailed the game already is? You'd need a resolution bump to even see all of what the game visually has to offer, let alone whatever extra detail they could possibly add
 
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Puscifer

Member
Nothing has surpassed TLoU2? You clearly just haven't experienced enough games mate. Alan Wake 2 on a high end PC absolutely crushes it. It's not 2020 anymore.
TLOU PT 2 also isn't even that great looking anymore, I tried playing it again last year and was surprised by how plain it looks. There's a lot of things about graphical powerhouse games is that their great till you find a spot that ruins the entire presentation.

I'd argue Returnal is a much better looking game, especially on PC with all the additional RT effects that fill the world and make it feel more alive. Going back to it on PS5 felt empty.
 

Senua

Gold Member
Do you see how detailed the game already is? You'd need a resolution bump to even see all of what the game visually has to offer, let alone whatever extra detail they could possibly add
Curb Your Enthusiasm Bingo GIF by Jason Clarke
 

Elysium44

Banned
Or people actually have eyes and can see the difference themselves. Have you had any experience on a high end PC or are you just going off youtube videos too?

So patronising 😂 I just have a different opinion to you, man. I think the move to 4K has been a major mistake. The trade-offs aren't worth it. Take another game I am (or was) a fan of, the Forza Motorsport franchise. The best graphics in the series are Forza Motorsport 5. FM7 is the worst. Why? They made it run at 4k60 and made it a major marketing feature. It runs on Xbox One X at 4k60 but it looks a lot more basic than FM5 because of the compromises they had to make in detail.

(Or maybe I just watched a 360p youtube video eh)
 

Gaiff

SBI’s Resident Gaslighter
Forbidden west and tlou 2 are still more mind-blowing than anything on pc,except a raytraced cyberpunk. Pc doesn't have budget behind it to take advantage of its hardware. You are mostly playing for higher performance.
Not more than Alan Wake 2 or Frontiers of Pandora.
 

Elysium44

Banned
Do you see how detailed the game already is? You'd need a resolution bump to even see all of what the game visually has to offer, let alone whatever extra detail they could possibly add

TLOU2 looks fantastic but nobody would mistake it for real life. Watch a blu-ray movie, does it look like real life? Of course it does, it is real life. Does it being 1080p make it not look real?
 

Topher

Identifies as young
I recently upgraded from a 2006 Sony Bravia 1080p TV to a LG C3 and the upgrade was fucking insane. The upgrade in clarity was genuinely eye popping, not even talking about HDR or anything either, just resolition. I'm not going to shit on 1080p like a lot of people do but to say 4k was a mistake is just ridiculous, it's a HUGE upgrade.

4k with DLAA is just heaven right now.

I do think 4k should be the focus for a long time going forward though, fuck 8k for a LONG time.

The leap from 1080p to 4k was significant. Generally I find a middle of the road rez between 1440p and 4k depending on the game to achieve the optimal frame rate. Going back to 1080p is just hard to do at this point. It looks like a fuzzy mess.

Or people actually have eyes and can see the difference themselves. Have you had any experience on a high end PC or are you just going off youtube videos too?

Ultimately, that's the thing. I don't really need anyone to tell me any of this. I can see it myself. Is it every game? No, of course not. Obviously I'm not going to see much difference in Persona 3 Reload on PC vs PS5. Cyberpunk 2077? Obviously. Even some middle of the road games like Hogwarts looked significantly better playing on PC than PS5.
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
on PC you still have to create a game toward the lowest common denominator. Also consoles still dictate the polygon budgets.
 

Senua

Gold Member
So patronising 😂 I just have a different opinion to you, man. I think the move to 4K has been a major mistake. The trade-offs aren't worth it. Take another game I am (or was) a fan of, the Forza Motorsport franchise. The best graphics in the series are Forza Motorsport 5. FM7 is the worst. Why? They made it run at 4k60 and made it a major marketing feature. It runs on Xbox One X at 4k60 but it looks a lot more basic than FM5 because of the compromises they had to make in detail.

(Or maybe I just watched a 360p youtube video eh)
I mean it's your opinion, but obviously its going to get challenged by people who disagree with you. Forza's problem was that they aimed for NATIVE 4k, which resulted in a lack of detail elsewhere, it was a silly tradeoff especially all those years ago. I still don't think console games should target native 4k, but there is incredible upscaling tech on PC like DLSS which makes makes my 4k screen look incredible with performance to spare. Consoles need some form of AI upscaling technique for the best of both worlds.

I genuinely think staying at 1080p is way too limiting, there is so much detail in textures among other things that would be lost. Yes 1080p blurays look awesome, but 4k ones look even better.
 

Gaiff

SBI’s Resident Gaslighter
The point is that if that resolution is the target for a console game then it puts a ceiling on how good the graphics can be. If games capped out at 1080p (and let people who have 4K TVs simply upscale to 4K) then graphics could be a LOT better.
At the expense of a lot of things though. Resolution isn't just more pixels. With modern engines, many things such as volumetrics, alpha effects, AA, and more scale with a higher resolution. Take a look at UE5 for instance where stuff like Nanite and Lumen are directly tied to resolution. I'd say 1080p is still too low and a lot of fine details that add to the game get lost.

I recently tried HZD on PC again and went from 3440x1440 with DLSS Quality to 5120x2160 using dynamic super resolution and DLSS Quality and the difference was quite substantial to the point I was willing to take the fps hit in favor of higher image quality. Granted, I went from 165fps which is the max refresh rate of my monitor to like 120 so it's not like there was a big difference.
 

willothedog

Member
TLOU2 looks fantastic but nobody would mistake it for real life. Watch a blu-ray movie, does it look like real life? Of course it does, it is real life. Does it being 1080p make it not look real?

Toy Story on blu-ray still looks like animation, is that how you see real-life :messenger_grimmacing_
 

Leonidas

AMD's Dogma: ARyzen (No Intel inside)
They do when games push things like Path Tracing.

Alan Wake 2, Portal RTX, CyberPunk 2077 are things that are not possible on console (technically console can run it, it would just be like 4 FPS, or at 144p30 :messenger_tears_of_joy: ).

The reason we don't see more of it is that the consoles are too weak for path tracing so only few games are supported now, I suppose this will change next gen when consoles can hopefully do path tracing at 30 FPS or more.

The biggest benefit of PC to me more has to do with the framerate. 30-60 FPS is abysmal to me today. If a game is 30-60 FPS on PS5, it can probably run 100-200 FPS on my PC. My PC is running some games at both higher resolution and higher framerate. Some instances I'd say my PC is around 5x faster than PS5 when you combine both the resolution and FPS increases...
 
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Vick

Member
I recently upgraded from a 2006 Sony Bravia 1080p TV to a LG C3 and the upgrade was fucking insane. The upgrade in clarity was genuinely eye popping, not even talking about HDR or anything either, just resolition. I'm not going to shit on 1080p like a lot of people do but to say 4k was a mistake is just ridiculous, it's a HUGE upgrade.

4k with DLAA is just heaven right now.
But you had a shitty TV before though.

Take 50 people and put them in front of a Kuro/late Panasonic plasmas next to a random 4K panel and almost all would pick the plasmas and all of them would think those are the 4K ones thanks to the resolution while in motion being actually far superior.

Huh? The game looks fucking insane without raytracing. The only reason the console versions suck is because the internal resolution is way too low, and that + FSR equals an artifact ridden mess. The asset quality, characters and shaders among many other things in Alan Wake 2 is fucking nuts tbh.
Nah.. and I found some shaders and particularly human skin being totally oldgen. Console version is full of shadows/reflection issues of the worst kind, resolution got nothing to do with it.

And it's got some truly great assets but also some pretty uneven ones. Can be considered a spectacle only maxed out on PC imo, thinking otherwise means having not enough references.
 
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DeaDPo0L84

Member
Actually play games on a high end PC where you can crank everything up and still get 100+ fps @ native resolution. Simply looking at screenshots is not really going to answer any questions for you. My come to Jesus moment was playing Destiny 2 on my friends PC years ago. At the time I had nearly two thousand hours in the game so I was well aware of how it played and performed. Once I played it on his PC my motivation to make the switch to PCwas pretty much instant. Now it's been nearly 4 years and I've never looked back.
 

64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
TLOU2 looks fantastic but nobody would mistake it for real life. Watch a blu-ray movie, does it look like real life? Of course it does, it is real life. Does it being 1080p make it not look real?
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that either way if you want to actually perceive the so called graphical differences that come with a new console gen you need a higher resolution than shit ass 1080p. And there is a very good in-between resolution that isn't as demanding as 4k but also not as soft as 1080p
 
I know a 4090 has like 80-90 teraflops of processing power vs the PS5's 8-10 teraflops. A 4090 cost about 3x what a ps5 does alone so it should be much more powerful. With that said, Why do we not see the difference? Yes I know a 4090 can run similiar looking games at increased framerates but why do we not see eye melting graphics.
You're investing/running a modern day triple A studio with a budget of 70-100 million to have some of the latest graphics and animations ever in gaming. You spec towards the highest PCs possible (The Crysis 1 Strat) and completely ignore all consoles. Do you feel that you will have a full return and profit on your investment on only one platform?
 

Mister Wolf

Member
Because games are designed for console in mind. Most of us play on PC so we don't have to play games like Dragons Dogma 2, Starfield, and FF7 Rebirth at awful resolutions or framerates.
 

Topher

Identifies as young
There is a massive difference when you actually get to experience it but that massive difference comes at a cost

It does indeed. I just wonder how many people have actually experienced the difference. No problem if folks who have been on the high end PC side say it wasn't worth it for them. At least they experienced it and can point to that experience.
 

Fbh

Member
Because games like Forbidden west, TLOu2, and Spiderman 2 already cost hundreds of millions to make.
Spending even more to make even better looking games that you can then only sell to the niche audience that has a 4090 or comparable GPU doesn't make sense.
 

BlueLyria

Member
2 big things, we don't get optimzation efforts like we used to and games are made targeting the average system config to ensure it will have a broad consumer base.
 

Senua

Gold Member
But you had a shitty TV before though.

Take 50 people and put them in front of a Kuro/late Panasonic plasmas next to a random 4K panel and almost all would pick the plasmas and all of them would think those are the 4K ones thanks to the resolution while in motion being actually far superior.


Nah.. and I found some shaders and particularly human skin being totally oldgen. Console version is full of shadows/reflection issues of the worst kind, resolution got nothing to do with it.

And it's got some truly great assets but also some pretty uneven ones. Can be considered a spectacle only maxed out on PC imo, thinking otherwise means having not enough references.
I know it was shit, it was 1080p man! but seriously yes motion clarity is obviously important but the resolution bump was massive. I was playing Forza Motorsport and was struggling to see the road ahead in the distance, jumping to 4k I could see everything so crystal clear, it was a fucking revelation. Games look so damn crisp, even at DLSS balanced mode it looks insane.

Alan Wake 2s biggest problem on console is definitely FSR breakup, but yea the shimmering is low post processing setting which is a bummer. What I was saying in my OG post was that the game looks incredible even without PT turned on. That's how I played on PC and it was probably the most impressive game I've ever played.
 

Diddy X

Member
Games do look and run way better on pc thanks to brute force, then there is production values that are the highest on Playstation exclusives.
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
Because fat PC dorks are too busy eating buckets of KFC chicken rather than sacrificing it to Jobu. Meanwhile, Nintendo fans be like:

y0Zr5g.gif
I wish I was eating KFC right now but im too fat to go out and get it.
 

bender

What time is it?
I wish I was eating KFC right now but im too fat to go out and get it.

Type /chicken in the chat widow. If your fingers are too fat to hit single keys, stab at them with the straw from one of your spent Slurpee cups.
 
If the dev doesn't offer you higher res textures, better post processing effects etc in the pc port of a game, you're out of luck and all you're getting is higher resolutions, higher frame rates, widescreen, VRR and so on. For many, even this worst case scenario is worth it. A 4090 is 5 x the PS5, not 3x.
 

Vick

Member
There is still nothing out, on any platform, that looks as good as path traced CyberPunk.
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Yeah I know, not an actual game. But still. A fully explorable and totally realtime photorealistic city.

I know it was shit, it was 1080p man! but seriously yes motion clarity is obviously important but the resolution bump was massive. I was playing Forza Motorsport and was struggling to see the road ahead in the distance, jumping to 4k I could see everything so crystal clear, it was a fucking revelation. Games look so damn crisp, even at DLSS balanced mode it looks insane.

Alan Wake 2s biggest problem on console is definitely FSR breakup, but yea the shimmering is low post processing setting which is a bummer. What I was saying in my OG post was that the game looks incredible even without PT turned on. That's how I played on PC and it was probably the most impressive game I've ever played.
Yeah I mean, going from a Sony Bravia LCD to an LG C3 must have been quite the jump, I can imagine.

Let's just agree to disagree on AW2 as it felt too crude to me, "plasticky" skins and not enough bounce/indirect soft lights.
It actually still does look a bit crude to me even with all the RT.
 

Gaiff

SBI’s Resident Gaslighter
I compared them both on my gaming PC and PS5 (using the trial). I didn't notice much difference. I do think that dual sense on PS5 makes the gunplay feel so much better.

I don't either
The assumption is that you're not running this on your 1060s to really appreciate the difference. Of course, you won't notice much of a difference running it on low-end rigs.
 

Mortisfacio

Member
Path Tracing brings my RTX 4070 to it's knees in CP77. I have to drop all the way to 1080P if I want to see those reflections stable in the water during the benchmark test. :(

Haha, it's definitely brutal. I have a 4090, but I'm still rocking a 27" ASUS Predator (2k) monitor as my primary. I want to go a larger 4k+ curved display, but I work from home and tend to alternate between work and personal PC so I like having the multiple displays as opposed to one large. Still haven't committed to an upgrade :(
 
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