1080p discussion

Resolution > FPS > Any graphical setting.

That's it for me when I'm gaming on my laptop that can't run every new game. I absolutely hate gaming on any resolution that's not native since it makes everything look blurry. After that I turn down AA, AO, usually medium shadows quality and then go from there to get a good framerate. So graphics are usually inferior to me but you'll have a hard time convincing me not to play on a native resolution... Definitely when I'm only sitting 3m from my big-ass TV.

Rolling101 For me a PS4 gives me exactly the same as an Xbone but with a crisp image rather than a blurry one... I'm sure there's differences in services and whatnot but that's not a factor for me since I only play games on them. So why exactly would I prefer an inferior image quality that doesn't sacrifice FPS or anything? I don't think that's lame at all... I really don't understand your statement I could understand if there's a trade-off but there's no catch...

As somebody who only ever plays games on PC I find it hilarious and absurd that this is even a thing that's being discussed.

I'd say game-play definitely trumps graphics every time, although in many cases graphical fidelity can have a dramatic effect upon gameplay -- in this case resolution effecting FOV and UI in certain types of game.

I would also say that gameplay trumps story, largely because I'm literate enough to read novels written by master storytellers writing in a medium that affords them sole authorship of the end product -- whereas game stories are normally ham-strung by factors such as budget, gameplay continuity, running time etc. Basically, because I want to have the best of both worlds, I will always play games for gameplay and read books (or sometimes watch films/tv) for story.

Quote from marks

But is it? Journey? Gone Home? Dear Esther? Those games would disagree I think.

The experience is king. A huge part of the experience is gameplay, whether the game is Journey, Gone Home or Dear Esther. Exploration is still gameplay.

Games need gameplay lol, should be obvious enough.

I think some of the modern day titles should have a new name for what they are, hard to call some stuff a "(video) game" anymore (which is OK, its just that we created a new category of entertainment, between games and movies and it needs a name).

gameplay complements graphics and vice versa, no need to be binary about it

Let's make it look real, but sub 30 fps.

Really though, I find it pretty mind boggling that up to now, no one has really played with art style except indies. Nintendo has been putting out amazing looking games running at 60fps (albeit 720p) on the Wii U, just because they use a less realistic art style.

A thing about graphics in general, which doesn't seem to have been mentioned, is that it can be a deciding factor for whether or not you're going to try out a game. Who hasn't bought a game on this premise or maybe skipped another title for the same reason? I'm not saying graphic is above gameplay or that the graphic has to be next gen, only that if the graphic is not satisfying, one might never give the game a chance. I do try some games for the graphic (it's hard to tell if you dig the gameplay before you've tried it), and if I keep playing, it's obviously for the gameplay

Some eye-candy surely doesn't hurt alongside good gameplay, I do prefer 1080p (as long it's not game breaking)

The problem is when eye candy does hurt game play, which happens more than you'd imagine.

These days, I see games like classics. Chess, Football, Monopoly ... they are very interesting from a game mechanics perspective - they have art in them to compliment the design.

There are also "experience" based games, which are far more about telling a story, cinematic, world exploration, discovery and wonder. These have a much deeper connection with artistic work, and of course are just as valid as an experience. At this point though, it's definitely easier to give in to pretty visuals at the harm of the experience, because these days we're finding it very hard to come up with unique game play. So, just as the movie industry struggles to make something fresh and new, they complement it with over the top effects. Thank goodness the industries and trends shift about every decade or so.

My issue is when developers (or mangers) assume you can make the best looking, best story, best mechanical depth and best performance all at the same time, this to me suggests a lack of focus in development - this has nothing to do with developers doing the best they can, it's about understanding what your making and why - it's naive to think that pushing deeply in one direction will have little consequence elsewhere.

Dont the next gen consoles have 4k support?

Original snake with 4k resolution sounds like fun...

Simply put, as I said in my first post, the premise of the topic is not written correctly.

We wouldn't be discussing this if the new consoles were offering the minimum requirement of native resolution.

Resolution (image clarity) is more and more important, is the visual differentiator at the moment imo.

I seriously have difficulties in using my old MacBook since i got the iPhone. You just look at the crispy retina display and then look down to the computer to read a forum more comfortably… and you just retract because screen looks blurry.

I mean my optician gave me glasses even if I've just a small defect: I can see the benefit of those on the laptop, I can do without on the phone.

It's even more important in games, where written things are on top of noisy backgrounds and read from afar.

Quote from SpronyvanJohnson

Gameplay over graphics. Always have and always will. I still play on my NES or Mega Drive and often enjoy those titles more then let's say, the latest COD.

Good point, bad example. I consider CoD more of an... interactive-movie? Less so than Heavy Rain but still.

For the last 7 years I've had to constantly go lower and lower with graphics and exclude some games.

Now, when I can play mostly everything out there, I still stick to the charmers that came out before 2013, and a lot more that came out before 2008.

Don't know if this makes sense. But games with multi buffers have multi resolutions internaly, there is the resolution of reflections, resolution of shadows, resolution of alpha blend masks, etc. For a side scrolling game, increasing resolution makes the whole gameplay area larger, you see more at once. For something such as BF4, increasing resolution + increased FOV adds to player imersion and view area. For a game such as doom 3, it's mostly indoors, so not really benefits from very high resolution.

It baffles me how hardware released in 2013 can't run games at a native res of 1920 x 1080. I mean, yes, obviously I understand that it requires a fair amount of work to optimise a renderer for the nuances of a particular architecture but considering that 1080p has been a PC standard for years now, I can see why people would be annoyed by the lack of games that run at that resolution.

The issue with the new modern consoles is the following

core count != performance increase

edit: you have to remember while we have 8 cores they run at a shitty clock speed

It's fucking hard to scale game performance when you have to do everything asynchronously. Essentially the entire game is as slow as the slowest task you dispatch to another core. It would help immensely if one of the cores clocked at a much higher rate but even then that's merely a bandaid.

edit 2 : It is possible to start to overcome this but you have to re-work your entire pipeline. It's not simple, it will happen eventually but it takes a lot of work. Especially considering that a lot of companies use engines and engines typically are generalized. Meaning they can't take advantage of any multicore rendering optimizations.

Include the fact that openGL is still a giant global state machine which means if part of your game targets it then multicore rendering is super hard to do. Borderline impossible.

My takeaway from this is the next single console focused game will be amazing. Even a game that only considers the xbone and ps4 will be way better than something that has to deal with OGL on the pc end. If naughty dog gets to start again with a single console focused rendering engine it's gonna be crazy.

essentially old graphics api's on the pc are holding console games back.

I'll admit that most of what you said there goes way over my head Alex, but your last statement makes even less sense to me. Modern PC games that run 1080p also have to cater to older graphics APIs, so if backwards compatibility isn't an issue on the most hardware diverse platform, surely it shouldn't be too difficult to build consoles with the same versatility.

Ah the thing about modern pc's is they also have crazy powerful GPU's. I'll have to check but I think even when the consoles came out the power of the high end GPU's was already better. I could be wrong about that though. I have to admit that's more based off of a general instinct than evidence.

As for the processor side. The processing power of a intel CPU per core I would be willing to say is far better than even the a core of a ps4/xbone when it came out. The AMD setup (can't remember the name) was more lauded for it's low power consumption and many cores than raw power.

I probably wrote my previous argument badly. I'm sure I could make it more clear. I need to dedicate more time to the point I'm trying to get across.

AlexM, your point is shared with Cerny's interview about the PS4 philosophy he put in the hardware: "easy to learn, difficult to master". Both MS and Sony are going down the road of GPGPU this gen, a detour rom last gen when GPGPU was still being born and they choose 3,2ghz cpus. Interestly though, PS3 was ahead of its time, but in a way that not having a GPU proved to be a failure and they had to add one and delay the console for a whole year. Intel and AMD are powering up their integrated graphisc every gen, which makes me suspect that this road shall be taken by the next consoles.

The thread's title is missleading, it should be performance vs graphics. But even when comparing higher vs lower resolution, performance dosen't scale down linearly, i.e. double the res, cut fps by half.

Quote from AlexM

My takeaway from this is the next single console focused game will be amazing. Even a game that only considers the xbone and ps4 will be way better than something that has to deal with OGL on the pc end. If naughty dog gets to start again with a single console focused rendering engine it's gonna be crazy.

essentially old graphics api's on the pc are holding console games back.

You are basically saying the problem is that we are using PCs to build games? Because Naughty Dog targets a single platform, so the only way I can interpret your statement is that to have the best game you need to run it only on the console, from the very first build(?).

Well yeah, targetting one platform will certainly yield better results. Basically if you generalize across a large number of platforms then the performance drops.

So if you target platforms X, Y and Z and platform Z has some sort of super render feature. It can be hard to take advantage of platform Z's super feature because you don't have an equivalent for X and Y. So usually what ends up happening is the feature isn't used.

Naughty Dog would be an extreme case of this because of the PS3's architecture. I'm pretty confident if it was a mutliplat game it wouldn't look as good. If you look into some of the stories about the difficulty of porting it to PS4 that will also give some insight. They are lucky enough to have legendary graphics programmer Corrine Yu handling the port though, even she said it was tough.

As for the opengl thing. Basically opengl doesn't work well with multicore rendering because it's a global state machine. If you did a basic multi-plat implementation where one uses opengl it can be a little tough. It certainly can be done but in the world of deadlines there just might not be the time to do it.

Quote from AlexM

Well yeah, targetting one platform will certainly yield better results. Basically if you generalize across a large number of platforms then the performance drops.

So if you target platforms X, Y and Z and platform Z has some sort of super render feature. It can be hard to take advantage of platform Z's super feature because you don't have an equivalent for X and Y. So usually what ends up happening is the feature isn't used.

Naughty Dog would be an extreme case of this because of the PS3's architecture. I'm pretty confident if it was a mutliplat game it wouldn't look as good. If you look into some of the stories about the difficulty of porting it to PS4 that will also give some insight. They are lucky enough to have legendary graphics programmer Corrine Yu handling the port though, even she said it was tough.

As for the opengl thing. Basically opengl doesn't work well with multicore rendering because it's a global state machine. If you did a basic multi-plat implementation where one uses opengl it can be a little tough. It certainly can be done but in the world of deadlines there just might not be the time to do it.

Display More

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't OpenGL 4.5 designed to fix the issues of it being a state machine? From a non-dev's perspective, wouldn't that make multi-plat development way easier, especially when DX12 seems to be doing the same stuff to bring it into line with XBOne DX 11/12? Last generation the PS3, 360, and PC couldn't be any more different. Now all three are x86-64, two use essentially the same rendering API if the Windows PC domination continues, and the PS4 API seems to be familiar territory from what I can glean. Seems to me that we won't be seeing so much quality difference between ports and exclusives.