The thing that really disappoints me is the number of 30fps games we're seeing. I thought with the vastly better CPUs we'd see 60 fps close to standard.
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Next gen graphics are underwhelming
- Thread starter Soulymist
- Start date
RDR on Xbox 360 was more immersive and groundbreaking for me than RDR2 on Xbox One X, and why all the new stuff feels like diminishing returns.
I'm hopeful there's a true next-gen, entirely new kind of game that's yet to announced.
I know, me too. There really should be a requirement to have a 60fps mode in each game.
So far what I've seen is the same art style as last gen, but fully realized and with less corners cut.
Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 was gorgeous and occasionally matched its proposed vision (photo mode can get damn close to concept art), but it was also had major cutbacks in polygon count, LOD, textures and texture filtering, and distant lighting. Most of the existing lighting was pre-baked. Cutscenes were very tight on character models. Running water is entirely opaque and barely reflective. Foliage isn't dynamic. Even later in the game, HZD's story became epic in scope but the gameplay was carefully constrained, and even then it became sluggish on my base PS4 during the siege section.
Overall, Horizon Zero Dawn is very careful on what it spends its limited technical resources on, and it's a triumph in that regard.
In comparison, Horizon Forbidden West has the exact same art style that it's trying to accomplish, and everything looks much closer to that vision. The amount of detail present is much, much higher. LOD is pushed way out, and the fidelity of everything is much higher. I'm guessing the lighting will be more dynamic, the animations will be more varied and fluid, and world traversal will be much faster.
However, if you're looking at next-gen hoping for entirely new visions in art and directions that games can go graphically, I think that time has passed. The peaks of last gen showed us that nearly any game art style can be accomplished, it's just a matter of time, budget, and talent.
Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 was gorgeous and occasionally matched its proposed vision (photo mode can get damn close to concept art), but it was also had major cutbacks in polygon count, LOD, textures and texture filtering, and distant lighting. Most of the existing lighting was pre-baked. Cutscenes were very tight on character models. Running water is entirely opaque and barely reflective. Foliage isn't dynamic. Even later in the game, HZD's story became epic in scope but the gameplay was carefully constrained, and even then it became sluggish on my base PS4 during the siege section.
Overall, Horizon Zero Dawn is very careful on what it spends its limited technical resources on, and it's a triumph in that regard.
In comparison, Horizon Forbidden West has the exact same art style that it's trying to accomplish, and everything looks much closer to that vision. The amount of detail present is much, much higher. LOD is pushed way out, and the fidelity of everything is much higher. I'm guessing the lighting will be more dynamic, the animations will be more varied and fluid, and world traversal will be much faster.
However, if you're looking at next-gen hoping for entirely new visions in art and directions that games can go graphically, I think that time has passed. The peaks of last gen showed us that nearly any game art style can be accomplished, it's just a matter of time, budget, and talent.
Games that are impossible on prior hardware take time to make. They usually don't happen in the first 2 years.
The CPU (Ryzen 8C/16T) is strong enough for 60fps, but the GPU isnt.
The cool thing about this gen is that ga mes look super impressive and mostly run really well. I don't feel like there's a feeling that these consoles overstayed their welcome like at the end of last gen. The "problem" it creates is that it's hard to have a very big leap in graphics quality when games already look fantastic.
I think a lot of people tend to overlook how current gen games actually look ingame vs in-engine cutscenes with improved lighting, Models and Effects.
I mean this is an extreme and cherry-picked example, but as incredible as DMC5 looks in Cutscenes for example, the Ingame Models are....a different story
If next-gen delivers current in-Engine Cutscene Quality in gameplay, it will be massive step up but people wont be wowed as much because the visual fidelity itself has already been seen before (in Cutscenens, in tightly designed linear games, with a bad framerate, etc.).
I mean this is an extreme and cherry-picked example, but as incredible as DMC5 looks in Cutscenes for example, the Ingame Models are....a different story
If next-gen delivers current in-Engine Cutscene Quality in gameplay, it will be massive step up but people wont be wowed as much because the visual fidelity itself has already been seen before (in Cutscenens, in tightly designed linear games, with a bad framerate, etc.).
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It's fun to read that considering we're ending a gen that start with already-old tech while PS5s et Xbox Series are more ambitious tech-wise.
The only people that care about FPS are the people on forums and Reddit. I'm sure if you survey all those 100 million people that have a PS4, half or more of them will say they don't care.
The big thing with next-gen will be load times (or the lack of them) and some of the huge implications the fast SSDs have for game design, less about huge grapical leaps. It's not just impressive planet-hopping like in R&C: Drift Apart. Devs like Insomniac had to go through big hurdles to have stuff like "going indoors in New York without loading screens" in some of the missions in Spider-Man, hiding that behind an elaborate cutscene that allowed them to remove the unnecessary city-assets while loading all the indoors stuff. Now stuff like that will be fairly effortless when they can load a whole worlds worth of data in just mere seconds.
And that's just the obvious kinds of improvements. who knows what clever devs will come up with once they really delve into the possibilities of SSD.
And that's just the obvious kinds of improvements. who knows what clever devs will come up with once they really delve into the possibilities of SSD.
This is a good example of what I was saying above with the Horizon games.
Ratchet and Clank PS4 was an incredible example of a consistent art style being applied perfectly to the hardware it was on. The game looks amazing and coherent, and few rough edges present themselves. And again, Sony first party games always do the cutscene stuff with just lavish gorgeous detail, but usually with the camera pulled WAAAY in.
But on the PS5, you're still seeing increased detail across the board, which holds up well to CGI. The world density has no peer on any current gen game. Ratchet's plant gun is an example where it suddenly pops up a bunch of detailed foliage, dynamically on the world.
I could argue some of these changes are excessive. Do we need ray-traced reflections on Clank? Do we actually need a level background that's intensely busy in comparison to the PS4 game? We'll see.
But again, the art styles won't fundamentally change, which may be a disappointment. The goal for what the game should look like hasn't fundamentally changed, but the cutbacks and details have.
You're right! What I think is cool now is that it seems a lot easier for indy devs to make fantastic looking games.
So it looked too good thats why it doesn't look any better than last-gen games. Gotcha. Nice goalpost movin' there.
Developers were always going to push graphics over performance. You can't see 60 fps in a screenshot.
Ohh man this exists every generation where people had opinions. I was just rewatching and discussing the 360 reveal, so many people were stating how "360 looks the same as OG Xbox, what is the point??".
i don't think that's true at all amongst my group of friends. We all built our PCs and have been doing so since highschool. Once I built My current PC which I can play almost every game at 4k 60fps or 1440p 120 fps on my 144hz monitor, it was really hard for me to play anything on my PS4 that was 30fps.
Same goes with my group of friends. Hell some of them don't even want to buy a ps5 if 60fps plus is not guaranteed in every game.
I was impressed by the games for sure especially Horizon 2 and R and C but them not being standard 60fps disappointed me.
This keeps saying said and I'll keep responding- the percentage of people is 100% different this time around. There are always these complaints, but I've never personally felt this way, and I've never seen it this widespread.
Well said.I think a lot of people tend to overlook how current gen games actually look ingame vs in-engine cutscenes with improved lighting, Models and Effects.
I mean this is an and cherry-picked extreme example, but as incredible as DMC5 looks in Cutscenes for example, the Ingame Models are....a different story
If next-gen delivers current in-Engine Cutscene Quality in gameplay, it will be massive step up but people wont be wowed as mich because the visual fidelity itself has already been seen before.
And when the PS6 comes out... everyone will claim how the games look just like the PS5!
Obviously there are limits to how much you can downgrade something without losing the experience, you couldn't put RDR2 on the Nintendo 3DS. But do I think they could make it work on the Switch and still retain 95% of what it makes it a great game? Yes, absolutely. In the same way, do I think they could downgrade the graphical fidelity or work some other trickery to get the dimension jumping in R&C working on a PS4? For sure. Thinking they would just add loading screens is silly, if the gameplay is contingent on quickly jumping to other dimensions/areas, they would retain that as the core mechanic and downgrade other aspects. Likely we would lose some stuff like ray-traced puddles. The bells and whistles.
But what do we get out of that type of thinking? Games will continue to improve and look better all the time. Yall gotta just stop stressing about the generational changes and just watch for the games that interest you. Plus limited loading times for next gen makes me way more excited for this generation then any others.
Plus you are all in a time where devs don't try to bamboozle as much anymore, devs like showing their raw game at the time (so prealpha footage often). So of course its gonna look a tad older, especially as we all figure out the benefits/negatives of raytracing.
Previous generational leaps relied a lot on tricks and prerendered stuff posed as real. (Which honestly I miss, but people love seeing games as they might be when they release)
The thing that impressed me the most was Square's showing. I honestly believe those were snippets of real gameplay.
It's exactly what I want from next-gen games. It gives me hope that FF7 part 2 might actually become a fully realized World (I truly believe it will be).
The Project Athia trailer made me believe... We'll see incredible things this upcoming gen, as with every gen. People aren't ready! 😊
It's exactly what I want from next-gen games. It gives me hope that FF7 part 2 might actually become a fully realized World (I truly believe it will be).
The Project Athia trailer made me believe... We'll see incredible things this upcoming gen, as with every gen. People aren't ready! 😊
Isn't that a bit self-selecting though? Gamers who care about frame rate wouldn't be playing on the PS4, a console where 30fps games are the norm.
While there's an inevitability to many of these complaints, I think it's always worth considering where they stem from. The answer will differ from generation to generation.
Plus, with last generation having games like Killzone and Ryse, I'm not sure too many people weren't impressed with the new consoles. But that was also a special case where the 360/PS3 were very long in the tooth, with a generation where basically every game struggled with frame rate and resolution.
I don't know how many times this has already been said on this forum, but framerate is a choice made by developers. You can very well design a game where the CPU is the bottleneck to reaching 60fps for any console, including the next-gen ones. If a PS5/XSX doesn't reach 60fps it's because of a conscious decision by the development team, nothing more.
The next generation is exciting because it's the first time in a while where they're selling improvements that aren't just MORE POLYGONS, but actual gameplay improvements with the fast SSD streaming.
60fps is literally always a choice made by developers.
Always.
You can run a game at 60fps on an NES or 30fps on a PS5, there is no magical breakpoint where developers say "ok we literally cannot make our game look better, might as well use the extra power for 60fps".
Uh absolutely not. The PS5 SSD is 100x faster than the PS4 HDD. To get around that, the "trickery" would have to be Ratchet falling in between rifts for God knows how long while the PS4 slowly removed the old data from the memory and loads the new ones. Which would also mean they could not pull off the part where Ratchet quickly switched between dimensions in succession because that means the player would have upwards of a minute of Ratchet falling through rifts instead of actually playing the game. That is compromising the experience and if you have to do that, that just means the game isn't possible on that hardware. And disabling the "raytraced puddles" would not help, because raytraced puddles aren't loaded from storage, they're calculated on the fly by the GPU.
Heh, based on all the arguments I've seen here and elsewhere around the 'Net, they most certainly do play on consoles like that, perhaps only so they have something to complain about.
This happens literally every generation. The potential of these new consoles has even been CLOSE to fully tapped.
Weren't most of these games showing CG scenes and not gameplay? Who cares then wait for gameplay to see how it looks.
In-engine cutscenes. Not CG.
Ratchet & Clank was almost entirely legit gameplay footage and it was the most impressive visually.
Again, if someone is actually looking at this and claiming it as somehow underwhelming, then the issue is with the person and not the graphics.
Oh, sure, I also prefer 60fps even when I'm playing a console game. I'm just saying, audience does dictate preferences.
It's like saying "most owners of high end video cards do care about frame rate." Like, yes. It was selected for that purpose. A good chunk of PC gaming is built around high frame rates for esports titles. The PS4 isn't that.
I can see how some people would still be disappointed by a lack of 60fps in the next-gen consoles, even if it was a pipe dream. If you want the console experience or want to get away from the annoyances of PC gaming, but without sacrificing something important to you like frame rate, this market doesn't have an offering for that.
didnt they say they capped the FPS to 30 for the video though?
Original Story: Sony's hotly anticipated PlayStation 5 reveal event will be restricted to 1080p and 30 frames-per-second, as the consequences of coronavirus mean this "eased" the pre-recorded livestream's production process
the current gen jump was even lowerwhelming. these consoles were designed assuming the gaming industry may collapse at any moment. they are going to greater lengths this time around
I guarantee both games could very much be played on PS4.
Neither made me go oh damn that's next gen. It was more oh that's slightly turning graphical settings up.
Well you're completely wrong on the first point, and realistically you should probably go see an optometrist.
I remember DMC5 looking way cleaner than that, I don;t remember seeing any of that dithering on their hair or anything like that. (I played it on PC, though)I think a lot of people tend to overlook how current gen games actually look ingame vs in-engine cutscenes with improved lighting, Models and Effects.
I mean this is an extreme and cherry-picked example, but as incredible as DMC5 looks in Cutscenes for example, the Ingame Models are....a different story
If next-gen delivers current in-Engine Cutscene Quality in gameplay, it will be massive step up but people wont be wowed as much because the visual fidelity itself has already been seen before (in Cutscenens, in tightly designed linear games, with a bad framerate, etc.).
The 360 got called Xbox 1.5 in the months after release. It ended up being a huge leap over the previous generation.
We might not get an initial wow factor anymore but in time you'll come to see how much of a big leap the hardware is.
We might not get an initial wow factor anymore but in time you'll come to see how much of a big leap the hardware is.
Thanks for your expert opinion guaranteeing it to us all. I'm sure you're right lmao
You're not wrong from a purely graphical standpoint. It's the same art style, but with way more detail. Both Horizon and Ratchet go above what you'd see on an Ultra setting on PC, though.
But don't let your memory of the PS4 games get too rosy. Horizon Zero Dawn was constrained gameplay-wise to look that pretty in an open world on PS4. The underwater stuff, the density of enemies and characters shown in the trailer. Technically...possible on the PS4, but difficult to balance all of these different axis. Horizon 1 was already a game very carefully balancing every technical and gameplay aspect to achieve its vision. Horizon 2 unleashes many of those limitations and the trailer is a celebration of those things that the original game had to sacrifice.
Ratchet looks like largely the same game as the PS4 version, but the level transition technology is a gimmick I'm down for. We'll see how they work it into the level design. If they get really clever with it, like Super Mario Galaxy clever...holy shit man.
I honestly remember the game looking a lot better than that. Especially in motion.
Paging Crossing Eden , thoughts?
If you opened those 4k shots, zoomed in and still came off unimpressed that its running in real time, then idk what to tell you