Xbox Official Xbox thread

4daLuLZ said:
You think major companies like Amazon and Sony do oopsies like this ?

It’s a fishing expedition. They put out the 700 dollar price. See how much stick it gets which will determine its upper limit. Alternatively, if you later announce a 500 price point, you get to watch everybody breathe a sigh of relief that it’s not 700.

Same with the 500 dollar “mistake” announcement. You again see what the response is. Is it meh, is it mild annoyance or is everybody up in arms and expecting a 4-450 buck console.

These two back to back "mistakes " makes me believe that Sony is rightfully worried about price.

If they do let MS announce first and they come out with some ridiculous 400 or 450 price point, Sony going to have some problems with sales in the first year. Lower or same priced and a more powerful spec console n Gamepass ?

I think Sony will crack first and announce their price and that gives it a chance it will be lower than what they would want.

Yay for us, I guess.
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Wooooooooosh
 
Madmick said:
Resolution scaling has advanced a great deal, and while 4K TVs have become the norm on shelves, still only 31% of American households even have one. So why wouldn't Microsoft offer a lesser product targeting the 69%?
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8K TVs and consoles are a wash IMO.
There’s no real difference between 4K n 8K TVs in the real world. I saw some studies where only a few could tell the difference and that too on a 88” tv. Some thought that the 4K was the 8K one !

I’m going to upgrade my gaming 1080p TV to a 4K when I buy my next console next year.

I have a feeling the 8K output of these consoles is just an incidental feature. Maybe it’s just real cheap or an easy byproduct of the advanced hardware in it (you would know better).
Just to say look we can give you 8K ! That or 60 / 120 FPS. FPS is something that is not considered as “sexy” as high resolution so they’re not marketing that but I think developers are going to go the FPS way after they reach 4K saturation on their games.

To address your statement......I don’t know if the Lockhart will nix the 8K output. Probably.
It’s no big loss and I think high FPS console games are at least 2 maybe even 3 years away from mainstream.
 
method115 said:
Ya there's been to many mistakes with the price for me to believe it's a mistake. Not sure it means they are worried could just be a way for them to gauge public opinion.
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Oh they worried all right. Imagine a 100 million lifetime console sale figure. Now take a 25 / 30 dollar loss on that. Do the math. It’s a lot of money you’re leaving on the table.
For some reason, Sony has decided that game royalties n digital sales alone isn’t going to cut it. They is on a mission to make the console itself a profitable proposition in its own right.
This would seriously affect that.

Not saying they wouldn’t nix the plan if it comes down to it but they’re going to try their best not to.



evergreenrider said:
Wooooooooosh
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<{hughesimpress}>
 
4daLuLZ said:
Oh they worried all right. Imagine a 100 million lifetime console sale figure. Now take a 25 / 30 dollar loss on that. Do the math. It’s a lot of money you’re leaving on the table.
For some reason, Sony has decided that game royalties n digital sales alone isn’t going to cut it. They is on a mission to make the console itself a profitable proposition in its own right.
This would seriously affect that.

Not saying they wouldn’t nix the plan if it comes down to it but they’re going to try their best not to.





<{hughesimpress}>
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What you tried to interject with? Had absolutely nothing to do with my comment.
 
evergreenrider said:
What you tried to interject with? Had absolutely nothing to do with my comment.
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Well, what you tried to say and what you actually wrote may have been disconnected but since I can’t read your fkn mind, I had to go with what you wrote.

evergreenrider said:
Let's get caught up in the in the brass tacks of a possibly misquoted price range at the wrong time. That really drives a conversation for next gen hardware pricing strategies
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Your sarcastic comment implies how we’re all putting too much into a "possible misplaced price quote” at the wrong (?) time.
Which, apparently, has or will have nothing to contribute in a conversation about next gen hardware pricing strategies.

I then posited how this might not be a "mistake" and my reasonings. From there I tied into your next gen hardware pricing strategies.
 
4daLuLZ said:
Well, what you tried to say and what you actually wrote may have been disconnected but since I can’t read your fkn mind, I had to go with what you wrote.



Your sarcastic comment implies how we’re all putting too much into a "possible misplaced price quote” at the wrong (?) time.
Which, apparently, has or will have nothing to contribute in a conversation about next gen hardware pricing strategies.

I then posited how this might not be a "mistake" and my reasonings. From there I tied into your next gen hardware pricing strategies.
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Jesus are you that dense? Go back and read MadMicks and whoever the fucks back and forth dude
 
evergreenrider said:
Exactly. It had absolutely NOTHING to do with amazon listing a price dumbass. Dude was stuck on Mick saying the Switch was 249. Jesus christ man
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Exactly ?
Lol, you really need that book. Send me your address n I’ll pay for it myself.

Are you trying to say that you meant Madmick's price range was being misquoted ?

If that’s the case, my bad. This is the book you need.

90914E38-FE1D-4270-BBB1-FA1DE51A925F.jpeg
 
evergreenrider said:
Exactly. It had absolutely NOTHING to do with amazon listing a price dumbass. Dude was stuck on Mick saying the Switch was 249. Jesus christ man
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4daLuLZ said:
Exactly ?
Lol, you really need that book. Send me your address n I’ll pay for it myself.

Are you trying to say that you meant Madmick's price range was being misquoted ?

If that’s the case, my bad. This is the book you need.

View attachment 778363
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I'm not entirely clear on why you two are squabbling. Clearly both of you ascertained the bigger picture, and the salience of my earlier point about the Nintendo Switch's pricing to this Lockhart rumor, without getting lost in the weeds worrying about the exact date the Switch first hit $249. I agree with @evergreenrider that nitpicking the chronology of an acknowledged price point for the Switch brings nothing to the thread.

@4daLuLZ acknowledged the price seemed realistic based on my logic, but raised the valid concern that while this strategy works for Nintendo, it might not necessarily for Microsoft/Sony's model, especially if we're talking about the pitiful level of power the Switch offers. Solid point. Nintendo's games are built around graphical art design that aren't focused on photorealism, and so they don't require much processing power. A recent example of a more demanding multiplat game that launched on the Switch that is something of a graphical disaster on the console is the The Outer Worlds. Doesn't matter to Nintendo because it's not their bread and butter.

However, that brings us to this useful post on the topic:
method115 said:
Lockhart spec rumors

https://www.vgchartz.com/article/44...aked-in-new-document-weaker-next-gen-console/
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The leaked document also mentions a Lockhart profiling mode. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s Xbox plans tell The Verge that this special Lockhart mode is part of the Xbox Series X developer kit. The devkit, codenamed Dante, allows game developers to enable a special Lockhart mode that has a profile of the performance that Microsoft wants to hit with this second console. We understand that includes 7.5GB of usable RAM, a slightly underclocked CPU speed, and around 4 teraflops of GPU performance. The Xbox Series X includes 13.5GB of usable RAM, and targets 12 teraflops of GPU performance.

best-gifs-oh-snap.gif


Holy shit. If Microsoft can deliver that level of power at $199...holy shit. It's really hard to believe the price point now because that would be some dark fucking sorcery. It just sounds too good to be true. If it is true...the Lockhart would immediately displace the NVIDIA Shield as the best value HTPC after five years. It would easily render 4K@60fps media playback.

-- A "slightly underclocked CPU" suggests it's the same 8-core Zen 2 CPU as in the XSX, but a mildly lower frequency. Such a CPU would still blow out the CPU power of any console currently available. That includes the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X.
-- 7.5GB useable RAM suggests an 8GB RAM total. No word on the speed, but I'd have to assume it's cheaper DDR4, and not GDDR6. This is the same amount of memory as in the PS4 or Xbox One. It would still be faster than the Xbox One's memory.
-- 4 TFLOPS for the GPU is on par with the PS4 Pro. See below for comparison.

Peak Floating Point Performance of Video Card by Console
 
Madmick said:
The leaked document also mentions a Lockhart profiling mode. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s Xbox plans tell The Verge that this special Lockhart mode is part of the Xbox Series X developer kit. The devkit, codenamed Dante, allows game developers to enable a special Lockhart mode that has a profile of the performance that Microsoft wants to hit with this second console. We understand that includes 7.5GB of usable RAM, a slightly underclocked CPU speed, and around 4 teraflops of GPU performance. The Xbox Series X includes 13.5GB of usable RAM, and targets 12 teraflops of GPU performance.


-- A "slightly underclocked CPU" suggests it's the same 8-core Zen 2 CPU as in the XSX, but a mildly lower frequency. Such a CPU would still blow out the CPU power of any console currently available. That includes the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X.
-- 7.5GB useable RAM suggests an 8GB RAM total. No word on the speed, but I'd have to assumed it's cheaper DDR4, and not GDDR6. This is the same amount of memory as in the PS4 or Xbox One. It would still be faster than the Xbox One's memory.
-- 4 TFLOPS for the GPU is on par with the PS4 Pro. See below for comparison.

Peak Floating Point Performance of Video Card by Console
Click to expand...

I don’t understand the hardware part of or it’s ramifications but the Lockhart is basically just a PS4 Pro Lite with a better CPU ? And of course other smaller improvements in its bus (?) logic ?

I dunno about the feasibility of that and especially at 199. Nintendo has its games, what games is MS going to put on that ?

I still think it’s going to be closer to a PS5 than a PS4 Pro if and when it comes. Price wise.......300 - 350.
 
I think the $200 rumour is insane. Phil Spencer has been talking a lot about a monthly pay plan for when the X Series comes out which I'm sure will be popular especially in a time like this. They haven't mentioned anything about the S Series yet but once they do, you'd think it would have a pay plan too. $200 doesn't seem like much of a reason to keep bringing up a payment plan.

If it's $300, does X Series at $500 with all that extra power make sense? Seems like there needs to be a bigger difference in price between the two.

S Series - $249 or $299
X Series - $549 or $599
 
Hey @Madmick , what do you think of this article.

https://metro.co.uk/2020/06/27/why-...owerful-readers-feature-12909891/?ito=cbshare

Why the PS5 and Xbox Series X may be too powerful –

Can a console be too cutting edge? (pic: Sony) A reader suggests that the next generation of consoles is more of a leap forward than many think, even if that’s not obvious right now. There have been a few articles flying around the web about next gen consoles not meeting reader expectations. Historically, each time a new console is released it’s expected to come with an amazing generational leap in graphical quality and, maybe, introduce a new IP or two. So far both the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 have failed to deliver on this expectation and have left readers unimpressed, but are these feelings warranted?
One reader suggested that titles like Super Mario 64 and Halo were examples of a launch done right. Super Mario 64 is indeed an all-time classic. But then it was bound to be, it was the first time we ever saw our beloved character in full 3D and it was the first time a console could truly achieve all 3D graphics; are we saying that all the Mario games since were inferior? No, but the novelty has since worn off. It’s a similar story for Halo, it was the first time we’d ever seen a fast-paced first person shooter paired with exceptional online gameplay on a console. But now games like it are a dime a dozen. The key point is that each time both of these games exploited a massive generational leap in capability, so what’s different about today’s next generation? Firstly, let’s establish what generational leaps are being claimed.

Ray-tracing Ray-tracing is a pretty impressive capability. Up until now all lighting in games has been effectively emulated using black magic; that is, approximations of how light should interact. Ray-tracing actually bounces millions of rays of light from light sources onto objects and all around the room, allowing it to create hotspots, reflect, diffuse, and adjust every time an object moves, exactly how real light works. For the end user, it’s a point of immersion, super-realistic lighting, shadows and reflections previously only seen in CG movies.

Primitive shaders Primitive Shaders are a bit more technical but potentially incredibly impactful. In a nutshell, they take work around vertice processing, previously handled by the CPU, and mass-parallelise it on the GPU. This removes the bottlenecks around modifying and transferring large numbers of vertices to the GPU, making it possible to adjust the level of detail (amongst other things) in a model on-the-fly.
This means we can now load 20 million polygon models into a scene and adjust how much detail you see based on your distance and focus on the screen, allowing for almost one triangle per pixel detail at any time. Previously 20 million polygons would have choked up a console. For the end user, this means incredible detail in all parts of a level and the closer you get to something, the more detailed it can look. Imagine the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, where the backdrops of Midgar were actually 3D models instead of pre-rendered images and the flowers in Aries’ garden looked photorealistic as you walked up to them, that’s what primitive shaders make possible.
This is a capability not to be underestimated, as it’ll allow games to deliver many times more effective detail than the last gen at the same number of teraflops (making the idea of teraflops as a measure of performance almost redundant).

3D spatial audio 3D spatial audio is another big feature for user immersion and this isn’t to be underestimated either. Most of us have had a small taste of it when watching Dolby Atmos movies or using the Dolby Atmos speakers on our smartphones. It’s the idea that you feel surrounded by the sound and can tell exactly where a noise is coming from, even if it’s behind you, above or below. Virtual surround of the past tried to achieve a similar thing, but what makes 3D spacial audio distinct is that it covers all directions and actually renders objects in a scene to adjust for their position, rather than it being baked in; not unlike Creative’s high-end X-Fi sound cards of the past, which were woefully underutilised in the PC world.
Microsoft is supporting 3D spacial Audio through Dolby Atmos and Dolby Atmos headphones/speakers, whilst Sony is going a step further with their own system that even accounts for the shape of your ear for extra realism and features hundreds of sound sources instead of the 32 supported by Dolby Atmos. That’s the difference in hearing each individual pebble in a landslide and having that final touch of realism to the sound.

New haptic feedback and adjustable triggers (PS5 only) New haptic feedback is a capability only for the PlayStation 5, but it garnered enough developer interest that even EA has gone as far as to add dedicated support in its new Madden and FIFA games, EA who almost never go out of their way for console-specific features. This new haptic feedback uses voice-coils (the inside of a speaker cone), instead of motors and normal actuators, to generate ultra-refined feedback patterns and strengths. This allows impacts as subtle as a player running across the field to be felt, as well as the touch of a foot to a ball during a pass or the heavy impact of a kick.
Again, as with ray-tracing, for the end user this is a point of immersion, you will feel responses to a lot more actions and each will feel very different from before, a bit like controller vibration is always on rather than just the occasional big rumble when something major happens. The adaptive triggers will provide a feeling of resistance, like when pulling back a bow string, pulling a trigger or performing a physically difficult action.

Blazing fast SSDs Blazing fast SSDs seem simple on the surface, faster loading times, right? But their impact goes beyond this. No more loading times means no more splits in levels or long passageways just to give time for the game to load the next scene – full creative freedom. I mentioned earlier about primitive shaders making more detail in games possible, but that detail comes at a RAM cost, and that cost is probably higher than the RAM of the system, even the 16GB of the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. This means level detail needs loading all of the time, non-stop, to keep up, and SSDs make this possible. Arguably, Sony have gone a step further here with the PlayStation 5.
Their SSD is more than twice as fast, it can load data straight into memory accessible by the GPU and it can even let the GPU know it has done this to optimise performance (through cache scrubbing).
It even has 16 different priority levels to make sure the most important details are always loaded first or that unexpected data can suddenly push in front of the queue for a smooth experience.
This may not seem like much but it’s the difference between being able to have all of that 16GB working for what you’re looking at right now, to half or more not being used at any one point in time. If you can completely replace your RAM in under two seconds with new data, like the PlayStation 5 can, you can load brand new detail even as your character turns around to look at something new, allowing for incredible polygon and texture detail and variety.

Variable refresh (HDMI 2.1/G-Sync/FreeSync) Variable refresh isn’t mentioned much, but both new consoles support it. With a TV or monitor that supports it, if your console fails to maintain a smooth 30/60/120fps, rather than tearing or a sudden judder as a frame is missed, the TV itself will just adjust its refresh rate to match.
The implications of this feature on console expectations is big, right now there’s a lot of marketing around ‘true 4K at 60fps’ and a big focus on 60fps games, but with this technology, it doesn’t really matter anymore.
Developers who can’t hit a solid 60fps can just aim for it and let the TV match any drops, rather than having to cap at 30fps, and the effect of a frame rate drop will be barely noticeable in most instances.
So on paper, there’s perhaps more generational leaps in this generation than any other, this is perhaps the biggest leap since 3D graphics, so why have launch trailers been so underwhelming?
There are two reasons; one is time, time to develop and time to catch up; and the other is hands-on demos, a chance to experience new haptic feedback and 3D audio. The thing to remember with Super Mario 64 and Halo is that in both cases, the generational leaps that made these games possible were already possible on PC many years before. In fact, Halo was originally developed for PC only, before Microsoft purchased Bungie in 2000 and delayed its release. This time around, the PC isn’t the bleeding edge, the consoles are.
Granted, ray-tracing is already available on some high-end nVidia graphics cards, but it’s not widely adopted or fully utilised yet and mesh (primitive) shading was just released on nVidia’s 20xx series for the first time with only limited game engine support. 3D spatial audio, new haptic feedback, and the use of an SSD as a key gaming component to gaming (key in maxing out the value of primitive shaders) are all new.
The simple truth is that it now takes a lot longer to make high-end games and developer tools haven’t caught up yet; the Unreal Engine 5 demo was a prime example of that. The demo showed us the result of ray-tracing in its fully dynamic lighting, the impact of hundreds of spatial audio sounds as pebbles fell down rocks, and the impact of blazing fast SSDs and primitive shaders in epic Hollywood levels of detail and a vast open scene as far as the eye could see. All things that weren’t possible before. But Unreal Engine 5 is still in development, it won’t be released until next year. We won’t see Unreal Engine 5 games until the end of 2021 at the earliest, as it takes time to make an AAA game.
Right now games are just using a beefed-up version of Unreal Engine 4, with the exception of first party games like Horizon Forbidden West, that use its own engine.
Likewise, normally there would be a huge buzz from the media around haptic feedback and the realism of the audio after they’d tried a few hands-on demos, building-up belief and excitement in readers, but with the coronavirus that hasn’t happened this time around.
So have consoles shot themselves in the foot by being bleeding edge? At launch, perhaps, but focus on what was shown in the Unreal Engine 5 demo, something that was real and rendered on a real PlayStation 5, and we can rest easy knowing where these consoles will take us in 2021 and 2022. And that’s someplace that will change gaming forever.

Who do I think has made the right decisions and who would I bank on? Sony’s PlayStation 5.
Why? We’ve just highlighted how time to develop is a big factor in getting AAA games that fully utilise new features to the market. Sony has chosen an architecture that is simpler and quicker to optimise for than the Xbox Series X (only one speed of RAM, no-fuss data loading from SSD, no optimising for heat or CPU vs. GPU), they’ve had dev kits in first and third party developer hands for much longer and they’ve been working closely with Epic to develop Unreal Engine 5’s new capabilities and to push the industry forward. Mix in the extra mile they’ve gone to with the SSD, haptics, and audio and they’re ensuring that the PlayStation 5 really will be a generational step forward.
Am I fussed about the extra two teraflops of the Xbox Series X? With the impact of primitive shaders on level of detail and variable refresh on frame rates? Not at all, and by the time developers squeeze out those extra two teraflops from the more complex architecture we’ll be at the mid-generation refresh and it won’t matter to those who care, as they’ll be looking to the PS5 Pro or Microsoft equivalent. Many thanks.

By reader Alistair Lowe, MSc MIET

_________…_______________…_____________…_________________…__


The guy basically fleshes out my very basic n rudimentary premise about the PS vs Xbox.

P.S - I don’t know how to embed articles in that collapsible box thingy.


<{cum@me}>
 
4daLuLZ said:
Hey @Madmick , what do you think of this article...

So on paper, there’s perhaps more generational leaps in this generation than any other, this is perhaps the biggest leap since 3D graphics, so why have launch trailers been so underwhelming?
There are two reasons; one is time, time to develop and time to catch up; and the other is hands-on demos, a chance to experience new haptic feedback and 3D audio. The thing to remember with Super Mario 64 and Halo is that in both cases, the generational leaps that made these games possible were already possible on PC many years before. In fact, Halo was originally developed for PC only, before Microsoft purchased Bungie in 2000 and delayed its release. This time around, the PC isn’t the bleeding edge, the consoles are.

Granted, ray-tracing is already available on some high-end nVidia graphics cards, but it’s not widely adopted or fully utilised yet and mesh (primitive) shading was just released on nVidia’s 20xx series for the first time with only limited game engine support. 3D spatial audio, new haptic feedback, and the use of an SSD as a key gaming component to gaming (key in maxing out the value of primitive shaders) are all new.
Click to expand...
This is where he lost me.

He acknowledge Ray-Tracing isn't new. Of course it isn't. By the time the PS5/XSX drop physical ray-tracing will have been out for 2 years.

3D spatial audio is new? Ummmm....


In fact, 3D Audio is making a comeback. This goes back 20 years. There's just a push to sophisticate it now because it is an avenue of technology that hasn't been developed, and of course the traditional increase in polygonal rendering has hit the wall of diminishing returns.

Haptic feedback is also already a thing in VR Gaming (on PC) and in touchscreen mobile gaming on iOS. How much of a difference is this going to make in controllers that already vibrate? Get real. Compare that to the guys playing VR games with haptic vests who feel themselves getting shot.

Exploiting the speed of the SSD as a key gaming component is new, sort of, if we ignore that faster SSDs have had a practical benefit to gaming for a long time. There are open-world games where when you reach the edge of an instance, if you simply continue on, you sit and wait while the game black screens, and loads the next portion of the map. You don't wait at all with the fastest SSDs. I look forward to that becoming the baseline, so that developers don't deliberately plot a loading point, and just let the open world seamlessly stitch together because the drives can handle it, but that is just a glorified reduction of load times for greater immersion. Now, if PS5 developers can really utilize that SSD creatively to do things in games that HDDs literally can't run without a broken framerate...that would be amazing. As I mentioned in the other thread, from the trailer, it looks like Ratchet and Clank might be the first game that is doing this.

No, I reject his thesis. He's not seeing the big picture. The key difference isn't that the consoles are the bleeding edge, but that the "bleeding edge" itself isn't ushering in an earth-shattering paradigm shift to mainstream gaming that previous, more significant technologies did. Take his examples. Mario 64 brought the paradigm shift to true 3D gaming. Halo brought the paradigm shift to open-world, nonlinear campaigns with deep view distances above 32-bits on dual-analog joysticks, and Halo 2 brought the paradigm shift to online multiplayer for the mainstream. We're talking about going from 2D to 3D, and the advent of broadband internet, here.

How can more realistic lighting compete with that? It's trivial.
 
Madmick said:
This is where he lost me.

He acknowledge Ray-Tracing isn't new. Of course it isn't. By the time the PS5/XSX drop physical ray-tracing will have been out for 2 years.

3D spatial audio is new? Ummmm....


In fact, 3D Audio is making a comeback. This goes back 20 years. There's just a push to sophisticate it now because it is an avenue of technology that hasn't been developed, and of course the traditional increase in polygonal rendering has hit the wall of diminishing returns.

Haptic feedback is also already a thing in VR Gaming (on PC) and in touchscreen mobile gaming on iOS. How much of a difference is this going to make in controllers that already vibrate? Get real. Compare that to the guys playing VR games with haptic vests who feel themselves getting shot.

Exploiting the speed of the SSD as a key gaming component is new, sort of, if we ignore that faster SSDs have had a practical benefit to gaming for a long time. There are open-world games where when you reach the edge of an instance, if you simply continue on, you sit and wait while the game black screens, and loads the next portion of the map. You don't wait at all with the fastest SSDs. I look forward to that becoming the baseline, so that developers don't deliberately plot a loading point, and just let the open world seamlessly stitch together because the drives can handle it, but that is just a glorified reduction of load times for greater immersion. Now, if PS5 developers can really utilize that SSD creatively to do things in games that HDDs literally can't run without a broken framerate...that would be amazing. As I mentioned in the other thread, from the trailer, it looks like Ratchet and Clank might be the first game that is doing this.

No, I reject his thesis. He's not seeing the big picture. The key difference isn't that the consoles are the bleeding edge, but that the "bleeding edge" itself isn't ushering in an earth-shattering paradigm shift to mainstream gaming that previous, more significant technologies did. Take his examples. Mario 64 brought the paradigm shift to true 3D gaming. Halo brought the paradigm shift to open-world, nonlinear campaigns with deep view distances above 32-bits on dual-analog joysticks, and Halo 2 brought the paradigm shift to online multiplayer for the mainstream. We're talking about going from 2D to 3D, and the advent of broadband internet, here.

How can more realistic lighting compete with that? It's trivial.
Click to expand...


Agreed. Ray tracing probably impresses the shit out of graphics afficianados, but to the general population they probably either won’t really notice or you’ll get a “that’s kind of neat” response.

I don’t want to beat a dead horse and post the pic of the diminishing returns of added polygons to a 3d model, as I feel like I’ve posted that pic about a dozen times in various threads in this sub forum before, but suffice it to say graphical improvements don’t happen by leaps and bounds anymore.

To me the cutoff year was 2004. You had games like Far Cry, Doom 3, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Halflife 2 which all looked so, so much better than pretty much every game to come before them other than say Unreal Tournament 2003. Compare Doom 3 to Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2004 to the original Unreal Tournament, or Halflife 2 to Halflife 1. Graphics wise it’s like comparing Ferraris or Lamborghinis to Mr. Bean’s little shit box of a car.

But 15+ years later graphics haven’t leapt that far ahead of where they were in 2004 imo. Does Doom Eternal looked better than Doom 3? Does Halflife Alex look better than Halflife 2? Does Farcry 5 look better than Far Cry? Yes, of course, but the difference is absolutely nowhere near the evolutionary leap from the late 1990s to the early 2000s.
 
TheWorm said:
Agreed. Ray tracing probably impresses the shit out of graphics afficianados, but to the general population they probably either won’t really notice or you’ll get a “that’s kind of neat” response.

I don’t want to beat a dead horse and post the pic of the diminishing returns of added polygons to a 3d model, as I feel like I’ve posted that pic about a dozen times in various threads in this sub forum before, but suffice it to say graphical improvements don’t happen by leaps and bounds anymore.

To me the cutoff year was 2004. You had games like Far Cry, Doom 3, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Halflife 2 which all looked so, so much better than pretty much every game to come before them other than say Unreal Tournament 2003. Compare Doom 3 to Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2004 to the original Unreal Tournament, or Halflife 2 to Halflife 1. Graphics wise it’s like comparing Ferraris or Lamborghinis to Mr. Bean’s little shit box of a car.

But 15+ years later graphics haven’t leapt that far ahead of where they were in 2004 imo. Does Doom Eternal looked better than Doom 3? Does Halflife Alex look better than Halflife 2? Does Farcry 5 look better than Far Cry? Yes, of course, but the difference is absolutely nowhere near the evolutionary leap from the late 1990s to the early 2000s.
Click to expand...

Yea I've said it before but this is the first time in a gaming gen where I just don't care about better graphics really. Sure I welcome it but honestly just from what I saw in TLOU2 games look amazing. I think my biggest issue right now in game load times. They are fucking horrible and need to be improved big time. Better FPS would also be a big plus.
 
TheWorm said:
Agreed. Ray tracing probably impresses the shit out of graphics afficianados, but to the general population they probably either won’t really notice or you’ll get a “that’s kind of neat” response.

I don’t want to beat a dead horse and post the pic of the diminishing returns of added polygons to a 3d model, as I feel like I’ve posted that pic about a dozen times in various threads in this sub forum before, but suffice it to say graphical improvements don’t happen by leaps and bounds anymore.

To me the cutoff year was 2004. You had games like Far Cry, Doom 3, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Halflife 2 which all looked so, so much better than pretty much every game to come before them other than say Unreal Tournament 2003. Compare Doom 3 to Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2004 to the original Unreal Tournament, or Halflife 2 to Halflife 1. Graphics wise it’s like comparing Ferraris or Lamborghinis to Mr. Bean’s little shit box of a car.

But 15+ years later graphics haven’t leapt that far ahead of where they were in 2004 imo. Does Doom Eternal looked better than Doom 3? Does Halflife Alex look better than Halflife 2? Does Farcry 5 look better than Far Cry? Yes, of course, but the difference is absolutely nowhere near the evolutionary leap from the late 1990s to the early 2000s.
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method115 said:
Yea I've said it before but this is the first time in a gaming gen where I just don't care about better graphics really. Sure I welcome it but honestly just from what I saw in TLOU2 games look amazing. I think my biggest issue right now in game load times. They are fucking horrible and need to be improved big time. Better FPS would also be a big plus.
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Pretty much.


With the Xbox Series X, Xbox boss Phil Spencer says its all about frame rates and latency — but he argues this is still a 'dramatic step up.'

"I think we're at a point now — with immersion, with the tools we have and the compute capability — that the deltas will be smaller from a visual impact, or that feature X was never possible before and now it is,” Spencer explained at Gamelab Live, spotted by our sister site TechRadar.

“And that might sound depressing to some, but what I would say is the advantage side of what I'm seeing now is really the immersive nature of the content that's getting created."

This is a similar position to that of Microsoft’s director of program management for Xbox Series X, Jason Ronald, who previously explained that improvements in frame rate will result in “power that you can feel.”

And it turns out that’s Spencer’s explanation, too. Higher framerates should lead to more immersion. "We're able to get to almost lifelike graphics today, even on current gen in certain instances," he continued.
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"But when you take that and you mix it with a very high frame rate, solid frame rate, very little latency in input, and the ability for game storytellers to really push the emotion and the story they're trying to get through their game, through the screen, through the controller and into you? That is something I'm feeling in the games now that is a dramatic step up.”

Marketing hyperbole, or a real difference?
It’s telling that both Ronald and Spencer are discussing frame rate and latency as the big game changers this time around. In past generations, we’ve seen huge immediately obvious differences — the jump from SNES to N64, say, saw the arrival of 3D graphics, while the move from PS2 to PS3 saw the explosion of online gaming.

Here, Spencer and Ronald are talking about something much more subtle: frame rate and latency. It’s no wonder Spencer caveated this by saying “might sound depressing to some.”


Is frame rate that big a deal? Some PC gamers will tell you it certainly is, with some buying gaming monitors reaching 240Hz refresh rates just to ensure their framerate goes into triple figures. That won’t necessarily be matched by consoles, of course: the rarity of TVs over 60Hz means that many gamers will experience a cap at 60fps, even if the consoles are technically capable of outputting 120fps.


In the interview linked to above, Ronald discusses how the power available here could lead to “entire new classes of games” which feels a bit like hyperbole to me. After all, PCs have had this kind of power available for years, and the games available are largely the same as the ones on console.

The difference, of course, is the market size. Only a brave company is going to make a whole new game experience that’s only playable by the comparatively small market of gamers with access to $1,000+ gaming PCs. Making this kind of power mainstream with the PS5 and Xbox Series X could make all the difference, unlocking new kinds of games for everyone.


We’ll just have to wait and see how the gaming landscape looks in a couple of years time to know whether Ronald was being prescient, or merely engaging in marketing hyperbole.
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https://www.tomsguide.com/news/xbox...tep-up-and-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-graphics




I'm happy to hear Spencer bringing up smoothness and frame rates a lot over the last year. But with ray tracing, I'm not so sure about third party games like GTA going with 60fps even on these systems. I hope they do.
 
TheWorm said:
Agreed. Ray tracing probably impresses the shit out of graphics afficianados, but to the general population they probably either won’t really notice or you’ll get a “that’s kind of neat” response.

I don’t want to beat a dead horse and post the pic of the diminishing returns of added polygons to a 3d model, as I feel like I’ve posted that pic about a dozen times in various threads in this sub forum before, but suffice it to say graphical improvements don’t happen by leaps and bounds anymore.

To me the cutoff year was 2004. You had games like Far Cry, Doom 3, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Halflife 2 which all looked so, so much better than pretty much every game to come before them other than say Unreal Tournament 2003. Compare Doom 3 to Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2004 to the original Unreal Tournament, or Halflife 2 to Halflife 1. Graphics wise it’s like comparing Ferraris or Lamborghinis to Mr. Bean’s little shit box of a car.

But 15+ years later graphics haven’t leapt that far ahead of where they were in 2004 imo. Does Doom Eternal looked better than Doom 3? Does Halflife Alex look better than Halflife 2? Does Farcry 5 look better than Far Cry? Yes, of course, but the difference is absolutely nowhere near the evolutionary leap from the late 1990s to the early 2000s.
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I agree with some of this but disagree that it's nowhere near the evolutionary leap you speak of...

While it's hard to tell the difference with stuff like polygon counts and textures, there's a huge difference with where games are now with more subtle things like lighting, ambient occlusion, self shadowing, facial animations, pixel shading, and now ray tracing.

Just give an example.. I have been on assassin's Creed fix lately, and going back to games like assassin's Creed 2 after playing origins and Odyssey is a huge leap. Even playing things like Halo MCC is not easy to Look at after playing far cry 5, doom eternal and the newest COD.

If you have a really nice display you can definitely see a huge difference with these games.

I'd argue that the difference between DX11 and DX12 is barely noticeable.. and DX 12 has been out for at least 5 years now... Don't see any updates in sight either.
 
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