Why do consoles set the minimum requirements

[pyr0]

Hello.

 

Recently I was building a cheap PC for playing all games at 1080p 60fps. I was going to put a Radeon HD 7850 in it, but had to put a GTX 670 in it to achieve that goal, despite not caring about fidelity.

I can kind of understand why a CPU of a certain level is required for a game, as you can't decrease AI complexity or change from simulating a bullet to hitscan with the flick of a switch, but setting the bar so high on graphical fidelity seems inexcusable. Many of my friends would like to get into modern games, but their rigs (GTX 550s, 460s, hell, one of my friends has a 9800gt), can't handle them graphically despite their CPUs being perfectly capable, and not being able to afford a new GPU. So why is this. Why for example, do you need a PC much faster than a PS$ to hit 1080p 60fps. Why for example, did they cap the fidelity so high in Deus EX, Mankind Divided as to basically lock people with console or near console powered PCs to 30fps?

 

It seems illogical to me, as you are isolating a big chunk of the market who would love to play your games, but, either because their GPUs aren't powerful enough, or because their cards don't support newer APIs (A rant for another day)

 

As much as I am mainly venting steam here, I am curious why everyone else here thinks that this fidelity cap happens. I'm sure you have friends who are in a similar position to mine.

 

Thanks for getting to the end of my rant.

[Techicolors]

depends on whether the game is optimized or not. Gears of War 4 for example is wonderfully optimized, whereas Mafia 3 is a shitty port. sometimes you don't need a whole lot to run games at 1080p60fps, sometimes you do. again the game has to be optimized if you want the former. 

[ARikozuM]

The big issues for this is the randomness of the hardware that PC gamers use. Games would likely be easier to run if we all had a single build to play off of.

[NinjaJc01]

2 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

The big issues for this is the randomness of the hardware that PC gamers use. Games would likely be easier to run if we all had a single build to play off of.

But then that removes the diversity and choice in the PC market. I like being able to build PCs for various budgets, such as my i5-2500k and GTX 750 Ti budget PC vs my i7-4770 and GTX 970 PC, which was built for good performance in certain games, and a little streaming.

[anybodykek]

And, with things like HairWorks and TressFX it further complicates the issue.

Don't consoles use dynamic resolution as well? As in, some games run at 900p or even 792p for a consistent experience? I'm not a console expert and have only owned a 360, so I wouldn't know.

[ARikozuM]

Just now, anybodykek said:

And, with things like HairWorks and TressFX it further complicates the issue.

Don't consoles use dynamic resolution as well? As in, some games run at 900p or even 792p for a consistent experience? I'm not a console expert and have only owned a 360, so I wouldn't know.

Yes. Many games on console will upscale their graphics to lessen the burden on the hardware. Unless you're Nintendo and do 1080@60 with good first and second-party programming.

[Sauron]

Honestly I call nonsense on 550s not being able to run modern games. Sure, they won't run at 1080p ultra, but they should at least work at a reasonable framerate. By the way, a 550 is not faster than a console gpu. It's also not true that you need to spend more for the same quality.

[anybodykek]

2 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Yes. Many games on console will upscale their graphics to lessen the burden on the hardware. Unless you're Nintendo and do 1080@60 with good first and second-party programming.

Wow. That sucks. I mean, if you can't tell the difference, then it's fine, but you could apply that "no difference" logic to PCs as well.

 

Props to nintendo, what the fuck are sony and microsoft doing

[pyr0]

7 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Honestly I call nonsense on 550s not being able to run modern games. Sure, they won't run at 1080p ultra, but they should at least work at a reasonable framerate. By the way, a 550 is not faster than a console gpu. It's also not true that you need to spend more for the same quality.

You should have seen Doom at 1080p. He wasn't able to hit 60fps, and 720p makes everything pixellated and hard to hit. I love doom, but their low settings are hardly low.

Also, It is a single 550.

[Dash Lambda]

You need a PC faster than a PS4 to get 1080p at 60FPS for lots of games because the PS4 is too slow for that.

 

As for the actual topic, the biggest problem is that most developers are building their games for a console first, and they don't put that much work into optimizing the game on PC or giving you a lot of options.

 

Also, there comes a point where getting a game running at 1080p60 would require a "Half-Life 1" button. I think that would actually be quite a bit of work to implement.

[Sauron]

17 minutes ago, pyr0 said:

You should have seen Doom at 1080p. He wasn't able to hit 60fps, and 720p makes everything pixellated and hard to hit. I love doom, but their low settings are hardly low.

Also, It is a single 550.

Well, 720p is expected - the 550 is about 6 years old by now and even back in the day it was a pretty low end card.

[jakinov]

3 hours ago, pyr0 said:

Hello.

 

Recently I was building a cheap PC for playing all games at 1080p 60fps. I was going to put a Radeon HD 7850 in it, but had to put a GTX 670 in it to achieve that goal, despite not caring about fidelity.

I can kind of understand why a CPU of a certain level is required for a game, as you can't decrease AI complexity or change from simulating a bullet to hitscan with the flick of a switch, but setting the bar so high on graphical fidelity seems inexcusable. Many of my friends would like to get into modern games, but their rigs (GTX 550s, 460s, hell, one of my friends has a 9800gt), can't handle them graphically despite their CPUs being perfectly capable, and not being able to afford a new GPU. So why is this. Why for example, do you need a PC much faster than a PS$ to hit 1080p 60fps. Why for example, did they cap the fidelity so high in Deus EX, Mankind Divided as to basically lock people with console or near console powered PCs to 30fps?

 

It seems illogical to me, as you are isolating a big chunk of the market who would love to play your games, but, either because their GPUs aren't powerful enough, or because their cards don't support newer APIs (A rant for another day)

 

As much as I am mainly venting steam here, I am curious why everyone else here thinks that this fidelity cap happens. I'm sure you have friends who are in a similar position to mine.

 

Thanks for getting to the end of my rant.

For developers, consoles are the main focus, so when they develop games they are not thinking about what about low-end PC owners. They are more focused on taking advantage of the console hardware as much as they can. When it comes time to porting it over, they could start offering more settings to let you play the games on crappier hardware but it's more work and not worth it. Consoles are where the money is at and PC just gives them a little more hence why you get shoddy ports or unoptimized pc versions.

[jakinov]

3 hours ago, anybodykek said:

And, with things like HairWorks and TressFX it further complicates the issue.

Don't consoles use dynamic resolution as well? As in, some games run at 900p or even 792p for a consistent experience? I'm not a console expert and have only owned a 360, so I wouldn't know.

Some games use dynamic resolution. Microsoft published games have been using it a lot because their GPU is a little underpowered compared to the PS4 so they could still advertise their games at 1080P even though at intense parts it can dynamic go down to 900P.

 

3 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

Yes. Many games on console will upscale their graphics to lessen the burden on the hardware. Unless you're Nintendo and do 1080@60 with good first and second-party programming.

The ones that are 720P and 900P natively will upscale to at least 1080P and the reason they do that is for displays that don't do upscaling so the user won't get black bars (but TVs nowadays all upscale for you). They don't do it to lessen the burden on the hardware. If they need to upscale to 1080P, they are probably using the same amount of compute power, they just aren't rendering their frames at that resolution. 

Nintendo games aren't 1080p@60 because of good programming, they are able to achieve those specs because they don't create that demanding of games. Non-Nintendo games on other platforms usually aim for more realistic graphics and need to perform a lot more GPU works to generate the image that they want. What Nintendo does a good job at is art, their games look fantastic, they just don't need that much power to create what they need to awe people.

 

3 hours ago, anybodykek said:

Wow. That sucks. I mean, if you can't tell the difference, then it's fine, but you could apply that "no difference" logic to PCs as well.

 

Props to nintendo, what the fuck are sony and microsoft doing

Read above ^. Nintendo isn't doing anything special they just have less graphical resource requirements for most of the games they try to make because the art style they use don't require a lot.

[pyr0]

22 minutes ago, jakinov said:

For developers, consoles are the main focus, so when they develop games they are not thinking about what about low-end PC owners. They are more focused on taking advantage of the console hardware as much as they can. When it comes time to porting it over, they could start offering more settings to let you play the games on crappier hardware but it's more work and not worth it. Consoles are where the money is at and PC just gives them a little more hence why you get shoddy ports or unoptimized pc versions.

Yeah, but the way I see it, you are taking away polygons and detail, not adding it, so I can't imagine it taking that long

[ARikozuM]

2 minutes ago, jakinov said:

Nintendo games aren't 1080p@60 because of good programming, they are able to achieve those specs because they don't create that demanding of games. Non-Nintendo games on other platforms usually aim for more realistic graphics and need to perform a lot more GPU works to generate the image that they want. What Nintendo does a good job at is art, their games look fantastic, they just don't need that much power to create what they need to awe people.

Pixels aren't seen as different by hardware. Art style can make things easier but pixel count and compute power requirements don't change based upon it.

[jakinov]

4 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Pixels aren't seen as different by hardware. Art style can make things easier but pixel count and compute power requirements don't change based upon it.

Yes they do...you use the a GPU to generate an image at X resolution with Y amount of pixels, depending on your art style and the picture you want to create, you will have different resource requirements. A realistic first person shooter will have a bunch physics for all it's objects (including things like cloth, hair, weather, etc.), destruction, extra fancy lighting, more detailed textures, more complex and more shapes/objects (more polygons), etc. that a game like Smash brothers won't have.  

[Sharkyx1]

On 21/10/2016 at 3:03 PM, ARikozuM said:

Yes. Many games on console will upscale their graphics to lessen the burden on the hardware. Unless you're Nintendo and do 1080@60 with good first and second-party programming.

Nintendo games are 720 60. Except for smash bros.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Developers focus on consoles for two reasons:

• They can optimize for the hardware because they know it's the only hardware they have to optimize for.
• The software environment is simpler.

In other words, they have a minimal amount of unknowns to work with and don't have to come up with "general solutions" to problems. The problem going into PC land is that all goes out the door. Even if you have a similar setup to the PS4 or XB1 (an AMD processor with an AMD graphics chip), you still don't have the software environment the developers used. PS4 uses a stripped down BSD OS with a custom API. XB1 has a bare bones Windows NT kernel running in a VM and probably a stripped down DX11/DX12.

 

However, the whole idea that consoles set the minimum requirements is absurd. What about PC gamers who aren't on the latest and greatest hardware? You know what happens when you release a game that demands hardware from the future to be run even on high settings? You've basically released a benchmarking tool.