Upcoming graphical powerhouses

[RussianSensation]

This all makes me think that Kinect is a great tragedy. As an Xbox One owner I find it neat and useful, but not $100 useful. IIRC the tear downs said the BoM was likely in the $75 range. For an extra $75 in silicon they could have built a much more powerful machine. Possibly even enough to run their launch titles in native 1080p at 60fps.That would be great for consoles and for driving improvements in PC games. Absent a killer app for Kinect it sure seems like the wrong compromise. We'll get some great improvements nonetheless, but there could always be more.

Yes, they could have easily matched the PS4. However, I doubt it would have been a lot more powerful than PS4. The timing when MS and Sony decided to release their systems coincides with major issues of 20nm node at both TSMC and GloFo. Going beyond 1152-1280 Shaders on AMD side would have entailed using the much more expensive and power hungry 28nm Tahiti Pro. Considering that GPU by itself uses ~ 145-160W, that's not really an option.

The GPU inside PS4 is more or less a Wimbledon XT (7970M, announced May 1, 2012) with 2 CUs disabled and slightly lower GPU clock (800 vs. 850mhz).

1 year later - May 5, 2013 - the successor 8970M was just a rebadged 7970M with a 50Mhz GPU boost, or barely a 6% increase in performance.

Nearly 2 years later since 7970M launched, on January 7, 2014, M290X because just a rebrand of the HD 8970M with identical performance. This means that from May 1, 2012 to today, AMD's flagship mobile performance in the 100W TDP improved just 6%! :thumbsdown:

Therefore, even if MS waited until August 20, 2014 to launch XB1, with AMD at best they could have gone with a full 1280 SP M290X @ 900mhz clocks which is barely better than PS4's 1152 SPs @ 800mhz. If they had done this, PS4 would have had 15+ million sales then. And if MS had gone with a full blown M290X, yields would have been lower.

If MS really wanted to beat PS4 in performance they should have taken a Core i3 or a downclocked voltage optimized FX8320/FX6300 and paired it with an 870M but that would have meant major delays to late 2014 which would have given PS4 an even larger head start. The timing of PS4/XB1 made it extremely difficult to make those consoles much faster on the GPU side. Hopefully PS4/XB1 get replaced in 5-6 years (2018-2019) and we won't have to wait until 2021-2022. :biggrin:

 

[darkewaffle]

Why can't we have both? A Game made today should look like Crysis 3 but offer a story and characters and setting and game play that are top notch. No reason for it to be one or the other. I demand both.

Because resources are limited, gamers are demanding and game delays can be crippling under the hype microscope (hype-roscope? shotgun on trademark).

No doubt there's great games with great graphics - personally I thought FC3 was one of the best games I've ever played and had a beautiful game world. And additionally it's not as though there's some magic scale during development where a gram of graphics can be subtracted and a gram of gameplay is added - there's a lot of variables in play.

But there is a relationship there. I watched a neat presentation on FFXIV 1.0 earlier this year and there's a few segments ("FFXIV Riddle" & "Original Version Graphic Quality") which briefly cover the original version's somewhat zealous desire to improve graphic quality, the reasons they thought that was the right thing to do, how it impacted the game itself, what it cost them, and eventually he credits "An unhealthy obsession with graphic quality" as one of the three principal reasons for 1.0's failure.

Nowadays FFXIV:ARR is still a very pretty game, but it's not some paragon of graphical excellence or fidelity. They let themselves worry about that less, devote more attention to the game instead of the look and subsequently have created a (by most accounts) a much more fun and (by all accounts) far more popular and successful game.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Batman arkham knight and witcher 3 were delayed and I see very few people saying that is a terrible thing. Delays are met with disappointment but very few times have I seen it get out of hand from the gaming community. Unless you venture into Half Life episode 3 and duke nukem forever territory, it isn't a big deal.

 

[toughtrasher]

Batman arkham knight and witcher 3 were delayed and I see very few people saying that is a terrible thing. Delays are met with disappointment but very few times have I seen it get out of hand from the gaming community. Unless you venture into Half Life episode 3 and duke nukem forever territory, it isn't a big deal.

I think because people are so into graphics in games they don't care too much about the game anymore.

If a graphically good game is delayed, they mind less because it means more eye candy

 

[RussianSensation]

I think because people are so into graphics in games they don't care too much about the game anymore.

If a graphically good game is delayed, they mind less because it means more eye candy

There are 3 other explanations:

1) So many new games coming out are buggy, unoptimized and follow 6 months of patches to get them up to speed (BF4/Watch Dogs/Skyrim) that people hope the developer's delay is really there to address these technical issues;

2) There are so many games coming out for so many platforms, that a modern gamer has a lot more choice. If you own more than 1 platform (PC+PS3/4 or PC + Wii U + PS4), if a game gets delayed, you have so many other games to play usually every month.

3) PC Steam backlog.

Modern gaming is nothing like gaming of the 80s and 90s. If you have real job, friends and family, and especially if you took the time off gaming during Bachelor's /Master's degrees, there are so many older and new games coming out, you'll need 2-4 years just to catch up to today's level! I don't know anyone with a real job who has enough time to play games on 2-3 platforms. Plus, with modern online multi-player gaming and mods, games like SC2, Skyrim, Left 4 Dead, LoL, WOW/other MMOs, World of Tanks, BF/COD series, etc. can keep someone occupied for years and years. If a new game gets delayed, it doesn't matter as much as if when you were 10-18 and only had money to own one console and plenty of spare time.

 

[futurefields]

Haha. Yeah. I feel bad that my mom had to pay $75 an pop for SNES games for me and my brother. That's probably why we only got 2 or 3 a year. I tell her now how little I pay for games on Steam and she get all wtf-eyed lol

 

[Midwayman]

Sorry but that's just ridiculous. Games and game engine often tend to be "scalable" if you didn't know..

To some extent, yes. However there are design decisions made on the basis of console hardware that wouldn't have to be made on PC. Player count and map size for one. If a console can only drive 32 players, designers will focus map design there. A PC may support 64 players but the maps may end up feeling pretty tight at that level. It may be rendered better, but you still inherit the limitations. I know animations have been an issue with bf4. Many times the devs have said they wanted to add something or other, but couldn't do it because of memory limitations on console. UI too. UI needs to be navigable with a joystick, and generally larger for readability on consoles. Hell even network issues. Don't know if you followed the network updates with bf4, but the low tick rate initially was driven in part by the limitations imposed by xbox live for 360 (and ps3 too I presume).

 

[toughtrasher]

Haha. Yeah. I feel bad that my mom had to pay $75 an pop for SNES games for me and my brother. That's probably why we only got 2 or 3 a year. I tell her now how little I pay for games on Steam and she get all wtf-eyed lol

Hahaha "wtf-eyed" Steam sales are amazing though, you can pick up a good game for under $10,which is incredible value seeing how much entertainment you're getting.

 

[TheSlamma]

Steam sales are amazing though, you can pick up a good game for under $10,which is incredible value seeing how much entertainment you're getting.

Too bad most of the people on the Steam forums feel games are overpriced if it's over 99 cents and they want a refund on every $7.50 game they get that doesn't live up to the standards they invent in their miniature brains

 

[toughtrasher]

Too bad most of the people on the Steam forums feel games are overpriced if it's over 99 cents and they want a refund on every $7.50 game they get that doesn't live up to the standards they invent in their miniature brains

I don't visit he steam forums but that's some pretty crappy people if that's true. Is ridiculous people don't appreciate the things valve gives gamers.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Too bad most of the people on the Steam forums feel games are overpriced if it's over 99 cents and they want a refund on every $7.50 game they get that doesn't live up to the standards they invent in their miniature brains

I see this on more than just the steam forums. A new game is released and on sale for 10% off but people say stuff like "that looks awesome, I want it but I'll wait for it to be on the steam holiday sale for $20"

 

[futurefields]

what's wrong with waiting for deals?

those who pay the full price get to play the game when it is brand new, experience everything with the community for the first time.

those who wait for the sale pay much less money but the community has already uncovered every stone in the game. so its a different experience.

with a full time job I simply cant keep up with all the games I want to play, so even if I brand new game looks great I wait for a sale, because the backlog is really long and I plan on playing most of the games on my backlog.

 

[RussianSensation]

what's wrong with waiting for deals?

with a full time job I simply cant keep up with all the games I want to play, so even if I brand new game looks great I wait for a sale, because the backlog is really long and I plan on playing most of the games on my backlog.

Exactly. Let's not forget that as people grow up and have families, priorities shift for many. The costs of tuition have skyrocketed in the last 20 years. I know that once I have kids, I'll start saving up for their college tuition and all of a sudden it won't be as easy to blow $50-60 on a new game + DLC vs. waiting 6-12 months to pick the same product on sale. Over time, the cost difference balloons.

200 new games @ $50 new = $10,000
200 games @ $5-10 on steam = $1,000-2,000

Let's not forget that with these savings on games over 5-10 years, we can use the funds to upgrade our hardware too, or purchase consoles and their exclusives, in turn still supporting the same industry, etc.

It's perfectly fine to mix and match buying brand new games and perhaps if you missed some gem because you didn't have time to play at the time, you can pick it up for $5-7.50. There are also plenty of times when a very expensive full game + dlc ends up costing $90-100+ (Borderlands 1/2, Civilization games, etc.) but their GOTY editions are usually $10-20 not long after. Some people are OK paying $60+$30 for a full game + DLC but others can easily wait 1 year to pick up the same product for $20. If you are particularly involved in some game that you play many hours (LoL, WoW, BF4, L4D, SC2, Civ5), you simply may not have enough time to buy the latest and greatest game on launch date which results in you buying it on sale later on not because you couldn't afford to purchase a new game but because you didn't have enough time.

Finally, not everyone has been gaming on the PC for 20 years. There are younger generation of gamers who may want to play some excellent old school PC games and most of those titles are usually heavily discounted. And honestly with buggy crap coming out from EA, Activision and Ubisoft most of the time, taking 3-6 months to fix their games, I only pay full price for top developers like Blizzard or small studios that are passionate like CDPR. In fact, when those large firms complain about the cost of developing the game, the vast majority of the funds is spent on marketing/promotion/PR rather than on the game development itself. For example, Gears of War cost $10 million to produce; Naughty Dog's Uncharted 3 cost about $25 million to produce and Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain cost $20 million. All these AAA companies now claiming that it's costing them $250-500 million to make a game should stop spending 80-90% of that on ridiculously expensive advertising. If they actually spent that on the game itself, and it showed, that'd be different.

 

[cmdrdredd]

That is what Activision wants to put toward it. Bungie, the developer who is independent now BTW...is not spending half that on development. Nobody forces Activision to spend 500mil. That is just their budget that they are reserving for this franchise over its proposed 10 year lifespan. That isn't a singular game, that is 10 years of support.

I spent 23 hours on a beta of the game that was about 10% of the total content of the first game. I played one class, one subclass that I didn't get to max out, on one location, that wasn't 100% unlocked. They have two expansions planned also. That means I will get 100hours at least out of it easily. So their budget means nothing to me. The game I played and will be playing is super enjoyable. I played the alpha, the beta, have the $150 ghost edition pre-ordered and paid for, and have a special edition glacier white ps4 bundle with the game pre-ordered and paid for. The game is simply worth it to me. How much Activision spends on advertising means nothing to me.

 

[Dankk]

To get a better idea of just how beautiful The Witcher 3 is: Here is a download link for a higher-quality version of the 35min gameplay demo. It's 5GB in size, but it's worth it.

http://www.gamersyde.com/download_the_witcher_3_wild_hunt_35_minutes_gameplay-32805_en.html

Watching the awfully-compressed Youtube version doesn't do it justice. It's like they ran it through a blur filter.

 

[RussianSensation]

I played the alpha, the beta, have the $150 ghost edition pre-ordered and paid for, and have a special edition glacier white ps4 bundle with the game pre-ordered and paid for. The game is simply worth it to me. How much Activision spends on advertising means nothing to me.

I think you didn't understand the angle I was getting at. My point was that developers/publishers feel as if their games are worth $60+ because it cost them hundreds of millions to develop. I was just making a statement that the development costs are not $100-200 million. They balloon because they spend a disproportionate amount on marketing and promotion. No one is judging you for spending $150 on a ghost edition. If you plan on putting 100 hours into the game, it's worth it. But that's the point.A lot of grown ups only get 2-3 hours of gaming time a day, if that, which means this 1 game will take 35-50 days or more to enjoy. And that's exactly how a backlog begins where it's perfectly reasonable that over a period of 5 years you have such a massive backlog that you can easily be buying $5-7.50 Steam games to catch up.

To get a better idea of just how beautiful The Witcher 3 is: Here is a download link for a higher-quality version of the 35min gameplay demo. It's 5GB in size, but it's worth it

:thumbsup::thumbsup: Downloading that now. YouTube is rarely worth it since it has horrible compression.

 

[Carfax83]

Nope, it's because Witcher 3 is much better than AC Unity and it makes it even more impressive given how large the game world is.

Right, and AC Unity is positively small in comparison? Witcher 3 is massive no doubt, but AC Unity is also very big. Not quite as big as the Witcher 3 perhaps, but it looks to have much greater density..

In AC Unity, there is an odd feeling that the characters and the rest of the world feel like they are from 2 different games, with characters simply interposed on top of the world. The shadows, reflections, animations and the way the characters interact with the world is current, not next generation. Even the buildings themselves are extravagant from an architectural point of view, not technical. Compare the stone work of walls in Witcher 3 to more or less flat surfaces with little to no tessellation in AC Unity.

All of this is very subjective. The game footage I showed earlier was likely done on an Xbox One developer kit so the graphical options weren't maxed out. We don't know what AC Unity is going to look like on a high end PC..

The Witcher 3 in comparison has been mostly demonstrated on high end PCs so yeah, it's going to look better. Witcher 3 will look even more impressive once the game is fully optimized.

In your AC Unity video, look at the 6 minute mark, when the character walks inside the building, it all feels so fake, no shadows, no reflections. They tried to make the world feel realistic but all the books, the items on the floors and ground are all non-interactive. Even when the character falls into the hay, there is 0 interaction with the physical material. At the 8 minute mark, the feet of the cat and the feet of the enemy he assassinates have serious clipping, further highlighting the feeling that the characters don't at all interact with the world, but are just imposed on top of it. The world doesn't feel alive whatsoever.

This is very nitpicky if you ask me. I could point out similar flaws in the Witcher 3 video (especially with animations), but since the game still has 6 months left of development time, that would be unfair.

But of course you make a lot of errors in your commentary. The game does use reflections. You can see reflections in the puddles on the street and on glassy surfaces, plus the game also uses soft shadows and volumetric lighting and fog..

AC Unity tech video.

However, one thing that Ubisoft (and particular the AC series) has excelled in is animations. The animations in AC Unity are second to none, and will likely be superior to the Witcher 3 even once the latter is finished..

In AC Unity, these items like collars, hoods and shoulders are static besides their face and some other minor items. There is no comparison whatsoever.

Um, thats not true. All the major characters had detailed cloth simulation, and even minor NPCs had some level of cloth simulation. Not only that, there was subsurface scattering on their skin and eyes and their forms appears to be tessellated like in Watch Dogs..

 

[Carfax83]

To get a better idea of just how beautiful The Witcher 3 is: Here is a download link for a higher-quality version of the 35min gameplay demo. It's 5GB in size, but it's worth it.

Witcher 3 is very impressive, and it's only going to get better. As the engine becomes more optimized, they will increase the level of detail..

 

[RussianSensation]

Besides Black flag, every single AC game had crappy graphics and worse yet horrible performance to boot. When I speak about shadows and reflections, they are mostly missing indoors and outdoors they are extremely weak. Again you didn't address any of my other comments which relate to how much more interactive the foliage is in Witcher 3. Speaking strictly graphically, AC Unity is not impressive at all for a next gen PC game, which is why no one voted for it so far. The character casts some shadows on the buildings but they look completely unrealistic.

Linking all the tech the game will have doesn't mean that it will all come together nicely to provide a next gen experience. Crysis 2 had every advanced technical features at the time but looked worse than Crysis 1 before mods. Graphically speaking AC continues to disappoint with static environments, extremely primitive interior shadow and lighting model, and poor world physics. If you jump 20 meters into a stack of hay, would the cart you fall into not shake at all? AC is exactly the type of game that needs the most advanced physics model and interactivity due to the nature of this type of game. Instead, it has neither. Maybe AC Unity will surprise but

http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/1525/15257558/2504400-7932559264-23989.gif

To me the Witcher 3 looks like a game at least 2 years more advanced than AC Unity in terms of graphics and detail:

Witcher 3 may not topple Crysis 3 as the graphics king but the developers really tried to take advantage of the key features:

1) "We knew from the beginning that this means a lot higher memory usage than before, so moving to 64 bits was a natural process for us."
2) "We worked a lot on our new terrain system, and we are quite proud of the results. The tessellation helps to provide even more details than before and the varied materials allow us to make every place in the game look really a unique part of the world."
3) "We are always trying to improve our multi core usage, but quad core CPUs were already quite efficiently used in the Witcher 2. The game, the renderer, the physics and audio systems are all running on different threads, and we are trying to maximize the efficiency. Since both current gen consoles provide 6 cores for the developer, our goal is to make the engine scalable."

Even in 2011, Witcher 2 already benefited greatly from an i5 CPU vs. i3. Hopefully this time an i7 can pull away from the i5 too.

http://gamingbolt.com/the-witcher-3...ormance-challenges-dx12-redengine-3-mods-more

 

[tidy]

.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I'll say this...I don't care if a game uses 64bit, 16GB of memory, 8 CPU threads, and requires Titan Black SLI to run properly. That's not why I play games. If the game is good first and foremost and runs good then I don't really care what resources are being used on my PC.

I'm not impressed when a dev says they are running on multiple threads, using 64bit, hogging memory because they can etc. The game itself has to impress. Witcher 3 looks fantastic no doubt but my positive impression of the game is from my experience with Witcher 2 and the videos of the gameplay I have seen. Not from the resources they claim the game will need. Crytek made a couple games that hogged resources and looked impressive but were not that great in terms of being a game. There is a very good chance I'll enjoy AC: Unity and it won't be because they advertised it to me as a 64bit game that needs all this memory and CPU threads.

 

[RussianSensation]

Well we are not discussing gameplay at all. No one is saying that graphics will make Witcher 3 game of the year or that AC Unity won't be fun because it is not the next Crysis 3. Still, if you take what each game is trying to accomplish, graphically speaking the fantasy world of Witcher 3 is integrated more effectively than AC Unity. AC Unity is trying to recreate a realistic world, Witcher 3 is not. Therefore the static environments and complete lack of realistic physics and interactive shadows in AC Unity stands out non-stop. It's literally impossible to ignore. I mean even in the scene when the character is walking on the ropes, his feet are moving between the 2 ropes, and those ropes under the assassin are not even moving. On the other hand, the world in Witcher 3 is recreated really well as a fantasy game. Both in artistic merit and technical merit, Witcher 3 as an open world game is way more impressive than AC Unity.

Granted, there is probably not enough horsepower for current cards to do tessellation on exterior of buildings for AC Unity and to render realistic shadows both inside and outside, but Witcher 3 easily tops in both of these areas. But even the physics behind the AC games is practically non-existent. They really haven't done much to make a revolution to the game mechanics in years. But since this is a GameWorks title, this game should be the showcase of NV PhysX from hay, to smoke grenades, to cloth physics, and various particles. There isn't a single mind-blowing effect of the sort so far in that game.

 

[cmdrdredd]

My point is that I really don't care what resources a game hogs or a developer claims to need. I only care about the end product.

 

[Carfax83]

Besides Black flag, every single AC game had crappy graphics and worse yet horrible performance to boot.

Since NVidia's partnership with them, Ubisoft is arguably much more concerned about the quality of it's PC games and their visual fidelity..

The PC version of Watch Dogs actually looks much better than the console versions, but as you said, it's afflicted by horrible performance. Although I wouldn't say thats indicative of Ubisoft games in general, but rather this particular studio's incompetence with the PC platform.. Or maybe the engine itself wasn't ready for prime time..

I have three Ubisoft games on my system, and out of them, only Watch Dogs has somewhat terrible performance; though patches have been improving it.

I guess we'll see how AC Unity turns out. It's being done by the Kiev Ubisoft team which was responsible for AC IV, and AC IV was a pretty good port by all estimations..

When I speak about shadows and reflections, they are mostly missing indoors and outdoors they are extremely weak. Again you didn't address any of my other comments which relate to how much more interactive the foliage is in Witcher 3. Speaking strictly graphically, AC Unity is not impressive at all for a next gen PC game, which is why no one voted for it so far. The character casts some shadows on the buildings but they look completely unrealistic.

Since AC IV had foliage interaction, I don't think we'll have to worry about it's inclusion in AC Unity. Although AC Unity takes place in a dense urban environment mostly, so opportunities for foliage interaction will be much less than AC IV..

And until we see what the game looks like maxed out, I'm going to reserve final judgment.. Because all we've seen so far are console or developer kit footage, which is typical of Ubisoft..

If you jump 20 meters into a stack of hay, would the cart you fall into not shake at all? AC is exactly the type of game that needs the most advanced physics model and interactivity due to the nature of this type of game. Instead, it has neither. Maybe AC Unity will surprise but

The cart of hay is a game prop only.. AC series uses Havok for low level physics though, and AC IV didn't really disappoint in that regard. The Ocean simulation in AC IV was pretty damn good; one of the best I've ever seen..

http://gamingbolt.com/the-witcher-3...ormance-challenges-dx12-redengine-3-mods-more

Awesome interview. Looks like we may be getting DX12 post release for the Witcher 3 when Windows 9 ships late next year! :thumbsup:

Even in 2011, Witcher 2 already benefited greatly from an i5 CPU vs. i3. Hopefully this time an i7 can pull away from the i5 too.

I'm very interested to see what kind of thread management Red Engine 3 has. Will it use DX11 multithreading? Or will it use manual threading?

It being an NVidia sponsored title might result in the same treatment as Watch Dogs, in which NVidia hardware uses DX11 multithreading and AMD hardware uses the standard manual threading..

 

[chimaxi83]

Since NVidia's partnership with them, Ubisoft is arguably much more concerned about the quality of it's PC games and their visual fidelity..

The PC version of Watch Dogs actually looks much better than the console versions, but as you said, it's afflicted by horrible performance. Although I wouldn't say thats indicative of Ubisoft games in general, but rather this particular studio's incompetence with the PC platform.. Or maybe the engine itself wasn't ready for prime time..

I have three Ubisoft games on my system, and out of them, only Watch Dogs has somewhat terrible performance; though patches have been improving it.

I guess we'll see how AC Unity turns out. It's being done by the Kiev Ubisoft team which was responsible for AC IV, and AC IV was a pretty good port by all estimations..



Since AC IV had foliage interaction, I don't think we'll have to worry about it's inclusion in AC Unity. Although AC Unity takes place in a dense urban environment mostly, so opportunities for foliage interaction will be much less than AC IV..

And until we see what the game looks like maxed out, I'm going to reserve final judgment.. Because all we've seen so far are console or developer kit footage, which is typical of Ubisoft..



The cart of hay is a game prop only.. AC series uses Havok for low level physics though, and AC IV didn't really disappoint in that regard. The Ocean simulation in AC IV was pretty damn good; one of the best I've ever seen..



Awesome interview. Looks like we may be getting DX12 post release for the Witcher 3 when Windows 9 ships late next year! :thumbsup:



I'm very interested to see what kind of thread management Red Engine 3 has. Will it use DX11 multithreading? Or will it use manual threading?

It being an NVidia sponsored title might result in the same treatment as Watch Dogs, in which NVidia hardware uses DX11 multithreading and AMD hardware uses the standard manual threading..

Nvidia's parternship with Ubisoft did nothing to improve experience in the game, and did nothing to show Ubisoft gives a crap about PC. They purposely gimp the game to make consoles look good. They release patches when they feel like it. DX11 multithreading did pretty much nothing to benefit the game, as Nvidia and AMD are neck and neck in performance. TXAA looks like the same old smeared crap that it always has.

The only benefit TW3 has going for it is PhysX, because I think CDPR will make good use of it, and not waste it on the stupidity of billions unrealistic particles.