How did the ps3 and 360 perform so well graphically?

[JumBie]

Considering the PS3 had the pc equivalent to a nvidia 7800gt 256mb, how were they able to run beautiful games natively at 720p? There are games on the pc that look beautiful at MAX settings and 1080p but look noticeably worse at 720p on low-medium settings and still don't run well on cards such as the 7800gt. Now we all say things like the developers were able to squeeze all the juice out of the 7800gt, but how? If they are able to do that on such a shitty graphics card how are pc developers not able to squeeze the juice out of a low range modern gpu with 1gb of ram and make games run at 1080p with beautiful graphics. It just doesn't make sense to me, its like as if these consoles are magical.

 

[DaveSimmons]

> games natively at 720p?

- Some benefit from lower-level access to the GPU
- A lot of games are actually upscaled lower resolutions like 540p
- 30 fps target instead of 60 fps that PC gamers expect
- Sitting on a couch, the distance hides the differences that you'd notice if you connected them to a PC monitor at your desk

 

[Anteaus]

Low frame rates, low res textures, excessive DOF, no aa/af, no vsync, and long load times. Platform optimizations also help. It's not magic. They cheat .

PC games tend to contain newer technology which requires more power to process and display. The PC is also running a full desktop OS which requires some overhead.

 

[007ELmO]

720p is the kicker. You would never run your monitor at 1280x720p. They got away with a lot...

 

[Doppel]

It's got to be safe to assume they are optimized better; PC developers are comparatively lazy. If the game doesn't run well, lower the resolution or wait for new hardware to come out. I'm have a very hard time imagining if you took PS3-level PC hardware from 2006 it would ever have a hope in hell of running the last of us forest scene on the horse in any PC game that has ever actually been made.

 

[cmdrdredd]

It looks nice but using lower resolution textures, lots of fog to limit the draw distance, lots of blur to hide the aliasing. The developers got very good at doing trickery. Most major game engines from last gen did this. Very few games had dynamic lighting effects, dynamic weather and reflections were primitive. These things stand out to me but it doesn't mean I cannot appreciate the games on their own at all.

 

[Bateluer]

720p is the kicker. You would never run your monitor at 1280x720p. They got away with a lot...

Less than that. Most of the recent console games have been 1024x600(GTA5,TLoU). Some are even lower, such as Battlefield 4.

 

[MrCoyote]

Optimization and fixed hardware specs. Tiled and streamed textures. XBOX 360/PS3 had such limited memory, they had to stream textures into memory in real-time. Code that calculated realistic lighting was squeezed into 2MB-3MB of memory.

This link has some info on tiled textures and how it works with limited memory.
http://www.giantbomb.com/xbox-one/3...-2-from-32mb-to-6gb-worth-of-texture-1448545/

Older technical document on fast realistic lighting coding.
http://ima.udg.edu/iiia/ggg/usersdocs/mateu/obscurances.pdf

PS4 Enlighten lighting and game engine demo
http://ps4daily.com/2013/03/video-showcases-stunning-playstation-4-game-lighting-technology/

 

[desiplaya4life]

this is a really topic that I also like people to chime in. good thread OP.

Its really amazing how developer could deliver an end product that looked as good as comparable on PC. Whatever trick they used, it works!

 

[desiplaya4life]

It's got to be safe to assume they are optimized better; PC developers are comparatively lazy. If the game doesn't run well, lower the resolution or wait for new hardware to come out. I'm have a very hard time imagining if you took PS3-level PC hardware from 2006 it would ever have a hope in hell of running the last of us forest scene on the horse in any PC game that has ever actually been made.

amazing.. you would need a SLI config to capture same scene on a PC ported version

 

[cmdrdredd]

amazing.. you would need a SLI config to capture same scene on a PC ported version

Not with the resolution, textures, draw distance, and lack of AA being equal.

 

[JumBie]

Not with the resolution, textures, draw distance, and lack of AA being equal.

So, Sony and Microsoft up scaled games from lower than 720p resolution.. Ive watched some PC game play videos of games running on the 7800gt most on 1280x720, one is of crysis on this video card an athlon 64 x2 7750 and 1gb of ram. On high there is noticeable slow downs and settings need to be turned down. If you look at game play from the ps3 and xbox 360 versions the game actually looks really good and runs smooth. Regardless of whether or not its a lower resolution and then up scaled.

Why cant PC's do this then? Why cant I game on a low end rig and have it upscale and make my game run at 1080p and look crisp and beautiful, instead of a game at 1080p with terrible low resolution textures.

If PC's cant do this then it is true that a game like that last of us trying to run at 30fps 720p on a computer with comparative specs will not look or run the same.

 

[cmdrdredd]

So, Sony and Microsoft up scaled games from lower than 720p resolution.. Ive watched some PC game play videos of games running on the 7800gt most on 1280x720, one is of crysis on this video card an athlon 64 x2 7750 and 1gb of ram. On high there is noticeable slow downs and settings need to be turned down. If you look at game play from the ps3 and xbox 360 versions the game actually looks really good and runs smooth. Regardless of whether or not its a lower resolution and then up scaled.

Why cant PC's do this then? Why cant I game on a low end rig and have it upscale and make my game run at 1080p and look crisp and beautiful, instead of a game at 1080p with terrible low resolution textures.

If PC's cant do this then it is true that a game like that last of us trying to run at 30fps 720p on a computer with comparative specs will not look or run the same.

Looks good is not the same. Everything is lower resolution. The textures, characters, weapon models. Everything. On a pc you dont upscale or downscale. There is no native resolution for the game like console games. It really is not a direct comparison.

 

[Doppel]

It looks nice but using lower resolution textures, lots of fog to limit the draw distance, lots of blur to hide the aliasing. The developers got very good at doing trickery. Most major game engines from last gen did this. Very few games had dynamic lighting effects, dynamic weather and reflections were primitive. These things stand out to me but it doesn't mean I cannot appreciate the games on their own at all.

You can call it trickery, but I call it effective design

 

[ChronoReverse]

No it isn't. It doesn't actually look as good. Side-by-side, it simply isn't as visually nice. For me, being used to no "cheap tricks", it doesn't look good even _without_ any comparison!


I mean, those screenshots look like a blurry mess (from upscaling). Draw distance is short (hidden by fog). The trees are obviously low polygons (you can see the straight edges). Look at the log on the ground in the middle of the second screen shot. Jaggies (and would look worse in motion). First screenshot's car door, blocky and low polygons. The bushes right above and behind that car, flat sheets of leaves. Ground textures are blurry (I've been running 8-16x AF forever on the PC now).


And this is only 720p at 30FPS (PC standard is 60FPS so that's already twice the work) when I've had been running 1680x1050 on the PC since before the PS3 came out and have upgraded to 1920x1200 since.


Don't get fooled by the bloom and light rays from the sun, those have been easy to do since before 2006.

 

[BikeJunkie]

It really is amazing when you consider what they were able to squeeze out of those systems. Even at the end of the cycle, games were coming out that made me think "wow, that looks GOOD!"

 

[dguy6789]

Console games are where the $$$ are so that is where the effort goes. PC users have to spend tons of money to brute force it while console gamers get the extra attention from the game devs.

 

[cmdrdredd]

No it isn't. It doesn't actually look as good. Side-by-side, it simply isn't as visually nice. For me, being used to no "cheap tricks", it doesn't look good even _without_ any comparison!


I mean, those screenshots look like a blurry mess (from upscaling). Draw distance is short (hidden by fog). The trees are obviously low polygons (you can see the straight edges). Look at the log on the ground in the middle of the second screen shot. Jaggies (and would look worse in motion). First screenshot's car door, blocky and low polygons. The bushes right above and behind that car, flat sheets of leaves. Ground textures are blurry (I've been running 8-16x AF forever on the PC now).


And this is only 720p at 30FPS (PC standard is 60FPS so that's already twice the work) when I've had been running 1680x1050 on the PC since before the PS3 came out and have upgraded to 1920x1200 since.


Don't get fooled by the bloom and light rays from the sun, those have been easy to do since before 2006.

Pretty much but taking the game for what it is, against the other games on the same system I can appreciate the quality of it.

I know the difference and I pointed out low resolution textures and shortened draw distance earlier. That doesn't mean I have to be elitist.

 

[BertolomeoDiaz]

i think big part of it is that the software doesn´t have to be compatible with all kinds of cpus and gpus and input devices and operating system versions
it can be optimized to the exactly known hardware
we´re gonna see the same phenomenon for the new consoles, i suppose
they physically translate into about fx8350 @ 1.8GHz + hd 7850, but developers are gonna get more performance out of that, too, i suppose (not immediatetely, though, takes some time to learn to squeeze it right)

 

[mmntech]

It's got to be safe to assume they are optimized better; PC developers are comparatively lazy. If the game doesn't run well, lower the resolution or wait for new hardware to come out. I'm have a very hard time imagining if you took PS3-level PC hardware from 2006 it would ever have a hope in hell of running the last of us forest scene on the horse in any PC game that has ever actually been made.

I think PC gaming has evolved a lot slower than a lot of folks care to admit. Up until recently, a lot of developers didn't optimize their games to make good use of multi-threaded CPUs. Also, only now are we finally seeing games ship only with 64-bit binaries. So a lot of gaming PCs simply rely on raw power for graphics prowess rather than efficiency. I think a lot of this is due to sloppy porting. PC gaming is still a niche compared to consoles. Though that will change with the new generation, as both systems have x86 processors with more than 4GB of RAM.

 

[exdeath]

They didn't. PS3 and 360 looked dated a year after release. Yay shiny plastic playdoh and horribly aliased shadow and normal maps.

 

[ChronoReverse]

Pretty much but taking the game for what it is, against the other games on the same system I can appreciate the quality of it.

Oh, I agree that those are good looking games (especially compared to the same console). I'm just pointing out that it's not "amazing" either.

 

[exdeath]

Playing Bioshock Infinite on 360, looks like crap IMO, esp after playing The Last of Us.

 

[Doppel]

Playing Bioshock Infinite on 360, looks like crap IMO, esp after playing The Last of Us.

Agree. It was perhaps the first game on the 360 that told me okay seriously this generation needs to go. Was fuzzy as heck. Lots of colors and light but poor details.

 

[zerocool84]

My roommates and I decided to dig out the NES after we stumbled across some old games at a garage sale. The problem that we have is the same that seems to affect all of these old systems -- when someone inserts a game the tv flashes either black to white, or a still of the game and then back to black. We can get games to work eventually, it takes forever though.

I have heard that this is because of poor connectors inside of the NES itself. Is there anything I could do to improve the conductivity? Should I spray it with anything?

Thanks

Bioshock games never looked good to begin with. The first Bioshock game was ugly graphically.