Anyone else feel resolution is overrated?

[curl-6]

Mr Puggsly said:

curl-6 said:

GTA5 didn't run stable on last gen though, it could and often did drop hard when moving through detailed areas as the systems struggled to hustle data in and out of memory. And Assassin's Creed was a series notorious for uneven performance and characters popping in meters ahead of the player. Both were examples of the RAM limitations biting. It's not that last gen systems couldn't do open world, just that it was not their forte since of their three key components (CPU/GPU/RAM) the latter was the biggest bottleneck by far.

It depends on the platform and game. GTAIV ran poorly and still does on X1 BC. That's likely because its poorly optimized on CPU. GTAV was above average in performance, it stays pretty close to 30 fps while significant dips can be during driving and action. But that was par for the course on last gen.

In AC games you might see NPCs pop in fairly close, but they could also be seen from a great distances. You're exaggerating to make a point and ignore they were always raising the bar on visuals which is GPU heavy. These game also run better on 360 than you suggest, a lot of open world games performed better on 360. Many 360 games perform better on X1 BC because the bottleneck was on GPU. Meanwhile the game heavy on CPU still struggle. So Crysis 1 still runs bad while Far Cry 3 is a rock solid 30 fps.

Lastly, later 360 games actually required a HDD or USB memory sticks because external storage seemed to be used to give a memory boost, helped for streaming data quickly, etc. That suggest there was a bigger issue loading data quickly off a disc than just RAM limitations. Some games actually ran worse if you installed it on a HDD because it was using the HDD for cache, GTAIV was one of those games.

360 was a better fit for those games because it had more RAM available to games than the PS3. Its OS used less and it was one big unified pool compared to the PS3 which loses more to its OS and could only use half for graphics and the other half for everything else. So the 360's advantage there came in no small part from memory superiority.

And Far Cry 3 on last gen is far from a rock solid 30fps, it runs very poorly when traversing detailed areas, again in large part due to aggressive streaming necessitated by severe memory limits.

But are veering pretty far off topic here, so to bring it back to resolution, last gen also offers a good example of the actual topic; let's look at 1080p games on last gen vs 720p games. The former may look crisper, but at the cost of vastly less detail and lustre. 

PS3 at (Dynamic) 1080p:

 

PS3 at 720p:

Last edited by curl-6 - on 05 December 2018