Should Halo Infinite drop Xbox One and go Scarlet exclusive?

[Mr Puggsly]

Pemalite said:

Mr Puggsly said:

Well we have to assume its gonna take years for developers to really squeeze the potential out of new machines. Engines will improve, it seems developers adopt more advanced effects over time, etc.

Of course. That goes without saying.

Mr Puggsly said:

I dont necessarily see it as the transition from generations takes time per se, I see it as trends in development changes. I mean early, mid and late gen content has looked very different on 7th and 8th gen.

The trends in development are typically enabled by new baseline hardware. - We see it on the PC every time the consoles finally catch up in regards to technological feature sets.

PC was dabbling in Tessellation back in 2010, but it wasn't a mainstream tech feature in games/engines until the 8th gen dropped years later with the hardware feature sets to support it. - I mean we can go back farther to when the PC first started dabbling in Tessellation back when the Playstation 2 was on the market...

Mr Puggsly said:

Its evident that around 2013-2014 games were already using the 8th gen consoles as the lead. Cross gen games of that period remind me of Switch ports. It was simply obvious the 7th gen ports were getting muddy and compromising resolution more than usual, but also pushing more advanced lighting/shadow techniques.

Not really. Some games were using the 8th gen as the leed, but it was certainly not the norm.
But titles like Call of Duty: Ghosts and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare were clearly being held back by 7th gen rendering paradigms as evident by their texturing, lighting and shadowing.

Titles like Dragon Age: Inquisition, Battlefield 4, Assassins Creed: Black Flag and so on had some of it's rendering roots clearly stuck in the 7th gen as well with 8th gen enhancements. - Basically what the PC had been doing for years prior.

Even a game like Dead Rising 4 whilst taking advantage of the increase in CPU headroom on the Xbox One, still had allot of it's technical visual underpinnings in the 7th gen, Capcom didn't really build the game and engine from the ground up to take advantage of the new hardware on a graphics front, they took the old Forge Engine instead to expedite development, which makes business sense, but not an ideal way to show off brand spanking new hardware.

It wasn't until the shackles of the 7th gen was removed that games started to come into their own visually...

Mr Puggsly said:

I don't know if X1 and PS4 will be treated as lead platforms for AAA projects, perhaps more on the CPU and RAM. They could do that while still pushing graphics because that scales more easily.

CPU tasks can scale as well.
Many CPU-tasks can be toggled off and on just like graphics settings.

Heck some graphics effects are very CPU heavy as well.

Mr Puggsly said:

Its worth considering X1 and PS4 support could deter some studios from making ambitious experiences that absolutely require 9th gen power. However, I also feel developers are interested in pushing GPU more than CPU. I just don't feel CPU has really been a very limiting factor on gameplay most developers are trying to create.

Pushing GPU has always been the status quo, graphics is what you can easily represent in a trailer or on a poster to help sell your title.

The CPU has most certainly held us back for the last few generations... During the 7th gen we saw some titles leverage the CPU to do things like decompression duties... If it was more capable, then Virtual Texturing would have probably been more impressive.

The 8th gen we have higher character counts, better CPU driven physics and so on, but on a simulation level things haven't really progressed significantly as the jump in CPU capability was not a catastrophic one, only so much Jaguar can do.

We are doing less graphics work on the CPU these days in general though, for instance we aren't using the CPU for Anti-Aliasing or Blur filters anymore... And even Particle effects are being GPU accelerated, so that CPU time has been spent elsewhere.

Mr Puggsly said:

Its worth considering X1 and PS4 support could deter some studios from making ambitious experiences that absolutely require 9th gen power. However, I also feel developers are interested in pushing GPU more than CPU. I just don't feel CPU has really been a very limiting factor on gameplay most developers are trying to create.

Once the middleware and game engines catch up they will take advantage of it, but it's going to take a few years, just like with the transition from 7th to 8th gen and 6th to 7th gen... That doesn't mean games on newer hardware won't look and run better, far from it.

It will be interesting to see how the Playstation 4 Pro and Xbox One X go in regards to the comparisons between 8th and 9th gen in graphics comparisons.

Mr Puggsly said:

I'm suggesting if a low end Scarlett did exist, that could be treated as the baseline for Scarlett software optimization. If there is only one Scarlett and it has more cutting edge specs, that becomes the baseline Scarlett optimization. In comparison games are optimized for X1, not X1X.

A low-end Scarlett wouldn't be a baseline if developers are still targeting the Xbox One/Xbox One S and Xbox One X, Playstation 4, Playstation 4 Pro and low-end PC's.

It will become the baseline once those devices have been phased out.

Either way... A Low-end Scarlett doesn't seem to be happening anyway, anymore. - So the point is moot.

Mr Puggsly said:

I took another look at that Halo 3 video from VGTech and youre right. What youre referring to is a slight judder that may not even happen in some places, it actually is reflected in that video. When most games have frame pacing issues its constant which makes the experience feel rough. Halo 3 in comparison is nothing like that, so I didnt consider it frame pacing.

People might play 360 versions of Halo for MP stuff like playlists, crossplat for 360 and X1 users, fire fight modes from ODST, achievments, maybe forge stuff, etc. Some of that may seem minor but 360 versions have activity.

You are better off playing the Xbox 360 versions on the Xbox One via backwards compatibility most of the time.

Although, last time I tried Reach (That was allot of patches ago) it was almost unplayable on the base Xbox One, the frame pacing and frame rates made it unplayable.
In saying that, it was never a perfect experience on the Xbox 360 either... I would assume it would be a much better experience now though, especially on X hardware, it's probably been a few years since I gave it a spin.

PC versions of games during the 6th and 7th gen software often had effects that simply couldn't be duplicated on consoles. Hence, developers were raising the bar on high end gaming PCs even while supporting vastly inferior consoles. People often blame consoles for slowing down gaming visuals, but developers have the option to push visuals on PC even while supporting consoles. A recent example is PC software experimenting with ray tracing.

CoD Ghosts looked like a 7th gen game, there was just some added effects for 8th gen. Battlefield 4 is one of the most impressive looking games on 7th gen, it also had to be relatively low overhead to achieve 60 fps on 8th gen. Dragon Age Inquisition looks like trash on 7th gen, that's exactly the type of game that wasn't using 7th gen as the lead. AC4 was obviously built for 7th gen, not a debate.

I think you mean Dead Rising 3, not 4. Also, that was clearly a horribly optimized game for launch reasons but developers were also struggling with X1 hardware early on. They surprisingly turned that into a game that stuck to 30 fps over time.

I actually played Thief and The Evil Within on 360, they're functional but you can clearly tell they were really built for 8th gen. I think its possible early 8th gen games were using less demanding engines, like stuff that works on 7th gen because they were getting their bearings on the new specs.

I think we agree 8th gen specs can be lead while still allowing support for 7th gen, just depends on the route developers go.

Maybe we can blame consoles for not pushing CPU in games harder, but I just don't think that was a focus of many games.

For a game like Halo Infinite, I think we'll get a big disparity between base X1 and X1X. Sound like Gears 5 is really being built to take advantage of X1X. For most other games though, I think it will be the same. Base hardware is the focus and mid gen upgrades add polish.

While crossplat software of 8th and 9th gen is being done, perhaps developers might use some aspects of 8th gen as a baseline, like CPU to make sure a game can function on 8th gen. But visually games can still treat 9th gen as the lead, as in just make the 9th gen versions much more visually impressive and add extra effects, high quality assets, etc. There are many examples of this in crossplat years of previous generations.

I remember the 360 version of King Kong looked stunning because it used higher quality assets and effects along with glorious HD resolution. It looks terrible now, but that made the generational leap evident even while using an ultimately 6th gen game. That's kinda my point from the start, Halo Infinite can show a generation leap even if X1 is the lead. We don't know if MS is doing that though, might just focus on 4K and increase effects settings.