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Maelstrome on 20 January 2013
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Hynad said:
Maelstrome said:
Some information I am gathering on the tech demo. It took 3 months of development. To clarify that, for a game that would take 2 years to develop, that is 1/8 the time on one cut scene .For a 3 year dev cycle that is still 1/12 of the total cycle on one cut scene. Tim Sweeny says in an interview about the tech demo that disk drives have no future in entertainment devices. that suggest it would at least be difficult if not out right problematic to do this grade of work with disk based media. To run at 1080p 30 fps it took 2.5 teraflops. Unreal engine 4 is not scheduled for commercial release util 2014. The tech demo was dependent on direct x 11. I cannot find a good source that says what hardware they used to run it. I am finding that it was either 3 gtx 580 or one gtx 680. Is there anything that you would like to add or correct this this?

So far it does not look like that grade of work would be viable for the majority of the industry.


It took 3 months of development. But with how many people working on it? I doubt the number of people who worked on this demo is comparable to the number of people working on an entire game.

I've seen the same kind of argument regarding S-E's Agnis Philosophy.  The truth is, only a fraction of the work force required for a full fledge game worked on those kind of demos. 

I havent seen mention of the number of people on the project.

These tech demos also only have a fraction of the content of full fledged games.

I cannot find mention of the cost of the samaritan demo. 

@thismeintiel- Nothing in your post really goes against what ive said. Its not a question of hardware but the amount of time and manpower. More time required raises cost and more manpower raises cost. Both of which will be needed to fully take advantage of the 8th gen hardware regardless of how powerful it is. Devs dont want to spend more so they wont. If we see anything that comes close to the samaritan demo it wont be for a few years after the full launch of the 8th gen. How easy a platform is to develop for will mostly effect performance , not visuals. Higher grade visuals take longer to develop regardless of platform. This wont change until we change the way we make the art assets. Scale of the game is not always a factor there are a lot of shorter games that are higher budget than longer games.There are a lot more forgivable short cuts that are used in the sense of scope and scale vs graphics.Generally speaking you can cut a little from the graphics to be able to increase the scope relatively dramatically. This though is a great direction that the industry can take with the 8th gen. With 7th gen graphics being largely acceptable they dont really gain as much from improving them. All of those resource can be better spent on expanding the ammount of content(preferably without resorting to dlc).  Graphics vs content has been a common thing in the industry for a long time. Cutting one to help the other. Good examples of both are ff13 against something like minecraft, xenoblade or dwarf fortress. 

TLDR- Graphics wont get much better, but this allows for other pursuits to enhance games.

On the topic of ps3 to vita ports.A lot of games are made with scalable tools. It would be easy to port up or down between the two.