Hynad said:
In that sense, they are in a way. Since an open world game has to constainly stream assets and will have less of them kept at all time in the RAM, having to replace them all the time as the player moves to different locations, as opposed to linear games having more of the level pre-loaded at once, this aspect makes it more difficult for the hardware to handle graphical fidelity as rich as in linear games.
Linear games, by their nature, also allow more demanding features to be used, like ambiant occlusion, higher res models and textures, more complex geometry and tesselation, etc... Thus making the argument that one kind of game being more, or less demanding for the hardware relatively moot.
That being said, if an open world game had all the bells and whistles as a linear game, that game would be technically superior. But the argument in these forums are brought when talking about games that are made for closed hardware architectures. As such, a game like TLoU is not really [if at all] less demanding for the PS3 than a game like GTAV. GTAV on console is optimized to make use of the hardware the same as TLoU. As such, it can't demand [much] more than a game like TLoU.
But yes, in essence, graphical parity for graphical parity, an open world game (on an open architecture like PC, where you can crank the performance up by improving the architecture components) is more demanding on the hardware than a linear game.
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That sums it up nicely I think. But it also illustrates the miscommunication regarding "graphical fidelity" and "technical demands" that has surfaced here. It shouldn't be part of the conversation as it overcomplicates the simple point:
Linear games look prettier
:P
