Consoles would benefit at running games 720p instead of 1080p.

[freedquaker]

Intrinsic said:

freedquaker said:
The thing is some people have 1080p screens, while some only have 720p. Sometimes you have both but had to pick either... So a much better path would be to leave it up to us. We should be able to choose to run the game either at 1080p with 30 fps and/or lower detail versus 720p 60 fps and/or higher detail.

That won't be possible cause devs have to optimize their engines to run on the consoles or their benchmark PC set up. So even fr PCs while PC gamers can tinker with rez and framrate and details all they want, those games were optimized to run on a specific kinda hardware. For consoles, devs know that everyone "has" the same specific hardware so they just focus on gettin their game running the best it possibly can on that hardware. All "pre-balanced".

Having said that, running at a lower resolution has very little effect on framerate. Actually, framerate is really a big deal. A really really really big deal. I'll just put it this way. Take a picture of any game you can think of in your head that you belive looks really really really good. Now imagine that as good as that game looked it was running at 30fps. To run the same game at 60fps would mean that everything that the CPU/GPU did to output that image at 30fps, has to happen twice as fast. So if we assume that the bottleneck is the CPU/GPU and not bandwidth you would literally need a CPU/GPU that is twice as powerful as whatever you had running the game at 30fps.

To run a game at 30fps, every frame has to be completed in ~33ms. And for 60fps, every frame in ~16ms. So no, dropping resolution doesn't mean you can tell the entire CPU/GPU to do everything else twice as fast.

Basic explanation to avoid it getting too long.

I understand and technically there isnt much to disagree here but it still is possible to have some simple configuration options. We have seen many examples of this before. The thing is, it just takes more time and effort to optimize for more than one setting. It is almost like optimizing the game for two different patforms.