Intrinsic said:
ok. of you have been there then you should be able to relate with any of what I'm about to say. Multiplatform games all have a config file of sorts. The PC version of said games have multiple config files. This makes it easy for devs to scale between XB1,PS4, PC low/medium/high/ultra. With the PC theye even allow the end user choose what in said config file they wanna enable via handy in game menus and some adventurous users can even hack the games and release "mods". Its all about scalability. We have the XB1, PS4 and PS4n. Which as far as devs are concerned will feel very much like having a PC medium, high and ultra setting. The XB1 will continue to get optimized to run games at medium cause rhas what utsbhardware permits, the PS4 will continue to run games at high settings. Only difference now is that on that PS4 game disc the contained config file will have support for two hardware types. One for high the other for ultra. Having a more powerful option doesn't mean that everything else automatically starts to suck, it just means that PS4 gamers get another graphical preset option enabled. What you are saying is almost as if in the PC world devs currently optimize for everyone to run their game with triple Titans or something. No, their games can run just fine at 1080p with any decent rig. And the " easy" decision.... is actually not to optimize for the PS4n at all. Cause "management" knows thatthr number of people that own the vanilla PS4 far outweigh those that owm the Neo. |
It's not as simple as you're stating. UWP has already demonstrated that there's a lot more to do than a simple config file. This config file situation for multiplatform games is merely a starting point. From there specific optimizations have to be made to ensure consistent performance, sometimes down to a scene by scene basis. Remove some objects here, bit less grass there, specific draw distance adjustments etc.
On PC you need a healthy overhead or turn some settings down yourself in taxing scenes, on consoles this tweaking is done for you which is time consuming. For 2 hardware specs all that fine tuning doubles. That likely leads to a PC like situation for the NEO, as in leave a healthy overhead to get over the performance bumps, thus only optimizing the base version.
But true, NEO version can have some enhancements from the PC version as long as it doesn't cause performance dips in certain places. However it still needs to be tested, which costs a lot of resources. That has to come from somewhere. So indeed the easy decision is to let the PS4n version run a bit better and not waste time on anything that might need tweaking.
And that is all about multiplatform games made with a scalable PC engine. Console exclusives go a lot deeper into optimizations and customizing game engines, thus a lot more work for 2 hardware specs. For example specific code adjustments to smartly cut some corners, like KZ SF and QB reprojected 1080p modes.
Anyway that all supports what I was trying to get at. Instead of going the extra mile to cram as much as possible into the ps4 version, there is now an alternative. Still show off the best in game graphics, yet some stuff won't quite make it into the ps4 version. Or drop the resolution for the base version. With the extra needed time to test for a second hardware spec, it's only more tempting to put less effort into the best optimized base version, nevermind doing all that work for 2 versions and still sell it to the same userbase.
Besided this is not the same as the PC situation
The CPU binary is identical, while three GPU binaries (shared, PS4-specific and Neo-specific)
Different neo specific GPU code is a bit more than a few settings in a config file.
