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curl-6 on 27 January 2018
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bonzobanana said:
curl-6 said:

GTA5 on last gen is far from stable, it chugs even more than the Wii U version of Botw.

Zelda's forest areas are not empty, they're teeming with wildlife, dense interactive foliage, volumetric light filtering through the leaves, tons of shadow casting, floating dust, pollen, drifting leaves, etc. This can in fact be more demanding than a comparatively sparse city street.

Zelda is a memory intensive game to the point where it's one of only two Wii U games to stream from both disc and hard drive.

Wii U = 1GB of RAM

PS3/360 = Less than 500MB

These are facts, not speculation.

Watchdogs on wii u vs ps3 and 360 versions is a massive win for 360 and PS3 because they both utilise their hard drives to stream in data quickly. The lack of hard drive in wii u was a big issue and I don't think the extra 500MB was enough to compensate for it although saying that obviously the wii u had 2GB of memory 4x 360 and PS3, both of which set aside a small amount of memory for their background operating system (not much though). My point is Watchdogs is a similar game to GTA and struggled on wii u and Zelda is a game that while beautiful makes no effort to present a realistic world it is more of a update on Zelda windwaker in visuals. Games like Zelda should not be used for comparison because they simply don't test the hardware. They don't attempt to do realistic physics, textures, lighting etc. However visually pleasing they are it is not really fair. Frankly its the reason Nintendo don't need decent performing hardware because most of their own games (if not all) are done in a cartoon style. The fact that PC's are emulating Zelda BOTW in 8k with high frame rates pretty much shows the underlying hardware. You aren't seeing that for PS3 or 360 games. Windwaker on Gamecube was achieved with only 8 gflops of gpu performance and still looked fantastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF1Itaye-z8

Everyone realistically knows Zelda BOTW would run on 360 and PS3 its just a question of how the game would be in comparison but it could certainly use hard drive streaming of data to compensate for lack of main memory.  The core engine of Zelda BOTW doesn't look particularly complicated and needy of resources.

It's a mistake to assume that a game not being realistic means it isn't demanding. Ratchet & Clank on PS4 is a cartoon, you think that would run on Wii U without downgrades? Botw has a ton of effects and techniques that are demanding for its hardware. 

You can port almost anything to anything if you downgrade it enough. Could PS3/360 run a mildly downgraded version of Botw? Of course they could. Could they run it as it is now, intact? Of course not; they don't have the memory, and hard drive streaming won't close the gap because Botw already does that.