8th Gen to 9th Gen: Visual Analysis Thread

[Shinobi-san]

hinch said:

CGI-Quality said:

Unfortunately, some will never let up on the loose term known as diminishing returns (which is actually being used incorrectly, but I'm not going to derail the thread with it). One thing I will keep telling people is none of the titles shown are even close to what we will have even in the next two years. I get some skepticism, but the hardware will do the talkin'! Just using PlayStation (never mind the more powerful Xbox Series X), let's examine what will be running your games versus what the baseline for game development was last time (the PS4)...

-snip-

We're talkin'...

• 2x the RAM
• A galaxy of a difference in the GPUs
• nearly 300GB more mem bandwidth
• I/O throughput (SSD facilitated) that easily bitch slaps even my $5000+ PC (when compressed, we're talking 9x what the PS4 could do)

That's just the PS5. The Series X, just in sheer graphical might, is even more impressive. I only say this to state just how little any of those things are even being pushed in the present, but they will be taken advantage of. So, you are, without a doubt, correct that the "CGI" look is going to happen this gen.

Its strange that people keep mentioning it because the way I see it 8th gen isn't even remotely close to CGI. I mean they do look good but games still look like games. If that makes sense...

I would say we might hit it next next gen (10) when GPU's are able to offer full raytracing in all modern titles. That's when devs can stop faking it and offer true-to-life lighting on all objects.

But yeah the jump in hardware alone is crazy. Especially the I/O offered in the SSD vs hard drives and GPU grunt. Makes me excited to see Microsoft can do with all that hardware next month.

I think the "diminishing returns" talk though is not to say the hardware upgrade is unimpressive? But rather purely based on the naked eye and perception of the layman.

So can we really disregard, what seems like the majority of online gamer sentiment, that the perception of visual fidelity shown thus far for PS5 is a bit underwhelming? After all the very fact that these opinions exist in relevant numbers kind of disproves the supposed visual fidelity leap.

That being said, I think most people are really waiting for that WOW moment..and maybe that was the UE5 demo...but needs to be something playable/tangible.

One thing I can say for sure though is that gamer's care about games first and foremost. Any negative sentiment on visual fidelity is completely irrelevant given the positive reception of the PS5 reveal event.