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curl-6 on 17 June 2023
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sc94597 said:
curl-6 said:

Not everything can be time sliced and still work well though.

Things like tracking a massive number of dynamic objects doesn't have a fixed cost either, comparing it to Morrowind would be like saying reflections can't be demanding in modern games because some N64 games had them. These things scale.

PS5/Xbox Series are not infinitely powerful, their CPU/GPUs are not made of magic pixie dust, they offer a limited amount of power and some devs will want to do more with their games than current consoles can handle at 60fps.

My point was that simulations usually are updated by the precision required, not necessarily the frames rendered, and at times they could scale constantly with frame-rate while other times they could scale super-linearly with frame-rate. 

As to the second point,

Sure, these things scale. That's not in dispute. What has also scaled since Morrowind are memory capacity, memory bandwidth, storage space, CPU speed, etc.  Even if the number of objects (and their storage size) scaled by 10000 times Morrowind (for a game-world that is 8 times larger than Morrowind ) all of this hardware has also scaled by at least that much, if not more, than that and Bethesda has likely learned many more tricks since then (i.e using more efficient data structures, putting a time-limit of 30 days on object permanence, etc.) 

Object-permanence mostly is a storage/memory management problem. The CPU does have a role in it (writing from memory to the disk/pulling to the memory from the disk) but it isn't some magic workload that is special. 

Most developers don't implement it in their games because it is a system that is developmentally costly to pull of correctly, not necessarily runtime costly (if it is pulled off correctly.) 

I'm aware, but that doesn't change the fact that running at 60 gives you half as much frame time to work with. There may be technicalities with the update rate of different tasks and systems or how your load is spread across cores/threads/components, but ultimately 33.3ms is double 16.7ms.

And world scale doesn't tell you much, it's what's in it that will determine how demanding it is. You can make a single room unable to hit 60 if you fill it with enough processing tasks. 

As Digital Foundry points out, 30fps vs 60fps is a design choice. Developers have a vision, and limited amount of power to try to achieve it. There are some things current hardware simply can't do at 60.