shikamaru317 said:
I feel like you and I have been looking at different videos most of this gen. I've seen PS5 and Series X each outperforming each other in quite a few different games all 3 years of the gen so far, while it seems like the majority of games they are effectively equal with identical graphics settings pulled from the PC version, identical resolution settings, and near identical framerates. I've seen several games just this year that ran better on Series X like Jedi Survivor and Alan Wake 2 (which is the best looking game released so far this generation, and it runs about 8 fps higher on Series X in performance mode). And let's be honest here, Larian is great at many things from story to characters to deep RPG systems and character creation, but they are simply not a technically proficient studio, Baldur's Gate 3 looks like a game a AAA studio could have released on PS4 and XB1 in like 2014 (Dragon Age Inquisition for instance released in 2014 and overall Inquisition looks slightly better in most metrics, with BG3 mainly only winning that comparison in terms of resolution and character model quality and Inquisition winning most environment graphics comparisons). On top of Larian's technical lackings, they were rushing to meet a release promise for this year that they made for the Xbox port, and most of their effort was going into getting the game to run at all on Series S, not going into getting the game to run well on Series X. There is no technical reason for Series X to be running the game at lower graphics settings than PS5, Series X on paper has the advantage in nearly every GPU, RAM, and CPU metric. It's just a matter of optimization, and I wouldn't be surprised at all to see them patch identical graphics settings to PS5 into the game later on. And therein lies the issue, many 3rd party devs won't take the time to get the most out of Series X, not when PS5 has already outsold S and X combined by nearly 2:1 just 3 years into the generation. Usually you will see equal graphics settings, equal resolution, and near equal framerates, but a few devs don't even give that much attention to the Series X version. |
Yeah, I agree. Remember the WiiU. Nintendo tried to be closer to the competition and they were on a hardware level. Still WiiU barely got any ports, and the ones they got were shit. Then comes around the Switch, that is farther away in hardware specs, more aligned to mobile specs, and suddenly we see an influx of 'miracle' ports. I think it is hilarious, that even a game like Hogwarts Legacy can be ported, albeit with massive adaptions. Sales of a platform matter more than hardware specs.
Also, in the case of Baldur's Gate 3 it is not as simple as tuning graphics settings. You are right that graphics isn't the biggest shiniest area of BG. But it has something that makes porting also difficult: an interactable world. Just mind for a moment: if you break a barrel with flammable fluids and then burn them, then the game remembers which area is covered with ash. If you soill blood on parts of that area, this change will also memorized. There is a lot more than that, but this single system alone makes for a lot of computing power before the game even starts to send data to the graphic card for rendering. There are other games with highly interactive worlds, and despite having more or less low graphics, they can be demanding on machines: Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress. The original DF hasn't even graphics at all, but has the reputation of being able to bring even powerful machines to their knees, once the fortress grows.
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