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curl-6 on 18 May 2024
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Chrkeller said:
curl-6 said:

A generation is the gap between PS3 and PS4; Switch is significantly ahead of PS3.

Chrkeller said:

Have to agree to disagree.  Playing the same games is irrelevant from my perspective.  I can play doom on a calculator and on a 4090.

But no worries, to each their own.

Edit (general commert, not aimed at you Curl)

Playing the same game as a comparison of hardware is curious.  I'm assuming it is driven by consoles historically having exclusives and lacking BC.  So gens were defined by the games more than the visuals.  

From a PC perspective, playing the same games means nothing from a hardware position.  A 2050 runs probably all the same games as a 4090.  When I upgrade to a 5090, all my old games work.  Playing the same games is expected and doesn't mean anything.

Games like Witcher 3, Dying Light, Hogwarts Legacy or Kingdom Come Deliverance wouldn't be possible on PS3 though, not without reducing them beyond the point of recognition or playability. Switch on the other hand can handle them, thanks to having a far more memory and GPU from the PS4 generation.

Maybe.  I honestly don't know.  According to steam the minimum gpu for W3 is a gtx 660.... that launched in 2012....  pretty old hardware.  Games scale on PC really well and can be played on all kinds of hardware gens.  

For me visuals of Switch games to tools, crack, TLoU and uncharted are similar.

The visuals on Switch to horizon, gow 2018 and GoT are not similar.

Even a 2012 card is 7 years ahead of the PS3 and 360. RAM size would be bigger issue though.

I see it more in terms of the techniques being used; PS3/360, rooted in 2005 technology, have a distinctive approach to graphics, defined by rather harsh materials which tend to look either shiny and plastic or matte and clay-like, as they generally have only a base, dirt, and specular layer. 

PS4/XBO made the jump to Physically Based Rendering, resulting in much more nuanced and realistic material properties you see in basically every major game of the last decade; Switch has this too, giving its lighting and shading a look more characteristic of the 8th generation than the more basic "everything is either shiny or flat" you see on PS3 or 360.

Reflections are another key point; on 7th gen these were typically handled with cubemaps or mirrored geometry; PS4/XBO moved to screen space reflections as standard, and the Switch inherits this as well.

Nintendo's games typically eschew anti-aliasing, but we have seen from third party efforts that Switch is also capable of the modern temporal supersampling anti-aliasing that became standard on PS4 and XBO, whereas MSAA and later FXAA were the standard method on PS3 and 360.

The basic "look" of PS3/360 is largely defined by these techniques, (pre-PBR materials, cubemap/planar reflections, FXAA/MSAA, etc) while Switch shares more in common with the methods used on PS4/XBO. (PBR, SSR, TSSAA, etc)

Last edited by curl-6 - on 18 May 2024