PC games do it because they make little guarantee about the performance. Looks too slow / crap on your PC? Your PC is too slow. Your fault. Better go spend some more money if you want a good experience.

Consoles need to be plug & play and provide a consistent experience.

If we make it OK to have variable quality settings on console games, you're going to have devs pump up the quality on highest settings without making that mode playable.  I don't want to see 20fps "photo mode".

Why do people keep using this argument?  I really don't understand it.  The largest HD TV I've ever owned was 47", and the difference between the Band of Brothers DVD boxset, versus the Blu Ray boxset are night and day.  And that's from 6-8 feet away.  I completely agree with the stance that resolution isn't everything, but having seen the differences in two boxsets I own on a lesser sized TV, from roughly the same distance away...just makes no sense to me.  Do you have poor eyesight?  Or have you simply not compared a DVD Boxset to a BR Boxset of the same movie/series?

The problem is it allows developers to wash their hands of the responsibility of delivering the best and most optimised experience. Why strive for a solid 60fps when you can blame gamers for not choosing the correct settings? There's no guarantee that the default settings would be optimal either.

Since console hardware is all the same as well, I doubt the customisability would even be worth it.

Resolution and framerate are two different things. It bugs me when people act like games should run at 60 fps because of next gen. It's never worked like that. 30 fps and 60 fps have been done in games generation after generation. Unlike resolution there's no trend of frame rate increasing. 5th gen 320p 30-60fps, 6th gen 480p 30-60fps, 7th gen 720p 30-60fps, and now 8th gen 1080p 30-60fps.

"Even infamous doesn't run at 60fps" Of course it doesn't. Why the heck should it?




I do like 60 fps though. Within a second of seeing a game it's pretty easy to tell what it's running at. It's almost part of the game's design though. Competitive shooters, sim racers, and fighting games are almost all targeting 60 while most other genres stick to 30. Would these other genres look better in 60 fps with everything else the same? Of course, but even the strongest computer in the world has finite resources. Something always has to be sacrificed for 60fps. For most games it's not worth it.



I do like the option of locking games at 30 fps by the player though. Killzone added this in the latest patch. It's super simple to code so I don't mind. 1080p 30 fps or 720p 60 fps however is never going to happen. That'd take a lot of work for the devs.

So why assume that the settings are optimal right now, especially when many games don't even consistently stay at 30 or 60FPS ?

About customizability:
The Forza series runs with 60FPS, while that is nice, I would like to switch now and then to play it with only 30FPS but higher resolution or better details for example. Forza already uses many different LODs on their cars depending on how much cars are on the track, so it would need very few extra work to make something like this available to select.

Skyrim or rather all Bethesda games have a bad draw distance on consoles. Why not make it possible to increase the FOV by sacrifying something else that you personally don't care about (shadow quality for example) ?

There's next to no development time or anything invlolved in that and in other cases, when there's a PC version, you have a broad set of LODs etc. available.

You do understand your BoB DVD runs at a max resolution of 720x480 progressive? Well that was an HBO show. If it was @ 4x3 it was even lower @ 640x480 progressive, but I believe BoB is filmed in widescreen although I've never bought it personally.

You're comparing 2 different visual mediums than from what I am comparing. You're comparing CAMERA/FILM I'm speaking on 3D VIDEO GAME ENGINES.

720x480 DVD MPeg 2 (which is also a far lower bit rate, than Blu-Rays VC-1 which is what you're comparing it to) because BoB BR is a 1920x1080p VC-1 transfer.

This is what you're truley comparing.

720x480 progressive MPEG-2 @ 5MBps in 345,600 individual pixels

Versus

1920x1080 progressive VC-1 @15-30MBps in 2,073,600 individual pixels

What you're comparing is exactly 6x the pixel amount higher on (Blu-Ray BoB vs DVD) with 3-6 times more bandwidth available on Blu-Ray Disc.

I'm comparing 720p,900p,1080p that doesn't rely on a codec/camera/film. Only a 3D game engine. For example BF4 uses the Dice engine not Mpeg 2 vs VC1. So it is strictly a pixel comparisson (if all Graphics are turned up to the same exact values, resolution/framerates becomes the only difference) whereas a DVD vs Blu-Ray comparision has other factors at play in image quality example codecs used.

There's problem one. Problem 2 is I'm comparing 1280x720 to 1920x1080 . Which 1280x720 is a far greater amount of pixels than the 720x480 DVD resolution you're tossing around in this GAMING conversation.

Here we will compare the majority of games resolutions per system.

256x240 = 61,440 individual pixels (NES/Genesis)

720x480 = 345,600 individual pixels (Dreamcast or original Wii)

1280x720 = 921,600 individual pixels (PS360/some or most XB1 titles)

1920x1080 = 2,073,600individual pixels (most PS4 titles)

Basically here's what I'm saying a 720p game basically loses half the individual pixel count to 1080p. A 900p would loose if 1600x900 = 1,440,000 a loss of a quarter of 1080p pixel count (I'm rounding for times sake).

That is a far cry from where DVD and Blu-Ray stack up, which is an absurd comparision to what I'm giving examples of.

Now your DVD is 6x the pixel count LESS so it is a GIGANTIC difference. It is. WIi U is 2x less @ 720p and XB1 is 1.5x @ 900p, which are far less trade offs in pixel amount on the WIi U or XBOX1 than the DVD vs BR comparrison you're trying to make. Don't also forget that codecs create differences as well, but that's another subject entirely.

I just watched Akira Kurasawa's Dreams last nite on my old af DVD and it looks like shit compared to a Blu-Ray. There's no Blu-Ray of Akira Kurasawas Dreams anyways...5MBps MPEG-2 720x480p quality sucks butt on a 1080p 55 inch screen, especially when compared to a 15-30MBps VC-1 transfer @ 1920x1080p. So you're right about that point. Good thing I have some Kubrick films on Blu-Ray now though, a breath of fresh air compared to his films on DVD.

Did my comparrison help anyone understand my position?

Consoles games always try to max out available memory. Having higher detail cars in active memory, or more geometry in visible range costs more memory and upsets the balance. Skyrim is a good example, it didn't fit in the ps3 memory as it was. No way could you increase fov, draw distance or detail by sacrificing framerate, it already did that on its own by running out of changelog memory.
PC is different, separate video memory, more system memory. If it runs out it just crashes to desktop and you restore the ini files.

The settings might not be optimal for your taste, but developer test and optimize for 1 set of parameters to ensure the game won't run out of memory and crash during play time. (Certain developers like Bethesda excluded...)

While I would love the options, I can see why they wouldn't do it though. That's strictly a pc thing, console aren't known for it, so maybe they wouldn't want to do it because it would make console gaming resemble pc too much? I don't know.... But it would be cool if they did. I love tweaking the settings for my pc games to find my happy balance, it would be great if I could do it on my consoles too... But I'm also ok with them not doing it too... It would just take one developer to get this ball rolling though!

I have a PC and PS3 and I prefer my PS3 because I don't have to do a damn thing in comparision to PC. I mean yeah if I turn on the PS3 and it needs a quick update I press "X" once or twice a month.

With PC's you have to update your malware, your virus protection, your windows, your steam, your origin, your DX, your C enviroment, you have to clean your browser, you have to update your nvidia or amd gpu driver, your nvidia phsyisx driver, your mouse driver your keyboard driver, your nvidia 3d vision driver, your blu ray software to run a blu ray movie because MS to cheap to licenseit, there's probably a lot more examples. Then yeah get into the game and check graphics and resolutions and do that a couple dozen times with fraps or msi afterburner frame number checker to make sure its smooth or frame cap it at some arbitrary number you can accept until you start the damn game. Multiplayer is even more demanding. Well shit I just wasted 2-4 hours in config menu and scanning/updating. WTF is this PC master race about? besides jerking me off with a dry hand? Great...pssh.

oh yeah mo pixels I can barely see baby! haha lolz... it is kinda like that though.

Netflix HD supposedly 1080p (5mbps h.264), or a 1080i60 (15mbps mpeg2) tv broadcast falls far short of blu-ray's 1080p24 (15-40mbps h.264) as well, bad comparison altogether. Though I still remember people claiming upscaled dvd looking as good as blu-ray at the start of last gen... Thanks google http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=51398 blast from the past.

However you bring up an interesting comparison:

256x240 = 61,440 individual pixels (NES/Genesis)
720x480 = 345,600 individual pixels (Dreamcast or original Wii)
1280x720 = 921,600 individual pixels (PS360/some or most XB1 titles)
1920x1080 = 2,073,600individual pixels (most PS4 titles)

1920x1080 doesn't seem unreasonable, it's the smallest jump in resolution between generations so far.

You also have to take into account that CRT tvs were far less sensitive to resolution than LCD. Native resolution instantly jumps out on an LCD screen as the better option. Any scaled resolution looks soft in comparison. Last gen was a mess with HD ready tvs (600 line 1080i crt) 1366x768 plasma panels, 1280x720 lcd and 1920x1080 lcd tvs. This gen 1080p is the standard and most people have full HD by now, console games can safely target 1080p now as the default option. It's a shame to sit just below it and make a soft looking picture by upscaling instead of matching the display resolution.

It doesn't matter for PC, there is no standard display resolution. However anyone how plays on pc prefers to match the native resolution of their display(s). Hence you have a choice on PC.