I wouldn't call Hellblade's graphics diminishing returns. It's clearly a big step above anything we saw last gen and one of the few games this gen to wow on visuals.

Almost every game that has sold the "visual" of next gen has had it's demo running at 30fps and that is what has wowed audiences and excited them about PS5 hardware. None of the these are being showcased at 60fps and there's not a single comment in any video asking about 60fps











To the contrary I think average consumer notices more the graphical leap in a game like Hellblade, then a game like God of war being 4k60fps... anecdotally a friend of my complained that he expected God of War Ragnorok to look more impressive, it kind of looks similar to the PS4 game.

That is kind of what you get when you prioritise 60fps and very high native resolution. Games which only look a wee bit better than what is on the PS4, there was no mention from him about the framerate because most consumers have spent their entire gaming life jumping between 30fps and 60fps on different games and they just take either FPS as it comes. That's not to say options aren't good, but I don't think the industry has it wrong in how they choose to build/showcase their games to the public.  

Hell, visit most people's houses and they have the god aweful framegen/motion smoothing on their TV without even knowing it.

Yeah it is above 1080p but ever so slightly. 1920*1080 = 2,073 mil pixels, 2304*964 = 2,222 mil pixels.

In terms of pixel count we could still call it a 1080p 30 fps game

Hard to believe RDR2 was 3840x2160 native on 2017 Xbox One X.

That's not what I meant here. Yes hellblade 2 is impressive and I look forward to it, yes game looks visually superior to the last gen, no doubt about that.

but every incremental gain in every aspect, would it be the resolution, AA, shadow, number of shaders applied, mesh definition,  etc requires increasingly more resources while the visual impact is increasingly less significant. for instance, going from 540p to 720p is more significant than 720p to 900p which is more significant than 900p to 1080p which is more significant than 1080p to 1200p and so on.

Yes diminishing returns are for sure in place in general and I think something that will benefit the Switch 2 a lot! I think Hellblade is one game where the sum of it's improvements does create a huge leap. One of the only few we've seen this gen (based of the trailer material)

Resolution for example is not something I care massively about at this point. 1080p is a bit soft but will never be bad on a regular TV IMO. My biggest sticking point is actually bad upscalling techniques that create lots of artefacts, dare I say I'd prefer a blurrier but consistent images then a mess of ghosting/artefacting

I think a game that only has 30 fps mode has to have a resolution of at least 1440p to look sharp enough from 2 meters on 4K TV.

Ollie from Digital Foundry said the game looks soft, it's unacceptable IMO to crank up graphics so high you have to go down to 1080p pixel count on 4K TV in 30 fps on world's most powerful console.

Have the trailer so far been running at a deceptively high resolution? Do you think the presentation looks unacceptable from you have seen? 

I played the video on my 4K TV from the distance I play games, and it does indeed look quite soft. 

There's a fine line between graphics quality and resolution, who wants amazing graphics if resolution itself is on base PS4 level?

A bit disappointing. With game-pass I tend to play Microsoft games both on PC and my Series X. Guess this one will be PC-only for me.

2304x964 was the lowest pixel count they found; using a game's minimum res as if that's how it runs all the time is misleading.

They also found 2560x1070, which is well above 1080p in pixel count.

As to who wants amazing graphics if the resolution is PS4 level, I for one would take that any day over PS4 assets at a higher resolution. Lighting, effects, textures, detail, etc matter more than pixel count in my opinion. Hellblade II for instance is easily the best looking game I've seen on consoles.

Weren't these next gen machines marketed as 4k? Kind of funny we are calculating to see if the new big release is better than 1080p....