I simply don’t understand how Sony studios extract the visuals they achieve in their games from old hardware. It feels like tech sorcery.
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Optimisation. Many, many games haven’t even had a proper baseline of optimisation let alone targeted optimisation for specific specs like consoles
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The PS5 GPU is more powerful than a 2060, and as a newer generation architecture supports more features which can be leveraged to improve performance
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The PS5 operating system is wayyy less taxing than Windows or any other OS because it does much less and does it more optimized
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Well as someone who has played the PC version, I can immediately tell that this game is probably running on Medium or possibly even Low. There’s fewer confetti particles, the explosion is less detailed, the fur doesn’t look as real and the lighting isn’t as good. Not to mention that it’s running non-native resolution/no DLSS cause you can clearly see the ailiasing. That said, it looks great for a $500 machine. My PC was over $4K cause I just had to have a 4090 (after I saw how disappointing the rest of the RTX 4000 lineup was. I usually only buy midrange GPUs).
In other words: Optimization.
Tbf, the PS5 version of the game has two modes; performance and graphics. You can have it look really good and get raytracing features but play at 30fps or reduce some of those settings and play at 60+ (I think this one goes to 120 if you have a capable display).
But even on Performance, it has been the best looking game I have ever played, and I tend to keep up with the latest and greatest.
Yeah that’s what I’m saying. Furthermore, if you want a high framerate (120+ FPS) and no-compromise ray tracing, you’re going to have to spend way more than $500. The PS5 is an extremely good value for what you get.
I knew a PC person would come in here eventually and flex.
Optimization and graphic tricks
Shorter view distances, lower resolutions for things in the distance, fan base being OK with 30fps for the longest time, etc
It’s a little easier when the machine is dedicated to that and only that. The OS doesn’t have all this extra crap running in the background that takes resources from the game because it was designed for that in mind.
That and devs have just one machine to design their game for versus trying to make their game run on hundreds of machines with very different specs.
Some devs, especially first party devs who work closely with or directly for the manufacturer also have insider knowledge of the system they’re developing the game for. The Crash developers did this in the PlayStation 1 era by tapping into resources that other games weren’t using to push out even more performance from the hardware.
It’s a little easier when the machine is dedicated to that and only that. The OS doesn’t have all this extra crap running in the background that takes resources from the game because it was designed for that in mind.
At best you’re looking at a 10% performance penalty, closer to the 1-3% range without known bad background software.
I not a dev or anything. But my understanding is that it all comes down to leveraging all the capabilities of 1 single hardware configuration. You can tune and optimize your code to extract every bit of performance out of the consoles hardware because the hardware (and software too I guess) doesn’t change. PC games are much MUCH harder to optimize. Users can have a near limitless variety of hardware, driver, and OS combinations that prevent such a high level of optimization.
I think this is the main bit of it. Just look at the Baldur’s Gate drama on the Xbox because there are two configurations and one of them is less capable.
How is nearly every answer in this thread wrong?
To answer everyone: haveing a single piece of hardware to develop does help, absolutely. But the answer is simply… money.
Sony pays to have have games like R&C or Uncharted made. These games wouldn’t be profitable for the studio to make, with the level of detail and polish, but they get $60 million (example number, definitely varies) from Sonyand now the studio is in the green.
That’s it’s. Console hardware is more PC than ever, having x86 AMD CPUs that aren’t that different from ones other OEM could just order. These is no secret sauce, they aren’t some crazy in-house developed flop or some weird also-ran processor like PS3 and 360.
I don’t think they’re necessarily wrong but I’d love a nice ELI5 answer that’s not just “there’s one kind of hardware and the developers try really hard to make it run good”
Also, I thought Ratchet and Clank ran at a solid 60fps.
What’s the right answer?
So the consensus is
Build an emulator or something.
Build on that. Boot to that os or emulator when you start up PC. Basically stop running anything else while gaming. Doesn’t seem to difficult to do on the future.
Especially when Xbox runs an emulator to run old games.
Honestly it’s probably the best idea going forward. Once you build a game for a single os or emulator. Then you can just port the emulator over in to everything. Hopefully means optimisation would be far better. Don’t need to run 4 or 5 different things. Just one and make it run on Nintendo Microsoft PC and PlayStation
An emulator has a performance overhead. Even a simple translation layer like valve’s proton has an overhead. The fact that most games are simply unoptimized and windows is so bloated means that the additional overhead of proton is not a performance bottleneck. But if one has a good hardware and a good dedicated OS, emulator is not really necessary, which is good for performances
