Games on PC these last years have not been great in my opinion, and now combined with the recently released Crysis 3 and the GTX Titan graphics card, i am seeing a very weird behaviour from consumers and media which is just plain wrong and i want to write about why.
Crysis 3 was just released and many people with really high-end hardware are saying they barely scratch the 30+ fps mark on very high settings and this is with hardware like GTX680 and i7-3770K CPU. Also nVIDIA just released the fastest single GPU graphics card in the world, named Titan. This is a $1000 valued graphics card which performs extremely well.
But in Crysis 3 it still cant perform good enough to give you 60 frames per second, it only can achieve around 38 frames per second. So is Crysis 3 THAT incredible or is there something wrong going on here ? My hardware right now is GTX580 on a i7-960 cpu and im around 70fps on very high setting. I've only turned off post processing effects and supersampling effects. My quality ingame is just like with post processing effects and supersampling, maybe i would call it better since there is no motion blur going on.
So this is my issue with todays PC games, they are NOT optimized for PC as many developers claim and are basicly killing your performance with features that barely gives you any visual difference in the game. Try changing your Crysis 3 settings to Medium and then to Very High and you will see there is barely any visual differences other than in post processing effects. The lighting, shading and depth of field are the only visual differences you will see. The grass will not be more detailed, the models will not be more detailed nor the enviroment in general.
Look at Crysis 1 which was released 6 years ago.
And now Crysis 3 which was released a few days ago.
Notice the difference in the enviroment ? Look the highly detailed leafes and grass in Crysis 1 compared to Crysis 3 which supposedly should be "Next Gen". The reason why Crysis 1 looks better is caused it was developed for PC in general. The meshes (Basicly the anatomy of a model that determines how detailed a model can be) is more detailed in older pc games shockingly enough, and the reason why we are seeing worse quality today in 2013 is cause the PC-industry is fooling you to think its been focused for PC which it never has. The games anatomy is the same for PC and the console, only the PC gets tons of post processing effects and shading which only enhance the game with small effects, but steals tons of power from your computer.
I can illustrate this perfectly with Skyrim since its so open for modifications that people have created more detailed meshes and models for it, resulting in a dramatic change in quality.
Here is Skyrim with everything maxed out:
Looks beatiful right ?
Now look whats happening if you install more detailed face meshes and models.
This basicly sums up what gamers today are missing out on. This is what your GTX680 card can do, hell even 5-series cards can easily do this. Why spend $1000 bucks on a extreme graphics card to play with post processing effects which barely improves the game quality ? Stop benchmarking games like Crysis 3 and also Witcher 2 and saying "wow the card is still struggling with these games" when all the card is struggling with is supersampling and post processing effects. Graphics cards 3 series backwards can perfectly play todays games with maxed out settings, just avoid the settings that do nothing but steal your power!
I'm not 100% sure how legit this video is and whether or not really everything is rendered in real-time and how many tricks are involved in the background and with polishing after it was rendered etc, but I saw it a while ago and it definitely does look impressive in terms of polygons, farsight, shaders and texture quality.
edit: Okay nevermind, I checked out their homepage and it's all CGI, which was to be expected. But I do think the last 6-7 years were really unimpressive in terms of progress in the video game graphics department and the main reason for this are the outdated consoles. PS4 and Xbox 720 coming soon should help with that
I'm not 100% sure how legit this video is and whether or not really everything is rendered in real-time and how many tricks are involved in the background and with polishing after it was rendered etc, but I saw it a while ago and it definitely does look impressive in terms of polygons, farsight, shaders and texture quality.
God damn I would kill for graphics to be that hard. I feel developers are holding back on PC because they focus so much on consoles which is a damn shame. Crysis 1 was amazing in terms of graphics improvement then they decided no more and went straight to developing mainly for consoles and porting to pc's :/
Consoles with 1:1 the same games as on the PC have always been a cancer. Back in the days, consoles really focussed on their own unique games, but since the first Playstation, it moved a lot to "games for all platforms", which just isn't good for anyone (gameplay, gamedesign, technology).
And out of all those "FOR CONSOLE ONLY LULZ" games, only a very select few should rightfully have that notion, because most of them are just PC games only released on console, so all the fuckers buy them.
I am the quintessential Alpha Bearded Tosser of the PC Master Race subgroup of irrational beings. I generally believe that games nowadays are so shallow that there's barely enough substance to get your knees wet, the blame of which I typically assign to the Stupid Epidemic known as the Xbox 360 Era. That said, us elitists don't have much to brag about these days, other than the future promise of things eventually looking gorgeous (if only someone bothers to make a game for the fucking thing).
That said, I cut the consoles a lot of slack. While we are for now forced to endure all of the bad PC ports of games that should have been on the PC to begin with coughSKYRIMcough, consoles aren't the ball-and-chain around the neck of gaming innovation that we would all love to hate.
Developers everywhere have had to come up with some amazing stuff to work within the limitations imposed upon them. The hardware limitations of the current gen consoles have necessitated innovation and invention in pursuing the best possible results, and they have to a large degree succeeded, as evidenced by the fact that we are still playing games on a device that was released in 2005.
Crysis 3 is out on a machine made in two thousand and fucking five.
Thus, to answer the question in the OP, "Why spend $1000 bucks on a extreme graphics card to play with post processing effects which barely improves the game quality?
Because these innovations carry over to the PC, and future games will make use of it. It's the same reason people should be excited about the PS4 even if they don't intend to get one: we are about to live in a world where game developers are under financial pressure to craft what is now possible with current generation graphics processors. Pity the poor fools, and pray that they can include a side of gameplay to go with the pixels.
It seems the Crysis 1 picture on OP is actually from the Real Lifesis mod, which isn't exactly indicative of how vanilla Crysis 1 looked. I would think that for the majority of players, Crysis 1 looked like this.
I don't really get why people get all pumped about skyrim's graphics. The landscapes are pretty but the game itself is... uh... not. Check out the second screenshot. See how nasty looking that armor is? No matter how much you mod the game you're going to regularly run into stuff that looks like it came out of Windows 95.
I don't really see any new games as having super impressive graphics honestly because people obsess about the shiny stuff but there's always patches of good old scrubby textures and the like when you play them. If it doesn't *actually* look fully like real life I'm not that interested in whether it's marginally closer than it was years ago.
The just announced Playstation 4 is basically going to be running on conventional PC hardware, so that gives some hope for the convergence of game development on console vs PC.
I just wanted to mention that I played Skyrim with a ton of visual mods, including whats seen above, and I ran on max specs with a GTX9800. That's 5 generations separating the NVidia 6-series, and what I currently use.
This comparison is highly flawed with the use of mods. Compare the stock graphics of each game and then come back. Also, you seem to forget that there's more than just "it doesn't get more detailed" to it. But seems you rather pull it on the easy track and generalize.
I wonder if the graphics will be so good that we can watch porn from computer graphics in the very future (not troll post). It is getting dangerously close. I wish I could freeze my body to rise one day to see the future before I pass away!
Crysis 1 isn't that visually stunning if you play with the base graphics. It's great, but not at the level that people make it out to be at. The mods are what really make it stand out.
Crysis 3's graphics are WAY better stock than Crysis 1's are.
Graphic war should come to an end. Not a lot of PC gamers are even using the high end graphic power card. It took a year or two for PC gamers to actually run crysis 1 well without going for the highest of the highest end of graphic card/SLI solution. Not to mention the difficulty on running the game isn't only because of hardware power, the software writing code was one reason why the game required such a high performance computer to run it. Games aren't gonna be sold well like this because the number of people willing to update their hardware consistently to play the even more graphic demanding game is not high.
Honestly AI department needs more attention from everyone. All of the crysis games, the AI is rubbish. Most open world's AI are too stupid and if anything, AI development is one of the slowest growing department in gaming. I can't recall any AI that wow-ed me since F.E.A.R.
On February 23 2013 23:18 ETisME wrote: Graphic war should come to an end. Not a lot of PC gamers are even using the high end graphic power card. It took a year or two for PC gamers to actually run crysis 1 well without going for the highest of the highest end of graphic card/SLI solution. Not to mention the difficulty on running the game isn't only because of hardware power, the software writing code was one reason why the game required such a high performance computer to run it. Games aren't gonna be sold well like this because the number of people willing to update their hardware consistently to play the even more graphic demanding game is not high.
Honestly AI department needs more attention from everyone. All of the crysis games, the AI is rubbish. Most open world's AI are too stupid and if anything, AI development is one of the slowest growing department in gaming. I can't recall any AI that wow-ed me since F.E.A.R.
I disagree vehemently with the idea that pushing boundaries should come to a premature end. I think it's a short-sighted ideology endlessly parroted by people who are disillusioned by all of the shallow games that this "war" seems to create, and it sells short the notion that it's possible to focus on improving more than one thing at a time.
What you should never fail to realize is that while this so-called war is going on, there are still tons of games that go with stylized graphics, precisely so that they can focus more on gameplay. These games will stand the test of time specifically because they are stylized, and thus endure a timeless quality. They aren't going away just because some triple-A companies are working overtime to push for graphical innovation.
More importantly, without these continued efforts to reach the next level of immersion, we will never get to experience that moment when you don your HUD glasses, boot up the newest fantasy title, and just stand there in awe and wonder, swearing that you could reach out and caress every single individual blade of grass.
Don't denigrate the journey just because the road there is a rough walk.
You know there's something wrong when a game from 2007 looks better than a 70€ game from 2013. Gotta love the fact that modders do a better job than developers.
I find modded Morrowind and Oblivion more graphically appealing than default Skyrim. Plus Skyrim "cheats", since there's usually only one very narrow path you can take to get anywhere. In Morrowind you can literally take any path you want since you can levitate, and in Oblivion there were very few invisible walls compared to Skyrim. Hell, even the north part of Cyrodil that's right next to Skyrim feels a lot more open and like a real mountain range than any part of Skyrim.
On February 24 2013 02:07 LuckyFool wrote: While I think advances are being made, it def feels the past 4 years or so we've been jumping at a slower rate than 2005-2009.
Definitely. I dropped about 2 grand on a really good PC 4 years ago and honestly there's still not a game I've played (which granted is not every one) that I can't play well on maxed settings.
I feel bad for the kids who blows thousands of dollars trying to max out their graphics. Save up and buy a sports car or something, seriously.
You main points are correct OP. There are all sorts of features in modern games that do almost nothing in terms of improving visuals, and yet eat up tons of power.
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