I don't mind them raising minimum requirements if they actually use features of newer hardware (cough unlike Windows 11 cough), but requiring upscaling is never a good sign. It's just a cost-cutting strategy that allows them to spend even less money on optimization work while reallocating that money to marketing budget or exec bonuses or whatever, at the cost of visual fidelity. It doesn't benefit customers in any way, quite the opposite.
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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One of the good things about this being an epic exclusive is that I won't get it for many years, so all these current hardware talks probably won't matter if I ever get my hands on it years later through an epic giveaway.
Epic exclusive
cool I can tune this game out and come back to it later after the apology letters and patches
What apology letter?
The phenomenon of hardware falling out of requirements due to lack of support for newer features instead of due to insufficient compute power is nothing new. We have seen it before with stuff like that awkward shader model change in early ps360 era or more recently with CPU instructions.
I understand it stings because I had it happen to me too in the past, but that's why it is important to have realistic expectations about hardware longevity when deciding a purchase, especially in the uncertain times of the late years of a generation, when you don't know where things might go in the next one.
Shout out to Hardware TnL 2.0 feature rendering older cards like the Nvidia Riva TNT2 useless for most games it would have otherwise run fine, like KOTOR. Extra shout out to Max Payne 2 for supporting software TnL at a time when most games did not, preserving the longevity of that card.
Oh damn, thankfully that was before my time lol.
That goes to show, that the last ~decade from 2011/12 to 2021/22 has been an outlier in that regard. It used to be that every 4/5 years there was a paradigm change that left any non-recent hardware completely behind, but in 2022 you had people running Elden Ring in almost 8 year old 970s. So I can't help but find this recent development in requirements acceptable... It has been due for quite a bit of time.
I'm all for realistic graphics, but a good story and fun gameplay can be had without them. It will definitely leave them out of some markets.
I have no expectation of my 1060 being able to run the next generation of games. It has a good run, but it’s really old by now.
It runs everything I throw at it currently, including Baldur's Gate 3. I'm in no hurry to 'upfrafe'.
The only game my 1060 truly struggled with was my pirated copy of Hogwarts Legacy, though there has been a few other games that would chug in parts like RDR2. I wound up replacing it with a 6950XTX I found on sale for less than some lower end cards like the 3070, so I think I made out okay.
(I really wish I'd picked a better game to upgrade over than fucking Hogwarts Legacy, though. Biggest disappointment in years.)
Same for me and my rx580 and they downvoted me on reddit for saying it, that consoomer hivdmind.
I don't understand the recent trend of making cards like 2060 sounds like the lowest you can go for "recommended", and any developer puts even 3070 as recommended suddenly become lazy. No, it is because everyone is starting to move on to PS5/Series X as the "baseline" spec as they are almost 3 years old now and pretty much become the "majority" of the gaming market.(note, PC takes really small amount of the gaming population even when you don't count mobile gaming.)
So if you go check what is consider PS5/Series X equivalent PC parts, it's the 3070/6700XT. People with lower spec machines should be glad that developer even want to put more efforts to accommodate your needs and release a game that supports your hardware in the hope to get some extra bucks if you feel happy about the result.(honestly it really is a pita for dev team ) It is perfectly reasonable to release a product that just can't run on older hardware, the developer is constantly making that decision during and even after game released with patches to address newer hardware being released. (this part I mean newer hardware but at lower performing tier, ie. the [x]060s)
Older gamer has experience the era where games just can't run on CPU anymore and you have to buy extra GPU and extra audio cards to get all the features delivered. It was acceptable then why not claiming developers are lazy because the game can't run on my Pentium 4 with Riva TNT2(I had 256MB ram and the last aureal 3d audio card).
There are other developer making games that also targets older hardware, play those and vote with your wallet. Or, use your 4080 GPU budget to buy PS5/Series X AND whatever latest switch and you can play like 99% of games released and not missing any exclusives. (Yes, you can buy all 3 consoles with the price of 1 super inflated GPU card. )
note, PC takes really small amount of the gaming population even when you don’t count mobile gaming.
googles
That doesn't appear to be the case. Looking at this article, in 2022, 43.8% of video game revenue was from PCs, and 56.2% from consoles. There's more revenue from consoles, but it's not a terribly-drastic difference.
The difference(if the article is trust worthy, see last paragraph) is made up by what some live service games on PC are pretty big money maker.(Valve's games, LoL, and some live service are really PC focus or PC only.) Fortnite is cross platform and here is a comparison from it's revenue source, and live service game are aiming more competitive not graphically more advanced. If you compare games like say Assassin's Creed or Jedi Survivor or say MWIII by pre-orders console vs PC, there will be a big difference. There is a reason why developer are focusing on console quality/performance first, because if you do cross platform, that's where you make most of your money from. But if you are doing a competitive FPS, then developer will focus on PC build cause that's where most competitive players are.
Look at best of steam for 2022, notice the lack of big selling console titles? That's why. Probably not valid source now, but before Psyonix bought by Epic, they released their Rocket League player by platforms, PC takes about 21% on 3rd year(2018) after switch version is released. First, second, third, they don't release new numbers after year 4. And you can run RL on potato laptops before their mandatory DX11 update. Most cross platform games will bias toward Playstation since Series X/S aren't as dominant this gen. but usually it falls around 70~75% on consoles and 25%~30% on PC.(if game also release on switch, PC shrinks further.)
Lastly, the article you linked if you read the info or sourcing carefully, they are some sort of report/forecast survey data selling company. They don't really actually have the numbers in terms of global revenue. Yes, public company have financial reports, but Valve is not public company which will distort the result quite a bit, and use survey means if your sample pool is bad, your extrapolation will also be bad. One of the graphic shows their sample amount. (with about 42k samples, with no mention where or how they get those number)
edit: minor edits for better reading
extra big edit: I went and look for playstation game division revenue for 2022 and found this article with links to actual financial report, 24.4 billions. Where the best I can find for steam(which dominates about 90% pc sales market share) is about 8~9 billions in gross revenue(including game sales/mtx/etc). I don't feel confident linking the articles as I don't think they are really reliable, but multiple of those "survey company" probably estimate it from source like steam spy or steam db data. So playstation along make 3x more revenue than steam. Like yeah, I know it also includes PS5/accessory sales etc, but we all know that console are selling almost at cost or slightly below to drive game sales. Sony sold "19.1 million PS5 during fiscal 2022" doing some paper calculation it's around 9.5b if all consoles sold are at 500USD. Actual number would be much lower as Sony don't get those sale money directly compare to PSN, they get it after the vendor/shipping split. And I don't know how much they get from console sales but look at the chart I linked it's way below 1/3rd. So even with worst case calculation Playstation still make 2x more in terms of software sales.
And that's across three separate consoles, no? If we exclude Switch (which is nowhere near recent hardware), I wonder if PC then becomes dominant.
if you read my response, this "googled" article is not a reliable source, cause they extrapolate their data instead of actually acquire and compare sales data. Below is best of steam 2022, green check means game is published by a public company, cross is PC only, question mark I don't know if the game dev/publisher is public or not. Also, even if the public publisher does have sales numbers per game, they don't usually tell you the details like platform revenue percentage, as their goal for public data is "my game make how much".
I have 2080 super, which is probably a bit behind the 3070 and it pretty heavily out performs my ps5.
on what games you have compared to? how do you get that conclusion?
Control. Runs better, looks better on pc, compared to ps5.
Baldurs Gate 3. Main thing I've noticed, which may be a CPU issue is there's a longer pause on the Ai's turn on the ps5 sometimes. I have a 5900x on the PC, and playing in normal, whereas I'm playing tactician on PS5. So maybe the harder difficulty requires the CPU to think longer, or my cpu is just significantly better than the one in the ps5.
Edit. Pretty sure I was using the ryzen 3600 for control. 30fps with ray tracing on PS5, and while not a solid locked 60 on pc it was pretty close. Control is why I want Alan Wake 2 on pc, but I refuse to buy from epic.
Looking online, the 5700xt or 2070 are the closest match to the ps5.
BG3 is a CPU issue because of how the game was made.(mentioned in DF's video)
Control however is a build issue where developed features for RTX/DLSS are not available on PS5 due to hardware and API limitation.(thanks to Nvidia). It's not really a good comparison unless you run without those and pick the same texture resolution/render upscale etc. Then compare your frame time/fps to claim 2080 super with your rig outperforms PS5. Remember, when we say "out perform", we need to compare with as close possible work load and then see which one finished faster. Not which one looks nicer with all the knobs tweaking.
Ps5 does have other stuff like checkerboard and dynamic resolution available though. Fact remains, control was almost a locked 60fps on pc, and locked at 30 with less impressive visuals on PS5. And I would bet it'll be same for Alan. In that I could get better framerate while also having better visuals on my pc than which I would get on the ps5.
I went to look up spec data, PS5 10.29 TFLOPS, 2800 Super, 11.15 TFLOPs. So by spec number 2080 Super is slightly better than PS5's GPU. But for Control like DF mentioned RTX/DLSS gives pretty big advantage for fidelity.
Unrealistic hardware expectations? Are you kidding me? They're not unreal expectations. Some people just don't have the best PC parts and are getting left in the dust. It would be unreal expectations if their game has to be run on a graphics card that hasn't been made yet. Other than that this is just a fluff article
The minimum-recommended GPU for 540p 60FPS on medium settings is an RTX 3070.
Yes. 540p. without ray tracing.
Tell me again how that's a realistic expectation.
Isn't that because it's being upscaled? So it's not really 540p is it
You'll be able to play a new game with state of the art graphics at medium settings with a mid range GPU from 3 years ago. Seems fine to me.
We don't know what medium settings actually mean. It may still look amazing.
For Control (2019) the first released minium system requirements had a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 from 2016. This was later lowered but that's pretty much in line with what we see now. They're aiming for next gen graphics. It worked for Control. The game was used as a benchmark for raytracing for years.
At 540p. That's less than 720p. How the fuck is that even remotely acceptable? Medium settings at 1080p would be barely acceptable. But literally half the resolution? No way.
You still don't know what medium means. Until you do it's pretty pointless to get worked up about linguistics.
I'm not worked up about linguistics, I'm worked up about the resolution. 540p anything will look like ass.
Maybe the graphics are that intense, even at whatever they chose to call "medium". Try "low" then and see how those work out.
You are worked up about linguistics because it's nothing more to you at the moment. Just because you're used to run every other game at "high" or whatever, doesn't mean this different game has to be the same.
I refuse to agree with "my midrange GPU has to be able to run everything at Ultra for #random number# of years or I am going ballistics". I want progress. That's what I buy new hardware for every few years. If you want graphics to be stuck and don't advance in any meaningful way, get a console.
Maybe the graphics are that intense, even at whatever they chose to call "medium". Try "low" then and see how those work out.
What are you trying to imply here? We know that "medium" doesn't mean any raytracing etc. So what techniques do you think they implemented that could make "medium" so unbelievably good?
You are worked up about linguistics because it's nothing more to you at the moment. Just because you're used to run every other game at "high" or whatever, doesn't mean this different game has to be the same.
My guy, what are you on about? I'm not saying that this game has to run on "high" on a specific configuration, I'm saying that 540p on medium is unacceptable for a last-gen GPU.
I refuse to agree with "my midrange GPU has to be able to run everything at Ultra for #random number# of years or I am going ballistics". I want progress. That's what I buy new hardware for every few years. If you want graphics to be stuck and don't advance in any meaningful way, get a console.
Why not go a step further and insinuate that I want Ultra-Mega-Hyper graphics on my 20 year old toaster? You're already misrepresenting my words to hell and back.
Ah I see. Graphics didn't get any more complex and needed stronger hardware before raytracing was introduced. There isn't any way to make a game demanding and look pretty without raytracing.
If you think it's not acceptable, then... Don't accept it I guess?
It has been incredibly rare for single games to be released which were so far advanced that they needed the highest end hardware to work with the commonly accepted minimum fidelity for the market. Of course there were always a bunch of games that ran equally bad on anything but the highest end hardware, because they were badly optimized.
Raytracing is something that actually needs hardware improvements. Pretty much anything else can - and should - be optimized to run on older hardware with less fidelity. You're free to wait to see if you're right, but anyone else can see that this is a case of bad optimization.
Or maybe they just disagree with the "common accepted minimum requirements" (please link your source) as they've done before.
And here is me with GTX 750Ti 😂