I simply don’t understand how Sony studios extract the visuals they achieve in their games from old hardware. It feels like tech sorcery.
Optimization, son.
Fr, you can optimize really well when you know exactly what hardware someone will be running.
A 2060 is still a really good graphics card overall.
Yeah, it’s not like Sony’s pumping out $500 consoles with GT1030s in em
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.
Would be amazing if windows did what steam deck does in shutting off the OS during gaming mode.
I doubt windows either has or wants to have that functionality, given their more business/general purpose oriented focus, also the steam deck runs on Linux.
A part of me wonders if it would be possible to put the Linux distro/is of a steam deck onto a dedicated gaming computer to get some of the optimisations from it like that.
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.
They only have to target a single hardware configuration, the os has much less overhead than a typical desktop os, a graphics api that runs closer to the metal (also why the ps5 outperforms the more powerful series x) and some good development tools all go a long way to boosting the performance of the hardware.
I have an r5 3600 with an rtx 2070 and would not be surprised if the ps5 performs better with multiplatform titles.
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
Right? How sre are they??
They’re targeting known hardware. They can optimise right down to the specific card in use. They don’t need to consider hardware that doesn’t support these optimisations.
ASICs.
There are processors that are optimized specifically for the task of running code correctly written for the platform.
How is nearly every answer in this thread wrong?
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
