Next gen is here: 720P / 10 FPS (seriously)

I'm definitely going to continue playing games on PC but I always have at least one console for those experiences, I don't mind the odd framerate issue or potential resolution gaps between PC and console, but this 720P stuff is really quite insane to me.

I just don't understand how they are having such problems with games running at 1080P. No matter what, 8 years of hardware advancements should brute force through any sub-par optimisation. The argument that it's poor optimisation loses weight a bit when you consider how many games are coming in hot at 720P. Maybe Microsoft's devtools are ass.

I feel bad for the developers. I have to imagine they wanted more time to work on this that Microsoft simply wouldn't allow them. This is one of those cases where delays are absolutely the right course of action, and it probably would've been better for Microsoft to spread out some of their games in the coming six months a bit better, anyway.

Nevertheless, this is horrific performance, even for a launch game. Hopefully it gets its due attention.

The more I look at Dead Rising 3 and see the problems it has, the more and more it feels like a PS3/360 game that was "rush ported" onto XBox One. It isn't the XBox One so much as people rushing this out the door.

Keep in mind that launch software is kind of in a functionally different place than a true next gen designed game. Anyone remember how framey and kind of ugly perfect dark zero was? The graphical leap is coming and I would expect we will be seeing some amazing stuff at E3. A poorly optimized game will always run like shit no matter what platform it's on. That said, it is kind of disappointing that these machines are clearly going to struggle to run most games above 720p. One good aspect about this is that hopefully this console generation will be shorter. I think a 4-5 year console generation is much better. Perhaps with more people having access to HD TV and with 4k on the immediate horizon there will be more of a reason for console makers to try and think about new products.

But even look at just COD2 compared to COD ghosts on x360. COD2 looked great when it came out but its pretty clear its a split generation game if you go and take a look. There was a lot of room to grow even on the same engine tech.

I was kidding. I'm only gonna get an Xbox One if it gets a lot of exclusives I want (I don't care for Forza, Gears or Halo) and is sold without a Kinect. (or is just generally really cheap)

I think the point is, it's not a good representation of what more standard games are going to end up like. Either way 720P across the board for most games is definitely worrying.

Incredible but I'll keep my snide comments to myself until they try out the final release.

No they're not. The first game stayed at a consistent 30 unless you were driving in the maintenance tunnells, mowing down zombies where it would drop to the mid 20's. Dead Rising 2 had the drops when in extremely crowded areas but it's not like poor performance is a staple of the series.

Oh no whatever will I dooooOOoooOOOooo. The launch game dips in framerate when blowing through literally hundreds of zombies in the streets. I cannot handle such a travesty. I must express my hate on the internet.

I know it's cool to hate but remember to also take it easy folks. Maybe start asking the more relevant questions such as "Is it heck of fun?" instead of "How many vertical Ps are there?"

@sooty: dude what? 8800 gtx, how did you even get that running well? I need to know this. I had a 9800 gtx with an e8400 and I was running it at 1440 x 900. High settings with 4 x AA. I was getting 45 fps unlocked which slouched to 30 in congested fire. what kind of voodoo magic did you have?

It's super adorable that people are analyzing launch games to death, as if their graphical quality is in any way indicative of the console's overall capabilities. We're going to need way more than a few launch games to get an overall sense of what developers are able to do with each console.

Try to read what a wrote. In substance I said: PC games are poorly optimized. Not PC games are not optimized.

Let me clarify though. What I meant to say: PC games are badly optimized compared to console games.

I feel like that argument only goes so far. The Cell processor in the PS3 is a pretty singular piece of hardware and I bet the documentation on it was severely lacking, at least for non Japanese developers. It took a long time for people to understand the system architecture, because it was problematically complex and unique. Neither of these new machines should have this problem, so the learning curve should be way smaller and plateau way sooner.

I was playing on high without AA, it didn't run amazingly, about 30 FPS. (at 1920x1200)

Crysis felt weird, because it felt so smooth even at 30. I don't know how that worked. Now I aim for 60 on everything but for how good Crysis looked at the time I was happy that it ran even remotely smoothly to be honest.

Though, hey! Compared to the Xbox One that 8800GTX was a fucking beast.

God, that looks awful. I must admit I'm not that sensitive to resolution differences and while I hate frame rate drops, gaming on a crappy laptop for years has me pretty used to a choppy frame rate...but bad textures or texture pop-in is really the god damn worst. It's the one thing I was hoping never to see on new consoles.

This is both true and not true, while it's amazing stuff like GTA V came out on the 360, you'd be surprised how playable games are on old PC hardware so long as you're okay with 720P and 30 FPS + medium settings. You can get very similar results (often better) to current generation console games on pretty damn old PC hardware if you drop the res and settings a bit.

But yeah, it is pretty great what they can do. If the PS4 is putting stuff out like Killzone and BF4 at launch I'm pretty excited to see how much they can squeeze out of that thing.

It never got any better than Perfect Dark so this is totally valid. Bro.

I kinda don't understand how people don't understand this.

Developers on consoles will always pick the lower resolution or the lower frame rate because they can alwaysput that horsepower towards making the textures sharper or the visuals pop more. They want that screenshot as pretty as possible and they're willing to bet the majority of people don't care what the resolution actually is as long as their TV says 1080p.

The funniest part is, the resolution/frame rate ''controversy'' doesn't matter to the people who make or break a console. It also tells us nothing aside from PS4 is more powerfull than xbox one. It may be disapointing that the first games on a brand new machine have a few technical problems but that's nothing new or unexpected. Even if we're 8 years from the last console launch, the same rules apply.

So, why is this a controversy again?

I think Jim Sterling covered this about as well as anyone could in his latest Jimquisition.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/8423-Children-of-the-Resolution

Meh launch games. Hopefully games that come out later get their shit together.

Perfect Dark was terrible in every way, not just because it was a launch game. Call of Duty 2 and Condemned were pretty damn impressive at the time, but that was 8 years ago at 720P. It's silly that we are still at that resolution now on the successor, that is my issue here for the 500 bones.

That makes sense. I still get by with 1080p and just 2 x AA on everything I play now. My eyes aren't sensitive enough to tell at 4 x AA at 1080.

I don't think that's a particularly valid excuse when it's 8 years on and you're still not capable of resolutions above 720P. That is why it's so disappointing.

It's nothing to do with me not understanding something. I'm fully aware of that practice on the current generation, I can accept 1080P/30 on launch, but 720P/30? Come on!

Okay? Don't buy this game?

There are games at 1080p on Xbox One (the aforementioned 2K14) so lets so where it goes from here. Games got way better looking as the last gen went on, why wouldn't they here?

Launch title excuse or not, to me, letting one of your exclusives come out of the gate running this badly really doesn't help sell the system.

As it has been said a basketball game is obviously quite different to anything else, or most others would be at 1080 too most likely, I guess. They will get better, but still, to say this is not worrying and profoundly disappointing is just a lie. It makes me wonder how big the gap will actually get between the two systems if this is happening at launch.

I guess I was hoping they would be much closer than this.

Didn't the article also say that they just recorded the footage at a London event where it was probably a much older build?

I am not profoundly disappointed. This is not a lie. It's a launch of a video game console. Lets see where it is in the future.

It's not just a launch thing that makes it bad, it's bad because it is considerably worse than the cheaper, competing console. That's just embarrassing.

Yeah, no difference between an open world game containing between 1 and 300 people on screen at the same time, and a sports game which has about 15 people on screen at all times and a mostly static camera.

What's an old PC though? 3-4 years old video card and processor? How much did you pay for all those parts+ the case and the motherboard 3-4 years ago?

The xbox 360 held on for about 6 years for a price of 500$ at launch before its age really started to show with BF3. It held on for 7 years if you ignore BF3 and start to count from AC3 and Farcry 3. Despite all that it remained relevant for nearly 8 years with stuff like bioshock infinite and GTA 5 running perfectly fine on its ancient hardware. When it finally dies (in my mind anyway) next year with the release of dark souls 2 it will be more than 8 years old.

You know what an 8 year old PC is good for? Very slow word processing and internet browsing. But it's most likely not even good enough for that and you should probably shoot it in the back of the case out of mercy.

But, the ball physics! Your 100+ interactive and physic based environment objects have nothing on the physics of a single basketball. It has spinning animations!

@sooty: I know resolution has numbers attached so it's easy to look at at get all pissy but it's pretty far down in the list of what makes a game look good. You can get all uppity when you look at screenshots but if you're sitting more than a few feet away from your tv you can barely notice a difference between 720p and 1080p while the game is actually playing. You're acting like nothing else has changed in the last years and they aren't pushing the systems in different ways. If the decision to is add more stuff or raise the resolution I'll take more stuff every time.

Your comparison to pc gaming is also ridiculous. If people care enough about the p's and will spend $1000 to make sure they have their p's then they'll buy a pc. Most people don't want to spend $500 on a console. I doubt you could even build an entire pc for $500 that would be capable of even running some of the multiplatform games coming out.

Dead Rising is also a ridiculous game to get all out if shape over about how it runs. If you know what's required on he programming end you deal with some of the performance hitches just like you put up with bugs in an Elder Scrolls game. The Digital Foundry videos still made the game look great and I saw nothing that looked unplayable.

Yeah, I just can't wait to see what happens in 5 years. Hopefully something else comes out other than Second Son for that PS4, cause it looks like I'd still rather play TItanfall and Watchdogs on my PC.

Yeah there is nothing technically impressive about 2K blending all of its animations on the fly with incredible detail, facial expressions, a 3D crowd and arena, all the lighting and reflections. It's easy to do. 2K only blows Madden out of the water in all areas in a sport that's way harder to render. With a whole bunch of camera angles you can select. And it makes LIVE look last gen. It's easy to do! Not impressive at all.

Xbox's feature set goes beyond games and has broad appeal. 5 friends of mine who are more casual are all getting Xbox because it does a whole bunch of other things in addition to games and they don't give a fuck or know about the resolution.

Xbox is fine.

Don't buy one dude. That's cool. I don't know what this is all about.

@artisanbreads: I think people are saying that it would have been better for the games if the Xbox One launch would have been delayed by a few months. Dead Rising is not the only game that suffers problem or missing features and most of them could be avoided by delay. Sony may have lesser exclusive titles but they look all better and seem to not suffer from games rushing out of the door. There was one game which even was delayed for the sake of more content and quality.

This game just screams rushed. Stuff like this here is not even a power issue

I think one thing that the Cryengine games do, as well as the idTech engines, and unlike the Unreal Engine games, is to do the user input separetely from the rendering. Unreal Engine games start feeling really unresponsive when the framerate drops as it reads input on every frame refresh, but not Id and Crytech games, where it still feels very responsive control wise, but doesn't update what happens on the screen as often.

@darji said:

@artisanbreads: I think people are saying that it would have been better for the games if the Xbox One launch would have been delayed by a few months. Dead Rising is not the only game that suffers problem or missing features and most of them could be avoided by delay. Sony may have lesser exclusive titles but they look all better and seem to not suffer from games rushing out of the door. There was one game which even was delayed for the sake of more content and quality.

This game just screams rushed. Stuff like this here is no even a power issue

I totally agree this game could use more time, which makes it bizarre to take a sky is falling approach on this system. This game obviously could just use more time.

It looks like a giant spectre from Doom in that screenshot.

Here is the problem. People are complaining about the resolution and frame rate now on XB1, what happens next year or so when this statement becomes reality, "1080p60fps PS4, 720p30fps XB1." I keep hearing that Microsoft hasn't fully updated the SDK but it's not like Sony is going to stand pat with their console either.

I try not to pay attention to things like resolution and frame rates too much unless I feel they are directly infringing on the gameplay experience. Does the game look good? Yes? No? Do reviews say whether the game runs like absolute garbage to the point where it's unplayable? Yes? No? These are the questions I care about. I think Dead Rising 3 looks decent. I think some games from the previous generation (not even looking at PC games, console games) look better on a technical level. I think Second Son looks better than anything else I've seen on either console so far and better than most things on PC as well. So should I be expected to think that the next generation is lost because of one or two or ten games at launch that are maybe under performing slightly?

I don't think OP is necessarily angry, I can speak for myself: sure I'm not, more like indifferent. Thou I have ask myself a relevant questions such:

-Having a nice PC, Do I need to trow 500 in a redundant already dated (before launch) console right now ?

No, not really.

Gears of War 2 looked better than Kameo,

God of War 3 looked better than Genji: Days of the Blade

@geirr: GOW > GOW

I personally think the frame rate is a real bummer, all this shit about 720p 1080p is all kind of nonsense in my opinion, resolution is not the be all and end all.

Guys don't worry, NBA 2k14 runs really well and looks really good. This launch is going to be AWESOME!!!!

It's a launch title people, calm the fuck down and go look at Gun on 360 at launch. We'll be okay. Also, why does everyone Herald gta 5 as the greatest looking game ever? The massive aliasing, poor texture resolution and shitty draw distance (of higher quality), and it's Semi playable frametate of 22-28fps.it looks good, but not that good. We need to be comparing to games like The Last of Us, that really are the gems of the generation, that is a game that you could have told me was on next gen and I would have believed it. Anyway, it's not a shock that xb1 is underperformed anyway, it's going to be broken as fuck at launch, hence all the mega late embargoes on the games, and absolute 0 online footage we've seen.

I'm not too fond of the arguments of "look at 360 launch games vs. current 360 games". Diminishing returns people.

@pyrodactyl said:

And your proof is? Nvidia/AMD driver updates boosting games each release is mine.

We will go from there? People who care about that will go PS4.

Xbox games always looked better than the PS2 versions so I played them there. It'll be that type of situation. And like that situation, maybe Xbox One will be the more successful system anyways as the less powerful system. Or maybe it will not be. We will have to see.

One thing is for sure: people freaking out about it right now is silly. Right now CoD has a better resolution on PS4, but according to people who have seen both, runs better on Xbox. These are the early, early days.

@gnomeonfire: it's true that we'll be hitting up some diminishing returns, my argument isn't so much the graphical improvement, as much as it is the frames rate and resolutions (or at least AA) that we expect