I simply don’t understand how Sony studios extract the visuals they achieve in their games from old hardware. It feels like tech sorcery.
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.
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.
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.
