Balance of performance. Need a better thread title.

[dumpster]

Inspired by comments in the Xbox Series Thread and having given this a great deal of thought when I should have been working, I have come to a conclusion which needs explanation. My conclusion is as follows.  The 360 had the best balance of performance.  What fresh shit is this, you may well ask.  Well hear me out 

 

I have an Xbox Series X and before I bought it I was under the impression that Xbox Series X and PS5 were the absolute bollocks, unbelievable power monsters capable of the best performance.  Only high end PC graphics cards could do better. Then you take a good demonstration piece like Forza and it has a performance mode and a quality mode.  Surely at this stage in the world we should have the latest consoles giving us "best" mode as a matter of course.  The idea that you take your amazing game and drop the frame rate to accommodate better graphics seems silly 

 

So I started thinking about how the screen drives the demand for performance.  You stick a PS1/Saturn  games console on a CRT screen and you can see it's great but obviously the graphics could be better.  Then the Dreamcast comes along and with a VGA box the screen colour just pops.  Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio , they looked amazing at the time.  Then 720p and 1080p came along and you needed a more powerful console to do the graphics you already had but in HD.  Burnout Revenge played with beautiful colourful HD graphics in HD.  

 

Today, it feels to me like we have far more computing power at our disposal but the screens are 4K, maybe 8K.  We have ray tracing and DLSS and 120Fps and once again the consoles are not up to the job.  They're almost there but it seems you're still turning one dial down in order to turn up the other.  

 

Consoles were always improving but the 360 nailed it years ago. Games looked great and we're 60fps, then newer TV tech came along and the consoles struggled to cope.  Another gen (PS4 and Xbox One) came along then another (PS5 and Series) and we never got back to what we already had.

 

As I scroll through the list of games on my Series X I see just how many games I have that are 360.  And the majority are beautiful looking and 60fps.  The performance of the console was greater than the performance of the TV and Gears of War etc look fantastic.  But today, the consoles seem underpowered for what they are being asked to do because we want all the bells as whistles.  It just seems incredible to me that Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, Forza 5 etc all run at 30fps where so many racers were 60fs on 360. And now, when I play Need For Speed Unbounded it looks great, it's 60fps...  But seems not that much better than a 360 game on a decent TV. 

 

 

Does HI Fi Rush really look especially better than Jet Set Radio Future? Like 2 generations of console and 4 times higher resolution telly better?

 

Eh, I do ramble on.

[Gabe]

Are you the nemesis of @RubberJohnny, given his distaste of nostalgia?

 

<insert appropriate emoji here>

[Down by Law]

It's funny most of the PS360 games I played towards the end of their life ran like total shit. Sub 20fps Far Cry 3 and GTA 5 were like torture, that gen definitely went on a year or two too long. 60fps definitely wasn't common outside of CoD, in fact when I had a job interview with Bethesda's marketing team I mentioned about Rage being a rare example of a 60fps shooter on consoles and that comment alone got me the job. 

 

[Fry Crayola]

3 hours ago, dumpster said:

Consoles were always improving but the 360 nailed it years ago. Games looked great and were 60fps

 

Citation needed. Loads of 360 games ran at 30 fps or even less. 

[K]

NFS: Hot Pursuit and Forza 5 both run at 60fps on Series X. I haven’t done a scientific study, but it feels like more driving games have 60fps modes this gen; in the 360 era, games like Driver: SF and Forza were the outliers for running at 60fp, whereas most games now have a choice of graphics or performance modes. 

[Majora]

Yeah what is this nostalgia for the frame rates of 360/PS3 games? Those consoles struggled like hell in the last few years of their life. Screen tearing and sub 30 frame rates on loads of games.

[Nick R]

4 hours ago, dumpster said:

As I scroll through the list of games on my Series X I see just how many games I have that are 360.  And the majority are beautiful looking and 60fps.

 

In many cases, isn't that just because the backwards compatibility on One X/Series S/Series X enhances them to 60fps? 

[Sarlaccfood]

Haha yeah that’s the backward compat boost doing it’s magic clearly. 

 

PS360 era basically invented 30fps.
 

Before that we had 60hz PS2/XB/Dreamcast/GameCube babay!

 

 

 

[dumpster]

Some good points there and yes, maybe it's nostalgia, maybe I'm lucky in the choice of 360 games I have.  Perhaps the balance of power was 60hz games on CRT TVs.  It feels to me that if TVs had remained as 1080p and 4K never happened, the standard of graphics, lighting, ray tracing would be better than we have now.  I type that and realise I don't agree with myself,  but Devs are creating games for 4K and then you have a performance mode that gives you 60fps on a 1080p screen. It tells me that, for example, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit in performance mode is how the game was always meant to be, and when you put it into graphics mode the frame rate drops, which makes it feel like the console isn't up to the task.  As the consoles we have today are capable of wowing us with their capability, 4K tellies add extra pressure to them.  Xbox 360 on a 1080p screen somehow seems to cope better than Series X on a 4K.  

 

But I am rambling.  It's my problem, I'm spending more time on Hard Corps Uprising than anything else at the moment.

[Escape]

The 360 era saw the end of CRTs, taking low motion blur and superior resolution-handling with them. If modern display tech weren't so rubbish for gaming we could happily use 1440/90 and throw the rest of the hardware at effects. /bugbear

[Thor]

Wait, you thought the 360 games running at 60fps on your Series X also ran at 60fps on your 360 back in the day?  🤣

[Isaac]

9 hours ago, dumpster said:

Some good points there and yes, maybe it's nostalgia, maybe I'm lucky in the choice of 360 games I have.  Perhaps the balance of power was 60hz games on CRT TVs.  It feels to me that if TVs had remained as 1080p and 4K never happened, the standard of graphics, lighting, ray tracing would be better than we have now.  I type that and realise I don't agree with myself,  but Devs are creating games for 4K and then you have a performance mode that gives you 60fps on a 1080p screen. It tells me that, for example, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit in performance mode is how the game was always meant to be, and when you put it into graphics mode the frame rate drops, which makes it feel like the console isn't up to the task.  As the consoles we have today are capable of wowing us with their capability, 4K tellies add extra pressure to them.  Xbox 360 on a 1080p screen somehow seems to cope better than Series X on a 4K.  

 

But I am rambling.  It's my problem, I'm spending more time on Hard Corps Uprising than anything else at the moment.

 

Display tech took a massive downgrade from CRT to early LCD, which was the big problem really.

 

Everything since then has been compensating for how badly LCDs handled pixels (we are only finally getting back to how nice CRTs looked with 4K and OLED).

 

The massive downgrade in display was worth it for pretty much everyone though as CRTs were so massive and cumbersome. 

 

Essentially, blame people's desire for flat screen TVs.

[Stanley]

2 minutes ago, Isaac said:

The massive downgrade in display was worth it for pretty much everyone though as CRTs were so massive and cumbersome. 

 

Essentially, blame people's desire for flat screen TVs.

Yeah people will always value convenience over quality, but it’s nice now that TV’s are at a place where we have both. Modern 4K TV’s with high frames, VRR, HDR etc. are a millions miles from the HD tellies of the past. 

[Garwoofoo]

I think there's an element of rose-tinting when it comes to people's memories of CRTs. I remember switching from a pretty much top-of-the line 36" Sony Bravia that needed three people to lift it, to what by today's standards would be a mediocre LCD, and I thought it was a clear upgrade. Suddenly lines were actually straight, text was readable, the edges of the picture weren't cut off any more and there wasn't that subtle but constant flicker that you could never quite get rid of.

 

CRTs are great for actual retro gaming but the 360 and everything newer has been designed for high-resolution, pixel-sharp screens and that's just the way things are.

 

That said, I think this is the first generation where the consoles and the TV technology really complement each other. Most games run at close to native resolution at 60fps or more. VRR is great if you can get it. I'm not fussed about graphics or performance modes, I just stick everything into whatever gives me the highest framerate and get on with things.

[Stanley]

VRR is a godsend. I always favour quality over frame rate because I, perhaps foolishly, believe that’s the creators intended vision for how the game should look. However playing The Last Of Us Part 1 in quality mode can get noticeably choppy at times, turn on VRR and it’s a lot better, not perfect mind but totally worth sacrificing the frame rate for IMO.
 

Obviously having both would be the ideal but short of spending £2500 on a graphics card alone we are not quite there yet. 

[Fargo]

Didn’t Digital Foundry say the opposite? That there stats shown that most games were sub 30fps ?

[Isaac]

1 hour ago, Garwoofoo said:

I think there's an element of rose-tinting when it comes to people's memories of CRTs. I remember switching from a pretty much top-of-the line 36" Sony Bravia that needed three people to lift it, to what by today's standards would be a mediocre LCD, and I thought it was a clear upgrade. Suddenly lines were actually straight, text was readable, the edges of the picture weren't cut off any more and there wasn't that subtle but constant flicker that you could never quite get rid of.

 

But resolution scaling was significantly better on CRTs, there was zero input lag, colour was more accurate, and you had actual blacks (until OLED came along).

 

Early LCDs were amazing in terms of how small they were, but I remember thinking 'hang on, is this how crap my games actually look?!' when I first plugged a console into one, and it wasn't because it was suddenly clearer, it's because LCDs couldn't handle scaling at all (particularly early ones).

 

Ghosting was also a massive issue too, the first LCDs had ghosting that would make a Game Boy look crisp.

[Girth Certificate]

Games are running at 60FPS now because they were all built for the last gen consoles. Once we start getting PS5 / Series X only games they'll be back to the shit framerates we all know and love. eg Forsaken. Hurrah!

[Stanley]

Forespoken a pretty egregious example of it, but that sounds more a case of extremely poor optimisation. Even on high end PC’s it is not a smooth ride. 

[matt0]

360 having higher frame rates on average than the current machines is a wild, wild take.

 

I went from a 360 to a One S that I got on offer around the end of 2018. So four years in to a generation - way past the cross gen period - and the weakest dedicated home console of that generation. The reputation of the base model Xbox One was so bad that I was expecting better graphics but equal, or possibly even worse performance.

 

But no, across the board, when comparing like for like the One S games ran at a higher resolution (though still almost always sub 1080p), higher frame rates (struggling to hit 60fps or locked 30fps compared to the 360 frequently struggling to hit 30fps), obviously better quality graphics. I can see how the generational leap wasn't as much as people were hoping for, but to claim that the 360 was a smoother experience... madness.

 

The Series S (again, the weakest of the new machines) is like night and day. Games I started in 30fps with frame rate drops on the One S are now locked 60fps on the Series S. Which I know is a product of the long cross generation period, but it doesn't necessarily have to change - it just depends on what developers choose to prioritise in the future.

 

There were plenty of sub 30fps in the PS2 era, but also many more games (usually Japanese) that were engineered for a solid 60fps. Going from PS2 era machines to the 360/PS3, there were far less of those games that prioritised 60fps + solid frame rates.

[Girth Certificate]

Quote

it just depends on what developers choose to prioritise in the future.

 

spoilers

 

Spoiler

they prioritised shinies

 

[Stanley]

To be fair this is the first generation we’ve really seen options to prioritise graphics or performance across the board, and some of them are display dependent (VRR 40fps) so I imagine that would continue.

[amc]

I have both a PS3 and 360 (and a Wii) plumbed up in the bedroom. Both with a ton of games on their respective HDDs. I love them, still, but they're a sub par frame-rate, bloomy and tearing mess. Yeah, there are some technically fantastic games but the vast majority suffer problems mostly gone today.

 

Tearing is everywhere on a lot of games.

 

Don't get me wrong, I'll always keep a way to play the Motorstorm series or Ridge Racer 6/7 but the machines were notorious for poor frame-rates, sub HD pixel counts and tearing.