4K Resolution FFXI And PS4

I feel your pain, and as a dev it pisses me off too.. and the irony is that the whole duration of the game's dev we're building it on PCs...

But what's happening is that most of the time, a console game is made at a studio and the PC port (not even going to try calling it "version") is offloaded to a outsourcing firm / studio / company... The people actually making the game do very little for a pc version (if its not a pc main sku game .. so basically any console game really..) Studio just pay a service to get the console game ported. and a lot of times its happening in parallel with the game's console version (so sometimes some bugs slip through the PC version more, and its more sensible due do a much more varying hardware).

As a dev, I hate that my studio does that, and I think its a shitty thing to do. BUT, I understand the higher ups PoV too. The amount of money you get on a PC version barely pays for the service of porting you paid to get it done.. (which is cheaper than doing it in house) and so... there is very little incentive for a company to do those things differently... Unless you are valve / blizzard and PC gaming is your main thing.

Why not just develop a real emulation tool, sell it to PC owners as a "downloadable console" and let PC gamers be part of the console market? You could even design in DRM if that's the concern. A true emulator would let them define their hardware, tweak the settings, and nearly eliminate the need for PC ports at all.

Why not just develop a real emulation tool, sell it to PC owners as a "downloadable console" and let PC gamers be part of the console market? You could even design in DRM if that's the concern. A true emulator would let them define their hardware, tweak the settings, and nearly eliminate the need for PC ports at all.

That exists already. It's called "Direct X"...

Why not just develop a real emulation tool, sell it to PC owners as a "downloadable console" and let PC gamers be part of the console market? You could even design in DRM if that's the concern. A true emulator would let them define their hardware, tweak the settings, and nearly eliminate the need for PC ports at all.

lolwat.

That's like saying a car door is like a school bus emulator.

I don't see any purpose of playing ffxi beyond 1080p unless you got a huge tv that makes everything looks horrible when trying to upscale everything in order to compensate the lack of native anti-alias.

Having consoles emulated on a PC would be an insane amount of resources. Considering the power it takes to even accurately emulate a SNES.

It's a pipe dream.

Having consoles emulated on a PC would be an insane amount of resources. Considering the power it takes to even accurately emulate a SNES.

It's a pipe dream.

lolwat.

That's like saying a car door is like a school bus emulator.

That's actually a misrepresentation. The resource problem of emulation has to do with an imperfect representation of the software versions of the hardware. People code things that work "well enough." With a more accurate representation(or, in the case of this hypothetical official emulator, a completely perfect representation) that problem would go away.

Current consoles run on about half as many resources as my own PC. It is completely feasible.

If the emulators are designed by the company that makes the console and their existence is considered when designing the console itself, that would change a lot. Most of the headache with emulating consoles is the trickery that needs to be done with software to mimic decidedly un-PC like console architecture. This generation of consoles will be much more resource friendly for emulation, whereas the previous generation like PS3 are incredibly difficult.

It also doesn't help that most emulators are being made by college students in their free time and not by teams of professional programmer with access to the actual hardware and source code.

Having consoles emulated on a PC would be an insane amount of resources. Considering the power it takes to even accurately emulate a SNES.

It's a pipe dream.

I meant in the sense of achieving portability and functionality.

You don't really need to emulate a PC inside another PC unless you want to segregate what the stuff running on "one of the PCs" see. That would make it a Virtual Machine, no?

Basically that Direct X gives a standard interface, it doesn't matter if you're running windows or a Microsoft console, the game will run mostly the same, no?

Maybe not the best way to say what I wanted to. I admit.

I'm not a big fan of emulation, too. Inaccuracies pile up everywhere and make for weird stuff all the time on the games you emulate.

I expect a high stadard of 1080p 60 fps, but I'll never demand a video game stay at 4k 60 fps lol. would rather they push the graphics higher quality at 1080p

I expect a high stadard of 1080p 60 fps

I used to be, but today's console are basically optimized PC. They runs the same graphics pipelines. There is still some console specific things going on because company fight over market shares and wanna keep their edge and stuff. But ultimately there is basically only one reason left why we sill have consoles, there is still demand for a small sized focused PC that requires only hardware updates every 7 or 8ish years without the hassle of dealing with complicated OS.

Think of it this way, if on your PC you had Steam, and a Steam-like xbox live, and a Steam-Like PSN and you would find your PS exclusive on the PSN Steam-like thing.. The end result is the same... The more console like Steam gets, and the easier small steam box pc can be built / distributed... the more console are going to go extinct.

We're close to this point. We'll see a PS5 and maaaaybe a PS6... But I doubt we'll have consoles still for a PS7 to ever come out. at that point, I'm pretty sure it'll just be a mode / drm system "a la steam" you can run on any computer.

True emulators are actually virtualizations. The name is a bit of a misnomer. Think of DirectX as emulation and an emulator as virtualization if you're thinking in PC terms.

Still, most of the issues with inaccuracy in emulators is their amateur nature. Lots of estimating, tweaking, optimizing, and compromises. Truly virtualizing a console is a pretty precise process, you have to consider bit rates through the virtual cores and meter that through logical and physical cores at exacting rates, virtualizing GPU's is another really tricky part of it. A professional development team would be able to build those structures with near perfect accuracy because they just flat out have more resources and time.

I like to think consoles will slowly get closer and closer to stable 1080p 60 fps, and then I'll be content and always keep it there instead of going to 4k 30 or 60

Honestly, they're several generations away from that standard as long as general expectations within the industry rely on "pretty" things, more so than how quickly their game is rendered, or how refined their image is.

Interesting though that neither SONY nor Microsoft were able to achieve decent backwards compatibility on the previous generation even with full understanding of how their hardware worked. To ahcieve it the PS3 needed to have half of a PS2 inside (the first model units had, CPU, CPU RDRAM and graphics chips of a PS2 in them). XBOX360 backwards compatibility was as wonky as you would expect an "amateur" emulator can be in the middle of it's development cycle...

So even professionals can be left scratching their heads on this matter, I suppose...

And the PS2 worked saem way.. The Ps2 backward compatibility was accomplished through the inclusion of the original PlayStation's CPU which also serves as the PS2's I/O processor.

Even in today's market on a ps4 1080p @ 60fps is almost a dream... You can do twice as much graphically intensive things running at 30... And when you sacrifice graphics for 60fps... the first thing that happens is you get slapped in the face with MGS5(30fps) looks soo good!? why does you game not look as good? Until Dawn (30 fps, highly tailored environments no free camera control) looks really good!! Why does your game not look as good? And all you got to defend yourself is "Well we run in 60fps" welp... Reviews don't care because that doesn't show on screenshots. Marketing doesn't care cause that doesn't show on the back of the box.

Funny enough, it boils down to PC master race vs Casual Console Plebians if you wanna put it in 4chan terms.

I like to think consoles will slowly get closer and closer to stable 1080p 60 fps, and then I'll be content and always keep it there instead of going to 4k 30 or 60

Further testament to how 30 fps is actually sometimes the best route to a much higher quality game. I believe what ya said about the human eye sometimes, depending on the individual, being able to see beyond 60 fps yet looking at MGS5 in all its glory. How many are complaining?

For consoles, sure. You're always gonna get the biggest bang for your buck keeping resolution and framerate consistently on the lower echelons, because for the most part, consumers are generally indifferent about those two parameters. In exchange, you can squeeze out significantly more graphical nuances and details and overall a much more visually appealing game.

But if you ever want to go the route of no compromises (outside publishers releasing console shitty ports), you should consider PC gaming.