What's the difference in functionality from a setting like 'Low' or 'Medium'? Can't you use that as a baseline to scale up or down from?
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It is time for developers to finally provide "PS4/Xbox" graphical presets in PC versions of their games
- Thread starter Paul
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What's the difference in functionality from a setting like 'Low' or 'Medium'? Can't you use that as a baseline to scale up or down from?
I would still prefer a setting developed by those who created the game, in accordance with their vision of the product, than an automated system.
As for low, medium, high - not once did I use them, because the best option is usually a combination: some things low, some medium, some high. And this is how consoles are set, btw - they are not "everything on medium". If the developers actually fine-tuned low/medium/high settings instead of (in most cases) just offering them as a quick way to set everything at a certain level, then sure, maybe I'd consider it.
Why not have both? It's not like anyone wanting this is asking for games to have less options in any way - and yet people are somehow against it.
The lowest enthusiastic response in this thread should be "I don't care about it, but sure, if you want it, you should have it" - not people acting like this request is some sort of insult to PC gaming.
I don't want to gatekeep, but I don't care for this idea. I feel that it would only cause more "lazy devs" complaints from specific crowds who feel that their experience is suddenly lessened when they can barely go above console settings despite their gpu/cpu being utter shit.
A lot of responses in this thread are so bizzare. Like it or not console is the baseline for most games and it would be nice to have those (attainable) options as a default template instead of having to wait for DF to do it. I guess they're foolish too! Since they want it.
I will agree that a lot of the responses are bizarre but for very different reasons. Do people really think that console settings represent the developer's true vision for their game? Do they think that any developer thinks "sub-30 fps and low settings are my vision for this game"? Seriously?
As explained many times already, the settings used by a console game are chosen based on that specific hardware's strong and weak points. Using the same settings on hardware with different specifications makes exactly zero sense because it's guaranteed that you either won't be using your hardware to its full potential of needlessly bottlenecking it. In both cases you'll be having a sub-optimal experience.
As for why Digital Foundry asked for such presets, it was explained in a very clear manner by Richard. It's so that people won't jump to conclusions and scream that a game is unoptimized because they don't understand basic facts about graphics technology.
Out of all the weird replies this one unlocked an achievement.
Your point doesn't mean the OP's suggestion can't work for past, present and future games.
you can't pretend that the vast majority of people are going to play the game on console, and that's how the game will look to lots of people. Having that as a baseline (the entire point of the request) to work off of would be an improvement to some over vague "low/medium" settings.
Combined with the "PC gaming is about spending hours tinkering with settings!" sentiment, the reaction to such a simple and harmless request is indeed bizzare.
i'd also like to not break anyones hearts but yes the console version has a lot more thought put into the settings by the devs.
This. Why the push back? It's just another option. I have a high end pc also and would love more presets. Doesn't really hurt the pc experience
According to Steam Hardware Video Card Survey, the top three GPUs which make up around a third of the users do not fit into the category of Xbox One X graphics profile.
How will having a single option help those with those cards help them run the game at optimized settings? (edit: to make them run at the leading console profile?)
So let's say we have a game out on PS4, PS4 pro, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox One X, Xbox One Scarlett the dev is supposed to list all the configurations that match each of these systems for the pc version? And I'm the weird one?
What was weird was your previous assertion that they can't bother with presets because a new console is around the corner and left it at that. This is a perfectly fine argument. What you said before was nonsense.
This would be handy if the presets also contained whatever weird/custom work-around consoles use. For example, sometimes you can crank up draw distance and still get blatant pop-in on PC that doesn't exist in the same way on a PS4 version. Using these custom profiles while cranking up resolution would make a happy medium.
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This is really what grinds my gears. I feel like I am banging my head against console gamers here who do not want PC versions to feature optional extra preset for..reasons. I am not asking for less options, but for more. Why the fuck is anyone against this.
No and I never claimed that. OF COURSE the console settings are a compromise done for the hardware. So what? Why wouldn't it be useful to have also on PC where I could tweak it further? Just as an extra option? FFS.
IT WOULD BE JUST AN EXTRA OPTION.
IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE USEFUL FOR EVERY SINGLE PC CONFIG.
JUST LIKE THE CURRENT ULTRA/LOW/HIGH PRESET IS NOT USEFUL FOR EVERY PC CONFIG.
Hope that clears it up.
(also, Xbone X has 6 TFLOP GPU, which is something fairly close to GTX 1060 and 1070, which are used by a LOT of people, but that's besides the point)
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This is delusional. Especially considering that there are games like RDR2 which have some settings on lower than you can get on PC..
Ssme settings ie shadows, textures effects and different outputs ie resolution and fps. I think its pretty intuitive what he means.
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Funny, it's the exact opposite for me. I'm having way more fun tweaking settings than actually playing the games, I can spend many hours doing that. Maybe I'm the only one, idk? If I really want to play a game, I usually play it on my Switch lol.
BTW, I fully support the idea of having console settings. It would have been super useful on my last laptop, which was roughly on par with a Xbox One.
It's like asking if a PS4 can have a "Nintendo Switch" preset, doesn't much sense. Shoehorning an arbitrary bunch of settings optimised for something else onto a game meant to run to on an infinite combination of hardware doesn't add value outside of the mentality "I just want console graphics even if it's poorly using my system".
Not entirely related to your point, but hearing that there are settings on console that are "lower than low" is frustrating. Future-proofing is fine, but having ways to make the game more playable on low-end hardware is even more-so, and it's really annoying that even "good" PC games and ports typically don't put the effort in there. FFXV comes to mind.
Though thankfully, that doesn't seem to be too big a problem with Read Dead 2.
Sounds good to me.
Give me your typical Low/Medium/High, and give me PS4/PS5 settings as well. Nothing wrong with options.
Give me your typical Low/Medium/High, and give me PS4/PS5 settings as well. Nothing wrong with options.
I think it's a little silly, when you could just go with the low, medium, high presets (no idea why you specifically need it to have the exact same settings as a console), but developers could sort this out by making the "high" option the same as consoles (though this is probably a worse option, since you can make adjustments that could potentially have your game looking better and running better than console depending on what settings you personally prioritize).
Personally I just go with whatever Nvidia sets my games to or the automated settings and then adjust a few things manually from there if the perfomance ain't good enough for me.
Personally I just go with whatever Nvidia sets my games to or the automated settings and then adjust a few things manually from there if the perfomance ain't good enough for me.
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This only makes sense if you're thinking about your PC performance in relation to console performance, which doesn't really make sense for most people because most PCs have hardware very different from console hardware spec-wise. Just picking the console settings and staying there is either going to stress your system out or leave a lot of its potential power unused.
On top of the tools already available (GeForce optimization, presets, etc.), maybe another good option would be to tell a game what resolution and framerate you want to maintain as a minimum, so it can help you maintain that minimum when tweaking settings.
On top of the tools already available (GeForce optimization, presets, etc.), maybe another good option would be to tell a game what resolution and framerate you want to maintain as a minimum, so it can help you maintain that minimum when tweaking settings.
Why not have more options? It's not 100% necessary, but it would be nice to have as an option for comparison.
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No, it's not like that at all. Obviously on closed system you expect developers to find the best combination of settings for their desired target framerate (although I welcome when they give me extra options as well).
On PC this would simply be an extra preset to use as a baseline for those who want to use it and tweak further from there.
I do not necessarily want "console graphics". I just want the OPTION of having console graphics and seeing how my machine runs the game at it, and then tweaking it further as possible by my hardware.
I agree. As I said in the RDR2 performance thread, they should have something like "console low" and "console high" as presets.
Consoles are tuned with a variety of settings that strike a good balance between image quality and performance.
PC presets tend to put all settings on low/medium/high even though those settings may not be balanced at all in terms of performance cost or image quality.
I think many people would also be happier picking a console preset and knowing their experience is at least on-par with the console, but likely at a higher frame rate, rather than picking something which may be lower quality than console just to get the frame rate higher.
Presets on PC really need a lot of work too. With rare exceptions, texture quality has almost no impact on game performance unless you exceed the amount of available VRAM.
Therefore texture quality should be set based on VRAM and not included in the performance presets at all.
I think a lot of people would be far less resistant to using a lower preset if texture quality remained high. That's going to be the most noticeable thing for most people.
The same applies for settings which are user preference more than they are a performance setting; e.g. chromatic aberration and motion blur.
The quality of those effects may be included in presets, but enabling/disabling them should not.
I've seen many presets disabling post-process anti-aliasing too.
While the very lowest-end systems may need to disable post-process AA, the cost is so minimal compared to the difference it makes to image quality that it should be prioritized over nearly everything else.
Consoles are tuned with a variety of settings that strike a good balance between image quality and performance.
PC presets tend to put all settings on low/medium/high even though those settings may not be balanced at all in terms of performance cost or image quality.
I think many people would also be happier picking a console preset and knowing their experience is at least on-par with the console, but likely at a higher frame rate, rather than picking something which may be lower quality than console just to get the frame rate higher.
Presets on PC really need a lot of work too. With rare exceptions, texture quality has almost no impact on game performance unless you exceed the amount of available VRAM.
Therefore texture quality should be set based on VRAM and not included in the performance presets at all.
I think a lot of people would be far less resistant to using a lower preset if texture quality remained high. That's going to be the most noticeable thing for most people.
The same applies for settings which are user preference more than they are a performance setting; e.g. chromatic aberration and motion blur.
The quality of those effects may be included in presets, but enabling/disabling them should not.
I've seen many presets disabling post-process anti-aliasing too.
While the very lowest-end systems may need to disable post-process AA, the cost is so minimal compared to the difference it makes to image quality that it should be prioritized over nearly everything else.
I'm not talking about you Paul, you said no such thing. It's not the option itself that is the issue here. I understand why you want it and in the particular case of RDR2 it would have saved us a frankly embarrassing thread in which people with little to no grasp of technology decided that RDR2 is such a bad port that it's a reason to hate PC gaming. So, I get it, I really do.
However, I strongly feel that the solution to people throwing uninformed opinions around and making dumb judgements without any facts to back them up is to educate them on this really basic stuff. Read through this thread and you'll see for yourself that there are multiple people who think that console settings are the perfect balance between quality and performance and not the compromise that developers settled on based on the hardware they had to run the game on. People genuinely do not understand basic concepts and that is a very big problem.
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Great post - your observation that PC presets in general need lot of work is spot on.
Fair enough, I agree on that.
In the classic days of gaming you picked the presets and the framerate would go and up down (with maxing at a cap because of vsync or a frame limiter). You can still enjoy this tweaking and optimisation on the PC.
The trend in console gaming however is to make much of this dynamic (resolution etc) in order to achieve a stable framerate while providing the best possible graphics for each scene. I can't see this working well in the PC space.
The other thing is that developers make a lot of money in the console space, and they aren't going to want to burn bridges with the platform holders by showing that console settings are actually lower than low. They could get around this by renaming the presets to make them sound more positive eg; high (the lowest) -> very high -> ultra -> ultimate -> overkill
The trend in console gaming however is to make much of this dynamic (resolution etc) in order to achieve a stable framerate while providing the best possible graphics for each scene. I can't see this working well in the PC space.
The other thing is that developers make a lot of money in the console space, and they aren't going to want to burn bridges with the platform holders by showing that console settings are actually lower than low. They could get around this by renaming the presets to make them sound more positive eg; high (the lowest) -> very high -> ultra -> ultimate -> overkill
Yeah. If console settings are carefully thought to give the best looking game for the least performance impact, and that almost always involves a mixture of low, medium, high and even other tiers, then why do they release a pc game recommending "just leave everything on medium" or something like that. Can't they help the users who usually don't know the cost benefit of most settings and therefore say the PC version is shit because they couldn't run with everything on ultra?
More options is always better, but this particular option just doesn't make much sense especially if you want to use it as a base for further tweaking. If that's the case it's still better to start at medium and increase/decrease based on what performance want and what you're actually getting. From what you're suggesting I don't even know how tweaking it further would even work because a "console" preset would be locked anyway since some of the options might not even exist on PC in the first place. "Console graphics" is just meaningless on PC, what you want really is more thoughtful/intelligent high/balanced/medium presets which some games already have (whether they work as intended is another thing entirely).
The real issue is that most games have visual settings that are either too limited (Metro Exodus/The Outer Worlds) or poorly explained (RDR 2) and a some player's insistence of running everything at ultra. In the ideal world every game would have options as clearly outlined as they are in Gears 5 and Modern Warfare.
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You are looking at this as some kind of rocket science for some reason. I said I am not necessarily looking for 100% identical 1:1, but even as close as possible approximation would be fine. Most multiplatform games actually do already allow getting extremely close to console settings, it just requires the annoying laborious process of tweaking and comparing, or waiting for Digital Foundry. RDR2 with some of its settings being "lower than low" is an outlier and even then, low would be ok approximation.
I simply want to set the game to preset "console" (could be PS4, Xbone, Pro or X, whatever the developers would choose, up to them).
This selects the combination of other subsettings that most closely resembles that console. Then I run the game, see how it runs, and tweak those individual settings further however I want. This would be helpful to me much more than the current existing low/medium etc presets that just put everything on low/medium without telling me anything about how the game will look. Console setting would be more useful baseline.
Why is there a need for this? Just to have easier comparisons? Why?
It would just further show how far above PC gaming is when it comes to performance and we would have on-liners posted in discussions in the form of screenshots showing 235fps on a i11 4080ti rig for $10k.
It would just further show how far above PC gaming is when it comes to performance and we would have on-liners posted in discussions in the form of screenshots showing 235fps on a i11 4080ti rig for $10k.
I think it's a good suggestion. And would perhaps even lower the barrier of entry further for PC gaming.
The biggest downside I see is console gamers are going to torch devs when they see how many settings are on low. Probably a headache devs don't want. Between benchmarks and performance guides it's not that hard to tweak a PC game nowadays but this could be be a baseline people can start with if they want. I wouldn't use it but others want to do so I don't see the issue.
This is a much better idea, when coupled with a self benchmark of the game during first boot and when hardware changes are detected, adjustments based on the hierarchy of options defined by the developers.
Why limit again to some standard preset values called Xbox or PS4, then start messing with the settings from another baseline.
Also mentioning this again that developers already define graphics profiles with the 'autodetect' option and tools like Geforce Experience existing to make life a bit easier for those using Nvidia cards.
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