Seventh-gen console optimization

How the fuck did developers get games running so well on seventh-gen consoles? The PS3 had 256 megabytes of RAM and VRAM along with that weird processor, while the Xbox 360 had 512 megabytes of RAM. Even the shittiest laptops these days have at least several gigabytes of that stuff and still run like crap, yet towards the generation's end we were getting surprisingly high-quality visuals and fairly large game worlds.
Sometimes it feels like all optimization went out the window the moment the eighth generation began despite having a fuckton more hardware resources to work with.

It's almost as though they had limitations but had the benefit of working with specialized hardware

larger companies bought up the smaller companies to the point where competition is none existent but their running costs are so inflated that they have to make a certain amount a year otherwise they collapse and bring down the whole economy with them. this is why we see shit turn over rates for script monkeys with college drop out replacing them and developers buying licenses for development tools rather then making their own

It would be much easier to bring whatever techniques they use for low-RAM environments much different from optimizations for specialized processor/GPU architectures over to the next generation and PC games, but vidya hardware requirements have skyrocketed lately without a similar increase in visual quality.

Its not hard.

EDF and Dragon's Dogma disagree.

They didn't.

Ita merely been a decase and we're already seeing 7th Gen nostalgia glasses bullshit

I'm not saying they were good games, just the fact that shit like GTA V ran on seventh-gen consoles at all is impressive even if they didn't run spectacularly.

Felt more like walking to me

DD doesn't have anything special for graphics and EDF can really start to chug when there's lots of bugs and airstrikes going off.

Low draw distance
Fog in distance
Low resolution textures
Static DOF to blur distance
Novel particle/shader effects to obscure limited quality

Almost everything I've listed can be seen in OP gif.
Memory is also more important for textures, so that automatically makes it cheaper to obscure flaws with effects that aren't dependent on textures.

...

Considering the hardware limitations, I'm surprised they even had 3D games that ran at 1080p 60fps.

...

Have you ever touched a ps3/360?
You're lucky if you can see past dick range.
They didn't.

One of the most common optimization techniques of 7th gen games is that shadows only render in a certain radius around the player. It's not that noticeable in games with corridor level design but you start noticing it in more spacious levels. LODs range are usually very low as well and when it comes to a lot of inexperienced Japanese devs/Bethesda, they just completely cull objects instead of using low detail LODs. A lot of the crossgen games like The Evil Within also had lazy super low distance LODs for the 7th gen versions because the devs couldn't be bothered.

If anything the RAM isn't the worst part about 7th gen but the CPU, CELL/Xenon architecture was a fucking piece of shit through and through and it makes shit like 1st gen P4 / Bulldozer look good.

I played Skyrim on PS3. They did not run well.

Fallout 3/NV/Skyrim being broken on PS3 was low RAM related in combination with shitty Bethesda optimization (save bloat). Also

They didn't. 7th gen gave us bloom and blur to hide how muddy everything looked. 7th gen was when developers stopped focusing on texture quality and used post processing to cover everything up.
This was also the generation where 30 fps started becoming the norm, and normalfags were none the wiser to it.

They fucking took out anisotropic filtering to make it run, no way was that impressive.

IF you conveniently forget about how the vast majority of gen 5 was 30fps and a decent chunk among those weren't even hitting that reliably.

N64 hardly even got up to 20FPS, and San Andreas on PS2 doesn't run any better than GTA5 on PS3. People forget these things so easily.

What is OP even talking about? Games struggled to hit 720p for most of the generation and sub 30fps performance was the standard.


Funny thing is it does.

Reminds me of how people forget how Doom was originally capped at 35 FPS.

Capped is the right word

Console optimization is an interesting topic. I remember reading an article from one dev who looked at the techniques used in the N64 era vs PS2/GC, unfortunately I think it's only available on paper.
N64 and PS3 had a similar issue (although obviously vastly different hardware) in that specialized microcode was what made for the huge differences between 1st party and 3rd party releases. (I'm pretending Naughty Dog was 1st party, you know what I mean. They dove into the cell architecture in a truly autistic fashion.)
Most 3rd party N64 games literally just used the sample code provided in the devkit for driving the hardware, whereas Nintendo games had their own staffers who hand-optimized that part of the code.
These days it really only makes sense to try to optimize by cutting features compared to the PC version, of course, since the architecture is the same but gimped.

I happen to have a consoletard brother and i played gta 5 on a ps3. They might aswell say the game has a 15fps lock because that's the frame rate it runs at and doesn't get out of unless it's going lower. San Andreas on ps2 at least reaches the 25fps cap sometimes.