Graphical settings for console games?

1- Why isn't it available or why devs won't do it?

2- Would you like to have the option? Let's say a game is 1080p 30fps, tone down the stupid foliage and voila, 60fps! Or tune up some settings to go from 60 to 30?

inb4 "but games have already a hard time at 1080p30"

The only setting PS4 needs is self destruct.

Project CARS did it, didn't it?

A) It's not a simple matter of decreasing one thing to increase another. Consoles are stuck with their settings their entire lives, so achieving higher performance on a static platform comes down to programming prowess. Knocking down a few settings here and there won't make the consoles able to render twice as many frames a second like a varying system like a PC.

B) I'd prefer 60 frames, but 30 has been something I've been good with my entire life. If you're at 30, stay there and do it well, like The Order. Nothing on any system looks as good as that because its framerate is steady, its 4X MX(S?)AA phenomenal, and its texture and filtering work top notch. I'd like settings to keep a locked 30, but otherwise, I'm okay without them.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-04-16-project-cars-on-ps4-and-xbox-one-has-pc-like-graphics-settings

Options are arranged into a number of menus, including "Visual FX", "Authenticity", "Field of View" and "Movement". We can tweak post-process features such as bloom, crepuscular rays and screen-space effects (rain/dirt), and tailor the field of view to our liking.

These options tend to have an impact on PC game performance. Unfortunately, Digital Foundry was unable to thoroughly test their impact on the console versions of Project Cars, but we've asked developer Slightly Mad Studios for more information.

No info on how it affects the game.

No why won't more devs do it?

Massive pain in the ass for devs. At the most, expect to fiddle with FoV or post-processing.

No, graphical options makes no sense for console games. The developers should be able to provide the best experience using only one set of hardware.

Why would it be any different than doing it on PC?

..not a programmer but I believe that better performance can be achieved but the question is.. what do you cut out? AC Unity's framerate was TERRIBLE before the updates.. (and it's still pretty bad). But had the devs shrunk the city a bit and excluded a few NPC's & Buildings.. the FPS would've fared much better. but again.. I'm no programmer. :P

No.

@MonsieurX: It's static hardware.

Waste of time.

Don't graphical settings on consoles tend to be medium-low compare to PC? And the few that are high it's because it hardly affects performance.

whats it truly matter? if you game..game ..if you want tech specs..then...go program..games look good on pc,and consoles..quit worrying about things that have zero impact on gaming..thanks much

1. There is a set Hardware so there is no need to add options for optimization when you know the exact hardware your app logic will run.

2. The delta of change between the settings required to achieve 30 => 60 would probably not sit well with the product owner they control what features are minimum value props.

Wouldn't work because.......the vast majority of the games on these new consoles are CPU bottlenecked. Dropping a few graphical settings down won't affect the Frames Per Second.

Your proposal would work in the few games that are GPU bound.

Because the only settings would be Low and Very Low.

I suspect manufacturer's have a huge hand in saying that everything must run the same, plus the issues with overheating/instability/etc.

Are you asking why programing a game on PC would be different than a Console ?

Nauseating....truly nauseating.

@mr_huggles_dog: Trolls be will be trolls. At least we know the almighty -God- is amongst them.

What kind of nonsense is this, the more you scaled back settings on the game for the console the higher your framerate would be....

Because it's a waste of the developer's time. Changing graphic settings isn't simple. It's actually a really difficult and quite annoying thing to properly program.

You can really ruin a game by not rendering things properly. It's just too much work. It's also why a lot of PC games today do not have a lot of variance in their graphic settings. Low is rarely super ugly. The difference between low and ultra is nothing like it used to be. As games got more complex and their rendering fed into the gameplay more, as well as the rise of multiplayer, graphic settings had to become more controlled. You can't just have somebody able to turn off all of their shadows. That would give them a massive advantage. It may also ruin any stealth gameplay options your designers worked at.

Lots of things to consider. It's really not that easy. I also doubt less than 1% of people would ever bother making their game look ugly and potentially break the gameplay just to get 60fps.

Not worth the developer's time.

@nyadc: Twice as many frames? Get out of here.

Why would you not be able to attain twice the frame rate?

PC has more frames per second and more games per second.

...OOOH!

Agreed. PS4 makes me sick to my stomach too.

FF14 on PS4 lets you choose between 1080p & 720p for better fps. You can also turn off most effects if you want.

I think simple changes would be better, like resolution and draw distance.

I think the reasons are two. One, they don't think the majority of people will want to deal with it and two, they want everyone to have the exact same experience. There are options on the PC because there has to be.

I prefer 1080p30 over lower res at 60fps, so i have no complains since it's how most PS4 games run.

That said, it would be nice to have the option, especially considering there are so many people who would put 60fps over anything else.

I think such option could only make things worse. I enjoyed my fair share of hassle during my PC gaming era (remember the wars were between OpenGL, Direct3D and Glide?), but now I'm too old for this sh... stuff. All I want is to buy a game and play it and let someone else do the work of fine-tuning it so that it looks and plays as good as possible on my device.

I didn't realise what I was missing until I started playing games at 60fps on the PC. I'll turn down settings to get there, especially in racers.

As a PC gamer that always played consoles too, the lack of options on console always pissed me off. The first Bioshock had the option - if I remember it right - to lock the game at 30fps, or to unlock it for better graphics but worst performance. I wish more games would do that.

60fps is awesome, but resolution is more important to me (assuming framerate keeps stable at 30 or above). Thats probably because im mostly a single player gamer.

I play mostly single player too. I wouldn't change my res to get 60fps, just turn down whatever graphical settings I need to, to get a stable and consistent 60fps.

Well after playing The Order 1886, I'd said the graphically settings is CGI

It does have a cinematic look and characters and some assets are really well made. But holistically it's not very impressive, ultra linear gameplay along small, confined environments and everything that's not really close is blurry due to the poor lod distance.

Nah, and I like consoles for that reason. I put the game in and play. I realize consoles are usually med/med-low settings compared to PC. Always thought they looked fine. Its a freedom of choice. A lot of PC gamers like fiddling with that based on their rigs. Power to 'em. Just not for me.

I assume devs optimize their games to the hardware.

@Gue1: There is rarely any low settings on Console games. Most or high to medium.

@clone01: lol again that's not true there are usually one or two low settings with the majority mid to high. Some even have a few maxed settings.

Whatever makes you feel better.

Many games are probably cpu limited as been pointed out already. But it's nice to see that some console devs actually give the gamers a choice between better graphics or better frame rate with worse graphics and/or lower res on games that are gpu limited.

@clone01: Not about feeling better it's about doing research and looking at several websites that compare games for a living. Not very hard to do now. Very few settings are set to low most are high/med.

Why would I research something I don't give two f*cks about?

@clone01: If your going to make a comment about the issue it's good not to just randomly babble bullshit.

Okay, sounds good.

lol wrong, look back to 360/PS3 especially after 2010, alot of the settings and assets were well below the pc's medium and low settings..... remember they only had a pool of 512mb to work with, being eaten up by OS and game cache which left around half the memory or less for graphics with hardware being multiple time slower.

Now this current gen has low-medium tier modern based hardware with less then 5gb for vram and game caching. Which allows many of the asset quality to be on par with high to ultra. However effects, shadowing, and some detail etc are still being compromised to allow a set resolution and or framerates since the hardware is not up to the task to go full out. We are still seeing selective low quality type assets and dynamic LOD to save resources.