Eurogamer's Digital Foundry sat down with Dead Rising 3, a launch game built from the ground up for the Xbox One.
[quote][url=http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-dead-rising-3]Dead Rising 3's big problem is that despite its many next-gen enhancements, overall polish feels lacking, while resolution and frame-rate fall more into line with a current-gen title.[/url][/quote]
The next-gen enhancements they're talking about are putting triple(!) the zombies on screen and eliminating(!!) load times. That's impressive, and they appear to have pulled it off. Capcom/Blue Castle/Whoever Actually Developed This Game [url=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/129398-Dead-Rising-3-Locked-at-720p-30-FPS-Capcom-Confirms]made it pretty clear that they would be willing to sacrifice some graphical quality to achieve those goals, which is very fair.[/url] They cut the resolution to 720p and locked the frame rate at 30FPS, so people expecting the game to be a photorealistic masterpiece were just in denial.
But here's the problem: Dead Rising 3 wasn't able to meet those tempered expectations either. The game dips to 20FPS during zombie encounters and hit a low of 16FPS. Pop-in has been limited, but "the limited pixel count gives Dead Rising 3 the familiar jagged look of almost any current-gen title you'd care to mention, not helped by the studio's decision to push for broader draw distances where distant details are obfuscated by the lower-resolution window."
So now that we (or just I) have gotten the pitchforks out, who's to blame? It's very true that launch games only scratch the surface of what a console is capable of, since developers have had very little time to optimize code for the hardware. Games always look better over time. It's also true that Capcom could have just overpromised on what they could deliver, aiming way too high with no load times and triple the zombie count.
To me, the only constant throughout this whole topic has been that games on the Xbox One simply don't look as good. Whether it's multiplatform games, exclusives, timed exclusives, or whatever else, hardly any games are hitting the mark of 1080p and 60FPS. If it weren't for Turn 10 and Forza 5, I could say that no games hit the mark at all. Also, Kinect Sports Rivals runs at 1080p and 30FPS.
It's hard not to look at the PS4's games and not question the power of the Xbox One. Games will eventually be super high quality on the Xbox, but PS4 games that have already hit that mark will be further refined. The Xbox One's use of DDR3 and eSRAM has a great learning curve than the PS4's GDDR5, but it's not a trade-off for better performance in the long run. Everyone knew the Xbox wouldn't be as powerful as the PS4. Now we're seeing what that actually means for games.
[quote][b]Edit: the first draft of this post ("XB1: The major consequences of less power") obviously put the blame fully on Microsoft. Unfortunately I was on my phone, so I wasn't able to type or think as much as I could have. So here's a better version. The "overexaggerating" part of the title refers to me, lol.[/b][/quote]
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This is just a developer choice. They decided to focus on getting more on screen and getting rid of loading times, rather than resolution and graphics. The game is rendering hundreds of zombies at once, and running AI for each of them. That takes a lot of power to do, and the scale of the game would not be doable on the last generation systems. The Dead Rising games have never really been the most amazing looking games, but they've pushed how much the systems can handle by putting a lot of stuff in the world. The same game on 360 or PS3 would run with far fewer zombies, long loading times, and lower-poly models. If Dead Rising 3 would have been developed for the PS4, it would probably have the same problems. It could probably run at 1080p, 60fps if the devs lowered the number of zombies on screen (or if the devs were more accustomed to the system and could optimize better). -Large open world with no loading -Large hordes of zombies -High Resolution and framerate pick two of the above