comchia wrote:ThePixelatedGenocide wrote:Voor wrote:Agreed. When I saw the trailers and what not, I just assumed it was going to be exclusive to PS5, PC, and SeX Box. Are watered down ports EVER successful?
Sure. Ms. Pac-Man on 2600. Duke Nukem 3d on Saturn. Marvel vs. Capcom 3 on Vita.
You've just got to be realistic about the system limitations.
And you can't rush the downgrade.
Cyberpunk 2077's PS4/XBoxOne ports weren't a priority, according to the people making them. They just didn't care, and they didn't want to hire anyone more qualified to do it.
They just wanted the money, without doing the work.
When I think of polished ports on weaker hardware, I think of Panic Button and their excellent Doom/Wolfenstein ports on Switch. While running at a lower detail and 30 FPS, for a handheld platform, you couldn't ask for much better, especially in how smooth they run under those limitations. If only CD Projekt Red could've had that energy for the PS4/Xbox One versions.
It's really not comparable though.
Doom for example is a fast FPS with lots of corridors and self-contained rooms. Even when you go outside the areas are compact enough to not ask too much from the hardware when it either needs to render or load new data. It's similar to how the Shenmue Passport's models look so good for Dreamcast, while in Shenmue 1 they're obviously not of the same quality, it's not the same context at all.
Also, Doom on Switch had a lot of early pain, it had to be patched several times for over a whole year to run as well as it does now, and even then it still drops frames and cutbacks like the effects running at quarter resolution are pretty obvious. And both Doom and especially Wolfenstein have to run at stupidly low dynamic resolutions to work on Switch, docked Wolfenstein in particular runs anywhere from 720p to 640x360p and scales towards the low end very often.
Cyberpunk is different, it's an open world game and constant loading & CPU grunt is the name of the game, and you can clearly see the cutbacks that have to be made for any of the console versions to run The Witcher 3. Yes, even the PS4/Xbox One versions once ran poorly, with models popping, visual glitches and frequent dips in framerates. That's where CDPR really did good by patching the game until it ran 95% of the time at a solid 30 FPS, but that took a year or two to get there.
The Switch version of The Witcher 3 in particular looks terrible and doesn't run very well even though it's supremely impressive for the system, and this is the mindset people should've gone with for the PS4/Xbox One versions of Cyberpunk.
Gaming on the Switch has a "take what we can get" or "settle for less" mentality, and I don't think anyone would really be happy on PS4 if a high end PS5 game managed to run on there but at a resolution that's lower than your typical Dreamcast game from 1999, like how Wolfenstein runs on Switch. Thing is... people seem to forget that the PS4/Xbox One are late 2013 consoles which didn't even have all that high end of a hardware at the time to begin with.
The PS4's GPU is pretty much equivalent to just a 750 Ti. That's a lower midrange GPU from early 2014, and just a notch above entry level. That's almost 7 years ago. And we also know that its CPU is pretty borked, worse than its GPU. (Xbox One has a slightly better CPU but worse GPU) Even considering the versions could be better optimised, it's very obvious the PS4/Xbox One are punching way above their weight.
There's a reason why it's recommended to install the game on an SSD for the PC version, and neither the PS4 nor the Xbox One comes with one. That's why the high quality models and zones take so long to load, and you get those low quality no-face replacements when they aren't properly loaded in.
If you need to load constantly, you also need decent CPU performance, and neither consoles are good enough at that in Cyberpunk's case, so that's a double disadvantage to loading, and it hurts the framerate further. There are way too many things to load in real time for the consoles to keep up.
The only way I see Cyberpunk run at a fully consistent 30 FPS on PS4/Xbox One without stutters or obvious loading, would be to drop the details, model quality, texture quality, crowd density, etc. so hard that it'll inevitably butcher the art style of the game. It already has a very different look and feel from the PC's high settings as is, and I don't think many people would be happy if it downgraded further. It's a lose-lose situation.
