While Battlefield 4 faced a number of network issues, the engine that was powering it – the Frostbite 3 engine – was a really piece of art. Frostbite 3 scales incredible on penta-core CPUs, and is one of the few games that looks significantly better on PC than on consoles. Not only that, but the engine did not overload a GPU’s VRAM in order to display high-resolution textures.
And after Ubisoft’s comments that Far Cry 4 would look – on current-gen consoles – the same as the PC Ultra settings, DICE’s Johan Andersson decided to call them out. As the Technical Director of the Frostbite engine claimed, a team is simply not taking advantage of the PC if its Ultra settings are similar to those found on current-gen consoles.
“Embarrassing to hear devs say their console versions is the same quality as “ultra high” on PC. Then you are _not_ taking advantage of PC!”
Johan Andersson has also expressed his disappointment towards the recently announced 30fps current-gen console games. As Andersson said regarding The Order 1886:
“They [Ready at Dawn] are a console exclusive so framerate has a massive impact. but yes it is BS, gameplay is always better at higher framerate”
Fire shots everywhere. To his credit, Frostbite 3 is an amazing engine so let’s not start the ‘Battlefield 4 is broken, so you have no right to criticize others’ circle.
Still, this does not excuse DICE and EA from not providing mod tools for both BF3 and BF4, but then again they wouldn’t be able to milk this golden cow.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
Contact: Email
Summary of the article “Ubisoft is console-pro.” Unfortunate but there’s nothing we, PC gamers, can do
Nope. U can buy games! So will companies will respect PC gamers!
Uhh… what ?
I think what he is trying to say is vote with your wallet, don’t buy Ubisoft games until they make PC a higher priority.
If that’s what he meant then I already did that. I didn’t buy Hype_Dogs coz Ubicrap already screwed me with AC 3 and 4.
hype_dogs…
not even a real game and it already sounds better than watch_dogs…
10/10, would buy again.
uhh… what ? How did EA come into my statement ? Did I say anything about them ? You hate EA or you love Ubicrap that much, huh ?
I’m only saying that Ubicrap doesn’t care about PC gamers and have not been for a long time. They think all PC gamers are pirates and they’re set at that thought. I’m not antagonizing anyone here. Chillax dude —,—
He didn’t say EA, he said DICE, EA only publish DICE’s games.
Yeah but the name that gets the usual hate is EA so I presumed that whatever hate he has is towards EA. But if you’re right, then “DICE”
EA get hated on for good reason.
Nvidia did give Ubisoft 8 million dollars for a partnership deal for AC4, WD and the next AC game.
nvidia and amd have contract with ubisoft and ea to promote their cards (intel with codemasters), maybe some optimizations on their cards or some exclusive features like mantel or physx but no exclusive content. yet still no nvidia nor amd own PC
He’s correct but then again his game was broken on all platforms so…
The game engine itself ran beautiful and was optimized well, net code it a different story obviously.
CryEngine looks great, but no Competitive FPS will ever be running on that either. They’re Eye Candy Engines, both of them.
Btw, I trust you’re referring to Post-Patching, because Battlefield 3 & 4 were anything but “optimized” at Launch, what with their memory leaks, screen tearing, elongated necks, wall hacks, disappearing this, that, etc.
that doesnt make much sense. They are eye candy and practical engines. They scale any way the dev would like them too. Just because Crysis 3 burns GPUS does not mean cryengine 3 cant be scaled back for a competitive game. And I dont quite get why you assume frostbite 3 cant be for a competitive game. It just happens that competitive games have to be quick frag fests, something BF3/BF4 are not. But if you took the frostbite engine and re purposed it for a COD or Quake type game, it would be fine.
Not saying this would ever happen but there is no reason it could not. Your evidence is anecdotal and does not represent reality. However I think I understand what you were trying to say.
And BF3 and BF4 were optimized TONS better than majority of multi platform games released in the last few years. These problems you speak of were majority BETA issues were they not?
Correct me if Im wrong here. Either way still much more optimized for PC than garbage ports. The fact that it properly multithreads is already saying tons for it.
CryEngine isn’t practical. It’s fancy, but its coding isn’t designed to be flexible like Unreal’s. It requires heavy modifying for anything other than a Crysis/Warface FPS (see Warhorse Games extensive documentation as they altered CryEngine for their Medieval RPG), which means a lot of additional work.
CryEngine does one thing right, as you said: It burns GPUs. Crysis did that back in the day, & Warhead, Crysis 2 & Crysis 3 continued down that line, but at the end of the day that’s the problem, that’s what most of the Engine is focused on: Eye Candy.
Scaling isn’t the problem anyway (with either Engine), its’ the coding. Some dumb twat decided to hard-lock Frostbite 3 to 30 Ticks Per Second, which is shit for a competitive FPS. Without modifying the Engine’s very core, & thus dismantling & re-doing a large part of its central coding, it will never be fit to host a Competitive FPS. It’s flexible sure (DA3, ME4, NFS, BF, MoH, etc. all run on either FB2 or FB3), but that’s about it.
CoD’s Engines are (ironically) a series of heavily modified Engines based on the original Quake 3 Engine (otherwise known as id Tech 3), which at this point are bogged down by years of bullshit & retarded Development decisions like that hideously stupid Lag Compensation Infinity Ward is so fond of. A CoD-Powered Frostbite Title at this point likely wouldn’t perform any better or worse than Infinity Ward’s latest iteration of Shit Engines.
Advanced Warfare seems to be running on something new at least, but we still have no idea if Infinity Ward & Treyarch will use this new “Sledgehammer Engine” as well, or not. That, & we’ve yet to actually see whether or not this new Tech of theirs is even decent. Designing an Engine for a Competitive FPS that isn’t bogged down in bullshit isn’t exactly easy.
BF3/4 (around their respective Launch Periods) when they worked, ran rather well, yes (mainly on Campaign Mode), but in MP those were rare exceptions to the general rule.
The Memory Leak on BF4 wasn’t a Beta thing, it was there on Launch & for weeks after, along with extensive screen tearing which came & went, until it made a major re-introduction with the Naval Strike DLC, though I believe it’s at last, largely been dealt with now with the “Netcode Patch” from a couple of weeks back, leaving us with just the lag. Many issues with Battlefield 3 persist to this day, & will stay with the game forever, since DICE is finished Patching it.
Both Games had numerous Graphical issues on Launch, which people seem to either have either never known about, forgottten, or simply disregarded, but I can assure you, Netcode was just one of the many major issues with BF3/4. Don’t quote me on this, but I believe BF3 even had issues with Multi-GPU Setups.
Rewritten (was thinking of Hyper-Threading, sorry). Respect to Multithreading for being a fine tech for many things, but Video Game application is limited, considering few Games are serious CPU Hogs, & those that are, do so generally because of either a bug, or poor coding.
Though it is true that Multithreading will help a lot on Consoles, once their Tech starts falling behind again, at least, but that’s still (hopefully) a ways off.
I actually wasnt aware of the tick limitation on Frostbite, that does seem retarded and a big screw up for a game that is primarily multiplayer. I can only assume it was due to the game having so much more going on at any given time in lets say a 64 player conquest match, that the lower tick rate would save on server costs?
Ya my argument didnt factor that into account and I still believe that if that wasnt an issue, it could be well scaled for a competitive fast paced game.
But I will have to disagree with you on your multithreading opinion. I think its a much needed feature for video games. And no its not limited to i7’s at all. Maybe your thinking of just hyperthreading in general but a game that is properly multithreaded can take advantage of cpu cores, either logical or physical. I mean the only reason FX 8300 chips can even keep up with an i7 in Crysis 3 and BF3/BF4 is because of proper threading. Why rely on just 2-3 strong cores when you can spread out your workload and then be able to add more on top of that to help minimize any code bottlenecks.
There arent many cpu intensive games that are using more than 3 ish cores anyways so its hard to say that its making a very little difference. Arma 3 which is extremely cpu intensive barely uses more than 1 core most times from what I understand. Due to this even really highly OC’d I7s cant get that game to run at full GPU usage most of the times. Artificial bottlenecks caused by the lack of cpu threads being used for draw and object distances.
Anyway thats just my opinion. More games especially lazy ports need proper multi threading and I think its integral to PC gaming’s future.
Apparently the TPS = 10 is a carryover from the BC/BF3 Era, so it’s likely it was done due to the Frostbite Engine originally being designed for Consoles, & then just never updated for PCs, but no doubt EA’s desire to use cheaper Servers (as DICE indirectly admitted to cheapening out on with their much-needed Upgrades a while back), also had some influence in this matter, since long ago I’ll bet.
Yeah, sorry, meant Hyper-Threading. Multi-Threading I can agree with, especially since I ran into a Single-Core Game a while back, Cities XL Premium, which runs exclusively on 1 Core, so the Game, while great, becomes unplayable rather fast once you max out that first Core 🙁
We’re in luck though I’d say, since the New-Gen Consoles are Multi-Cores, there’s little reason to keep shafting Quads.
Lol I figured you mean hyper threading. Ya we should definitely start seeing better CPU usage scenarios as more next gen ports hit us. Especially from EA devs and Square Enix devs. Those guys seem to have a knack for PC porting. Hopefully the same goes for arkham knight, a CPU bottleneck in an open world game that size with that much going on would just destroy the port.
Frostbite 3 scales well on CPUs and works well for AMD CPUs because of their good muli-threading performance. There is a rumour that AMD paid DICE to multi-thread their engine, funny enough the benchmarks prove it, as an FX6300 beat a i5 2400K, yet single-threading CPU games the FX series get’s destroyed by most Intel CPUs. Skyrim being crazy CPU bound and single-threaded.
Lol ya I had already explained all that yesterday to him. Hr was just mixed up hyoerthreading with multi threading.
And if amd wants to pay more devs to multi thread their engines, fine with me!!! It’ll only benefit PC games and players that much more. We are stuck way too long in this single threaded BS rut. Arma 3 and skyrim are CPU disasters and full of code bottlenecks due to it…
I don’t think I’ve seen a company so hated since EA and Bank of America. They deserve all the backlash they get.
I guess EA and Ubisoft are fighting to see who can rule hell.
*Ahem Comcast
Lol sorry I’m not up to speed with american cable companies. I thought they were all just evil by default.
EA is starting to look better t PC players than Ubisoft. We’re really comparing a shit and turd here though.
My weak 2 year old spec £80 AMD FX 6300 can hit over 60fps on custom ultra in BF Hardline at 1080p, yet PS4 can hit 30fps on 900p, high settings and I’ve never seen my GTX 660 go as low as 30fps,
You can clearly see Ubisoft trying to close the gap to consoles with bullsh*t and PR talk because they run at 792p/900p 30fps and no FC4 won’t be ultra on consoles because no MSAA and will be 30fps lower than 1080p anyway. Truly ultra is 4x/8xMSAA and consoles can’t do it, they just used cheap FXAA and call it ultra.
Just look at the console deferredfxquality setting in Watch Dogs, it’s lower quality than the “PC” setting even when you put everything on ultra in the UI settings.
Agreed, As much as I defend Dead Rising 3 and some others ,I’ve seen how ubisoft is trying to play PR game of they look exactly the same no matter the platform and in turn are dumbing down PC versions in order to make console gamers feel like they’re getting the same game as any PC player, Watch_dogs ran fine for me but won’t bother with getting the Season Pass nor am I really bothered about AC Unity(they’ve butchered the AC series) Far Cry 4 seems to be the only game I’ll possibly buy down the road otherwise will wait for a sale.
Good on Johan for speaking his mind about this issue ,if only more devs were like this.
That’s because the Frostbite engine isn’t CPU-bound and the GeForce GTX 660 outperforms next-gen console GPUs.
With that said, PC hardware will always be on top. There’s very little point in beating a dead horse. What we should hope for is developers that push the boundaries even further on PC because of the capable hardware that a lot of PC gamers have.
A good CPU will net you big FPS gains in BF4 though, especially AMD FX CPUs. There is nearly 10fps going from a 6300 to a 8350 because Frostbite is highly multi-threaded.
The performance gain isn’t as big as you think it is. Check out Techspot’s Battlefield 4 benchmark. It has a CPU performance page.
http://gamegpu.ru/images/remote/http–www.gamegpu.ru-images-stories-Test_GPU-Action-Battlefield_4-test-bf4_proz_2.jpg
Thats because the engine is extremely well threaded for cpu’s. Hence why i7s dont have that huge of a gap over the FX cpus. Strong single thread performance isnt needed in this engine. Definitely a good thing, allows more flexible coding of effects and resources.
But the game is cpu bound given the right circumstances like 64 player conquest. Start lowering the cpu speed or disabling cores and you will run performance down quickly.
That techspot article benchmarked using single player missions… that’s is the worst way to benchmark the game’s dependancy on cpus to tell you the truth. Multiplayer huge matches is the way to stress the cpu properly.
“We tested the single player portion of the game to ensure consistent results” -Techspot
Multiplayer on the other hand makes good use of CPU resources.
I praise this man mostly for the order comment, its time devs start treating gamers like people and not idiots.
“most console users are idiots”
xbox users
“pcs are just for pron and checking my acount balance, they are not for gaming, pc gaming is for nerds and its dying it has no games”
sony c3nts
“sony declared japanesse dominace, best platform with the best games, i have been a loyal sony customer for 10 year and for that i was rewarded greatness awaits”
Let them wait and fight who has da power of da CELL and who has GPCGPU and who has teh hUMA in the end their games run subpar because both next gen consoles are weak and that wont change.
“BUT TEH NAUGHTY DOG WILL SHOW WHAT PS4 IS CAPABLE OF”
Juding by what they got out of ps3, naughty dog can run crysis on a toaster, sucks that sony wholly owns them, i hope sony goes bankrupt so naughty dog goes free.
I trully laugh and facepalm when i see console gamers argue hardware that they dont understand with teh cloudz and dx12s and desperatly trying to look for a diffirence between gta v on x360 and ps3 to declare a better version, when we tell them if you care about graphics, get a pc then we are “elitists”
Trully most are idiots, but what they dont seem to reallize the masses dont care they just buy the better console to play games and dont hang around the internet damage controling for a corperation that doesnt give a damn about them.
Then there is extreme derp who has developed an unhealthy relationship for sony and thinks its his duty to damage control and scou the internet for “heretics” who dare not agree with him that ps4 is the best solution for gaming and call them menally ill when in reallity its him who belongs in a mental asylum.
Sony lets Naughty Dog put secret code in their game that unlocks more power and more RAM for their PS4 users
wat? ive never of this. So the GPU ram and power was being away from all other 3rd party devs that whole time? Da fuq? That seems so tin foil hat no?
Can’t you spot a joke when you see one?
I guess NOT!
Ive been up for more than 24 hours… give me a break.
Console users think their consoles have Sony super secret sauce which only Sony studios can get the full power out of it, that’s why I made the comment. 🙂
lol i got ya.
Well to be fair, their first party titles always seem to look tons better though so theres that.
Sony and Microsoft buy the best devs that’s why, see RARE, see Naughty Dog, see Bungie all owned by the above, though Microsoft sold Bungie and they are on the side of the Sony camp now, no surprise there then.
makes sense. Santa Monica studios I believe was bought by Sony as well and let me tell you those guys know how to push the PS3’s hardware. God of War 3/4 was one of the most gorgeous games on the PS3 with huge bosses and level design for that type of game. Id say those guys, naughty dog and guerilla know how to take a console with terrible outdated hardware and give us decent looking games for a console.
Bungie was just working with Microsoft they were never owned by them and the reason they are collaborating with Activision is that to reach a larger audience. Not the point though, in Naughty Dog’s case which is one of the more capable studios in the industry with incredibly gifted talent the situation is entirely different. With specific hardware and exclusive dedicated focus from the developer even on a weaker system amazing results can be achieved. There’s no “secret sauce” but hard work and dedication can achieve wonders. Corinne Yu is working on entirely new facial animation tech that makes Uncharted 4 look far better than anything seen so far on far more powerful hardware.
Microsoft owned Bungie, then sold them.
“Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000; the project it was working on was repurposed into a launch title for Microsoft’s Xbox console”
My mistake, my point though is that exclusive console titles like Uncharted can achieve an unprecedented visual fidelity. It is unfortunate that PC titles won’t be able to match that until it becomes the standard. PC gets ports of multi-platform games and titles that don’t fully take advantage of the true hardware capability of the high end market. It is not about resolutions and FPS which of course the PC will always have an edge on and will definitely provide the smoother gameplay experience. The attention to detail though that a studio like Naughty Dog and Santa Monica can provide is totally unique.
they had a 10 year contract i think
“Uncharted 4 look far better than anything seen so far”
What exactly you saw? just a face up close during nighttime,not the enviroment or anything else, dont expect the game to look like that at 1080p 60 fps, that will be impossible, that is if they achieve 60 fps becasue so far they just target 60 fps not confirmed.
psst uncharted 4 will look amazing at 1080p 60 fps, end of story, its not like the better the graphics the lower the resolution and fps, naughty dogs has magical pony puke whcih allows them to go 1080p 60 fps with the best graphics ever.
Better cancel your plans, she’s already married.
shut up, both of you, she is mine 😀
i don’t even know who she is :))
Your console posts are the best! Something about how you word it is hilarious! I was literally LOL on this one!
thanks
LMAO… Toaster…nice.
But then how would you make toast… All the gigaflopz would be used for crysis. 🙁
But I think your eyes can only see 15 crysis each anyway so its OK I guess since your stomach can only have 15 toasts too… 😐
you’d be surprised there are quite a few PC gamers who are idiots too. I cant tell you how many times someone comes to me with issues with their gaming pc’s or laptops and it turns out, the gpu drivers havent been updated in 3 years or HDD defragged etc.
Look, even the PC version of Watch Dogs is much better than the PS4 version if you take into consideration we can use higher resolutions and higher AA modes that make all the difference, destroying the console version which is locked anyway.
Setting for settings the PC wins ,even on my FX 6300/GTX 660, same settings as PS4 version I can get over 50fps, 900p, high, 4xTXAA I can hit 40fps, still better than the PS4.
According to my readout it uses all 6 cores and never should a game use cores 100%,anyway.
Are you drunk?
Oh please. Derp runs crying any time someone contradicts him and immediately goes into copy pasta mode.
Sony shills all have a pattern. Derp copy pastes. You Are Flat Out Wrong freaks and starts trying to slide it by calling you a brony. Twitter shills go into “BUT YOUR MOM” mode. Easy to figure out.
nice job mr.andersson 🙂 finally someone s**t on some ubi devs mouth 😀
“same as the PC Ultra settings”
so PC version will look shit on purpose and it might run like azz & another ubis*it dev that don’t know s**t about PC but they sure know how to say “yeah,pc is the lead platform”
Ultra Settings,mmmm… so PC version have super duper Ultra High then ?
PC will always look better, just as long as Ubisoft provide the options like MSAA and higher resolutions, NVIDIA features,HBAO+, TXAA, PhysX, AMD stuff like HDAO, proper ultra settings for the PC, unlocked frame-rate, supersampling. Consoles get stuck with poorer quality SSAO, MHBAO, FXAA, 900p, locked frame-rates sub 30fps drops.
of course it will be better on PC, even messy watch dogs with all those downgrades & performance issues still looks better and runs better than consoles
i said shutup, she’s mine :)) still didn’t google her
It’s unfortunate that this sort of thing happens.
One misconception that spawns from all of this is that people think a bad PC version means the console version will be better. Not true. Even without any of the enhancements you would expect to see from a developer like Crytek or Bohemia for example, you’ll still see better performance and graphical quality on modern PCs.
Right. Without getting into the Games that they make, I’ll focus on the Engine alone. an Engine that’s been base-coded with a 30 TPS (Ticks Per Second) cap, is NOT a “good Engine” by ANY stretch of the word, unless you’re attempting to make a dedicated RPG Engine, & in that case….. Why bother.
Note: This was confirmed by the Devs themselves on BF4’s CTE, once players started asking when they’d push the TPS further than 30 (originally 10 on Live – same as BF3), which caused massive ragefesting about all the “Behind the Wall” kills it was causing etc.
Furthermore, as has been successfully proven, the original Frostbite Engines (1.0, 1.5), were a bloatware mess of 3rd Party Software merged into a single chaos-filled package that would make any semi-decent Programmer have a seizure when s/he saw it. One of the original reasons why we didn’t get Mod Tools with BC2, before EA went all “lockdown” crazy on them.
Frostbite 2 while being majorly cleaned up, continued down that trend however, as anyone could easily notice, with things like Battlelog’s 3rd Party VoIP Software that wasn’t In-Game on PC, etc.
Now without getting into the yet unsolved “why’s” of why DICE was so incompetent, they couldn’t Patch Fix Frostbite 3, resulting in oh-so-many Battlefield 3 issues which were actually Patched carrying straight over to Battlefield 4 & thus requiring another Patch to “re-fix” them, but I will say this:
Frostbite 3 as it currently stands, is nothing more than yet another “Fancy Eye Candy” Engine that on its best day ranks below CryEngine, which on its own best day, is also little more than yet another “Fancy Graphics Demo” Engine unto itself.
(Before someone mentions Unreal Engine: Decent, but Unreal 3’s Netcode was shoddy work. No idea about Unreal 4 so far).
Now as far as the twat’s comments, with the apparent exception of DICE, EA is going to be doing much the same thing with 90% of their own New-Gen Games, making his comments rather hilarious tbh. You really think Dragon Age 3 PC is going to “look significantly better on PC than on consoles” just because it uses Frostbite? Mass Effect 4? Need for Speed? LOL’d. Don’t forget, both NFS Games releleased on Frostbite so far have both been natively 30-FPS locked, even though Rivals could be “fixed.” Yeah, they’re REALLY taking advantage of the PC, right?
95% of Studios will continue to do what they’ve been doing for years,treating the PC on the same level as Consoles, except now it’s the New-Gen ones instead of the Old-Gen. They might throw in the occasional Graphical something or other, but that’s about it. Wake up, halfwits.
Got to love ultra console frame-rates
http://i.imgur.com/8xRdCXh.jpg
derp, ubisoft at it again…
http://whatifgaming.com/the-division-developer-insider-we-already-downgraded-a-few-things