I said it myself there are games with more than 5, I know very well some have a lot of options, here's another one: MS flight simulator. It doesn't matter how many are there, you don't have to ever worry about them if you don't want to.
Please stop moving the goal posts. You said, and I quote:
it's rare that I see a game with more than 5 options say, maximum about 10
A statement I easily disproved by showing examples of games nearing 2x your stated maximum amount of settings. See the issue here? If you say "5, maybe up to 10" you can't then say "I said more than 5", because that's a plain-faced misrepresentation of what you said.
You are still having a very hard time differentiating between the shear number of components available and the choices that are actually important. For example there may be 1650, 1650S, 1650 Ti, 1660, 1660S, 2060, 2060S, 2070, 2070S, 2080, 2080S, 2080 Ti but :
1650, 1650S, 1650 Ti, 1660, 1660S
2060, 2060S, 2070
2070S, 2080, 2080S, 2080 Ti
They are all kind of grouped in performance tiers and within each group the differences aren't that big. So in reality the choice get's simplified to just three groups, after that you are facing differences that can be argued to not be that important for the overall experience.
Can you please make up your mind whether you are talking about game experience or development difficulty? The "one size fits all" console paradigm does of course address both those (users know what they get; developers have a single target to aim for), but you can't make an argument pointing to one of these and then start pointing to the other when you are contradicted. While those three groups might be somewhat applicable when it comes to user experience (though resolution throws a serious wrench into that, as there are people in each tier playing at vastly different resolutions), they don't apply to development and optimization at all - The 1660S is so close to the 2060 that it is much better catered for by optimizing for that than for the 1650, for example. In other words, a three-tier system is insufficient for that. And besides, you're still just working with one of the at least three relevant generations from just one of two GPU vendors. I used that generation to exemplify the complexity of tuning a game for the selection of GPUs out there; you can't then take that limited example and present it as if it (or was meant as) an overview of the totality of the situation.
If people really had to chose from 3^30 combinations, no one would get anything done. Clearly things are much simpler in reality.
No, they aren't. But developers take a lot of shortcuts and consciously simplify things simply because testing for all the different relevant combinations
is entirely impossible. But this also inevitably leads to problems - something clearly demonstrated by the fact that the most popular GPUs
always get the most optimizations.
You still don't quite get what I am saying, I not talking about the resolution itself as much as I am about the pixel structure, which is physically larger in a 1080p display of the same size. I am talking about the screen door effect more precisely, I can see the gird of pixels on practicality every single 1080p larger than 40 inches from no matter how many meters away (well, any reasonable distance).
That still comes down to the panel, and pixel pitch and pixel size. I've also seen 1080p panels with tiny pixels and huge gaps between them, but they are relatively rare. I have to get really close - far less than 1m) to my current 40" 1080p TV (8 years old and not particularly high end at the time) to see any type of grid. At 65" that distance would of course be longer, but as I said, 65" is on the far end of what 1080p can handle in a normal living room IMO.
I guess you have to see recent cheap 4K TV then to convince yourself they are superior. Again, I would trade worse contrast and for not being able to see that pixel grid any day of the week.
We're going to have to disagree on that. Mostly because, as I said above, I can't say that I've ever seen a relevant example of a grid/screen door effect on a 1080p TV.
Objectively, yes they are linear, 4K means four times the information of a 1080p image. Subjectivity, it may not be linear but it still exists.
Could you please reread that? And then
please make an effort to abandon your naivistic belief in absolute resolution? I was talking about
perceived resolution, which while partially subjective, is also determined by factors beyond absolute display resolution such as viewing distance, viewing angle, brightness, contrast/dynamic range, color gamut, and a few others, with viewing distance being the most important of these by far. While people spouting things like "the human eye can only see 1080p" are presenting an argument
just as naive as this (again, they're ignoring exactly the same things!), your statement makes a claim to objectivity in a way that strips any relevant context from the data, rendering it meaningless. It's like determining which is the best commuter car by measuring top speed - while the metric might be objectively true in a vacuum, its objectivity and truth are both irrelevant in an in-use context. Remember, you - or any other human! - have never actually seen "1080p resolution" or "4k". You have seen "1080p at X distance on a display of size Y". Perception is always contextual, and decontextualized numbers, while "true", are only one piece of the puzzle, and a piece that can
never be perceived by itself. (I mean, you can always get really close to a display and count all its pixels, but that doesn't really qualify as perceiving its absolute resolution either, as you'd then only be perceiving part of it at a time.)
So, for future reference in this debate, can we please stop throwing absolute resolution around as if it is a meaningful metric by itself?
Effective resolution, or DPI vs. viewing distance, is the bare minimum of what is useful. And effective resolution drops as viewing distance increases. Always, and indisputably.
And before you object with "perceived resolution is subjective" - no it isn't. There are obviously limits to human visual acuity. They also obviously can't be measured or described in the same way display resolution can - for example, the human eye is much better at distinguishing diagonal lines than pixel grids - but they nonetheless exist and are just as objective as the resolution of a display, even if there is a range with a vaguely defined ceiling rather than a fixed number. This is just as objective as the absolute resolution of a display, and again, unlike absolute resolution it is
actually relevant.
The kind of funny thing here is that your argument about screen-door effects on 1080p TVs is exactly this kind of contextual argument (in this case dependent on pixel size and pitch) yet you are trying to present it as proof of absolute resolution being relevant regardless of viewing distance and display size. Which, again, simply isn't true.
How the hell is this "last gen hardware" if its got Zen 2 rdna2 and nvme in it?
Can you game just with your 3070? Because there's more pricey components needed to build a PC and it's comes at well above $299.
After reading that post twice, I think it was meant to be sarcastic. Always hard to tell in writing.
PC has the advantage of backward compatibility. Where as with consoles you mostly have to keep your old box to play your older games.
"Mostly", but going out of style fast. The XSX (and XOne series too) can play most X360 and OG Xbox games. That's better than most PCs - you'd really struggle to get a game from the early 2000s to run properly on a modern PC. The XSX even adds in nice-to-have features like resolution boosts, upscaling, and even automatic HDR(!). No PC comes even close to that. The selection of older games on PCs is still much, much larger, and the freedom of choice in how they are played is much larger, but overall, we're looking at a radically changed console landscape compared to ten years ago.
Of course, the PS5's backwards compatibility is limited to "most" PS4 games, whatever that means, and a small selection of earlier games through PS Now streaming (which is rather terrible still).
