Topic: Did the PS3 always run THAT bad?

So I found my old family PS3. The 3 games I’ve been playing most are Battlefield 3, Infamous, and GTA IV. BF3 seems to be the most stable when it comes to frame rate, regardless it has hitches and chugs, especially while sprinting or in combat. Infamous is worse. It has a pretty shoddy draw distance and usually gets around 20-30FPS. Even while I’m traversing and get a “stable 30” it still feels hitchy due to the frame pacing, especially while turning the camera fast.

I think GTA IV is the worst in terms of performance. Basically drops constantly and only seems to hold a stable 30 in cutscenes and certain indoor environments. Another game that’s a victim of the hitching when I move my camera around fast. Driving can get a little slideshow-ish and very tanky if that makes sense. I initially thought my HDD was dying but it’s making no odd noises nor has my games crashed once. In fact I also feel like the loading times were actually the one thing that was better than I remembered

it’s just your ps3 or whatever screen you have it hooked to. whenever i hook mines up to my monitor , other than the outdated sub 30fps, its still stable. it’s just old

@nomither6 hmm. You think so? I’m not ruling it out either but it feels like if it is my ps3, it’s something that is gonna be hard to fix. I don’t think it’s my HDD. My games all actually load pretty fast. As I mentioned, I was actually shocked by the loading times being faster than I remembered. But on the contrary I was shocked by the performance being worse than I remember. Have had 0 crashes at all while gaming despite the games feeling like they probably are going to. The menu runs butter smooth, and system itself does not seem overtly hot or loud. My ps4 fan actually was a lot louder than the ps3. I could just be spoiled by 60FPS and 1080P-4K now that I’ve had a ps5 for a few years.

In lieu of evidence for the things you've mentioned, sub-30fps in the X360 and PS3 era was very commonplace. My PS3 is a new old (as in was only unboxed two years ago and never used before) Slim model, and there a plenty of games that run poorly on it. We've just conveniently view these consoles with nostalgia goggles, especially by those that used to own one back in the day but no longer have one.

@BennyWheelie i wouldn’t say we view em through nostalgia goggles, it was an amazing generation because of the amount of innovation and revolutionary games and exclusives. it took both the good of 6th gen and the good of 8th gen and hit the sweet spot. 8th gen is when online/live service, buggy crashing games on release , MTX, and long AAA developments started getting outta control

@Tr4405 not all games run poorly, as the gen progressed newer games ran better. but unfortunately you just gotta get used to that 30fps and jaggy looking games…and sub 30fps for older games

@BennyWheelie even to the point of being near constant?

@Tr4405 Depending on the game, yeah. If you look up those games on YouTube, Digital Foundry does a X360 vs. PS3 for quite a few popular games at the time. You'll get a few rare ones like COD4 that aim for 60FPS, but most of them are capped at 30FPS.

Some games, mostly multi-platform games that weren't optimised for PS3's Cell SPEs, underperformed and suffered from really bad frame-pacing. So the FPS counter might say 30, but it's rendering those 30 frames in very consistent intervals which impacts the feel of game. This was the era of graphical fidelity over frame rate.

Nostalgia goggles, as in they praise it like it doesn't have its own issues.

• High failure rates for the first few models of both X360 and PS3 (X360 definitely takes the cake on that though)
• The attempt and failure to introduce network passes to deter people from buying second-hand games (that failed thankfully)
• Network issues that occurred far more frequent than people play it out. It was a new thing for consoles so I'm not surprised.
• When compared to what was available to PC (Teamspeak, Ventrillo), the console communication quality was pretty poor. However, most console-only gamers accept the quality because it was new to consoles and there's no alternative.
• Loading and playing most things off disc was slow, and became more evident as games grew in scope.

Those are only a few things off the top of my head, but don't think I hate on the generation because of it. You're right that it was one of the best times to experience innovation in gaming. There's a very good reason I hold onto my two PS3's and play them on a monthly basis (big backlog of exclusive games).

@BennyWheelie youre right and definitely more informed about that generation than me; when you mentioned teamspeak, i knew that you knew your stuff, lol.