Gersen: The thing is that "
Surprisingly well" doesn't really mean anything, if I expect a game to run at 2 FPS on my computer and it runs at 10 FPS then I can say that it runs "surprisingly well" or even that it's very good (compared to what I expected).
They can try and "argue" that but that
1. Sony themselves have force-removed the game from their store for "inadequate performance and quality expected of the platform" (a platform with fixed specifications that have been known for nearly 10 years), and that
2. The context of what most people deem "surprisingly well" for frame-rates in first person games would be an average of what other games run like on that console (I doubt many would agree that 10-15fps average in some areas is so low that
textures don't even load in properly or that vehicle turning becomes near impossible to control), is "surprisingly well". Likewise "they run
a bit lower than on pros", can probably get away with 40-50 vs 60fps, but no-one's going to say an 80% reduction of 10-15fps is "a bit" lower than 60fps without the whole room bursting out laughing.
The issue with older consoles is that the whatever changes they've added to the engine since Witcher 3 has made it far too heavy for the CPU (8x Jaguar cores are literal "Intel Atom" class CPU's, ie, all 8x cores combined still perform less than a several year old Haswell i3 dual-core desktop, which is far below what CDPR have labelled "minimum" even for the bottom-rung barely playable PC). There's just no way the game would have run on those consoles with rewriting major parts of the engine, and there's no way that CDPR didn't know this all throughout given the static hardware nature of the console. They gambled on PS5 replacing PS4 quickly yet due to numerous factors (lockdown, scalpers, manufacturing yields, etc), hardly anyone can buy one. So PS4 still is "current gen" not last gen (and will remain so well into 2021 until people can buy PS5 in large numbers) placing CDPR in an unpleasant situation.
pds41: For his comment to be misleading, you would want to be able to establish his baseline for unsurprising performance and to show that his baseline had been communicated to the investors
See above. You are correct a "baseline" will need to be established, but part of what makes consoles different to PC's is the closed ecosystem. You could make a 10fps PC game and claim it's "relatively better than 2fps" and there's nothing to stop you. With consoles though, you are given fixed API specific development tools that come with developer documentation that will almost certainly state exactly what is baseline / recommended, purely as insurance against a lawsuit by the developer vs Sony in the event it gets force-removed from the store for not meeting them. Like Sony just did with Cyberpunk 2077 - for clearly not meeting PS4's baseline expectations (and it is Sony that has the final say on what's "baseline" on their own store / platform / console...)