Well, you said it yourself. Graphical fidelity is next gen and it comes with all the bethesda object persistence, physics, and large number of NPCs. So they upgraded at least one thing and thats why the game is so heavy and needs a 12 tflops GPU like the xsx running at 1440p 30 fps. Of course you and I will need a 3080 or a 6800xt to double its framerate. Thats all I am saying and what Todd is saying.
I am actually with you on the fucking constant load screens. I have been bitching about going through loading screens after loading screens just to get into ships and small buildings. I am on your side on this, they shouldve implemented a streaming system. if no mans sky could do it with 20 devs, bethesda with its 400-500 dev team and 8 year long dev cycle should as well. but i think thats a different discussion and doesnt pertain with how heavy this game is. streaming has been around since the ps3 era. for whatever reason, bethesda just wont let us enter interiors without loading. even when the loading is now down to just 1 second. its not a next gen or last gen cpu or gpu limitation. just bethesda being bethesda.
I will have to rewatch that video but I remember either them or some other channel showing CPU threads and all 16 threads were showing running at 70% which is crazy high utilization for CPUs that typically top out at 10% in last gen games with only 1-2 threads hitting over 70%. I think there is something going on with zen 2 or zen 3 chips that might be a bug or something to do with their design, because if you look at zen 4 and ANY of the intel chips 11th gen onwards, this is not an issue.
I will try and enable some logging on all cores and threads and see what i find, but this game makes my CPU go absolutely mental. Even cyberpunk with its ray tracing and higher 100 fps non RT modes dont make it go that high and cyberpunk is the best game to benchmark CPUs because of its fantastic threading and scaling with higher cores. If my results show poor CPU thread utilization in Atlantis then i will concede this point, but ive been under the impression that the game is doing proper multithreading based on the benchmarks i saw at launch.
As for their global illumination, i think it looks pretty good. Low vs ultra might not be scaling that well, but even their low is way better than what they had last gen.