No they aren't. Graphics can easily scale and the Xbox One and PS4 have enough ram and CPU power to play even the most demanding PC games on the market today and for the foreseeable future. The biggest limitation of the Xbox 360 and PS4 was the 512mbs of ram they had and their aged CPUs.
CPUs today have far more power than games need. Unless a game is poorly coded, it's rare that the CPU is the limitation. The biggest bottleneck on the PC is actually DirectX and OpenGL which have to do a lot more processing on the CPU than the consoles do to render graphics. This is slowly changing with Mantle and newer revisions of DirectX/OpenGL, but it's something the consoles have never had to deal with so their weaker CPUs are not a major issue.
With 8 gbs of total ram a developer can do quite a bit. Actual game logic, level design, AI, pathfinding, and all of those things do not take that much RAM. Even the most graphically intense and CPU demanding games on the PC rarely need more than 3 gbs of system ram. You can do quite a bit with that.
The thing with graphics is they can be scaled a lot more easily. You can much more easily scale back the amount of pretty graphical effects and focus on just the necessities. The PS4 and Xbox One, even the Wii U, are more than capable of running games with the basic graphical features that actually impact gameplay (draw distances, lighting, effects). If you have the power you can start making more rendering passes for more detail, increase the resolution so that more detail is rendered each frame, increase the AA to smooth out jaggies when not running uber high resolutions, and do all of that stuff. It's really easy to just tone that stuff down to make it run on a weaker GPU. A lot of PCs games today can run on a large variety of GPUs with the low end often falling well below what is in the PS4/Xbox One.
So don't worry about it. Now that the devs have 8 gbs of ram and a familiar x84 processor, developers will not be bottlenecked by the console's hardware. They'll still have to design their games around a typical living room setup and controller though.
I respectfully disagree. RAM alone is not the answer. The CPU are damn too weak in next-gen consoles. Pretty damn sure the CPU in PS4 didn't meet the Planet Side 2 teams demand and they had to scale back.
And I highly disagree that the DirectX is actually has any bottleneck on PCs. You your self has said that the biggest impant these APIs have is on the CPU and not on the GPU it self. I'm sure PC gamers have CPUs magnitudes of times more powerful than the ones in 900pStation and 720pBox.
It is just the start and developers already started cutting resolutions ranging from 720p - 900p. I can easily see either more cuts in resolution if they go higher on graphics effects or just not push the boundaries at all which ultimately HOLDS BACK THE PC.
I would really be impressed if I can see any game on consoles matching Crysis 2 technically.
You can disagree with him/her all you like. Doesn't change facts. Ram constraints on the last consoles was part of what held back pc gaming.
The overhead that the pc API's(DX3D/openGL) make is also holding back PC game development, Now with Mantle we might see some changes.
Lastly, as I mention in an earlier post, ignored by all, is the fact that game devs have to take into account that the end user might still be on 32bit OS. limiting their use of RAM to between -3gb on system ram and VRAM combined. This is the reason why Skyrim, though looking good, looks like shit compared to what it could have looked like if they didn't ship with being locked at 2gb.
Well if you call yours fact, at least bring something to back it up or I simply have to accept what you say while I already mentioned the bottlenecks in 900pStation and 720pBox.
Ok, let me put it simpler then. Until PC games has to sacrifice feature sets, such as using DX11.2 instead of DX18.89, then consoles are not holding games back. Textures and models can be easily scaled down to fit within a systems ram and chipset limitations. The fact that all the games coming out now started development before the specs and feature sets were known, MIGHT have something to do with a lot of the titles not performing as well as the devs would hope and like, forcing them to cut corners were it is quickest, resolution.
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