[QUOTE="Spybot_9"][QUOTE="sgac"] I'm never been quite sure what's goin on with PC games, as I'm always suspicious that devs are somehow forced to develop thier titles in such a wayas they can't really harness what actual power older GPU's might have. I mean let's face it, by an Xbox's standrds, it's not as if the hardware's puny on a 6 series card, so why when a game is ported or it has similar GFX to consoles, you normally need a more powerful GPU than that to run em at the same GFX fidelity as you'd get on say a 360, why?
sgac
Now let me get this staright.A 6 series card is obviously quite a bit weaker than a xbox 360.
Call of duty 4 runs in 1024x600 with 2xAA on consoles and you only need a 7900 to max out COD4 with those settings.PS3 runs UT3 in 30FPS in 720p,a 7900 CAN do BETTER.Xbox 360 runs HL2 in 720p at 30FPS?LOL even a 6 series card can do that!Halo 3 runs in 640p and look at the jaggies now where is the impeccable efficiency of consoles which cant even make such a big game look clean?Look at the awful textures of MGS4?
Sure there are examples like AC,rainbow six and some other console ports which agree with what you are saying but it's not like every console game is coded in the most efficient manner and it's not like the PC is some sort of nightmare to program efficiently as COD4,UT3 and orange box are perfect examples where PC's as powerful as consoles perform better.
Oh and you said it yourself and it's the most important factor in these sort of discussion and that is "resolution".Just the other day at system wars,a fanboy was trying to claim ownage with gamespot COD4 benchmarks claiming that you need an 8800 or better to get the same graphics and performance as a 360:lol: altogether ignoring that they were in 12x10 which is more than twice as many pixels as 1024x600.:|
[QUOTE="sgac"] I'm never been quite sure what's goin on with PC games, as I'm always suspicious that devs are somehow forced to develop thier titles in such a wayas they can't really harness what actual power older GPU's might have. I mean let's face it, by an Xbox's standrds, it's not as if the hardware's puny on a 6 series card, so why when a game is ported or it has similar GFX to consoles, you normally need a more powerful GPU than that to run em at the same GFX fidelity as you'd get on say a 360, why?
Spybot_9
Now let me get this staright.A 6 series card is obviously quite a bit weaker than a xbox 360.
Call of duty 4 runs in 1024x600 with 2xAA on consoles and you only need a 7900 to max out COD4 with those settings.PS3 runs UT3 in 30FPS in 720p,a 7900 CAN do BETTER.Xbox 360 runs HL2 in 720p at 30FPS?LOL even a 6 series card can do that!Halo 3 runs in 640p and look at the jaggies now where is the impeccable efficiency of consoles which cant even make such a big game look clean?Look at the awful textures of MGS4?
Sure there are examples like AC,rainbow six and some other console ports which agree with what you are saying but it's not like every console game is coded in the most efficient manner and it's not like the PC is some sort of nightmare to program efficiently as COD4,UT3 and orange box are perfect examples where PC's as powerful as consoles perform better.
Oh and you said it yourself and it's the most important factor in these sort of discussion and that is "resolution".Just the other day at system wars,a fanboy was trying to claim ownage with gamespot COD4 benchmarks claiming that you need an 8800 or better to get the same graphics and performance as a 360:lol: altogether ignoring that they were in 12x10 which is more than twice as many pixels as 1024x600.:|
Yes. OK you have good comeback there my friend. Right well let's take the worst optimised game out there. Crysis. Now why on earth do you require a card as powerful as a 9800GX2 to play it at it's highest settings, I mean it looks good, but not that bloody good if you look closely. Games always seem to be requiring stronger hardware than they could have been coded for just as well on a lesser card and play top notch. I bet you my right arm Crysis, UT3, Bioshock you name it, could have been able to run on a GeForce 6800 if you'd tried hard enough to code it effectivly. Forget the consolething for a minuite, fact is that when you consider just how much silicon is being driven under the hoods of even 2 year old GPU's, the combined power of these should be able to handle the latest graphical effects, bar DX10of course, easily had the game been programmed to properly use all the power that was there, most of the GPU's potential power, I think is bein wasted a bit, there seems to be a certain something going on behind the scenes when you really think on it.
While I appreciate your comments there is one major thing I have to point out. Have you ever heard the silicon valley phrase "the first chip costs a million bucks and the second one costs a nickel"? All the cost is in R&D with hardware, and even more so with software. So the amount of silicon under the hood is irrevelant, it is about Moore's law, new architectures, and better fabrication plants to get the nanometer count smaller. And why you need all those improvments to a game? It is just the nature of the thing as I understand it. As you have prettier and pretteir graphics it gets exponentially more complex to compute in real time. Just the nature of the thing.
However I do agree with you that there is something to say about programming and coding efficiently, you need to make your code efficient, but at some point the law of diminishing returns kicks in, and there are more and more developer hours required to eek out fewer and fewer fps. It is also my experience that Crysis was not the best optimized, but maybe that wasn't their goal? Maybe they said we don't want to nit-pick and make the game run smoothly on the majority of graphics cards, we want the game to kick the crap out of the current standards for how PC games look. In crysis, high means high in the graphics settings, and the effects of which you can set to high are much more numerous and powerful than other games. Very high means that you need to have gods own rig to run this at the resolutions you were enjoying for all the console ports. The whole thing is about people's time, from the R&D costs of hardware to the new construction of fabrication plants to coders to developers of games. These games and these graphics cards are not what they cost from the silicon, but the development. A game developer can only do so much in one game. I know I rant but thanks for reading my take on this.
Log in to comment