Heavy Rain Graphic Quality Destroys The PC Gaming Business

[Squilliam]

inverted3reality said:

Squilliam said:

You're talking to a fellow programmer btw (Reasonable)

1. Theres a sheer brute force difference which cannot be overcome. The HD 58xx range from AMD is 2Tflops+ and the graphics cards have tricks up their sleeves that the PS3 couldn't hope to compete with. Shader model 5 vs shader model 3 for instance, tessellation, multi-threaded rendering, compute shaders etc.

2. Say that to their face why don't you. Actually stand at the door at crunch time and call them lazy, I wanna place bets to see if it would provoke anyone to take a swing at you. (no offense intended)

3. Funny the times when the game really shines are the times when you can put down the controller and watch... funny huh?

4. Expensive yeah... but doesn't look as good as a game which cost half as much to make (Crysis), which I might add was released in 2007.

5. Hardware that doesn't exist huh? You'd probably nail that sucker out at 2560 by 1600 with an AA mode of your choosing and 16x AF on a modern GPU at the same frame rate as the PS3. Its a visual intensive game, theres very little else to it. What good that the Cell brings is being used to make it look pretty and a PC with say an HD 4870 or better under the hood doesn't need to call on the CPU for help.

 

Again, you could do it, I never said you could not. I simply said development would be very difficult because you would need to ensure it would run on a wide range of hardware. Of course Brute force will do it, but what happens next gen? We get even closer..

Think about it? Why hasn't their been any PC games to come out over the last 2 years that rival the console exclusives in terms of graphics? What if the next consoles have cards that are as good as 4870s(4890 is where its at imo..)?

WIth PCs you're forced to develop for ever changing technology, its really difficult to optimize on them. In general, you do very little optimization.. CRYTEK is actually amazing at optimization, and look how well that went?  Basically no one could play the game when it came out.

CRYTEK has developed the cryengine 3 for consoles and PC. While the PC does look better, they have invested a lot of time and resources into making the consol engines and they look just about as good. If this isn't proof I don't know what is.

The reason why a wide range of hardware can exist is because of APIs, standards (X86, Windows, Direct 3d) so it really doesn't matter what the hardware is as long as it conforms to the standards and runs the APIs acceptably. The problems exist for the most part on the software front with so many possible conflicting programs, a user problem really. Nvidias TWIMTBP program tests IIRC 75 major hardware configurations for the developers as part of the package, which is why they use it.

Why haven't their been any games coming out which rival the console exclusives? My pick is that its a perceptual problem, your perception. Beyond that theres more to graphics than just the look of them. If you want consistant higher framerates, no tearing, no aliasing problems, you'll have to look beyond consoles for that. Just because Crysis is picked, doesn't mean there aren't any other PC games which look wonderful. I suggest you look in this thread if you want proof < http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=45986&page=35 > and work your way backwards. It isn't just Crysis, though thats the favourite.

With Crysis anyone with a gaming PC at the time could play the game. Its like buying a kid an oversized sweater so he can grow into it. Some kids (gaming PCs) grow faster or slower than others and thats natural. With console hardware coming up you have to consider the current launch TDP to be excessive and inpractical. A next generation console will probably have to live on the power draw of a mid/high end standalone PC GPU.

Finally, Crytek haven't really shown off their PC engine yet for Cry Engine 3. My pick is they are working on Direct 3d 11 support before they do.