| Squilliam said: One way PC gamers are making themselves angry for no reason: 1. Buying expensive PC hardware and then expecting that developers would have the money and time to dedicate to targeting a fraction of a proportion of the overall PC games marketable install base in order to release visually impressive games outside of the run of the mill 'throw more tech at it until the frame-rate tanks mantra of more AA/AF and various basic light/shadow technologies' which don't take much manpower to implement. At the present time games have been limited more by art work than raw performance and all platforms have benefited from the increased efficiency attained recently at eeking out better looking games without relying solely on the advance of hardware technology.
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So true and yet the PC enthusiast attitude typically overlooks this either because they need justification for spending between $300 and $700 on current upper tier VGA solutions, or they feel that by buying such set ups, they're entitled to games that actually make full use of them.
From a developer perspective, helping Nvidia or AMD sell the latest, highest performance video cards does less to benefit them than releasing games with reasonable minimum/preferred settings, which ironically, PC gamers often complain about anyway.
There is however much to be said about the underlying game engines and API updates that run on the latest GPUs though. Of course the latest game engines will still only look as good as the art resources that utilize the code, and that has just as much to do with the amount of time that goes into making them as the technology that utilizes them if not more.
What I found particularly interesting was how CryEngine 3 was in many ways a downgrade, or at least a lateral evolution rather than a vertical one, partly to accomodate its use on consoles, but just as importantly, to accomodate the largest potential PC install base.
