(Video) case you are wondering, this is what Skyrim looks like on PC in Max Settings

[Reasonable]

mjk45 said:

Reasonable said:

mjk45 said:

Boutros said:
No wonder you guys always end up banned.

Did you notice he said it was good that a 3-4 year old PC was all that was needed to keep up with consoles ,not bad for 5-6 year old consoles keeping up with younger PC's.

To be fair though it's more that recent games (Skyrim being a prime example) don't exploit modern PCs than consoles keeping up.  When you fire up a properly modern engine (like say Frostbite 2 under Battlefield 3) on PC the difference is stark.

Don't get me wrong, I still very much like what consoles can deliver, but they are a lot further behind technically than it seems - it's ust few games push the envelope now on PC as most are simply console ports (again Skyrim being a prime example).

My point was people forget about how old the HD consoles are when saying thing's like 3/ 4 year old PC , and of cause something that is 5'6 years younger running the latest DX will look great , the fact is as the steam hardware report shows most people game in the middle , I remember people talking about the HD consoles being so yesterday when they came out and then saw that the steam report had most PC gamers running lesser specs than the consoles at that time , of cause this changes over time but the fact remains most PC's are rooted in the middle and even more are on  laptops so to me it is a marvel that even today , console games look as good as they do at a time when they should , based on history look like junk compared to even a vanilla PC game running on minimum settings .

I agree about most PC games not being made at their true potential but in many ways that as always been the case as they have had to pander to the lowest common denominator one that  thankfully increases upwards every year , it just that  HD consoles this gen  are seen as a mid powered PC's enough to be used as a denominator , Games like Crysis that showed off the PC as the platform for pushing the envelope also showed that pushing the envelope doesn't in and of itself guarantee success commensurate with the time and effort put in , indeed it can lead to  a negative response regarding what hardware is needed to run it , so scalability is what I like to see, Another thing that worries me is with it's increased power and memory  over consoles we aren't seeing the same  increase in getting rid of slow texture draw in and pop up etc compared with the increased graphic effects lighting etc , and thats what I want from the next gen consoles but if we aren't getting it  on PC  I don't hold out much hope for  next gen consoles advancing those areas much either.

Good points.  Yeah, in the PC market the focus is often on the top tier PC specs even though only a minority ever have them typically.

TBH I think, and I think Carmack from id said this himself, that we need a bit of an overhaul of some of the basic engine approaches to improve the kinds of things you mention, improved streaming/loading of assets and so on.  I understand the cost benefit of getting a lot out of an initial build - heck look at Valve with Source Platform, they've arguably leveraged a slowly adapting engine better than anyone.  But, to really see a jump we do need some new techniques ideally married to SDK environments which reduce cost/effort of creating games/content.

Also, I need more justification for my PC!