5 Reasons PC Gaming Is Better Than Consoles

[fordy]

r3tr0gam3r1337 said:

just a word in your ear Dirt 3 is not being run on an emulator so you can come out with as much jargon as you like but the fact is there is a huge performance difference between 30 fps and 150 fps, the PC is not hardware restricted as much as consoles and for your information this debate is 5 reasons why pc gaming is better than consoles not have a hissy fit with pc gamers who use emulation to run old games with better graphics, im not accepting your advice cause you are trying to force me to accept what you say as fact and change my opinion as to what i consider to be emulation.

so according to you you are accusing codemasters own benchmark of lying! lol and apparently i make ridiculous statements, i suggest you get in contact with codemansters and call them out aswell.

The PC is not as restricted as a console, but there are a few things that set it apart. PC games use software interrupts issued by the OS. A lot of this is subject to other tasks that the OS is processing at the same time, and can skew the timing or firing of said interrupts. Game consoles use hardware interrupts, which are guaranteed to fire at exactly (in nearly all cases) 29.97Hz. Games that run in this fashion call an update routine every 29.97Hz to reposition sprites, redraw the screen etc. 

If Dirt 3 is not being run on an emulator, then it's a port or a remake, a completely different topic altogether. Emulators run by means of interpretation, not compilation. If a game that originally ran at 30fps vsynced now runs at 150fps, that means the original code has undergone changes, something that emulators do not cater for (they work off the same ROMs being read by the sytem. If the system does not cater for 150fps, neither can the emulator).

If you think that it's a "hissy fit", then you obviously didn't read my last answer to pezus, since I mentioned that, once again, while emulators are handy, they CANNOT fully replace the real thing, nor did you read my original post. You might think that a PC running a console emulator is the be all-end all, but it isn't. Emulators still have to abide by the laws dictated by the emulated console as well as the hardware, and there is no such thing as "a fraction of an interrupt". therefore, you're stuck with the "close enough" result of 30Hz on emulation. Anything that attempts to get around that limitation is a port of a game, not an emulated game. I'm sorry, but you can't have it both ways. You can't say emulated games are allowed to break the rules of timing because they can't. If you ramp up the speed of an emulated game without appropriate changes to the game code, you're only going to get a fast, unplayable game. Any change to the code to break these limitations turns an emulated game into a port. If you have a different interpretation for emulation, that's your problem, not mine.