Digital Foundry: £100 Graphics Card vs Next-gen consoles

[kirby007]

Mummelmann said:

JEMC said:

That's incredibly good for PC gamers (who most likely will have something better than a R7 260X), but as always there's a fly in that soup:

That said, for all the advantages we found in our tests, we do notice a worrying trend in this recent slate of PC releases. Need for Speed: Rivals is capped to a console-standard 30fps, while Assassin's Creed 4 requires a lot of GPU horsepower to sustain 60fps, dropping down hard to 30fps on less capable hardware. Likewise, the PC version of Call of Duty: Ghosts is in a bit of a state, which despite several attempts to achieve parity with the console settings, was held back, seemingly due to poor optimisation.

Unless developers and publishers start paying more attention to the PC version of their games, we'll still have to own cards a lot more powerful than what's inside the consoles to be able to play the same games.

Too true, the consoles have a great advantage in unified hardware, most developers get a bit lazy with PC versions and make them really poorly optimized in comparison. The worst examples are games like Skyrim only utilizing 2 GB of RAM regardless, on release, that's amazingly stupid for an open world title with such a massive amount of more or less constant texture load and no transitional rendering besides entering and leaving buildings.

I really hope the 8th gen will be better in this regard and I think it actually will; the PS4 and One having hardware architecture so close to a pure PC setup should make the development and optimization whole process more natural and fluid. There is hope now!

didn't skyrim actually had a change in that like the last 2 weeks tho?