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

[Pemalite]

torok said:

Munkeh111 said:
So it's not quite a fair comparison as your £100 graphics card will likely find itself in a £400+ system. You would also only expect this parity to last another few months and teams get more time and more experience working on next-gen hardware

The problem is as a PC gamer you always want more. My 670 could provide nice 1080p gaming, but once I can't hit ultra and keep the frame rate up, I'm going to want more power rather than just lowering the settings. Star Citizen is going to ruin me

I actually see the bigger problem in flutuating framerate. In AC IV, my GTX650TI can achieve 60 fps in some areas, but when we reach locations with more vegetation, it woud dip to 20 fps unless I lower my settings. In the end, you have to lower the visuals for the worse part on the game, while the console version is automatically optimized, they will just remkve what they have to in any area to achieve the performance they want.

Adaptive V-Sync is your friend with the fluctuating framerate.
AMD users can obtain that functionality by using RadeonPro. (Which in turn gives you access to SweetFX to improve a games graphics.)

Also, feel free to overclock, it's free performance.
AMD and nVidia are both making great strides in dealing with framerate fluctuations, nVidia is throwing G-Sync out into the wild and AMD is pushing for the more open Freesync.

Then you have Mantle being thrown into the mix, which allot of game engines may end up supporting, giving PC gamers similar overheads to that of console gamers. (That's gonna' ruffle some jimmies!)

kitler53 said:

isn't the ability to optimize due to standardized hardware the entire reason consoles are competitive.   yes, PC has far better numbers but you need them to overcome the overhead of being on a non-standardized platform. 

Most console developers don't optimise for a consoles specific hardware to any great degree.
Most developers Purchase/Lease a 3rd party engine such as the Unreal Engine, Gamebryo, CryEngine etc' and then use those engines on a Low level or high-level API and never even deal with the hardware.

It's usually only the console exclusive developers who take advantage of a specific console and optimise for every little nuance to extract as much performance as possible, but that is more or less the exception rather than the norm.

The Goal of Mantle is to give a similar environment to developers that the consoles have enjoyed for years, pretty much since 3dfx Glide days, standardised or not, API's were invented to hide such things and make making games easier, it's just Direct X is old and slow at handling it, OpenGL is a little better, Mantle may solve allot of the issues.