The mobile market shows the danger of parity

[VanceIX]

gergroy said:

VanceIX said:

Do you own a gaming PC? When you downgrade, of course it looks worse, what do you expect? That doesn't mean it looks like a mess. A recent example is Star Citizen. Optimised for high-end cards, but looks and plays just fine on medium-specced cards on lower settings. When you lower the quality, you don't magically lose optimisation, you just make it look like what it would on consoles, or what your hardware is capable of.

I have an out dated gaming pc.  Stopped playing games on the pc a while ago.  Also, you do lose optimization.  Games are optimized to run at a certain configuration, if your pc isnt good enough, you can turn off settings, but the visual result will be far less than if it had been optimized to run at those settings.  It may be playable to olay a game without most of the shaders, lighting stuff turned on, but it woukd be an inferior product to that of most console games.  

If a game was optimized to run on the high end of PC's, if you tried to play it on a mid range pc it would look way worse than what the current consoles can output because the console games are fully optimized to run at their specs.  Even though that PC would technically be better than the consoles in almost every category.  

Developers are smart enough to realize this and develop their games with the majority in mind, not the minority.  

Absolutely wrong. Once again, I don't know when you last played PC games, but the market is very different today. If you play Crisis 3 on PC on a high-end card, it blows away the console version. If you play it on medium, it still looks better than the console version. It's all the matter of how a game is optimised. You don't neccessarily optimise a game for the high-end cards per se, but for PCs in general. That way, when you lower the setting, all you do is lose out on some effects like AA or high-end textures, while still keeping a great looking game.