Soundwave said:
Why is it that PC hardware is so different from console hardware, is there something magical in the console chips that make them completely different? If MGSV wins game of the year, that will be three straight years (The Last of Us, Destiny, and MGSV) of a game getting GOTY being cross gen between two completely seperate hardware generations, let alone a unified family of devices with the same architecture. These are platforms in some cases seperated by almost 10 years with completely different CPU, GPU, memory structures, etc. etc. By the way here's a really interesting look at how insanely scalable the Battlefield 4 engine is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0BpD2fylmk You can scale it down all the way to basically make it look like a PS2/3DS game and scale it back up so that it's too much to run on a Playstation 4. There's nothing magical or different about console chipsets these days, they're basically just watered down PCs or smartphone architectures, both of which are extremely scalable. Having low/medium/high settings is nothing new for developers. This will be easier for third parties than in the past, where if they wanted to make a Wii game, say Call of Duty for Wii ... they had to use a completely seperate team and a totally different engine. Want to make a DS/3DS game too? Well that's another new engine that's going to require a completely other team. A scalable NX will be easier for third parties dealing with Nintendo not harder. |
In simplified terms:
PC game developers (I've made PC games as well) test for a handful of common GPUs and CPUs, design their engines to integrate with the graphics card APIs and let AMD, NVidia, or whoever deal with the "scaling". If something runs like shit? Blame the driver, or just raise the minimum spec. Problem solved. No time and effort is put into optimizing for specific hardware specifications, as long as it runs decently on what is considered to be a decent PC, then it's fine.
Consoles on the otherhand? Console games go a layer deeper than that. Console development has the engine interacting directly with the hardware, or through a much more minimal, more open API. Game engines often encompass what drivers do for PCs, and this gives a lot of advantages when it comes to control. That control is needed for Optimization, and that's what console video games are all about. - Optimization, optimization, optimization. Then more optimization. If there is a single unified spec, optimze for that single hardware spec, you can work around specific bottle necks, you can arrange instructions to make processes run faster for a single GPU and CPU that runs at a specific speed, has specific cache sizes. When you are coding for specific quanities rather than general quanities you can get more, and more out of them. That's why console games at the start of a generation look terrible compared to the games that come out at the end of a generation. That's why if you could hypothetically take a console and a PC with the exact same hardware specs, and fast forward five years into its lifetime, the console will run the same brand new game better than the PC.
That is the heart of what differentiates consoles from PCs, and you just want to pretend it doesn't exist, that you can just wipe it away and expect the games to come out to either a)look as good, and play as nearly well as they would if the NX was just one unified spec or b) not drive up devlopment costs as console developers have to develop for 3-4 different specs instead of 1. It does not work that way.
Consoles aren't scalable. That's all there is to it.
