Kyros on 09 May 2008
$500 Gaming PC Plays Crysis on High
Didn't Crytek say that they have Crysis running on 360 comparable to PC High settings? And a 360 costs 200$. Taken with a grain of salt.
since COD4 actually isn't a great looking game
Seriously thats out. Call of duty4 is one of the best looking games this gen. It can hold its own against Crysis on high quite well.
The point is PC games do not have significantly better graphics than console games at this point in the console life-cycle. Only few games like Crysis can target the 5% of PCs that are a class or two more powerful than the actual consoles. The rest has to run well on the average 2year old gaming PC which results in at best higher resolution and more antialiasing and slightly higher textures than the console version. Consoles will run along quite well for a while. They simply have some big advantages:
A homogenous development environment where you can optimize the graphics for a specific hardware.
Some architecture enhancements perfect for gaming like a gigantic bandwidth between CPU and GPU and for the PS3 integration of the Cell CPUs as really advanced shaders.
And the possiblity to use low-level APIs and optimize for hardware instead of using DirectX for everything three abstraction layers above.
Yes high-end PCs are more powerful and games look better. Yes the divide will get bigger.
But to say that console games look much worse than PC games at this point is hyperbole. All three platforms have awesome graphics.
