| Mr Puggsly said: No, Fable 3 on PC is trash because it has the GFW crap and that was my original point. I stand by that, fairly certain thats why it was delisted as well. You feel MS doesent want to make keys, I feel they dont want to sell products with GFW. Not really a winner and loser debate. |
Eitherway... Games for Windows Live! Isn't a legitimate excuse. Just remove it (And patch all the older GFWL titles too) and sell more keys on Steam. Microsoft is just being lazy, they deserve the criticism on this front either way.
| Mr Puggsly said: Abysmal frame rates were more tolerated at the time, but that doesent mean it ran fine. DF looked at that version in HL2 retrosoective, it hung in the teens and nose dived for heavy physics. I played it, enjoyed it at the time, but it was rough and doesent mean it ran fine. We just had lowered performance expectations for technical marvels I guess. |
I fired it up not long ago, performance wise it's not something unexpected, it had semi-decent frame pacing so it still controlled okay... I mean if we were to look at Halo 3 that had terrible framerates and poor framepacing which meant the controls felt extremely floaty... But the game still played fine for that era, obviously it's a far better experience on the Xbox One, just like Half Life 2 was a far better experience on the Xbox 360.
Either way, I feel like this is side stepping my actual point... That improvements in hardware capability tends to open up the possibility of new gameplay mechanics... The original Xbox was a showcase for this... Shadowing and Lighting took big strides thanks to programmable pixel shaders... And a few games actually leveraged this, can you guess which?
The CPU was also the best of the generation which enabled games like Elder Scrolls Morrowind and Half Life 2 on console.
| Mr Puggsly said: In previous gens RAM on PC was generally significantly higher on PC than consoles. I remember needing 256MB of RAM to play a game thats virtually the same on Xbox. PC has generally been less efficient and has to run an OS like Windows. |
The PC tends to run with better, more expensive visuals, that's not free.
It's like comparing SSAO that many consoles games used which is lower quality, less memory and GPU intensive than HBAO... The PC's hardware does get used extensively you know.
Oblivion uses 512MB~ of memory on Xbox 360... When I re-engineered the shaders, polygon reduced allot of the assets, reduced texture resolution, I was running the game on only 128MB of memory on PC... Does that mean the Xbox 360 is less efficient? No. It's just pushing better visuals.
At one point though the PC was running a more memory intensive Operating System, especially with the advent of Vista, even when we shifted from the 9x to NT kernels... But since the 8th gen, that is no longer the case where the Xbox One and Playstation 4 reserve a few Gigabytes for OS/background duties.
Plus we have more and larger caches, it wasn't unheard of for graphics drivers at one point to duplicate the GPU's vram in system memory, Intel was notorious for this which became a significant issue when Aero came about... But over time the PC does get more efficient and it's no longer the case.
| Mr Puggsly said: I looked at RAM usage of AAA releases in 2013-14, 4GB was fairly common. While many modern games can function fine with 8GB. And again, PC is just less efficient. |
The PC is slightly less efficient, but not a generational difference. Again... Read above.
Keep in mind that PC games using 4GB in 2013 is being compared to games that would use 5-6GB on the 8th gen... But was probably still pushing out higher visuals. - That doesn't make consoles less efficient, it's just resources being used differently.
| Mr Puggsly said: Again, 7th gen had a lot of open world games. Red Faction Guerilla was even a mix of great physics and an open world at the same time. BF lowering the player count was like for performance reasons. |
I am aware that the 7th gen had a lot of open world games, never said it didn't. - Heck the 6th gen had a heap of open world games, but it wasn't the norm like it was in the 8th gen, especially from outlets like Ubisoft.
| Mr Puggsly said: In practice, the console CPUs have out performed the FX 6300. Again, just an example of superior console optimization. Im pointing out that CPU can run the game and we can only speculate what the console CPUs could do with good optimization. |
Not really.
Just because Ashes of the Singularity... A PC exclusive that leverages all the CPU time you can throw at it tanks a low-end, last generation CPU, doesn't make the PC significantly less efficient, it's a different use of resources.
The FX 6300 is more than capable of playing the majority of multiplats just fine... Shit. I can run the vast majority of multiplats on a Core 2 Quad from 12 years ago... That's a 7th gen equivalent CPU. - Jaguar hasn't pushed up the CPU bar all that much in the last decade on the gaming front... It's simply a shit CPU.
Even Digital Foundry recognizes the limitations of AMD's Jaguar... So why don't you?
| Mr Puggsly said: Again, I dont feel 10x CPU necessarily changes how a game would be designed in most cases. They may splurge on CPU heavy effects that are easy to add, but I feel something like AI is generally design related more than spec limitations. |
We will wait and see.
Although the gaming industry is extremely mature at this point... And big publishers don't like to make allot of gambles and would thus rather push out yearly releases from reliable franchises...
However, I would imagine there would be some experimentation that will happen on the Physics, Particle and A.I. side of the equation next gen, maybe something like Supreme Commander on console with actual decent A.I?
On the graphics side, because we don't know much about the Ray-Tracing implementation going on in next-gen, the CPU might be employed to assist in culling or some-such. - Can only speculate though.
| Mr Puggsly said: I suspect Crackdown 3's destruction ambitions were scaled back just because it was difficult to actually create. At some point they just threw something together. |
Crackdown 3 was a colossal failure, the Xbox One just didn't have the hardware resources to achieve what their original advertised vision entailed.
Destruction isn't a new concept, Red Faction has been doing it for ages, Battlefield has been doing it for ages, it's a known quantity.
However the processing that goes into such a scheme is significant... And the scope that the original idea for crackdown 3's showcase meant that the cloud was a necessity because Jaguar was simply not up to the task.
| Mr Puggsly said: I feel the Jaguar CPUs were fine for what developers were looking to do this gen. Frankly, they had more CPU power this gen and didnt do much I consider ambitious compared to the previous. |
Jaguar was the only option this generation. AMD was not in a good place on the CPU side of the fence... Which is a reversal to where they are now, where their GPU side is where they are dropping the proverbial ball.
But what improvements have we seen this generation over last generation on the CPU side? We are seeing larger multiplayer maps with more people, we are seeing more extensive use of physics based particle effects. - But considering how marginal the CPU improvement Jaguar brought to the gaming table over the 7th gen was, I think developers have done well with the hand they were dealt.
When consoles rely on PC technology and use only low-end and mid-range components, there is only so many options available I guess.
| Mr Puggsly said: Maybe CPU is being taken seriously because game design in general has been kinda stagnant, more demand for 60 fps, will help loading, split screen, practical stuff. Generally speaking, I dont expect more CPU to make many fresh experiences. |
It will only assist loading if there is heavy scripting, unpacking, decompression and procedural generation and so on going on during the initial load phases.
The main limitation for load times is the last century optical and mechanical disks.
| Mr Puggsly said: On a side note, I think its time MS play its Windows card and allow Xbox to run PC games maybe in a curated fashion, kinda like backwards compatibility. A great CPU would help with that. It would also mean the Xbox library could be easily in cases developers dont want to make a Xbox port. |
I absolutely agree... It seems it's been the path they are heading towards anyway... But considering I have every Xbox console and 500+ games, I wouldn't be against the idea, but I refuse to use the Windows Store... So I would prefer it to be a stand alone application.
The reverse could also happen where PC games operate on Xbox... We saw some hints towards that with the App side of the equation this generation, with even some emulators popping up on Xbox and some games implementing a store-front for mods and so on.
But that is also a double edged sword... It will mean there is less incentive to pick up an Xbox console... One of the reasons why I even bothered with Xbox was due to a couple of games like Halo and Fable.. They were day 1 purchases which made me jump on the Original Xbox... They did get PC releases later though, but by that point I was invested.
That meant the Xbox 360 and Xbox One were must-have purchases on day 1.
At this point though I have gaming devices for every area of the home, the Xbox One X in the lounge room for couch-gaming, Nintendo consoles in the bedroom for gaming in bed, PC and Playstations in the games room.
And a Ryzen notebook for gaming when away from home/traveling long distance... My platform of choice is of course the PC.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
