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Are Consoles Holding Back PC Gaming?
An anonymous reader writes "Despite all the excitement over Nvidia's upcoming Fermi GPU, there is still a distinct lack of DirectX 11 games on the market. This article points out that while the PC has returned to favor as a gaming platform, consoles are still the target for most developers, and still provide the major limitations on the technological sophistication of game graphics. Inside the Xbox 360 sits an ATI Xenos GPU, a DirectX 9c-based chip that bears similarity to the Radeon X1900 series of graphics cards (cards whose age means that they aren't even officially supported in Windows 7). Therein lies the rub. With the majority of PC games now starting life as console titles, games are still targeted at five-year-old DirectX 9 hardware."
Why should devs adopt DX11? Because the last iteration of DX lasted about a year and a half before being ditched and extended/redone? Because the majority of the market doesn't have DX11 cards? Because there's no clear advantage in developing to DX11 rather than DX9c?
Why should developers shift from something they know to something that they don't know as well unless there was significant profit motive to do so? There simply isn't in this case.
You're somewhat wrong, because games are also sold by their graphics and sounds and such. You're probably thinking that great graphics and sounds make a bad game, but you can have the both. I enjoy some of the old games, but seriously I rather play with awesome graphics and sound environment too.
Also, you are missing one important thing. If you free more resources from the graphic rendering by using newer technology, you can have more resources on AI and other gameplay elements.
//PC Gamer since 1986 ///Now happily a 100% console gamer ////Though I love to play Cave Story
Your example of Cave Story just illustrated another point: PCs tend to be better for games from smaller studios. Indie games on PCs are commonplace; indie games on Sony and Nintendo consoles need a jailbreak unless some major label notices the developer. See Bob's Game for an example of what Nintendo can put developers through. And the modding tools for PC games tend to be far more complete than for console games. For example, the stage editor in Super Smash Bros. Brawl is limited to just a few predetermined pieces on a grid; there's no way to add custom pieces, custom characters, or a custom soundtrack.
If not being able to use the latest shiny things is holding things back, then I say good. Why should I have to spend 2 grand on the latest and greatest hardware every 6 months just to play the latest fad game, when the computer I bought 2 or 3 years ago still serves perfectly well for everything else? Computers are expensive, and last I checked most of the world is dragging it's feet out of financial crisis. Additionally, we reached the 'good enough' mark a long time ago. Pushing the technical envelope for the sake of pushing has been an exercise of diminishing returns for a while now.
The Nintendo Wii in particular has proven a very important point. Hardware spec wise, it's a pile of crap. Yet it's also a wildly popular platform. Why? Affordability is a significant factor. Also it's because instead of focusing on massive polygon counts and 1600x antialiasing and whatnot other geewhizbang features, they make games that are enjoyable to play.
If I wanted high quality photorealistic graphics withe pixel perfect shading, etc, I can go outside. It's better than 1600x1200x32 bits out there.
Now get off my lawn!
Not quite. The big change was between DirectX 9 and 10. If you use OpenGL, you can access the new rendering model on Windows XP which, according to Steam, gives you 80% of the PC gamer market (or, at least, the subset of the market that is willing to put up with DRM'd crap). DirectX 11 is a relatively small change from 10. You can do some extra stuff with it, but it's much easier to write code that uses 11 and falls back to 10 than it is to write code that uses 11 and falls back to 9.
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When you program a console you know exactly what hardware is available so you can create a "budget" for polygons which uses it 100%.
On a PC you have to program for 20 different levels of hardware capability and try to scale the graphics up/down accordingly. It never really works properly and programmers hate doing it.
There's also the issue of drivers. On a console you know what the drivers are and what bugs are present. On a PC you have no idea.
The stability/predictability of a console's environment is what gives it the edge over a PC, not raw processing power.
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Except... Warcraft is 100% open GL. And alot of game makers (as the article and others read) are not interested in DirectX anymore because Mac is gaining in popularity, consoles are gaining in popularity, iPod/iPhone/iPad are gaining in popularirty, etc. They use something so they don't have to code twice and can save money on coding costs.
That's why they originally went with DirectX because there was no other platform. Now there are... and game makers want something to cut their costs and CODE ONCE, USE EVERWHERE!
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Except... Warcraft is 100% open GL.
Is it? Or better yet, start the same client two times at the same time and see it complain about DirectX.
You'll have trouble measuring a real performance difference between OpenGL and Direct3D (which isn't surprising since both APIs are simply ways to queue up commands in buffers for the graphics card to execute)
Since Direct3D 9.0, both OpenGL and Direct3D are very equivalent in terms of features and ease of use. Neither is "more suited" to either games or serious use.
For long term projects OpenGL has been much more suited to "industrial" apps simply because it's a lot more stable. If you'd started a project ten years ago using Direct3D you'd have had to rewrite the graphics code three or four times by now. With OpenGL the ten-year-old code would still compile/run, no problem. This long-term stability has a downside in that OpenGL has a lot of accumulated cruft - functions which serve no real purpose these days or have better alternatives.
OpenGL ES is a cleaned-up, modern OpenGL which would be perfect for games but for some reason it's never really been pushed on desktop machines (which is a pity IMHO).
Direct3D is a teeny bit lower level when it comes to things like memory management (e.g. for fine control over where geometry/texture data goes) whereas OpenGL just says "leave it to the driver". This gives Direct3D a slight advantage for games.
The main reason Direct3D is used for games though is because Microsoft spends lots of money wining and dining the CEOs of games companies and making pretty presentations to the developers.
No sig today...