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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.
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!
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.
No sig today...
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.