Slashdot Mirror
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."
I don't think you ever played FF7's PC version. Even the software renderer was graphically superior on a middle-ranging PC at the time of its release to the PSX version. Having a fast enough computer/3D accelerator to run it in high resolutions and there was no comparison.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
And in turn your post about cross platform support for wii/ps3/xbox360 also doesn't make any sense, because
1) 360 doesn't support OpenGL, it supports DirectX
2) Wii and PS3 OpenGL support isn't compatible, and they also have other technical (cpu, SD/HD, ram, so on) and gameplay (wiimote) differences that would still require complete rewrite of graphics engine and gameplay.
Mac is also only using Unix underpinnings, it has plenty of other APIs that a game may be using - e.g. Cocoa and OpenCL.
Which should ease a port to Linux because Linux has parts of Cocoa. Or what am I missing?
It also ... had fixed save points.
It was a console game ported to PC, not rewritten for the PC. What did you expect?