Slashdot Mirror
How the PC Is Making Consoles Look Out of Date
An anonymous reader writes "What has been clear from this year's Game Developers Conference is that consoles are beginning to show their age. With nothing beyond a possible Nintendo update on the horizon, developers at this year's GDC have turned their eyes to the PC. The article includes three videos that give a fantastic insight into where PC graphics are headed, including a version of Epic's Unreal engine, Crytek's Cryengine 3, and DICE's Frostbite 2 engine. Considering that these leaps in eye candy are only possible with the current state of PC graphics, we wonder how long consoles will be the target platform for development of blockbuster games."
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Doesn't matter, as long as your opponents have the same limitations. It's still frustrating at times, but it got me out of the PC upgrade cycle for a while, and it's been a good experience. Console graphics of this generation have definitely been approaching "good enough" in my book, and the next generation will definitely last a good while too. Even in PC gaming recently there haven't been many games pushing the latest hardware to the limits.
which is totally what she said
FTS:
"Considering that these leaps in eye candy are only possible with the current state of PC graphics, we wonder how long consoles will be the target platform for development of blockbuster games.""
PCs have, for the most part, outclassed consoles in terms of graphics for years. For most games which are available on the consoles and PC, the PC version will almost always feature higher resolutions and better textures and other graphical bells and whistles (even in cases of console ports). However, pure graphical power isn't why people buy consoles and not PCs. People buy consoles because it's cheaper (at least, it's cheaper than buying a state of the art video card every two years), it's accessible, and its better integrated with their home theatres. I think consoles will stay the target platform for blockbuster games for a long time.
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In the scope of things, the fact that the 360 and the PS3 are showing their age doesn't translate to a mass migration of developers to the PC platform. For a long time now, consoles have gained and held the larger gaming audience compared to the PC, and that market continues to be the biggest and most profitable market. For the majority of the time, PC's hold a significant technological edge over consoles, which is nice for when you want to punch things like Crysis ahead of the graphics curve, but it isn't as if all the console gamers converted to the PC platform because Crysis was pretty.
Even in PC gaming recently there haven't been many games pushing the latest hardware to the limits.
Thats usually because most PC games are being held back by developers pandering to console version limitations from the very start of the development cycle.
With a keyboard/mouse setup, I can spin 180, while leaping through the air, target and kill someone all the way across a map almost effortlessly.
Honestly, that's one of the reasons I dislike modern FPS. Players tend to be hopping, somersaulting, whirling dervishes that have nothing in common with any sort of real human behavior on the battlefield.
A jump should take you no more than a foot in the air while carrying combat gear, and COMPLETELY ruin your accuracy during and for a bit afterward. If you're going to make your soldiers behave like low-g ballerinas, at least recognize that your game is silly, like Quake Arena.
It's going to take a quantum leap in hardware design
You mean the smallest possible change?
No, more like theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, then leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that the next leap, will be the leap home.
The rest of my PC I _already have_, and would already have even if I didn't use it for gaming at all.
Yeah, this is a point that almost always get skipped.
Every single person on slashdot owns a computer, to within statistical margin of error. Everyone hear debating is debating via a computer they own.
And in general, I would be astonished if more than 1% of households with consoles in them did not have a computer. And 90% of that 1% of households probably have a Wii, which is not really what we're talking about here. All gamers have a computer.(Please do not think I'm dissing Wiis, which are amazing ideas, an epic win for Nintendo. You got my mom to buy a game console! My mom! You broke the entire damn product market. But they aren't really in this discussion.)
Now, so all households with gamers own a computer. Maybe 20% of those households do not have one that 'could have been' a gaming computer...they only have Macs or laptops or something.
But for the other 80%, the question isn't 'What is the price of a console compared to a reasonably powerful computer?'. Everything thinks that, but it's not right.
The question is 'What is the price of a console compared to simply purchasing a $100 video card and maybe another gig of memory?'. They already have a computer. Everyone already has a damn computer. This is 2011!
Now, there are other reasons to get a console, but the comparison isn't '$200-$300 PC' vs the console price...it's a $100 video card for the PC you probably already have vs. the console price. Unless you only have laptops or Macs or something, then, sure, you'd have to build a whole computer, but that's not normally true.
And $100 is plenty fine for a video card, you do not need to spend $250 or whatever 'half a PS2' is. ;) I always go somewhere between $100 and $150 when buying a new one, which I have to do about three times a decade.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?