How the PC Is Making Consoles Look Out of Date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."

Comments

Re:Not only graphics

[rainmouse]

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.

Re:Not only graphics

[DavidTC]

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.