Better looking and easier to control (insofar as higher framerates and more control peripheral options) I'll give you. Not sure about the rest though,
That's a straw man argument. No-one mentioned "wimpy little 2Ghz CPU's" (however you define one of those). We are talking about an AMD FX 6300. A CPU with a base turbo clock speed of 3.5Ghz and a turbo clock 4.1 Ghz. With well over double the per core performance of the Jaguars in the XB1 and the same number of available cores to the game, that CPU should quite easily be able to spare a full core or two to audio.
I'm not saying for sure that's is or isn't enough to outperform SHAPE in game related audio. I don't know enough about SHAPES relative performance in that regard and neither do you but their's no doubt that the CPU would offer a lot more flexibility for developers to programme custom audio solutions should they so wish.
And besides, why bring up SHAPE (or Kinect) in the context of Titanfall? Is Titanfall demonstrating some more impressive audio solution than that which is available on the PC? If not (and there is no evidence of that) then it's of no relevance to the DF article being discussed.
I brought SHAPE because they faintly mention it. And yes, as you say, I think that a CPU core belonging to a very good CPU could certainly replicate most of the dedicated audio features, but to what extent is unknown since we are talking about specialised hardware. Any input bkilian could give would be nice, because flops wise they might be close but flops alone aren’t going to show how capable certain hardware is.
This is another Straw man. No-ones saying that Durango isn't more powerful than some PC GPU's. For example it's more capable than AMD GPU's from at least the Radeon 7770 downwards and Nvidia equivalents.
But we're not talking about some random PC's GPU's, we're (or rather DF is) talking specifically about the GTX 760. And that GPU has 72% more shader performance than Durango on paper and 142% more pixel fill rate, geometry performance and texturing performance. And that's assuming the XB1 has access to 100% of it's GPU's resources which you're 8% comment points out that it doesn't. So even when it gets that 8% back, the extra performance (and more in fact since the XB1 will still reserve a small percentage of GPU time) of the 760 detailed above still stands.
As for the GPU you mention, that’s a hell of a GPU. A PC making justice to it would be much more expensive than the Xbox One. An excellent choice in the long run too, anyways. Which brings me to the point of the life span of the PCs.
The PC has infinite backwards compatibility –as
joker454 pointed out sometimes-
and that’s great, but the actual life span of a PC is shorter than a console. Especially now when next generation of consoles blur the line in terms of performance vs PC performance. Now the games can run at superior than HD resolutions and better framerates.
The only console which could handle 1080p in the PS2/GC/X-box era was the original Xbox. I wonder about the framerate but that’s fact. Now we have consoles which are several times superior than those and you need PCs as 200% more powerful to really notice a difference.
And now when that line is blurred, surpassing the capabilities of a console is a tough task. Consoles have a longer life span than PCs, and the GTX 780 for instance, is a great GPU for a PC, and it’s going to last for a few years. :smile2:
What can make PCs to look as if they have a longer life span is that you can upgrade it, am I right? So you can even keep the same case. This can make you feel the illusion of thinking you are basically using the same rig...
But would be it the same rig you bought 4 years ago? Certainly not. You just don't realise how much money you have spent on upgrading the rig to get it to play newer games at 30fps.
:smile2:
Decent CPUs (for gaming) are like 100+$. Then there is the mobo. RAM (many PC gamers have the habit of filling all their DIMM’s ‘cos it’s cool
).
Then there is the GFX card, some GPUS are crazy expensive, like the Titan. A decent soundcard, and the 5.1 system laying around. SSDs… Display… PSU… UPS…
Not to mention the cash spent on moddeing your rig with the round cables, better fans and also those cold cathode lights.
And then the software! Your OS… you do pay for all these stuff, don't you?
So once you try to sum up all the expenses you realise how much you paid for your 4 years old rig (half the life span of the Xbox 360), to run Crysis 3 at 30 fps today. I’d say the expenses are a lot more than a 500$ console.
:smile2:
At the pace of which the hardware is improving these days the PC Digital Foundry is using will become obsolete in no time. Whereas the PS4, Wii and Xbox One will improve.
And then the Xbox One is a console meant to be backwards compatible forever, which will only expand the life cycle of the console.
: )
What I don’t have, alas, is a fine rig to mess around, but I am playing many games on my laptop with a i5 CPU and the Intel HD3000 and I managed to run Heroes of Might and Magic V at 2560x1600, J even when I throttle down the laptop to keep it cool.
And Heroes 3 and 5, in the top 3 games of my life, runs butter smooth on my laptop. Also effectively using one of Shifty’s favourite AA methods, SSAA for free.
I know my PCs relatively well, just as developers know consoles better over time, and now I can mess around easily, and don’t feel too dumb, so I can play games on the PC without much hassle. I love the PC, its customisation and it has more uses, and I can understand you and Davros.
:smile2:
But it’s also true that PCs life span is shorter. In 5 years a good PC will whip the floor with a console.
That’s the upgradability factor, but consoles will run fine. No need for astronomical full screen extremely high resolution (8096 x 4000) gaming on a PS4 or Xbox One which can give worth thousands of hours of fun in easily accessible online multiplayer environments.
Scalability being the advantage of a PC, in the future PC games could have the ability to change the amount of detail which are converted from their console counterparts though.
I don't see why they are unfair. They quite clearly state the spec of the PC that they are comparing too and they've gone into detail about both the spec and cost of that PC in the past. It's a £500 PC so yes it costs more and lacks some functionality of the XB1 (and vice versa) but they aren't moving the goal posts or comparing the console to a PC that costs 10x as much. It seems to me like a pretty fair comparison.
I'm not sure what you mean here? What are DF insisting on and how is it unfair?
By that I meant that I do enjoy sitting around with friends or siblings playing a game, it is a different type of multiplayer experience rather than being connected to a server hundreds of kilometres away that many people you’ve never laid eyes on do also connect to.
Additionally, it is fun to sit in a comfortable seat and take turns at playing a SP game. That doesn't work the same with most PC games. That wasn’t the case time ago on the PC though, with Heroes of Might and Magic you could play hot seat with a friend, your wife, siblings, etc.
: )
Finally, it isn’t fair ‘cos they focus on comparisons and I would love to read a DF article on Powerstar Golf, where they find out the actual resolution of the game and talk about its great sound.