I said : " (playable only in tank and jet levels)" , and you are linking benchmarks from "thunder run"(tank level)
. Anything other than this level( maybe train), with only two shooting AI's and performance is unacceptable ( muliplayer basically unplayable). Yo can see in this movie ( from 3:00)
http://youtu.be/ylYwTWV1aHg
Guy claims it is running at 720p medium . Look at that dips ( or more accurately freezes), look at those shadows, which are somehow much worse than console version. Moreover scenes in this movie are nothing intensive, add few more solders, runing and grenades and you are seeing slide show. Ironically MW3 was even worse.
The shadows are set to low, thats why they look so bad. Everything else looks better than the console versions from what I can see. I find it unlikely that the consoles are running across the board medium settings and until it's established exactly what they are running then its a complete apples to oranges comparison. For example, are the consoles running BF3 at full 720p? Would they be running with the equivilent of "high" PC textures that the game was set to in that video? Pretty unlikely. In fact "High" textures in a modern PC games designed for 1GB+ GPU's on a 512MB GPU is generally a bad idea and likely exactly what is causing those freezes.
I'm sure with a more optimal application of settings that better match the console versions then that GPU would handle the game at least as well.
I was talking about beginnig of last gen, remember quake, oblivion ports?, Those were pcgames/engines fast ported to xbox 360.
Quake 4 was very much a niche case. I certainly wouldn't call Oblivion particulatly PC biased compared with the console version. What drives you to say that?
Remember all the shock /complaining about in order CPUs, multi threading and necessity of rebuilding engines etc?.And by the time they were somehow optimized, and pc cached up with brute force... This will not be the case this time. Another thing is full switch to console centric development. Look at skyrim which stock version is closer between pc and 360 than oblivion was six years ago...
As above, what evidence do you have suggesting that Skryim is closer between the platforms today than Oblivion was back when it launched? The PC version of Oblivion was only marginally better than the console versions at the time. y understand of Skrim is that on maximum there are quite a few obvious differences in the PC version.
This time with this console centric development, new hardware which may have strong points where pc's are weak (interposers with very low latency connections/ high bandwidth, some crazy threading like 4 way IBM in P7/a2, edrams. I bet minimum one of these will end up in consoles.) AND add much smaller/ maybe none( from prespective of average pc)power advantage...
If anything the hardware of the new consoles is likely to be much closer to PC hardware than the current generation consols were at launch. Xenos had unified shaders and edram, not exactly run of the mill for PC's and I won't even mention Cell.
The general thinking is that relatively speaking this generation of consoles will be weaker at launch compared to PC's of the time. This makes perfect sense given the power restrictions and law of diminishing returns. Your argument seems to be operating under the opposite assumption. That's fine for you but until we have some evidence that you're right and the majority are wrong I see little point in continuing to debate it. Lets just wait until we know what the new consoles will be packing, and what PC's will be packaging in their launch windows and we can pick up then based on fact rather than fantasies.
There are truly none developers interested in truly pushing PC anymore.
This was never an argument I put forward. In fact all along I've said that PC's are underutilised. That doesn't mean that game engines designed for the new consoles ar efor some reason going to run like dogs on equivilently powerful and capabale PC hardware though. Its clear developers are targetting PC as a platform along with the next gen consoles even now. UE4, CE3 etc... are all marketed as being designed for "PC and next generation consoles". And given the increasing cost of development it only makes sense that developers would trend
more towards cross platform development, not less as you seem to be arguing.
Another thing, there are surely powerful forces, namely console manufactures which will depend on seeing these boxes as truly next gen by publics end even geeks and may persuade devs to making console versions stand out for some time/not making pc version/making conversion from last gen machines.
This just sounds like wishfull thinking now. I can see no logical reason for Sony or Microsoft to pay developers to deliberately gimp the PC versions of games that would only be playable at console settings on a very small percentage of PC's around the launch time anyway. Hell if they were going to do that then now would be a better time to do it when there's a lot more risk of gamers jumping from consoel to PC for the better graphics with a very low cost of entry.
Far more likely is Sony/MS will pay for exclusivity but then that will be exclusive to one console, not consoles in general with the PC being the only loser. Plus, because of the rising cost of development, the incentives for exclusivity are going to have to be higher to offset the developers costs and loss of revenue from not releasing on a third platform.
Remember pc versions of Just cause, GRAW, not releasing force unleashed,cod 3, bad company "because pc is to slow". I feel that combination of all this, will make few years of nasty ports on PC ( an probably there will be no light in the tunnel for pc gamers like crysis was last time...)Console exclusives level , let alone higher will be no match for small pc devs.
I'm not sure what argument your making with those games? I'm not familiar with the circumstances of them all but GRAW was arguably better on PC - albeit completely different to the console game and COD3 was released on PC alongside the console version if I recall correctly and ran at least as well. But regardless, yes sure the PC had a few raw deals last generation and it surely will next as well. But given the likely relatively weaker position of the consoles this time round, their requirement to render at higher resolutions and less API overhead hobbling the PC, there's every chance that this generation will be better than the last in that regard. Especially given the higher pressure on developers to release on as many platforms as possible to recoup development costs.
About API. I don't listen too much these reassurances about efficiency, Dx11 pc-console parity? yeah right , just like parity of dx9 with console and pc at the beginnings... Gosh, I remember all these buzzwords : dx10,stream out, SM4.0, geometry shading
Your lack of understanding of what an API enables does not make it any less relevant. Its a simple fact that DX10 and moreso 11 are more efficient than DX9. I'm not talking about added features, I'm talking about pure API overhead. The kind of overhead which doesn't really effect consoles regardless of the features that API exposes.
With consoles regardless of the generation, you can pretty much code to the metal almost totally eliminating API overhead completely. The next generation consoles will sport a greater featureset but in terms of pure API overhead they'll be no better off than the current generation consoles or the generation before that because they're already pretty much as good as it gets.
PC on the other hand has always been hobbled by a think API but as DX progresses, not only does the featureset grow put the overhead goes down. Completely hypothetically since I don't have real numbers, lets say DX9 saps 30% of a GPU's performance on average while DX11 being more efficient only saps 18%. Thats a universal improvement for PC's that won't be reflected in consoles dues to a generation change.
Virtually every game from this generation was DX9 at it's core and only tacked on a few DX10/11 additions so the efficiency gains were largely unseen. That won't be the case next generation where games will be built from the ground up with DX11 efficiencies at their core.
and now these "monster" can't even play b3 like a console...
I think it's time we dropped this now don't you think? Without an apples to apples comparison from a reliable source it's waste of time debating this point.
Few years later we have third generation of dx11 cards and not a single game have efficient, groundbreaking implementation of any features . Consoles will gain new efficiencies too, and soon we will see new excuses about new API needed, and at the same time excuses about fragmentation of pc base which will be cause of not using it...
No ones trying to claim that PC's have made great use of DX10/11 this generation. In fact that's my point, where they haven't this generation they will next and that's a relatively bigger gain for PC's than it would be for consoles where the API overhead is practically none existent in the first place. Don't get me wrong, there will be efficiencies to be taken from the greater featureset which consoles will benefit greatly from (as will PC's) but on balance, the PC's going to benefit more by a move from native DX9 to DX11 than consoles will.
And yes there will always be complaints about API overhead on the PC and no doubt we'll all be looking forward to DX12 and the extra efficiencies it will bring which will likely never make it to the core of ame engines just like DX10/11 didn't this generation. But that's doesn't take away from the fact that DX11 is a step forward for PC efficiency to a greater degree that it is for console efficiency.
.. oh wait
