Gears of War PC

Are you ever going to stop trying to compare PC gpus that can only be accessed through a significant hardware abstraction layer to specialized console gpus to which devs have extremely low level access and can specifically tailor their code? Just curious.

 

Yep, just as soon as there is some evidence that that significant hardware abstraction layer has any major baring on real world performance. Putting CPU's and memory aside for a moment. Its my experience that GPU's almost always perform as expected in comparison to their console counterparts given their power differential when you take into account differences like resolution, image quality and detail.

Until that changes, I see no reason to stop concluding that a more powerful GPU will equal better results in the same game, regardless of the fact that that GPU is in a PC.

 

Yeah, it doesn't seem like HALs have a significant performance cost for GPUs EXCEPT when the limitations of the HAL cause the gpu to use a suboptimal method. (like say halo pc's shaders versus halo xbox)
However, there does appear to be a substantial cpu and memory hit.

 

It's not only about the HAL, it's the fact that there are also ppl out there with x1300s, and 7300s, and Ultras with Pentium Ds and whatever. Meaning there are about a gazillion possible combos, and optimizing is far far harder.

For a closed box, everything is known quantity. Say you find a neat trick for Xenos that gives you 15 fps extra. On the x360 you go ahead and implement it. In the PC space it may translate into:+15 fps for ATi HW, -15 FPS for nV, the reverse of that, extra fps only for DX10 hw, extra FPS only for the 2900 and so on and so forth. So you drop the POS because debugging it is too hard, and you scour for general case optimisations-within your time and budget constraints. Which means you eventually give up and that's that, whereas on Xenos or RSX, you'd have milked every drop of extra performance.

 

Nah dude, any game that doesn't run at least as well on any decent PC as it does when finely tuned to a particular console is just a crappy port.

 

I do agree thats the case, however its the results of that process that are greatly exagerated IMO. I'm sure it does produce greater results but for the most case they seem to be marginal. A quick look at just about any cross platform game on say the X1900Pro when resolution, image quality and detail settings are the same and there doesn't seem to be any difference (or if anything the X1900 comes out ahead, as per its slightely greater specs). I'm sure the same is true of the game this thread is about.

Same was true of the Ti4200 and NV2a. Even Halo in Fox5's example ran perfectly on a Ti4200 at 640x480 (better than the xbox version) and the differences between those GPU's were fairly small. Arguably smaller than between Xenos and a HD2xxx series GPU with identical numbers of execution units.

I think the problem is that people get carried away with the whole "PC's of the same spec as consoles are no where near as powerful" line. Its absolutely true, but only in regards to memory size and to a lesser extent CPU power. GPU's do seem to produce roughly similar results in the majority of cases.

 

Yeah there were a couple of effects missing that presumably the DX8 API just wasn't suited to handling. In performance terms though its performance was pretty predictable for a given hardware spec in comparison to NV2a.

 

I've actually disagreed with this comparison from day one. If you load Halo PC up on a GeForce 4 Ti and run 640x480, it doesn't run bad at all. It runs better than Xbox.

Now, when a PC gamer naturally tries to raise the resolution, frame rate does tank quickly. That is because the shader load basically scales with resolution. Halo is probably one of the most shader dense games of those times. If you use a Radeon 9700, which has much more shader ALU grunt than Ti 4600 even, you are back in action at 1280x1024. Seems like decent coding to me....

You can see this shader load impact most obviously inside the alien ships because most objects and surfaces seem to be using shader programs. The game actually seems to run best outdoors where there is less of the shader detail

 

I think Fox5 is referring to the fact that Halo on the GF4Ti missed some effects that were present in the xbox version. Mainly the "predator" effect when you cloak. Obviously not a limitation of the GPU but likely one of DX8 itself.

But yes, performance was better on any GF4Ti than the xbox showing that at least performance wise, the closed box element held no advantage.

 

Exactly what I was referring to. Actually, I ran halo pc in dx8 mode on a geforce 3 at up to 800x600 with decent performance (about the same framerate as the xbox), albeit on a ~2ghz athlon.
And halo I think was more a poorly designed game with regards to looks versus performance, as there were better looking games out later on both xbox and pc that ran better. For instance, halflife 2 runs better on a 9700pro than halo pc, yet looks better, and I believe the same remains true on xbox as well. I guess the first halo suffered from being a launch title, as well as shifting dev targets several times though and starting as a small budget title from a dev without prior experience on dx8 level hardware. (albeit, at the time of the xbox's launch nobody had experience with dx8 level hardware besides the games in development at the time)

 

I don't really disagree with your reasoning, but i think multiple factors act together do reduce performance on the PC side. I think few PC players play at 480p/720p without AF/AA and medium textures, which would be roughly equal to what a console was doing. Also, there are few PC players who'll game on a large screen TV, sitting at quite a distance from it, thus being less sensitive to a number of details that are apparent when you're with your nose stuck into a 19-20-22" LCD. So basically you get higher res+higher detail+added features on PC+some inherent code suboptimality being slower than consoles. Which is quite logical, but seeing it as such would require objectivity and it's far sexxier to scream:"OMG, PC gaming sucks, the consoles are the awesome".

Also, I think that due to confounding factors, it would be really hard to do a head to head comparison between Xenos/RSX/a console GPU and a desktop one.

 

One thing I noticed with Halo PC is that I couldn't really read the food dispenser panel text on the human ship (first level). On Xbox, they were clearly readable.... That could've been SDTV res cleaning it up though. But I was sure those textures were better on Xbox.

 

Lol. why did i even buy a 360. All the good 360 games come out on PC anyway.

 

Sure, but often as crappy ports. At leat the 360 version of Gears supports surround sound.

 

Yeah, and you're forced to use a gamepad.. not a good tradeoff.

 

And here I'm happy the PC version at least has proper gamepad support, after all that is what the game was designed to be played with.

 

The lack of surround sound is dissapointing (although as I understand it, you can get surround sound, just not true positional sound) however I think its a bit of a stretch to call it a crappy port.

It still plays just as good, looks even better and has more content. I'd take that over top notch positional sound any day.

 

Not to forget it runs faster on older hardware maxed!

 

Not really. You can hack it to get some very broken surround sound, or you can expand the game's two channel output by various means to get sounds out other speakers same as you can with any stereo source. But no, you can't get anything resembling proper surround sound out of the PC version of game.

And sure, if you don't game in surround sound anyway, then obviously you aren't missing anything there by playing the PC version. However, if you accustomed to playing games with surround sound, then the sound in the PC version is disgustingly outdated even compared the PLII mixes on many PS2 and GCN games.

 

I wonder why they made it 2-channel, time, money, lazy? Otherwise I dont see any reason for skipping it if it was included in the xbox360 version.