So is this the generation where PC's are surpassed forever?

Nitendo will allow you to plug in in a PC monitor, I expect the others to do the same.

 

those features may not be able to "make bad graphics good", but they definitely do improve the look of games;

example of 0x AA
example of 6x AA

[source: http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?page=3&articleid=452&cid=2




example of 2tap AF
example of 16tap AF

[source: http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=50000268 ]

 

For me they are just as bad as they were without AA and/or AF. Far Cry has 100000 times better graphics at 800x600 no aa/af than serious sam at 1600x1200 6xAA 16xAF.

And then there are those pc games with stupid requirements for what they are showing/doing, that and why they forgot adventure, platform, fighting space shooters genres? Bleh to pc gaming.

 

I'd hope so but thats like comparing a playstation game to a playstation 2 game .

Fsaa and ansio make games look better , it gives a reason to go through and player older games

Well pcs have space shooters and there are adventure and platform games on it though no where near as many as on a console . On the flip side

Where are all the mmorpgs rts and turned based games on the console Oh and flight sims

 

I see alot of MMORPGS and FPS on PC, but RTS, turned based games and flight sims, have become quite rare on PC.

 

or like comparing half life 2 to unreal championship. all the aa and af in the world couldnt make blah life 2 look good.

 

sure hovz sure .

Get a high end gpu like a x800xt pe and play half life 2 from start to finish with 6x fsaa , 16tap aniso and at 1600x1200 then go play unreal championship and bring a barf bag with you because it will look like a mess

 

lol yes, let me go spend 500 bucks to add 2 more aa samples, 8 more af samples, and a resolution bump to flat life 2. THAT WILL MAKE IT LOOK MUCH BETTER.

 

Somehow I'm reminded of the the various discussions on individual bias. . .

 

Nope. The sad thing is that Half Life 2 is one of the best looking games we have on the PC. The problem is that it looks rather old in the lighting/shadowing area and that totally ruins the visual impression of the game. All imo of course.

 

If Hovz believes that Half-Life 2 is inferior to Unreal Championship 2 in terms of visuals, that's an opinion and is purely subjective, it's illogical to attempt a debate.

Now, on topic, PC's will undoubtedly advance far past the next generation consoles, because the PC is a constantly changing, evolving platform, while consoles are fixed.

Perhaps the consoles might "beat" the PC's for a few months, but Intel, AMD, ATi and nVidia will not be sitting dormant. They make considerable money off this market, and will continue to advance their product lines.

Oh, and how do you think the console games are made?

 

The thing is that pc games are never aimed to the fastest hardware, and, because of that, console games will look always more "polished" and will have better visuals because they don't have to support older harware (GF4Mx, 9200's and so).

 

In some ways, perhaps. But PC games will usually make use of higher-resolution textures than consoles can offer, just due to the difference in the amount of RAM.

 

If you look at a movie, generally no two pixels have the exact same color at all. And you see no real sharp borders. So, the holy grail is to make things as smooth as possible, which requires you to calculate the color of each pixel as accurate as possible. The smoother the image (geometry / normal maps) and the better those lighting and color calculations, the more life-like the image looks.

But as that would require an almost infinite time to calculate, clever hacks are used to decrease that time. Like anti-aliasing and shaders. Even ray-tracing is a hack.

 

FarCry doesn't have much support for GeForce MX cards, it even says on the packaging that Geforce MX doesn't have all the core rendering features enabled.

The CryEngine also includes support for floating point blending and filtering based HDR, SM3.0 and shadowing techniques that are essentially the same as the top shadow-heavy games.

Perhaps games like Doom 3 or Half-Life 2 may have targeted low specs, but FarCry didn't, and is an excellent display of the power of the PC, and puts any console game to utter shame.

 

We'll have muti-core CPUs and graphics that exceed R500 class hardware in far less than 2 years. The new consoles will just be gaining traction by then, so things will be on an even keel for awhile, then PCs will start to pull ahead again.

Of course, it's up to developers to take advantage of that PC hardware and as we all know they usually target the lowest-common denominator, but to say console power will permanently surpass PC power is rather short-sighted. If anything, the new consoles will give a huge boost to PC gaming. No more poorly textured, low poly console ports!

 

I'd have to agree slightly(on one particular aspect actually) with hovz comments on half life 2, while the environments I've seen(I've yet to play it) do look extremely mpressive the characters themselves are whole other thing(judging from the pics I've seen).

http://www.shacknews.com/extras/e_halflife_2/1_faces.jpg
This is in line with characters like those seen in top tier console games like NG/RE4/DOA/SH3, in fact some of the console characters could very well be considered more impressive looking.

Now as for next-gen consoles beating pc-gphx for most of the console-cycle, I'd say this would only be feasible if a BE+(an equally beefy scaled up PS heavy)nvGPU setup was made available. But alas manufacturing woes, and cost constraints seem to've made this nigh impossible, so teh pc seems to be safe from such a scenario...

 

I think games for the new consoles are to be devolped on "developer" versions of the consoles themselves. Obviously not the 1st gen of games but later ones.