Yay for P.C Gaming

Just had to jump in real quick and say, "PC gaming, HUZZA!".

 

I agree, I just went with the 8 core to remove any ambiguity. 8 cores with higher IPC at more than double the clock speed seems pretty difficult to make an argument against

 

But, but... unified memory and ESRAM! Nevermind the fact that those are 8 overclocked tablet cores. Surely developers can get comparable performance to an i7 since consoles are a fixed target.

 

Regarding CPU, what about the DirectX 11 overhead?
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2011/03/16/farewell-to-directx/2

I'm not trying to start anything here, I'm just curious regarding how consoles may drive up the requirements. I was shocked reading that 2011 PCs with DX11 lose out against the old consoles in draw calls

 

Consoles will always be ahead in things like that as they don't need an OS that has to be able to gracefully deal with a user being able to install any hardware driver they wish, any software they wish, etc.

So for a console there's no ability for a new graphics driver to do something bad and bring down the entire system. PC's have to abstract much of that in order to preserve system stability in case of errant code.

With a console and only one target, if Microsoft aren't making the hardware drivers for everything themselves, they can at least validate everything quite heavily before putting it out there for system updates.

Not something you can do with a PC. It's also why the choice of hardware and stuff is extremely limited for MacOS, Apple makes sure it's limited in order to reduce the chances of errant hardware drivers, etc. from causing system instability. The benefit in their case is that their system can be lighter on resources.

Regards,
SB

 

This is a good question for the graphics guys. The answer I've heard is that with DX10+, you can do a lot of work in not very many draw calls, so the added overhead isn't such a big deal. Also PC CPUs are enormously more powerful than console CPUs (next gen included), so they can simply muscle through if necessary. Not ideal but oh well.

 

There was a good conversation about this in another thread involvong AndyTX, sebbbi and a couple of the other devs. Wish id saved the link! The general thrust of it though seemed to be that yes PCs have to brute force through it and it takes a lot more power to achieve the same draw calls as a console but pcs are still capable of handling sufficient draw calls for pretty much any situation within the budget of whats possible on a regular cpu using as i understood it, a single sandybridge core.

So applying that to the scenario above, lets say the pc cpu has to allocate 2 full bulldozer cores (1 module) to draw calls while the console allocates half a jaguar core for the same result. That still leaves 6 bd cores for everything else on the PC and 5.5 cores left on the console (since 2 seem to be reserved for the system).

 

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1725711&postcount=413

 

Thats the one! Cheers!

 

Went to Bustbuy the other day. Their PC games section is a SHADOW (less than 1 shelf unit, mostly empty) of it's former self (good thing, I got Skyrim for $30!, bad news, current rig can't run it).

Anyway, Steam is KILLING jobs. Steam burns. Shut off the Steam! I **WANT** hard copies of my games. I **DON'T** want my games on a "cloud", where some shithead, greedy, chiseling, weasal can DENY my access to what I PURCHASED. Bankruptcy, choice, etc. "the man" is **NOT** to be trusted. Do people not understand the **TRUE** meaning of capitalism yet?]

 

So ?
Just order from Amazon or go the whichever shop you like.
As far as I'm concerned I don't resell my games (except bad ones and I quite rarely purchases one by accident), and Steam is both user friendly and has great sales...

(I can even log in on friend's computer, download a game and play it there to demonstrate it...)


On the API topic: They are SHIT on PC. 'nuf said !

 

Order boxed copies on Amazon?

Calm down, Gabe does not want to eat your babies. He just had lunch and won't be hungry again for a few hours

 

So, how much of a disadvantage is PC at vs next gen consoles with similar but weaker hardware? Is D3D really that bad?

 

I think this one's been talked to death. The rule of thumb I use is consoles can achieve 2x the performance with the same hardware. The reality is going to be far more complicated than that and in many cases far less (and some more) but since no developer has ever gone on record saying "more than 2x" for the sake of argument it's a pretty easy basis to work from. Fortunately for us PC gamers PC's are currently quite capable of absorbing a 2x efficiency disadvantage unlike 2005. I'm sure the reality though, especially during the first year or two of fairly unoptimised ports, is far more forgiving on PC's

 

Calm down.

THQ went bankrupt and all my THQ games on Steam still work just fine.

Hell, even my Crysis 3 copy on Steam kept on working when EA forced Steam to stop selling Crysis 3 for a while.

And frankly, thinking about it, if Valve themselves went bankrupt and I somehow lost the ability to play ALL of my Steam games, it wouldn't bother me too much. There's a LOT of games in Steam that I haven't played in over 5 years and I'll likely never play again. I'd only be sad for the games that I haven't finished yet.

I actually kind of wish I could permanently remove games that I purchased from my Steam Library. Just like I'm considering throwing away every single one of my game DVDs and CDs because I haven't touched them in over 10 years in some cases and likely won't ever touch them again.

Regards,
SB

 

/Davros puts up a tent next to Buddha's bin

 

Um, why would you ever want to permadelete games from your account? That seems nothing but bad... do you have some kind of punishment fetish? Do you like to be spanked and called a "bad boy"?

 

Just lacks hoarder gene. Piles of old useless crap sometimes lose their appeal. But I don't know why one would want to flush Steam games.

 

If he does can he not gift them ?

you can uninstall them (and redownload them at a future time) and select only show installed games