Its not just the consoles,don't be so ignorant and snobbish. Not evryone has the same rig regarding PC's some games look worse on some PC's because they have a crap load of stuff going on in the background,all that power is not just used for gaming. Pc's are better if you have a decent/or high end one. i've seen lots of videos or examples of people having to play oblivion and other games on low/lowish settings,which looks worse than consoles. Are you going to blame those PC users too,just because you can't have your own way?

Just except what bethesda is trying to do across the board and deal with it,we should all experience skyrim.If it was made specifically for decent to high end PC's only,bethesda would be left in the dark ,comparied to other companies,and the elder scrolls may not last as long either....don't be so ignorant and look at the bigger picture. Over 100 milion consoles have been sold and are still selling strong,which shows,that people are happy enough with the games around at the moment. Leave bethesda to do what they want to do,everyone should enjoy skyrim no matter.

Then I'd be happy and I could deal with a longer release date. If the PS3 version was as good as the 360 version, I would be perfectly happy. What I'm worried about is an inferior PS3 version. I don't care about bragging about graphics and the like. I'm just sick of getting the short end of the stick with multiplatform games. If the PS3 version of Skyrim is just as good as the 360 version, I'll be ecstatic with joy. I don't want better, I don't expect better. I don't think my PS3 is a demigod compared to a 360. I think it is capable of equivalent graphics and performance, though, and that is all I want.

If this is true, can we have the official word on this sticky'd and an immediate deletion rule in place for future topics like this? It would solve all issues. Not everyone is hanging off Skyrim 24/7 so more people will be showing up not knowing if the PC version will be different or not.

Hope they learned from Fallout and get the PS3 version right.

The only official word on the PC version so far is that it will have a different UI (the announcement of which, to me, smacked of damage control), anti-aliasing, and higher quality textures. Beyond that, they have given nothing beyond vague assurances.

why is there no response in the poll "I don't care because I'm playing it on PC where it's meant to be played"?

This.

Because that's only true if it's meant to be played on the PC. Remember, Todd said he favors the Xbox.

Fair enough. I really haven't been keeping up with the rumors on this one, so I honestly have no idea what the scoop is.

Yes but consider this, xbox/ps3 are about $300 in the store right now. A decent gaming pc is $500+ and that doesn't include a monitor or operating system for new time builders like me. It's just fair that since pc gamers pay twice to three times as much to game, they get special privileges and better graphics ect ect. Mods are definitely a bonus though, and if the graphics are the same, mods will improve them anyway, so i'm not really complaining. I'll be buying this game for 360 and pc, 360 mainly when i want to talk to some friends while i play. Pc for mods+better graphics.

I could go on about how I'd love the game to be fully optimized for PS3 (my console of choice), but since I'm moved to the PC in recent years I couldn't care to much. And the fact is that we're never going to get the real deal in terms of what the PS3 is capable of (Uncharted 2, for instance), so if PS3 gets equal or even a tiny little bit better than 360, I think its users should be over joyed.

And rememeber, the only difference between Oblivion on PS3 and 360 was that PS3 had a slightly longer draw distance, and that was with a large amount of time to optimize the game for the PS3, which they aren't going to have now. So don't hope for too much.

You can only do so much with consoles. PCs are different. You can do anything you want on a PC, so long as it has the required hardware.

There's no reason for the PC version to be graphically superior to the console versions. The game costs the same across all platforms, right? Why should I get less for my money simply because I prefer consoles over PCs? I'm fine with not having access to mods or the in-game console, but to sell me a severely watered down game for the same exact price as the PC version is nothing more than an insult.

"Pushing to use all of the capabilities of the PC" isn't quite that hard. The top end of PC graphics cards are downright absurd: even worse once you realize that they're designed for setups where you're using 4 or so GPUs at a time. GPU power has gotten so high that nVidia and AMD have had to INVENT new technologies to chain together super-HD monitors together just to make a resolution high enough to justify the cards' existence. Hence, you can now get the equivalent of 3200p super-widescreen, hooking up to 6 monitors together to form a screen 7680x3200, a 24:10 ratio display that gets you >24 megapixels, 1,185% as much as 1080p. (2,666% that of 720p!)

For those of us without desks large enough to even FIT 2, 3, 4, or 6 monitors in a gaming display, (many of us PC users only have one super-hi-res monitor for gaming, plus maybe a second lower-res one so we have extra work space) there's still reason to perhaps justify the most powerful cards: DirectX 10.1 and 11 features.

• Ambient Occlusion: DX 9.0c and the consoles can handle Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) but that version has significant weaknesses: just circle-strafe a dark crevice and watch the dark patch grow and shrink as your view angle changes. More powerful AO methods require more advanced shaders and more power. Though admittedly, even SSAO would be nice to see in Skyrim, given that Oblivion and Fallout 3 lacked it.
  
• Radiosity: Indirect illumination of areas can produce even more realism than just Ambient Occlusion alone: AO handles the dark spots, but radiosity can reduce the reliance on "ambient lighting," adding vastly more realism in scenes where much of the lighting will be active, such as the sun moving through the sky or a fireball sailing along a collumn-strewn hallway in a dungeon.
  
• Tesselation: The oft-boasted feature of direct DX 10, (and 9... and 8...) but only really finalized to have universal compatability in DX 11. This allows for on-the-fly boosts in object detail, when combined with good LOD scaling scripts can drastically boost quality even WHILE improving performance.
  
• Improvements to prior shaders: Many staples, like normal- and parallax-mapping, have been around for ages; even the original Xbox had limited capability for some of them. However, newer hardware can handle increasingly realistic variants to these and other shaders.

For one, making an ill-informed statement trashing one console in favor of another is the exact contradiction of "not wanting to start a console war."

Power-wise, the PS3 and Xbox 360 are very, VERY close in capabilities. To just give you a brief little bit of education:

• For one, their total RAM supply is more or less the same. (technically, the Xbox 360 has 522MB vs. 512MB for the PS3) It's double-edged here: the PS3 has an advantage for having a faster, more dedicated buffer for the CPU, but the 360 has the advantage that its GPU can access a full 512MB without the added latency the PS3 gets when the GPU needs to access the CPU's memory. (which is frequent, because in most games, the GPU needs more memory than the CPU, and on the PS3 both get 256MB)
  
• CPU-wise, the two chips, for all that's said about them, are a toss-up. The 360's CPU, as it has three REAL cores, (3x PPEs) it can process instructions at three times the rate of the PS3, which has only one PPE. However, of course, focusing silicon on smaller-and-less-capable SPEs for the PS3's CPU gives it 220% the total MATH capability of the 360's CPU.
  • The Xbox 360's Xenon achieves 96.0 Gigaflops, and the PS3's Cell achieves 211.2 Gigaflops, when both run in single-precision. (any figures you see to the contrary of those are made-up, including anything that mentions "teraflops")
• Graphics-wise, it's another toss-up:
  • The PS3's "Reality Synthesizer" is a modified G71: the GPU that powered the nVidia GeForce 7900-series cards. It's cut-down a bit, though, as it only has a 128-bit memory interface (vs. 256 for the PC version) and half as many raster pipelines. (as the full 16 aren't necessary for merely HD resolution) It has a serious weakness that shows up in almost all major games: it can't do anti-aliasing plus HDR at the same time, so games can have one or the other. With the exception of Final Fantasy XIII, all major titles I've seen pick HDR: hence you can notice some "jaggies" not present on the 360 version. The flip side is that power not spent on AA (as AA *does* need power when used) is USUALLY spent to bump the resolution up a bit higher: games that run at 576p, 600p, or 640p (but with AA enabled) on the 360 often run at 720p (without AA) on the PS3.
    
  • The Xbox 360 has a decidedly different CPU. It DOES run at only 91% of the clock speed, and fewer texture units (16 vs. 24) but has more shader power: the G71/RSX have 24 old-style pixel shaders, while the 360's Xenos more resembles a newer type of GPU, with "unified shaders:" 48 of them, each with its own vector unit & ALU.
  In the end, the graphics differences are mostly minor, and in the realm where a "significant step" is going up or down by a power of 2, a 10-20% difference in some areas is more or less negligible.
  
• Disc-wise, there's a bit of a trade-off: at least with older PS3s (I don't know if this was changed for the "slim" PS3s) the Blu-Ray drive had an issue with latency: it'd take a second or two longer to start reading the disc compared to counterparts on the Xbox 360. In many cases, this readily countered any benefits gained from increased disc capacity.

In the end, it comes down to what's mostly a wash. There's a REASON why there's never much visual difference between the two versions for any game that comes out on both. The only significant thing that often shows up is a result of the RSX GPU's major weakness: PS3 games often don't use AA, as they chose HDR instead, while 360 games have both. And as I said above, a consolation is that the PS3 games tend to run at a slightly higher resolution. (always keeping 720p, while many 360 games, including Oblivion, run as low as 576p)


The disc capacity is more or less meaningless, really. In any situation where a single dual-layer DVD proved insufficient, it's always been due to massive use of FMVs: hence why only Japanese-style RPGs and other games that are FMV-heavy have needed multiple discs.

Money that could be better spent elsewhere such as DLC.

This brings on an important point: cost and benefit. "optimization" can be done almost endlessly... Well, until you start to reach a point where the outright computing cost of optimization outweights its benefits. However, you rapidly start hitting "diminishing returns:" days and programmer-days of work for almost meaninglessly-small gains. This is part of why most of the PS3/360 different lies on the AA vs. resolution tradeoff.

This makes no sense, and any console war makes no sense either, as the real limitation of BOTH consoles are the crappy RAM they have, not the discs' capacity (which being 8 gb's for the XBOX360 makes it "decent").

512 mbs of RAM (and shared with video RAM) is just pathetic. even the guys at Crytek says so. And any dev would say the same if asked.

If you think Bethesda is going to take extra time to optimize the game for PS3's terrible development structure you are insane. You'd be lucky if they optimize for PC which has essentially the same coding architecture as 360. Stop crying cuz you spent more money for a machine that gets most of the same games as 360 at generally lower quality

The thing about PC games, though, is that they have quality settings. And the thing about modern hardware is that it's so incredibly overpowered that the old overheads just don't matter any more. The average PC, according to Steam, has 3GB of RAM - if a game is a 32bit executable, which the vast majority are, it can only access 2GB of RAM on windows - so that leaves 1GB for everything else before there's even a theoretical RAM concern. Modern processors are multi-core, again according to steam the average PC has a dual-core processor, and as most games don't make perfect use of your processor (Because really, there's only so much to process in parallel) and your OS is generally quite good at assigning processors to tasks, idling applications simply can't make an impact. Your GPU is pretty much never used by anything, and aero will disable itself if it's ever causing an issue. Disk I/O could be a problem, but very few applications continually hit your disk while idle, so really more of a theoretical concern.

We're basically past overheads, so that no longer holds water. Nobody is asking for the PC to only run better than consoles - PC gaming is about freedom, and part of that is the freedom to choose to spend very little on your hardware. All we want is a higher ceiling. Make those sliders a bit longer. Do it harder, faster, better, and stronger. Because we can. Because if you don't let us, we're going to do it anyway, it'll just take longer.

(And FWIW, a 'decent' PC is only about 150% the price of a console these days)

A lot of people don't know the when you enter the settings menu in PS3 and change RGB setting to full color and superwhite on you have much better color quality....

I hope that everyone platform's version is of good enough quality.


Huh? You get exactly what you pay for. If you buy better and more costly hardware you get better graphics. If the game was available for Wii as well would you want the other consoles to have as good graphical quality? I think not.

The X360 and PS3 are both fairly similiar in power, I don't care though, I'm getting on 360, because the devs test it on that rather than PS3.

lol I dont even know if this is relevant to what your asking, PC is FTW though.

Source?

At last we have mods for improve game better in visuals, so graphic not so important for me, but better if non-linear and well done quest, deep and contrast game mechanic and rich dialogues almost have nothing with console limits, thats not a graphic features thats will take all out of them, do not simplify game.

I think the reason they ported Oblivion was because it came out b4 the PS3.... there not going to do it this time around being the PS3 is out for its release this time around.... that said it annoyed the crap out of me i can't cure my Vampirism because of it... and the knights of the nine ending even screwed up... now the guys jusst standing outside with his arms up....

Um, no they aren't. Granted, there's similar APIs (DirectX) providing that abstraction layer there, but then again, the PS3 uses OpenGL, which is ALSO used for different PC games as well. That, and the 360's version of DirectX doesn't QUITE line up with DirectX 9.0c on the PC: it's got a few features missing, (as the GPU in the 360 was finalized before DX 9.0c was) but overall, can roughly approximate the same stuff.

The CPUs are entirely different: the Xenon uses the RISC-based PowerPC architecture, contrast to the CISC-based x86 architecture found on both AMD and Intel's PC CPUs. While the old Pentium 4 had SOME similarities in the semantics of its implementation, (both the Xenon and P4 had long, hyper-threaded pipelines with poor branch prediction) many fundamentals were significantly different. Overall, the Xenon, like the Cell, trade off an x86's massive performance in handling varied instructions on-the-fly for cheap and quick math processing. CPU performance can be classified along that spectrum, as math vs. instructions: and the Xenon and PC CPUs take opposite ends.


Actually, this varies depending upon the hardware setup: a 32-bit OS can only access 4GB of address space. Said space is used for more than just your main RAM, but anything else the CPU would directly address, including input devices (keyboard, mouse, and network input are stored to a buffer that's not part of the RAM, but still use address space) and output devices. Don't forget that the video card's RAM also takes up address space as well. Typically, the amount of address space left over in most 32-bit OSes will be 2.5-3.5GB, mostly dependant on the particular flavor of Windows, (IIRC, 2k, 98/ME and earlier only use up 256-512MB for non-memory purposes, leaving just the video card and main memory to take the rest) and how much video RAM your graphics card has. Yes, that does mean that you can't properly use a pair of 2GB cards (or a dual-GPU 4GB card) in a 32-bit OS whatsoever.


Actually, it's possible to build a decent gaming PC for under <$300 nowadays. At least, if you count out the price of the OS, which does a lot of things the gaming experience isn't gonna need... (alternatively, you could get Linux and WINE for free) Post-rebate, apparently Radeon 5570s have fallen http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131342, and will grant a good 2-4 times a 360/PS3's graphics power. Similarly, good gaming-grade CPUs can be had for <$70US, and <$50US for the motherboard.