I wondered the same question. I guess we will find out when we start getting some videos around time for E3.

I would disagree, lot's of progress has been made on a from a technological stand point, the reason why games such as Crysis 2 are now just coming on consoles is because the hardware is now optimized enough to were you can get it to work, from a coding perspective take a look at a game such as Rage, it's essentially a leap for the hardware. Sure, they have constraints but the PS3 is just as good as most gaming rigs out there thanks to it's multi-core architecture and the xbox is with the latest Chip set which I believe is Valhalla which Combines the CPU with the GPU, it's effectively what the Sandy Bridge Processor is. Each console maker adds more power to the chip since the chip basically is an integrated graphics processor in of it's self. The XBOX uses currently the 3.2 GHz Triple Core IBM PowerPC or Xenon Chip allowing for multiple strings. So, saying consoles hold back PC's is ridicules to a degree. I'm also a hardcoe PC gamer and a Computer Science Major, I don't see how philosophy fits into this btw :confused: It's really how much time the developers want to devote to the interface. I should also point out that the markets are now splitting into two separate markets as to where it used to be the same market. The PC is slowly regaining on it's on, as you pointed out the witcher 2, so I don't see how consoles are holding the technology back. That's purely a developer choice.

well i was just throwing the fact i was a double major in two totally different subjects for not obvious reason.

Are you sure you're a CS Major? For one thing, hardware doesn't /get/ optimized without physically changing, software does. The reason Crysis 2 is coming out on consoles is because Crytek want to put it on consoles, not anything inherent to the hardware getting better (like what, wine?). The PS3 has some nice multiprocessing capabilities, but that doesn't change the fact that these are 6 year old chips and current architectures are significantly more efficient, and while only higher end chips are at the same level of parallel processing, linearly any modern chip will outpace the PS3. The 360's chip may bear resemblance to Sandy Bridge, but only in the same way that a bicycle resembles a car - they're both sort of similar looking, one is much more powerful. Nobody put GPUs on CPUs before now, not because they couldn't be arsed, but because a GPU powerful enough to justify it had too high a heat output to be cooled by a heatsink that didn't sound like a jumbo jet and cost $300, and the power requirements practically forced GPUs off of the slab of metal.

You can devote as much time as you want, and optimise as much as you like, but hardware has limits. A slower processor can't process as fast as a faster processor no matter how fancy your coding, and you can't work magic and load more into memory than you have memory. You can't push more pixels than your GPU is capable of rendering, regardless of how well you write your renderer. It's not a case of being smarter about it, it's a case of having serious limitations. It's not the consoles' fault per se, it's just inherent to them.

haha, lighten up I'm just giving you a hard time.

I see were your going with your argument but I think it's invalid since as you pointed out in the games you listed the PC is slowly becoming a separate market.

The games i pointed out are the few that are trying to push things but they either have; limited are hardly any funds to do so, or the limitations of console hardware.

I can see this is gona go in circles ,but the point I was making is that just because it's a static console market doesn't mean the games are going to look bad, Skyrim already looks several levels above nearly all the games I've seen out so far on the consoles. Even though it's static Microsoft still updates it's chipset with each new console release to a certain degree. Your right in that a console will almost likely never be able to keep up with the PC market but they are also two separate markets now(or at least to a degree). I would imagine it will not be long before you see a lot more PC exclusive from indie developers and major publishers looking to cash in on a huge gold mine.

No, they don't post about it on forums. They let it slide and let everyone else figure it out for themselves. Also, I can see several other improvements just by looking at screens and reading up on some of the technology used.

In fact a lot of the tech they are using has done the rounds and blown away a few people in the industry. I saw a reel showcasing a lot of the new Havok technology not too long ago and am very happy to see Beth using it.

Yes, more is capable with today's top end PC's compared to the consoles. I do think that Bethesda should include options to allow Skyrim to be run above the console level for those willing to spend the cash on a rig that can handle it. That being said, being forced to optimise the engine isn't always a bad thing (and that's exactly what limited console hardware is causing Bethesda to do). It means more is capable with current technology, leading to less being needed for those great leaps.

I've always felt a lot of PC gamers are much like a hammer anology. "just hit it with enough power until it works". It's q very blunt way of achieving the goal, and while having power is useful, coupling it with optimisation sounds like the ultimate combination.

I whole-heartly agree except in one point.
The audience IS the market and therefor its the audiences fault that those quick developement cylces are common today.

Maybe I'm just getting old, as well as my view on the PC market, but I like game sequels to take about 3 years to develope.I hate those mass productions like CoD.

However, to get on-topic:
Consoles are not bad. The developer has to concentrate on getting everything out of the current hardware instead of program a poorly optimized game because the next generation of graphics card will handle it.
It forces the devoloper to make scalable engines, so that one engine with different settings can be used for PC, PS3 and XBox360.
And there the PC user will benefit massively. A scalable engine runs on nearly every pc.

Something curious I notice from reading this kind of thread: I've been a PC gamer for more than 20 years and an Xbox owner for 5. There was a time, before this latest generation of consoles, when gamers would religiously upgrade their hardware every couple of years in order to keep up with the the higher demands for memory and graphics processing, all part of each leap in techonology. PC games always had a fair degree of scalability so that hardcoe gamers could enjoy their brand new toys, while casual gamers followed not far behind. Yet, they were not forgotten, being able to play with lower settings and optmized engines.

When the Xbox and the PS3 became available, the PC gaming industry declined because you'd essencially be affording a top of the line PC for a fraction of the price. So developers migrated to multiplatform development, which also sounded a good idea back then. Afterall, if all platforms could deliver the same level of graphics quality, you obviously aim for a broader audience.

That was all positive for this industry, up to the point where console manufactors decide to not upgrade their hardware every couple of years. Today, console gamers don't see the point to upgrade as often as they would have otherwise, almost as if their hardware has some sort of secret potential to be unlocked and explored for the next ten years to come. They think expending $300 every three or four years is absurd. However, they are prepared to spend the same amount in other sectors of the entertainment industry without ever questioning it.

They refuse to see all sorts of technological advancement made in the lastest years because they're no longer required to replace their hardware, since the market is now bent on developing titles that could have been released 4, 5 years ago. No longer is the user following wherever the progress is leading, but the progress is following what the user is dictating. The gaming industry became just like the TV/showbiz industry. Spoon-fed audiences are given what they want, as long as they don't have they have to leave their couches. Meanwhile, overplotted and overly complex titles gave place to streamlined cheap entertainment. Are there exceptions? You bet. But if you are to compare "old" games, even the Elder Scrolls ones, to modern ones, this shift of pace is very visible. Today people will say "graphics are unimportant, what is important is art direction". This attitude was unconceivable when the Xbox was in its infancy and legions of gamers were in awe at the realism of games like Gears of War. Nowadays...that's just passable.

So if you ask me, consoles really transformed this industry in many good ways. And the comfort/casual/affordability/family factor always played a huge role since the first Atari. However, like television sets, it also created a generation of lazy consumers, which instead of taking two or three years to accept the advent of new technologies, will wait until the very last second to replace obsolete equipment with radically new ones, such as HDTVs or eco-friendly cars. Personal computers, like cell phones, always had a very short lifespan, but consoles, which are ironically also computers, became household appliances. You buy them and hold on to them for nearly a decade until something really new comes out or they just stop working. If that's not holding back the industry, I don't know what is.

Btw, what is now labelled elitism appears to be what I consider a serious reflection of the ongoing process of economic decline, at least as far as the american dominant industry goes. In decades past, these same people would be leaping at the pride of technological advancements instead of holding on to what is safe and cheap. The words of choice are practical and efficient, instead of modern and daring, at least nowadays. Nothing wrong with the status quo, it's just an observation.

Agreed with the above.

In an ideal world, we'd have an amazing sequel with re-defined engine and gameplay every 2 years.

The scope of my topic was not to start a PC vs console debate - the debate started when some people who "didn't want that" began to talk about it.

I don't care that much about graphics. I finished BG2 recently, for the 4th time.



But the information that we've been given about Skyrim is neatly packed into the modern hype machine. They've given statements about various new graphical enhancements. Again, being in the modeling industry myself, I can firmly say that even with optimization that has certainly its part to play, the new eye-candy is there to be the counter-weight to it.


Remember how Oblivions AI used to be hailed? The "radiant" AI? No one seemed to mention the telepathic guards, people walking into walls or eachother, or into your weapon, which made you get reported. Or the fact that the radiant AI was basically just a bunch of scripted schedules assigned to NPCs. Conversations broke immersion for the most part, there was nothing natural about them.

I know, I'm talking about AI when I started a graphic thread. But I'm only saying this so when they say "dynamic shadows for all objects" it really means "dynamic shadows for all objects in the 5 meter radius around the character, muddy shadows for everything else". There's only so much you can do with optimization on 6 year old hardware.

Like these Crysis shots

http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/3079/2pblu.jpg
http://h-1.abload.de/img/2nuq3.jpg
http://www.pcgames.de/screenshots/original/2008/11/crysis__8__081129154321.jpg

Apparently Radiant AI was actually dec... ok, not as terribad in development, but had to be quickly scaled back because they'd overestimated the capability of the next generation of consoles and didn't have time to scale it down properly.

Or at least, that's what I've heard, and I find it much easier to believe than them hyping up a system that features actors walking into knee high walls instead of opening a gate, being completely unable to jump, and having two states: "Friendly" and "Murderous".

How better can it really look?
My guess is something similar to fallout new vegas

Consol users are the game market.

We get a fancy new Skyrim because consol users bought about a billion copies of Oblivion.

Try playing Just Cause 2 on a nice HD TV. Game is [censored] beautiful.

I certainly agree that the game does look better than Oblivion, and it's not just Just Cause 2. Lots of newer games on the Xbox 360 look better than Oblivion, Red Dead Redemption is another game I've played on the Xbox 360 that I'd say looks better than Oblivion, for one thing, the rain doesn't even go through objects and the ground appears to get wet when it rains, in fact, I'd say even Fallout 3 looks better than Oblivion. The idea that because it's running on the same hardware, the game can't look much better than Oblivion I'd say, is inaccurate. Consider, Oblivion was a launch title on the Xbox 360, therefore, at the time, Bethesda may not have known the hardware of modern consoles that well, and their later experience may have helped them to make better use of the capabilities of it, thus allowing later games made on said hardware to look better. It's not just like this with games on modern consoles either, if you look at games on the previous generation of consoles, you're likely to find that games released later in a console's lifespan tend to look better, as a whole, than they're predeccessors, despite all being run on the same hardware. One must also consider that the programming of the engine itself will have a lot to do with this, and Skyrim is running on a rebuilt engine, which may or may not be better optimized than the incarnation of the Gamebryo Engine seen in Oblivion. But really, if you want to know how much better the game can look, I'd say look at the screenshots, and see for yourself, because those can tell you how the game looks better than words can. From what screenshots I've seen so far, at least, I wouldn't say Skyrim is the best looking game on the market, but does it look better than Oblivion? If the current screenshots are anything to go by, certainly.

Now, I have no doubt that the hardware of the current consoles has limited the graphical quality of Skyrim somewhat, though it's not impossible that Bethesda will allow the game to look better than the Xbox 360 or PS3 versions when running on maximum settings on a high-end PC, but we really don't know if this will be the case or not. And at least when designing the console versions, Bethesda may have needed to sacrifice some technical features that they would have liked to do to ensure the game can run well on the console's hardware, but to say that it can't look much better than Oblivion seems a little ignorant to me.

I'm sure they can do it, look at bad company 2 on computer and then look at it on xbox

5 years later...I assume it should look a lot better than oblivion (which didn't look too good IMO, even at release: the bloom, the textures, faces etc).