I agree with this.....

Speaking of crappy video chips and cards... that Crysis demo just finished downloading and I installed it. My jaw's on the floor. Unbelievable... this thing ran Crysis. To keep it playable, I kept it at low settings without any AA, but even that was... wow. It ran.

Nope, we are still trying to find a room temperature superconductor. Superconductors have an ER rating of 0. It used to be believed that something like a superconductor was physically impossible yet here we are with something that has 100% electrical efficiency. Once we find a superconductor at room temperature, we can have internet stream out to the furthest distance in the world from a station and still work perfectly, which normally high speed internet is impossible after a certain distance because of electrical resistance.

Did I mention that I love technology?

We'd have a lot of things, including alot more energy at our disposal. I believe I read somewhere that at least 1/3 of all our hydroelectric power is being lost through transmission lines. A superconducting line would give us access to all of it. Plus car batteries that can run an electric car for days. It would no doubt make solar power systems alot more efficient as well, putting an end to our reliance on fossil fuels.

Well solar power technology is already efficient enough to replace normal power plants but governments are too cheap to build solar panel fields. I believe it was said that an area the size of 100 square miles can power the entire United States, I just find it ridiculous no one will switch out powerplants we have no for pollution free energy. It's pretty sad.

OT though, if your just wanting to play Skyrim without highest settings, then most computers made since 2005 will probably play the game, however if your wanting to play Skyrim on mid-highest settings, you'll need to spend about $800-950 but that's a pretty nice investment seeing as how you'll be able to play any game on highest settings for a few years to come and when you can't anymore, you can upgrade for a fraction of the price of a new computer.

If anything it's a good thing consoles have limited the graphics. It means a much wider array of PCs will be able to play the PC version, rather than just catering to the most dedicated and/or affluent PC gamers that have newer hardware.

Yes, it is kind of a mixed blessing. I'd hate to feel that I had to upgrade my video card every year just to play the latest games, especially now when I don't have the money to invest in one. I'm fairly confident my 8800GT will be good enough for Skyrim, though of course not at the highest settings. I don't see the game requiring all that much more than Fallout 3 and I can play that just fine on High settings, though not Ultra-High. It still looks pretty good though.

I think the answer is a little more complicated than it first seems.

Being restricted to console limits has had two significant effects. Firstly it provides Bethesda a massive budget to develop the game, based in part on projected future earnings. Without this budget the development team would be considerably smaller and we'd be losing out in multiple departments. Secondly it has forced the programmers to seriously overhaul and optimise their code. This is very important as it allows more 'things' to happen per second as less clock cycles are used for each process - thus you can handle more complex AI and more interaction, for more objects at a greater distance. With current trends in bloated software this has been a welcome and much needed step.

On the other hand however, we are missing out on better optimised GPU drivers and the sheer mutlithreaded processing power available to the newer generation PCs. We could have stunning water effects, tessellation, cloth physics and so on which would have only a small to modest effect on the overall FPS. You could also have a city full of people or battles involving hundreds. That's just the GPU. With increased memory and a 64bit runtime you could even potentially do away with separate cells entirely and load the whole worldspace into memory, leaving only the speech sequences on disk. That would enable things like transparent windows, being able to plan break-ins and enter from different directions... and/or a broader range of subtly different animations for things like mimicking age or injury.

So yes, the maximum possible PC quality remains massively untapped. However, we wouldn't have the same game depth and quality as Skyrim appears to possess now without the support (and ironically the restrictions) of consols.

That still wouldn't be possible. People with 64bit systems are still the minority, most are using some form of 32 bit OS. So aiming for those types of abilities would restrict them to the point where they probably wouldn't be able to make any money at all. Someone put it nicely, by aiming for the console market, they're aiming for the average of current household technology. While all those things are probably technically possible today, they aren't practically possible as the overall level of technology hasn't reached that point yet, and won't for some time to come.

Basically, I agree. The fact that the game is being released for consoles doesn't mean it can't take advantage of the latest hardware for computers, after all, PC games usually have graphics settings that can be scaled back so the game can run on computers that don't have the latest hardware.

What is restricting what Bethesda can do is not the fact that it is being released for consoles, but the fact that Bethesda wants it to look similar on all systems, not to mention the Xbox 360 is their primary focus, I guess Bethesda didn't want to spend lots of effort on developing features that their main target audience wouldn't be able to use (The Creation Kit doesn't count as it's most likely just a version of the same software they use for developing the game themselves, though potentially a more limited one.)

If you've bought a laptop (I sincerely hope not only for gaming) which supports DX11 (which means it's pretty decent) and you can't run a 5-year old game, then it's your problem.



Based of the quote above, I hope this is an irony.

No, it's not specifically for gaming... not at all. I've always played games to the limit that our (my household's) PCs have allowed. Luckily, I've never needed powerful PCs to play Baldur's Gate, Civilization, and Sims games. According to these kind people here, Windows 7 PCs all come with DX11 capabilities, regardless of whether video cards support them or not. No, it's not an irony. I love technology... as in I love technology. I love the thought of its progression, I love its rapid change, I'm infatuated by the thought of efficient energy, advanced space flight, and viable biotechnologies. I spend much of my free time researching these types of things. Medical technology is doing pretty well, currently. Growing organs in labs from a patient's own cells (to prevent tissue rejection) is within the realm of possibility. Why wouldn't I be impressed? I live in a technological age where 3D virtual gameworlds are able to be rendered in real time and I'm on a video game forum for one such game while contemplating majoring in computer sciences. Just by taking a step back and actually thinking about how all of this is possible, I give a moment of appreciation to these technologies. In a nutshell, yes, I do love technology.

Now, why the hostility? Have I said something to offend you? My computer doesn't do what my PS3 does. It's a fact... and not one I necessarily relish. I've always divided my play time between the two pretty evenly. It's just that my PCs have never been on even ground with my consoles, but I've found different games I like to play on both and, as games get older, I get them for relatively more powerful PCs rather than lug around five different consoles to play said games on when my current PC is perfectly capable of doing so. In the past, I'd been very disappointed when a PC of ours wasn't capable of playing a new PC. I still am now. If I hated PCs, I would not be using one to type this, if that is the impression you were under. If not, then what is the problem? Not everyone's PCs are even as capable as their consoles. Why should that fact be difficult to bear?

True, I was only stressing the maximum potential as asked by the OP.

As a matter of interest it is worth looking at the current Steam surveys, which should be a pretty realistic overview of the current tech distribution of Gaming PC hardware.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

So currently win 7 64bit is currently leading the OS pack, with over 50% of the surveyed PCs running a 64bit OS. Still a small share of the overall market, but things will change further in the next six months, and you'll probably see a spike after Christmas 2011 as new PCs are given as presents. However, it is now a large enough proportion of the PC gaming market that it would be worth developers releasing a dedicated 64 bit exe for their games.

I'm not sure if this is quite relevant to 64-bit OS's, in particular, or if it's just a problem with internet explorer, but is it me, or are 64-bit computers a bit glitchy with internet browsing? For example, videos don't seem to work outside of Youtube. Is that normal? Does it stem from a lack of support?

Because it's irrelevant?
The average PC is *not* a gaming PC. Comparing consoles and office PCs is apples and oranges, they're trying to perform completely different tasks in completely different ways.
You cannot go out and buy new hardware that is weaker than a console and marketed for gaming. There are office class cards designed pretty much entirely to drive office suites and HD video, and then there are mid end gaming cards that pretty much max everything out.

That's the thing about PCs, of course, they don't have to do what you don't want them to do. If you bought a PC not designed for heavy gaming, the fact it cannot do heavy gaming is in no way a bad thing - it's a good thing. The best of things.

edit: RE: 64bit;
IE in Win64 is 64bit - there is no decent 64bit flash. Youtube falls back onto HTML5 video where flash is not available - most services don't. I highly suggest you move to a 32bit build of any other browser. While WoW64 is near-perfect, add-ins to applications is one area it cannot translate.

Did you even read what I was responding to (which Benrahir, in turn, responded to)? It was a post from a person mentioning how even cheap laptops come with more RAM than modern consoles and must therefore display superiority of even the cheapest PCs to modern consoles. I was not parading my PC as a gaming PC, but rather as an average PC more expensive than even those cheap ones being referred to, yet still being less capable than a modern console.

I see. My wakeup routine should include less foruming while I wait for my cup of tea to cool, I guess

My sleeping late routine should involve less staying up even further... but habits are hard to break.

I agree with this and your previous post,well said. I've said this for a long time too.Not everyone has the same PC,and in theory an average PC should really show consoles up,but they don't.They have so much more going on.There are so many examples on youtube. The fact the consoles have the same tech,and it's not changed ,makes thing easier for dev's in a way,they know it inside and out. And not everyone can afford to have better all the time.I can understand that people with good PC's want this and that added,because they spwnt extra money for it.But alot more games are becoming multi-platform,so you need to be a little more realistic. Yes maybe it's time for a console gen change,but sales suggest that most people are happy with what they have/what these consoles can do for now. The way i look at it is,yeah ok,we are still waiting for the next gen,but when we do eventually get it,it will look all the better for it.Because of the gap/longer wait-things will look better when it eventually changes. Regardless of this PC's users are still going have skyrim look fantastic on their machines. Most people in the gaming world just seem happy/content at the moment. If i owned a PC i wouldn't be worried.

thats odd, my old computer i used for 4-5 years ago could max oblivion... I dont remember its rig but kinda weird your computer cannot :blink:

This
Games never get made to utilize the very latest PC tech because only a small segment of the PC market has cutting edge PCs

Battlefield 3? the new stalker game?

On the other hand, outdated hardware is *still* very, very powerful.

nuclear powered laptops............... i cant wait.