The problem with that article is that its basis - the words spoken by that guy from AMD - aren't actually true and were taken heavily out of context, something which he himself put right. There is certainly a performance hit from the abstraction layer, but that's inherent.

The thing is, there is nothing technical holding back PC graphics. If there were, there'd be something bottlenecking, and there isn't - even on the most graphically demanding games, even mid-high end games have room to spare. If we were bottlenecking either in hardware or software, they wouldn't have any spare power. They do. Technologies like Eyefinity or 3D support have had to be made up simply to justify the existence of higher end cards. There is nothing inside the machine holding it back, it's simply not being used.

While the lovely John Carmack puts the performance gain from writing without abstraction layers, "directly on the metal", so to speak, at about 2x, even conservative estimates put modern hardware at 15 or 20x faster than console hardware. As it has always been, the constant platform of a console is far more efficient, but the moving platform of a PC overtakes it quickly through sheer overwhelming brute force. The idea that PC games don't look 10x better is also somewhat flawed - running at 2.5x the resolution, at twice the framerate, is already running the game much, much better than a console - even if the game looks the same. However, most games, console settings come in at about medium/low to medium. 10x better isn't really that outrageous - and the highest end cards have significant spare power running things even harder than that.

Graphics are discussion quite rationally, whether you agree with it or not. Even on console, there are better looking open world games. Contrary to popular opinion, the amount of NPCs that aren't actually loaded, or the map that's waiting to be streamed from the disc, have very little bearing on texture quality, or animation quality, or shader quality. The GPU doesn't care how much stuff is there for it to do later, and it doesn't care about AI, or streaming the local environment, or whether your cities are open.

Or maybe its just the weird priorities this particular fanbase has. We have to have a dozen different modes of traveling. We have to have walking/running/sprinting, swimming for lakes and rivers obviously, then since we have mountains we have to have climbing skills, then we have to have horse mounts, then carriages in real time, then carriages that teleport you instantly if you don't want to wait, then magic map fast traveling, then recall scrolls, then recall spells, then mage guild teleports, of course levitation, then flying on dragons, and unicorns, and all the other ridiculous things folks want. I mean seriously! Just how many different variations of the exact same game mechanic do you really need?

Until the game is released, fans have nothing better to do than sit and anolyze screenshots under a fine tooth electron microscope until every little spec of dust has been transformed into a thoroughly pulped horse carcass. That is my opinion on the subject.

I suppose you're right. I mean who needs nice looking cloth and hair? Or shadows for that matter? Or flowing water? Or high textured skins? Or detailed weapons and armor? Or lush terrains? Heck lets just go back to a 8 bit graphics engine like the old NES games. Just imagine how much content you could fit on a dvd without all that unnecessary stuff taking up space.

You know the screenshots are taken from the Xbox 360, right?

What's your point? The only difference between the console version and pc version are slightly higher res textures.

I'm not really seeing anything wrong with it. Looks pretty good to me. The only thing that really bothers me about this game is that it makes me so anxious as to how amazing Fallout 4 is going to be.

To be honest, I really prefer the fact that the made the animations better in most things we saw so far. I could care less about hair moving, really. And as for clothes... well, as long as it looks better than tho reboes in oblivion suddenly doubling size when your leg moved forward, then I'll be perfectly glad.

Because to me, YES, graphics matter to the immersion, but I spend a hell of a lot more time looking around me than looking at my character.