Well you bought a console for what $300 and you're using a pc that was at least purchased for what 400-500$...add those two numbers together and you have a gaming rig that can currently run the witcher 2 at max, OR crysis 1 at max with some mods.

No. Just no.

Yeah, but that $700-$800 range is for people who know how to choose and buy the right parts, and who know how to assemble them, right? Some people know how to do that.... (I certainly don't)

Tomshardware.com
For buying parts advice

http://www.lego.com
^if you ever played with these as a child you are now qualified to build a gaming pc.

compared to the difference between morrowind and oblivion really not so much. The technical improvements from morrowind to oblivion were quite large but simply looking at skyrim shots it's apparent the jump isnt that large, considering improvements in graphical api's and hardware.

...I didn't either when I built my first one. Go on computer building forums and ask for their opinion on your parts list. Look up a guide on assembling it yourself. With a little time investment and involvement on your part, you can build a computer just as well as the pros.

Not everyone has great rigs,so it does kind of make a little sense. Those with better rigs etc will have nothing to worry about. Skyrim looks good to me as it is now on xbox,but i still believe the PC version will look fantastic. You have options were as us console users don't. Modder's will have a say in this also,look what they did with morrowind. I used to play PC games a long time ago,but if i had one now,i wouldn't be worried.

So I got to page 7 before I gave up looking for a simple example like http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/18498-1-1216447689.jpg

It might not look a whole lot better at first but eventually yes it will look a lot better. This is why I bought MW, OB and now SR on the PC instead of any other platform. The modding community is awesome, you can play the game when it first comes out (vanilla) go back to your 360/ps3/wii and play other games in the meantime and after about 6mo/year come back and play TES 1.5 with a ton of new....everything. I played MW/OB about 5-6 times so far....never the same twice. I'm about to build a new PC (not just because SR is coming out [got nice tax return]) and I'll be playing a whole new OB than the one I played last year. I'll have hundreds of new quests/monsters/items/companions....the great thing about TES games is the CS. If BGS could give us anything I would want a more powerful CS, nothing could be better than that because we have an amazing Mod community.

I would pay 300 dollars for my copy of skyrim, and I am dirt poor. Seriously, dirt poor. I'm not just saying that but secretly i have a family who owns a home or some magic form of income. I flatout don't have 300 dollars right now.

I would pay 300 dollars for my copy of skyrim, if it took advantage of dx11, and had tessellation and other features.

I am also strongly confident that many others would as well.

It didn't look that good to me. The animations were good, I liked how everything was shadowed, and the LOD scaled better with distance.. but that's just improvements to the existing system (which weren't done so well in Oblivion to begin with). The model details and lighting effects weren't all that much better. Where's the Ambient Occlusion? Global Illumination? Light shafts? Depth of field? Color grading? Tesselation, or even Parallax Occlusion mapping? The stuff that actually makes it look like a game that was released in 2011? I'm not sure I even see good terrain blending, ala the Detailed Terrain mod for Oblivion.


The same is true for consoles, too. Oblivion doesn't run on the original Xbox, for example. I remember a time where people would get upset over a game not being ported to older consoles, and being told "just buy a new console".

Don't forget too: just as there are mods that can make the game look better for better PCs, there are mods designed to make the game more accessible to PCs below the system requirements. Remember Oldblivion? That actually allowed the game to run decently on hardware rather close to Morrowind's recommended specs.

You know, honestly, I don't even know what half those things are.

Did play around a bit with Oblivion Graphics Extender, though. Light shafts is pretty nifty. Gratuitous, but nifty. But Depth of Field? Holy cow, is that freakin' annoying! Turn that off immediately, the constantly shifting focus as you pan your view around is hideous. :sadvaultboy:

As with anything else, it can be done good or bad. OBGE's Bokeh DoF shaders are definitely on the extreme oh-my-god-my-eyes side of things (it does make for some pretty awesome screenshots, though), but they can be tweaked to not be so harsh. Crysis did it well, by leaving it subtle (which OBGE's Crysis_DoF shader mimics). There would also be no harm in leaving it an option, so people that don't like it can disable it.

FWIW, I don't think the way OBGE does light shafts is all that good. MGE seems to do it better, though having proper in-engine support would obviously be best for quality and performance.

Patrick Bach of DICE said:
“So for our target of what we want to hit, we are now using the more powerful platform to try and prove what we see gaming being in the future rather than using the lowest common denominator, instead of developing it for the consoles and then just adding higher resolution textures and anti-aliasing for the PC version. We’re do it the other way around, we start with the highest-end technology that we can come up with and then scale it back to the consoles.”

I wish this was the mindset of bethesda. I'm not all that overjoyed at higher resolutions and anti-aliasing, I can do that from my video card's config. I just don't like these things left to modders. I love what they do but this Dx11 stuff should be in the game in full force!

Exactly, I recently built my first PC and all I used was a post in the General discussion here and a wikibooks page. Took me 1.5 hours and it runs flawlessly. Besides, a $700 - $800 PC bought at Best Buy with stock parts can manage anything an Xbox can. You won't be maxing the graphics with tessellation mods, HD replacement textures, and FRAPS running but you can at least play on Xbox quality.

i think the gap will be larger than oblivion console to oblivion pc i think the over the top hdr on characters will be fixed but i dont think it will be a huge deal between the two

Yes, actually; yes.

Ambient Occlusion is excellent for a lot of reasons, but the basic idea is to find places where light would have trouble getting in to (Corners and things very close to other things and so on) and "Occlude", or basically shadow them. It's nifty. It wouldn't be a part of a perfect lighting engine, but until we can entirely simulate light bouncing it's a very good solution.
Global Illumination is a term given to trying to achieve that perfect lighting system - we don't just look at direct lighting (From light sources and so on), but also indirect lighting (As it bounces off other objects). This is really computationally heavy and we're not quite up to doing it entirely yet, but if you look at titles like BF3 or Crysis 2, they give it a good shot, and it can look amazing. (Also, if you played Mirror's Edge, they did a lot of indirect lighting and 'baked' it into the levels. Looked amazing, but wasn't real time - we want to do that in real time)
Light Shafts are, well, we all know what light shafts are. Really pretty, but little else - but who needs more than "Oh god they're so pretty" anyway.
DoF *can* be used properly. Solutions based on where your pointer is are not properly, they have the fundamental flaw of assuming your eyes are focussing on the pointer, and this is almost never the case. What DoF *can* do for you is blur distant land in a convincing way, both masking imperfections in the LOD system and giving a greater impression of scale.
Colour Grading is very much what it sounds like, changing the colours of the screen. Sounds boring, but can really help in giving different environments unique feels.
Tessellation is, as I'm sure you already know, a system that allows you to create meshes on the fly from a displacement map, most useful in smoothly scaling in detail as you get close to something, but can also make for other nifty effects, like fancier water and so on.
POM is a method of giving flat objects more shape. It's like bump mapping turned up to 11, because the objects are actually given shape, and you can do all kind of fancy thing like self-shadowing it, or just having relatively cheap, but still excellent looking, objects.

Certainly a game doesn't *need* all these buzzwords to look good, to say such a thing would be mad. However, some graphical styles need more power than others, and while I remain unconvinced anything will ever be prettier than Yoshi's Island, if you're going to do realistic lighting in a semi-realistic 3D world, you cannot sidestep some things with "Style". For some things it isn't style - most old 3D games look awful for a reason, because they simply didn't have enough power to realise their graphical style. Hell, most *modern* 3D games look awful for exactly the same reason, attempting to be realistic without the ability to produce realism. No, graphics aren't everything, but that does not mean you should skimp on it. If you don't want to put the effort in, please pick an art style where it won't be painfully obvious!

edit: And, just for the (Broken? Stuck?) record, my PC was around $500 and maxes out just about everything. PC gaming isn't all that expensive any more, especially when you consider the cost of games over its lifetime. If you buy a lot of games, it'd be cheaper than console gaming.

Until cloud gaming comes into play full force, this is fiscal suicide.

PC gamers need to just get over their sense of entitlement, and realize that the only day the platform will be developed for as a primary source, is when it is economically the most viable platform to exploit, which will be never as long as the consumer hardware arms race continues. When that day comes, and if we embrace it, not only will "Real" PC's die, but consoles as well, as cloud gaming in theory, requires nothing more than a Smartphone and an increasingly common high-speed connection.

So, aside from higher levels of quality on existing features (Draw, AA, ect) Skyrim will not look significantly better because the engine is designed with console (Particularly the Xbox360) support in mind. Modders are great, but remember, they perform a labor of love not under the oppressive boot of the Market. If Bethesda doesn't turn a profit, there will be no more Elder Scrolls games to even complain about. To fault them for favoring the market trends is to fault them for survival.

Also, why does everyone throw The Witcher 2 up there as "omg look how azome PC games look", I think it looks just one step above Fable, in terms of Art style and color palette, and all the fancy lightning effects are akin to lens-flare, obscuring a good portion of the game-screen for sake of a "Photorealistic" shot.

I stopped reading here because that makes absolutely no sense.

The rest of your post just looks like rambling and poorly thought out points.

To answer the thread title's question and repeat what many people have already said, it won't look significantly better unless a modder(s) can figure out how.

Ask any developer, making hardware driven PC games right now is as economically viable as taking up a full-time heroin addiction on a custodians salary. Just because you lack the mental capacity to make sense of the obvious does not mean a statement makes no sense at all.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/04/15/consoles-are-holding-pc-games-back-say-dice/

They are, who ever said anything different? I'm just saying the market favors Console games right now. Maybe if you would read instead of selectively skim, you'd see.

To actually be a little more accurate, it's the Market that's holding the art of gaming back, more so than the platform, but no money-driven developer would ever say that.

Anyway, lern2read

Watch out everybody, smart guy here.

He's got it all figured out and explains it without being vague or simple-minded. And he doesn't need to provide any sources, just trust him.

You dont have to be rude

but what about blizzard? they're only making PC games and it seems to go very well for them?

Sorry, sarcasm doesn't translate well through text, it wasn't my intent to be rude, at least with any intent of malice. People see punctuation on a forum and instantly get defensive, so it's my fault.


Seriously though, nothing on earth would make me happier than consoles being phased out completely, the only thing I can't justify about PC gaming, is the total lack of user-friendliness of it all. Some people just want to throw in a disc and teabag n00bs on mediocre FPS's, without having to deal with all the software/hardware issues that come with PC's, especially since a striking number of individuals in this age, despite how technology permeates our society, completely lack basic understanding and maintenance skills.

Oh, and one more thing I just don't like about PC gaming is the "White Whale Syndrome". I'm an avid overclocker and performance tweaker, always trying to get that best experience, but no matter how hard you push it, the overall goal always seems to alude you. Doesn't matter if you're running a 250 Planet, 10 Empire game of Sins of a Solar Empire at 66fps at max fleet capacity, you always want more.