Who's holding back PC gaming? Consoles or Nvidia?

[PigSkinWhiteBoy]

I never understood why people cry "consoles are holding us back" when consoles are the only reason PC has AAA games. It's been ages since PC had a AAA exclusive.

Nvidia, on the other hand, has been exposed for having weaker cards that are pretty bad in dx12/async games. As such, they would rather ride dx11 and bribe devs into using their game-crippling gameworks software.

 

[boozzer]

100% consoles. but with how similar consoles are now to pc, and maybe having just 1 api in the future, easy ports = higher quality. hope for the future?

 

[Maverick177]

Probably 60% console 30% nVidia, and 10% AMD for having a turd of a CPU.

 

[Silverforce11]

Consoles are not holding back PC gaming. Without the money from consoles, AAA gaming on the PC will be a poor shadow of the current blockbuster release cycles.

Big studios would simply not exist because PC platform alone is not that profitable for a lot of game genres. Without the manpower of these studios, you don't get awesome looking games with big scope.

As an example, do you think the Doom remake, to critical acclaim, would have gotten the go ahead if it weren't for the potential sales on PS4 & Xbox One?

 

[brandonmatic]

Nobody is holding back PC gaming as far as I can tell. Things have never been better for PC gamers.

 

[shortylickens]

GAMING?

I'd say its the redactedusers.
They pay 60 bucks for a redactedgame over and over and over again then wonder why the industry doesnt try harder.


You know there is no profanity in tech.

This is your one warning from me on this issue. NO Profanity in tech. Period.


esquared
Anandtech Forum Director

 

[brandonmatic]

GAMING?

I'd say its the redactedusers.
They pay 60 bucks for a redactedgame over and over and over again then wonder why the industry doesnt try harder.


You know there is no profanity in tech.

This is your one warning from me on this issue. NO Profanity in tech. Period.


esquared
Anandtech Forum Director

Funny, I sort of think the opposite. The people who are willing to pay $60 for games are the ones that make it profitable for companies to make them and allows cheaper gamers like me to buy them at a discount after a few months/years.

It's a cross-subsidy of sorts.

 

[Newbian]

It's mostly the game devs that toss crappy console ports to the pc and then cry when it gets ripped to shreds in reviews and hurts the pc gaming with poor games.

Blaming nvidia is a joke as they help push the boundaries with their usual faster but more expensive gpu's as we have seen in the past and their large gap between amd until vega gets released sometime in 2017.

And blaming their issues with directx 12 right now is a joke as there are so few games that use it unlike 11 and amd has had issues with 11 for a long time so if you want to blame anything blame amd for this issue for a long time as 12 is only starting to become more important.

If we didn't have one of them then yes it could be said they were a issue as they had no reason to push things like we are seeing right now with the newer gen cards coming out.

Those 2 being at competition is a great thing as it helps out the consumers more and I am guessing you were one of the people that got a ban from recent VC&G trolling it sounds like and are trying to spread it to other forums that's not needed here.

 

[XavierMace]

As a strategy gamer, I'd say the users also take a lot of blame. Every strategy game beta I've done you see the same story, people asking if it will run on their ancient single or dual core processor. Quad Cores have been available since 2007. I'm tired of AI (and gaming in general) being severely limited by that factor. It's a computer, not a house, it's time to move on people.

 

[Elcs]

AAA titles are typically the games you want to avoid. The main buyers of most AAA titles are those that follow the herd and buy the same game reskinned with a different title each year ie. CoD/Fifa etc.

For many years now I have picked up Indie games for a much lower price, spent a lot more time playing them and had much more enjoyment from them than my AAA purchases over the same time period.

And after being quite a competitive FPS player for a number of years in my teens I have found that my motion sickness has worsened dramatically to the point at which I'd love to complete FONV but cannot which automatically ruled me out of FO4 which seems like a minor blessing in disguise.

 

[escrow4]

Games that were different and fun died with the PS2. Devs don't push the boat out no more. That magic feeling I used to get with sprawling or just plain different games (Manhunt say) is dead.

 

[biostud]

I never understood why people cry "consoles are holding us back" when consoles are the only reason PC has AAA games. It's been ages since PC had a AAA exclusive.

Nvidia, on the other hand, has been exposed for having weaker cards that are pretty bad in dx12/async games. As such, they would rather ride dx11 and bribe devs into using their game-crippling gameworks software.

Except all RTS games.

 

[Borealis7]

the best games in my opinion in the last 2 years were all KickStarted. Its the Publishers who make game studios produce the same games over and over with little to no innovation, just cramming on more and more graphical features and not investing in a story or gameplay.

we have all the power we need in terms of graphics and performance. now we just need good IP to makes games with.

 

[JimmiG]

Well on the hardware front, it's AMD that's holding things back. Can't expect Nvidia and Intel to release faster and cheaper products out of goodwill, when they already have the lead. If AMD could match the 6700K and GTX 1080, you can expect prices to drop and performance to increase.

The main reason PC gaming suffers is bad console ports. Games that run fine on the equivalent of a low-end PC from 2013 (Xbox One, PS4) stutter and lag on 4.8 GHz PCs with 3-way SLI...

Also, it's not just about the graphics. The gameplay mechanics and user interfaces are adapted for use with a controller on a huge TV. This just doesn't translate well to the PC. One example is Witcher 3, which required multiple patches to even be controllable on a PC. The original Witcher game was developed for the PC, with a mouse+keyboard driven interface.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I never understood why people cry "consoles are holding us back" when consoles are the only reason PC has AAA games. It's been ages since PC had a AAA exclusive.

Nvidia, on the other hand, has been exposed for having weaker cards that are pretty bad in dx12/async games. As such, they would rather ride dx11 and bribe devs into using their game-crippling gameworks software.

This is a troll...r-right?

Seriously though, the consoles are now just re-packaged PCs with proprietary software on them. The hardware they run is heavily based off the hardware in PCs slightly modified, the rendering paths and APIs the console uses are borrowed from windows (DirectX) and almost all of the games are based off game engines that were written over decades on the PC (Unreal, Crytek, Quake, Source etc).

Consoles hold PCs back because lazy developers target all platforms at once and because the consoles are so old and hopelessly slow and useless the games need to be able to run on that lowest common denominator. We also know that console users are generally less competent gamers and use ineffectual control methods which don't allow for large amount of complexity and cause gameplay to be dumbed down.

Nvidia have the most powerful pieces of graphics hardware available in the world by a huge margin. A single 1080 boasts about 8.9 TFLOPS of compute power compared to the laughable 1.3 of the Xbone or the only marginally less pathetic 1.7 of the PS4

Exclusives aren't relevant to the PC because the PC is an open platform and games are made and bought on their individual merit and not bought off like the console games are to be exclusive in a pathetic attempt to make the platform appear superior.

You're either trolling in which case can the mods just ban him, or you're naive beyond credulity.

 

[exar333]

Troll thread is troll thread.

 

[nerp]

Nothing. It's all in your head.

 

[sweenish]

GAMING?

I'd say its the redactedusers.
They pay 60 bucks for a redactedgame over and over and over again then wonder why the industry doesnt try harder.


You know there is no profanity in tech.

This is your one warning from me on this issue. NO Profanity in tech. Period.


esquared
Anandtech Forum Director

Funny, I sort of think the opposite. The people who are willing to pay $60 for games are the ones that make it profitable for companies to make them and allows cheaper gamers like me to buy them at a discount after a few months/years.

It's a cross-subsidy of sorts.

I'd say you're both right. Gamers, taken as a whole, are a stupid and whiny breed. They slurp up shoddy ports, all the while complaining about them. Publishers have no incentive to change. What's all that whining versus all the money they got from the same people? Gamers don't "reward" or "punish" based on a game's quality or a publisher's reputation. They can literally do what they want and gamers will keep throwing money away.

Kickstarter and Early Access are prime examples of money just being tossed out. AssCreed and FC and most anything from Ubi shows that gamers are apparently fine with what they're doing. Same can be said for CoD; I love that MW2 boycott group screenshot.

It's slowly, slowly starting to change. Gamers are still making blind purchases in the form of Kickstarter, EA, and pre-orders; but Steam finally allowing for refunds sent a loud and clear message to WB at least. They finally found out what gamers absolutely will not tolerate, and we've set the bar way too low for ourselves.

 

[master_shake_]

GAMING?

I'd say its the redactedusers.
They pay 60 bucks for a redactedgame over and over and over again then wonder why the industry doesnt try harder.


You know there is no profanity in tech.

This is your one warning from me on this issue. NO Profanity in tech. Period.


esquared
Anandtech Forum Director

pretty much this.

but not because of the same game.

it's users that buy unfinished or broken games that need 700 patches in order to function properly.

or users who buy games that looked great on trailers that look like a n64 game come release time.

if devs get away with it they'll keep doing it.

look at ubisoft they make a living with bait and switch and poor performance.

 

[TeknoBug]

100% consoles. but with how similar consoles are now to pc, and maybe having just 1 api in the future, easy ports = higher quality. hope for the future?

One would think so but consoles are still behind in hardware and capacity, devs has to lower graphics and textures in order for their games to play well on the Xbox One and Playstation 4 while PC's are at least 2 generations ahead already.

The recent release of 7 Days to Die for XB1 is an example of a badly done port (add ARK to that), PC > console doesn't go as smoothly as console > PC porting does (although most console ports to PC are still terrible in resource management).

 

[DaveSimmons]

Trolls. Trolls are holding back everything.

 

[justoh]

It seems as though piracy is largely a thing of the past. Wouldn't that be helpful, in a sense?

 

[desura]

Definitely consoles.

PC games used to be about hard solid rules, used to be very sim-like.

Since Halo and COD with regenerating health got introduced into FPS games pc games have gotten a lot easier.

 

[sweenish]

Definitely consoles.

PC games used to be about hard solid rules, used to be very sim-like.

Since Halo and COD with regenerating health got introduced into FPS games pc games have gotten a lot easier.

What a joke. What's so sim-like about D&D? And just how exactly does Halo affect the difficulty of Total War?

 

[desura]

D&d is very much about rules. Sim games are all about hard and fast rules.