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

[Midwayman]

Consoles for sure. Even though graphics have gotten better recently with the newer generation of console we still have them to thanks for the casualization of game design and dumbed down control schemes designed to be used with a controller.

Even if you assumed they had equal hardware that would still be the case.

 

[sweenish]

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

Not my question.

ALL games follow rules. Generalizing to the extent that you have gives you no argument at all.

 

[Rifter]

Up until this generation i would have said consoles hands down with Nvidia being the lifeblood of PC gaming not holding it back.

However now that its time for my GPU upgrade and ive done some research about the current situation it seems like Nvidia has dropped the ball, they are clinging to DX 11 stupidly and not embracing DX12. Why put all your eggs in the our chip runs old games great but new games poorly basket?

So since as already mentioned most PC games are quick sometimes bad console ports more and more of them will be DX 12 in the coming months, by next year the majority being released will be DX 12.

So unless Nvidia rushes out the next gen chips in the next few months by early next year latest, to replace the 1070/1080 with something that has good DX 12 performance i think Nvidia is starting to become part of the problem not part of the solution. Charging a extra $150-$200 Gsync tax on monitors isnt a great move on their part either.

At the current point in time Nvidia is looking to the past when they should be focused on the future as a new API DX12 is being born and fully utilized.

 

[Yakk]

PC gaming is finally getting low level APIs consoles have had for years in one form or another. Awesome performance is finally being seen on PC, instead of the massive amounts of wasted resources just to match consoles.

So I'll say for sure consoles have not been holding anything back!

 

[cmdrdredd]

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.

How can you say this when a GTX 1070 which isn't Nvidia's fastest card wipes the floor with AMD's fastest offerings? It also does get a boost from async compute being turned on as evident by the new 3DMark DX12 benchmark that allows you to toggle it on and off. The percentage gain isn't as high but it is there because Nvidia has done concurrent tasking all along.

need proof? This is a DX12 benchmark using Async compute. As you can see there are gains there due to concurrency which is the important factor in actual performance.

 

[master_shake_]

How can you say this when a GTX 1070 which isn't Nvidia's fastest card wipes the floor with AMD's fastest offerings? It also does get a boost from async compute being turned on as evident by the new 3DMark DX12 benchmark that allows you to toggle it on and off. The percentage gain isn't as high but it is there because Nvidia has done concurrent tasking all along.

need proof? This is a DX12 benchmark using Async compute. As you can see there are gains there due to concurrency which is the important factor in actual performance.

i would hope a card that is 200 dollars more is faster.

 

[TidusZ]

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

Better than ever but not getting much better over time anymore.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Semi related, I recently read the XBone will soon support mouse/keyboard for games. Was said it will be ready in months.

 

[aigomorla]

This thread is about to get locked REALLY REALLY FAST, if u guys start hashing between AMD vs Nvidia.

This aint allowed even in the videocard section, and it wont be tollerated here. The only time i want to see actual comparisons is like NEVER.

If i see more direct hash between red vs green i will lock this thread and bury it under a red/green floor mat.

Pc gaming moderator Aigomorla

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Aww I thought it was pretty civil

 

[tidy]

.

 

[cmdrdredd]

i would hope a card that is 200 dollars more is faster.

Not the point. You can't really blame companies for holding things back unless they are releasing hardware that is intentionally gimped from a performance standpoint IMO. Nothing hardware wise holds back gaming on a PC IMO. There are plenty of options at every budget that are very fast for gaming. It's the users who do the holding back IMO. Nothing wrong with wanting to find a deal but when you have many on the forums outright refusing to buy a game new because they want a steam sale, that hurts the perception that companies have toward gaming on a PC. If anything I think the lack of sales at launch hurt the most.

 

[cmdrdredd]

OP doesn't specify what aspects of the games are being "held back". Held back purely on the technological front? Crytek said that piracy was a big reason for them not making another PC exclusive flagship like Crysis, and while there seems to be a lot of skepticism directed at this claim, it seems reasonable to me.

To be honest I don't even think that's a real problem anymore. Many games don't get a physical version and those that do register through steam. Sure there are always going to be pirated games but is it as huge as it was in the past when all you needed to do was copy the disc?

 

[Anubis]

piracy argument is BS. make a good game and it wont matter

CD Projekt Red proves this

 

[cmdrdredd]

piracy argument is BS. make a good game and it wont matter

CD Projekt Red proves this

Pretty much. I just wonder how big of a thing it is today vs say 10 years ago when it was easier to pass around games because many games didn't register through steam or origin etc.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

I'd say its big money. Nobody wants to take a chance on something different unless its EA or kickstarter, which is a different discussion. Even when 50 million is spent and it returns 60 million its kind of a failure of a game. Have tons of corporate D-Bags involved in every decision to squeeze more profit doesn't help either.

 

[nerp]

piracy argument is BS. make a good game and it wont matter

CD Projekt Red proves this

Two words: Sega Dreamcast.

 

[William Gaatjes]

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.

Consoles do not hold back anything. It is up to the developer of the game, you know the one that invests money to come up with a product (game) to sell and earn that investment back and make a decent profit.
If developers get all the help from the console manufacturer to get a broad customer base by designing for a given console, then that is a perfectly logical choice. Because of various reasons, the pc gamers are going to benefit a lot because of a similar hardware setup. This should in theory and to some degree in reality, make the porting of games a lot easier to the pc.

I do agree, that the game developers should create a user interface (mouse keyboard or joystick) that is abstract and not hard coded. THen the pc people who like a mouse and keyboard(people like me) can play the game they like and the console gamers can play with what they like , the joystick or controller from the console. Everybody happy.

Also, the same game/checkpoint method to store checkpoints or save games, should be abstract. To give pc gamers also a choice if they just want to do the checkpoint method or the save game method.
For clarification what i mean with checkpoint method : The checkpoint method automatically saves for you and you have no control over it.
The save game method allows you to save (F5 /F6) when you want to and only saves automatically when you get to the next level.

These two changes are the only changes that are needed. Why because whomever promoted Mantle to become DX12 and who helped creating vulkan (Did i mention AMD ? whoops .. :awe Made sure that we are going to have some very nice games that are not going to need a lot of work in creating portability form one platform to another.

What we will get and continue to get for the pc is 3 low level gpu code paths for 3 different gpu architectures (Amd Intel, Nvidia). And only one will be the least effort for the upcoming years... :sneaky:

 

[Sonikku]

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.

That's because dev costs are higher compared to then. The number of copies a game had to sell to break even was far lower. That meant the threshold for more quirky/unique games was easier to reach then it would be now. I'm hearing new zelda would need to sell millions of copies just to break even. When things are like that and small devs are just one flop away from bankruptcy you can be sure there is a lot of pressure to play it safe.

 

[William Gaatjes]

That's because dev costs are higher compared to then. The number of copies a game had to sell to break even was far lower. That meant the threshold for more quirky/unique games was easier to reach then it would be now. I'm hearing new zelda would need to sell millions of copies just to break even. When things are like that and small devs are just one flop away from bankruptcy you can be sure there is a lot of pressure to play it safe.

What i always wonder about :
What we need are new, young, fresh, talented and promising engine programmers and game artists, that sit together to come up with a solution for a huge market that could really need some help.

I do not know much about it, but i do know game programming now is a lot of work and extremely expensive. Who ever comes up with development tools that can do a lot of the stuff programmers and artists have to do manually now in an automatic fashion would really be rich extremely fast.

For example, when you need trees. Go out side , take pictures from all sides of a tree. Let the software process and analyze that picture turning the tree into to fractals. Use some fractal coding for randomness within set limits. And then generate a 3d forest with trees that are all a bit different. Reduce and compress it to essentials and that is it.
When you need a car, take pictures of the car, let the software analyze it and create random cars within set limits.
A city, take some pictures of some houses, and to the same thing.

When i read about the costs, it reads as if there is a tremendous amount of manual labour that i think could be reduced.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Well with low level APIs there is more burden on the developer for doing optimization a than in the past. It doesn't apply to consoles as much because they are a closed system and devs have optimized for the hardware there before but on the PC, with Vulkan and DX12 there is less optimization required at the driver level and more required at the engine level. Coding to the metal (or close to it) isn't easy. Developers can't be lazy and expect new drivers to optimize for the game as much as before. Things are going to get tougher on developers on the PC now. I know a lot of people think you can just turn on a dx12 rendering path and you magically gain fps and reduce CPU overhead. That is only part of the benefit.

As far as bringing in art assets I don't know how that would be accomplished easily. It would be nice if you could take a picture and import it just like that into a 3D mode but I think we are pretty far away from that being widely available etc

 

[Midwayman]

.

I do agree, that the game developers should create a user interface (mouse keyboard or joystick) that is abstract and not hard coded. THen the pc people who like a mouse and keyboard(people like me) can play the game they like and the console gamers can play with what they like , the joystick or controller from the console. Everybody happy.

It goes way deeper than just have a PC UI. There are a finite number of buttons on a controller for example. Try making a hardcore flight sim on console. Won't happen. It needs way too many inputs.

There are also a lot of design decisions that get make based on what a controller can do. RTS are a great example here. Direction selection is such a core concept of the genre that you can't bring it to console without losing a lot.

Then there is just the more casual audience on consoles that influences annoying things like regenerating health and 3d spotting on FPS games. That at least you could argue is just them trying to appeal to more casual players everywhere though.

Some games do the transition better than others I mean BF3 had a terrible consolfied UI. BF4 at least had a PC specific interface.

 

[aigomorla]

Aww I thought it was pretty civil

it is... which is why no one got a infraction.
however i am not going to let this section be a bypass of what the mods over @ Videocards are trying to enforce.

The only time where i will look the other way is when there is a driver problem, or a frame rate issue and your using both platform to note the issue...

 

[zinfamous]

PC gaming is finally getting low level APIs consoles have had for years in one form or another. Awesome performance is finally being seen on PC, instead of the massive amounts of wasted resources just to match consoles.

So I'll say for sure consoles have not been holding anything back!

this sounds like you are saying that consoles offer better performance than PCs? Obviously that isn't true, so I assume you meant to say that with low level APIs now coming to PC, there is a chance for better efficiency in compute processing, which is probably true.

This should theoretically lead to better performance, but it is not something that consoles have every really boasted. Being more efficient with hardware is certainly a good thing, because it assumes that more compute and IQ processing can be handled with even less hardware...so better hardware would generally mean better performance.

anyway..

piracy argument is BS. make a good game and it wont matter

CD Projekt Red proves this

aye.

 

[Mem]

I would say mainly game developers, lets be honest here, they go where the money and profits are, there is nothing stopping them from making any type of game or exclusive game they want on any platform, but throw in demand, time, profit margin etc and you see they go where it's best for them.


I remember decades ago where PC gaming had no competition, times have changed a lot however in modern times.