Will games looks better on PC's after the Nintendo Revolution?

[HDTVMan]

I read that game developers develop on the lowest common platform. Meaning that game companies look at thier game as potentially being sold on PS2, Gamecube, XBox 1 and PC then design the game so that it will work on all platforms instead of the PC level which is obviously much great than those game systems of 3 years ago.

Which explains 3 things:
1-Why games released on the PC dont look like they have evolved much beyond games of 2002/2003.
2-Why games like Doom, Half-Life 2, and Far Cry play on the X-Box and dont look bad. Which by the way is 733mhz 64meg ram machine.
3-Why games on the X-Box 360 dont look much greater than those on the X-Box 1. Which has to really annoy microsoft. Granted some are upgraded but not so much so that you would need the X-box 360 because the Xbox 1 looks horrible.

Which then screws the PC gamers who pay for high end video cards and top end hardware hoping to get the best levels of gameplay. Which for some games feels like Doom 3 Xbox 1 with some added lighting effects which is a total ripoff.

PC gamers have to feel ripped off because the developers are developing toward systems that are $150.00 (Xbox) when they possible spent twice as much on their video card alone.

Which makes me not feel bad that I dont usually spend more than $150.00 on a video card but those who spend $300 or more have to be ticked.

Think about it a lot of people upgraded thier PC's to play games like Half-Life 2, Doom 3, and Far Cry only to see the same game in nearly the same quality on the $150.00 X-Box. If I purchased a $300+ video card not to mention a $600 video card I would be ticked I upgraded because I was told I needed to in order to play that game.

I dont see any games getting any better for at least a year when developers stop developing for X-box 1, PS2, and Gamecube and start focusing on PS3, XBOX 360 and Revolution.

What is the benefit of upgrading to top end technology only to have developers writing games for 2002 hardware?

I am going to base my next video card around the capabilties of the XBOX 360/PS3 because to me thats what the next 3+ years are going to be about. There may be 1-2 games that wont follow this rule but then if I believed what Valve and ID software told me then Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 never should have been able to run on the X-BOX 1 as good as it does. But then they were marketing campaigns for video card companies anyway.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: HDTVMan
1-Why games released on the PC dont look like they have evolved much beyond games of 2002/2003.

Major PC games tend to have a fairly long lead time; HL2/Doom3/Farcry were the last big push in terms of engines, and newer ones have been slow in coming (AOE3 was pretty underwhelming given all the hype around it). ES4 looks pretty promising, and STALKER may also do some neat things. I wouldn't expect anything really 'next-gen' until UE3 makes an appearance in 2006/07.

2-Why games like Doom, Half-Life 2, and Far Cry play on the X-Box and dont look bad. Which by the way is 733mhz 64meg ram machine.

If by 'don't look bad' you mean 'run at 640x480, sometimes interlaced, with no AA and AF and incredibly bad texture quality'.

3-Why games on the X-Box 360 dont look much greater than those on the X-Box 1. Which has to really annoy microsoft. Granted some are upgraded but not so much so that you would need the X-box 360 because the Xbox 1 looks horrible.

Launch titles for most consoles tend to look nowhere near as good as later releases (see, for instance, the PS2; later games like Final Fantasy X and Metal Gear Solid 2 look a LOT better than some of the launch titles). On an SDTV, there probably isn't much difference, but the 360 should look a *lot* better on a proper HDTV, since it can actually output all the games in widescreen 720p, and most in 1080i as well. With at least 2xAA.

What is the benefit of upgrading to top end technology only to have developers writing games for 2002 hardware?

Well, the XBox360 and PS3 should be competitive with today's high-end PC graphics cards (although PCs will leave them in the dust in a few years, but that always happens). So you should see games that take much fuller advantage of things like programmable shaders, and fewer compromises made in terms of porting between the consoles and PC.

There's also a flip side to developing on the PC, which is that unless you want to limit your game to a VERY small audience, you have to have your engine support DX8 cards (though a handful of games have abandoned this), as well as lower-end DX9 hardware (which can technically run programmable shaders, but not nearly as well as the newest $400+ cards). Not to mention systems that may have as little as 256MB of RAM, and a CPU that is half the speed of a high-end one. Designing game engines that are both that scalable *and* capable of looking great on the latest hardware is very hard. You tend to get either stuff that looks good across a wide variety of hardware, but isn't as stunning at the high end (like HL2), or games that look great on top-end hardware but don't scale down well (Doom3 at release, FEAR).

 

[HDTVMan]

Matthias99 you have good points
Dont you find that most games havent evolved in the last 3 years despite underlying engines there hasnt been any major improvements.

Better Textures and Higher Resolutions is all it feels like seperates the consoles from the PC versions. This is sad since the PC which should be capable of 3 times more than Xbox 1. I hate to think that is all that seperates XBOX 1 from a modern PC costing many times more.

Now that XBOX 360 is here to rival current PC levels I think that is the standard for the next 3 years of game development which is good we should see some game improvements once 360 sales and PS3 and Revolutions are out there selling games more than previous generations.

My fear is the UE3 engine will be scaled back or have scaling technology in some way to work with the XBOX 360(2005 Technology) instead of the abilities of a 2007 PC. Scaling technology which lets face it means backwards compatibility which translates to performance hit and graphics hit in some way shape or form because lets say for instance a certain element can work in DX9 but cant work in DX7 so the game gets based on what is capable in a DX7 world. The DX9 able are left wanting more. So us PC gamers are going to be at the mercy of the capabilities of the XBOX 360. Which is good but bad 2-3 years from now when everyone is still talking about upgrading thier video cards to the latest ATI/NVIDIA offering and then taking it to SLI when no games will really take advantage of that hardware until the next generation of consoles are released.

I guess to give an analogy. Xbox 1 is based loosly on the Direct X8 which the majority of games today I would say are based upon. Some games may be enhanced visually on the PC with a few DX9 abilities but the gameplay seems strictly limited to DX8 because it needs to work on a lesser system. You cant add something that is DX9 capable to a game that wont work in a DX8 because the game wont port to the lesser system properly and you then limit your sales.

XBOX 360 is based upon DX 9b and 720P/1080i. Lets just say the PS3/Revolution is also visually. Which means some games will now be based more upon Direct X 9b. PC's have been able to do this for quite some time. The problem is that we will be stuck here at this level for the next 3 years on the PC.

But since a lot of XBOX 1 and PS2 are still out there and buying games then games will be written with those systems in mind until the next gen consoles start to take over.

It all comes down to sales since development costs are so high it makes sense for developers to write the games based upon the widest market possible. So games are developed on the least powerfull console then ported with slight enhancements to each others system. So as the PC evolves games will still be based upon the XBOX 360 some 3 years from now because that is where the widest market share is.

Sadly I must say Consoles drive the PC market now. You can pretty much semise that buying a PC system that rivals todays X-box 360 should give you a machine that should last 3 years play games at 1024x768 which is comparable to the XBOX 360 and you wont get much improvements by upgrading to much better hardware.

Be very afraid if the revolution sells a lot because that system is considered weaker than the PS3/XBOX 360 which then developers will be baselining their games on that system with minor enhancements to the more powerfull systems.

 

[HDTVMan]

I guess if I could sum it up this is what I could say.

If game development costs me millions upon millions I am going to write a game that can be sold on the Gamecube, PS2, XBOX, and Now XBOX 360 and PC because that is a massive market share to try to recoup the most amount of money on development.

But if I write a game based upon PC technology of 2 years from now its strictly limited to PC people who have upgraded to that point in time. Which means I could lose a lot of money.

This is the problem and why most people dont need power beyond console ability. Development companies are going the safe route and this is why some X-box 360 games look like crap today.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: HDTVMan
Matthias99 you have good points
Dont you find that most games havent evolved in the last 3 years despite underlying engines there hasnt been any major improvements.

That's a different issue.

Better Textures and Higher Resolutions is all it feels like seperates the consoles from the PC versions. This is sad since the PC which should be capable of 3 times more than Xbox 1. I hate to think that is all that seperates XBOX 1 from a modern PC costing many times more.

If you're just comparing graphics and single-player gameplay in shooters, I would basically agree. Hardware-wise, the XBox(1) is almost identical to a Pentium 3 system with a slightly souped-up GF3 graphics card. When you look at things like multiplayer online gameplay, PCs still have an edge there (although consoles are catching up). And PCs still have genres of games (turn-based and realtime strategy games, and MMORPGs, for instance) that are basically nonexistent on consoles. Not to mention that you can't do any of the other things that a PC can do on a console (although you certainly could with a cheap non-gaming PC and a game console!)

My fear is the UE3 engine will be scaled back or have scaling technology in some way to work with the XBOX 360(2005 Technology) instead of the abilities of a 2007 PC.

To some extent, this is inevitable. Flexible game engine design (that doesn't require a huge amount of hardware specialization) almost dictates that you build to some baseline technology, with optional enhancements on top of it. Presumably the game will be able to run on 2005 graphics cards as well -- many PC gamers would be unhappy if it didn't.

I guess to give an analogy. Xbox 1 is based loosly on the Direct X8 which the majority of games today I would say are based upon. Some games may be enhanced visually on the PC with a few DX9 abilities but the gameplay seems strictly limited to DX8 because it needs to work on a lesser system. You cant add something that is DX9 capable to a game that wont work in a DX8 because the game wont port to the lesser system properly and you then limit your sales.

I would basically agree with that. We are only starting to see PC games that won't run with DX8 graphics cards, because those had been the standard for so long (and that's about the limit of what game consoles could do, if cross-platform compatibility is a concern).

XBOX 360 is based upon DX 9b and 720P/1080i. Lets just say the PS3/Revolution is also visually. Which means some games will now be based more upon Direct X 9b. PC's have been able to do this for quite some time. The problem is that we will be stuck here at this level for the next 3 years on the PC.

But we'd be 'stuck at that level' anyway even without consoles -- if a PC game came out next year that wouldn't run on this year's $400+ graphics cards because they lack some killer DX10 feature, the game would flop. You can't realistically make everyone's graphics hardware obselete every 12 months, which is why major features tend to be rolled out only every few years.

It all comes down to sales since development costs are so high it makes sense for developers to write the games based upon the widest market possible. So games are developed on the least powerfull console then ported with slight enhancements to each others system. So as the PC evolves games will still be based upon the XBOX 360 some 3 years from now because that is where the market share is.

To some extent, yes. It's up to developers to write game engines that can both scale down well and take advantage of the latest technology -- but that's hard to do. There's no easy answer here -- there's always been a chicken-and-egg problem with graphics hardware and software in gaming. Developers don't want to sink time and effort into new hardware features until those features are widely available to gamers -- but gamers don't want to invest in new hardware until there are games out there to take advantage of it.

Sadly I must say Consoles drive the PC market now. You can pretty much semise that buying a PC system that rivals todays X-box 360 should give you a machine that should last 3 years play games at 1024x768 which is comparable to the XBOX 360 and you wont get much improvements by upgrading to much better hardware.

What upgrading to better hardware buys you is a lot better graphical quality. Many PC gamers would consider running games at 1024x768 at low settings to be a relatively poor use of a gaming PC.

Be very afraid if the revolution sells a lot because that system is considered weaker than the PS3/XBOX 360 which then developers will be baselining their games on that system with minor enhancements to the more powerfull systems.

From what Nintendo is saying, they are not really aiming to have the same market as the PS3/XBox360, so I don't think this is too much of a concern even if the Revolution is markedly inferior in terms of hardware. This may turn out to be a bad decision by Nintendo, but you can't say they're not trying something different.

But if I write a game based upon PC technology of 2 years from now its strictly limited to PC people who have upgraded to that point in time. Which means I could lose a lot of money.

This is the problem and why most people dont need power beyond console ability. Development companies are going the safe route and this is why some X-box 360 games look like crap today.

The good news here is that DX9-based engines should scale between slower and faster hardware a lot better than DX8-based ones. It's easier to scale up/down the complexity of shader programs than geometry and textures. Once your 'baseline' is something like the XBox360 (which is probably in the ballpark of a 7800GT), you don't have to make as many compromises for slower hardware (let alone hardware that doesn't support programmable shaders). The flexbility of DX9 (and OpenGL 2.0) means you can implement more advanced/longer shaders on faster hardware and get graphical improvements that way without needing to drastically change the layout/function of the hardware.