Next Gen Console vs This Gen PC graphics

[Feylynn]

The trick is a PC can ALWAYS convert more money into more power. Once you cap out one box if you really wanted to you could start using more than one simultaneously to make it better. "High End" PC can without to much stretch refer to trillion dollar super computing banks of doom.

Consoles are trying to aim to be able to be bought by anyone. They will likely stick to sub 1000$ unless they are insane.

Even beyond that though, the second a console design is finalized it is outdated by more user accessible PC systems. Technology advances to quickly and a production cycle is to long for it to happen any other way.

The real gap closer is that game developers don't spec games for use by that much money in one system. They spec them for a wide range of people to play. So in a lot of games there isn't a difference even though the PC has and always will have a higher max capability.

 

[The Comfy Chair]

The trick is a PC can ALWAYS convert more money into more power. Once you cap out one box if you really wanted to you could start using more than one simultaneously to make it better. "High End" PC can without to much stretch refer to trillion dollar super computing banks of doom.

Consoles are trying to aim to be able to be bought by anyone. They will likely stick to sub 1000$ unless they are insane.

Even beyond that though, the second a console design is finalized it is outdated by more user accessible PC systems. Technology advances to quickly and a production cycle is to long for it to happen any other way.

The real gap closer is that game developers don't spec games for use by that much money in one system. They spec them for a wide range of people to play. So in a lot of games there isn't a difference even though the PC has and always will have a higher max capability.

Yeah, most of the major graphical differences in multi platforms are higher texture quality, AA, AO, AF, much higher resolution and higher framerates. Some games make more effort and have better lighting, models ect. Then some games, which get slammed as being the worst PC ports of them all, vilified and treated as trash, are the games which look the exact same as console (which is funny because i think some console gamers assume 'bad PC ports' are because they're worse than the console versions). They make any game look vastly better, but you wouldn't see most of it on a youtube video! It's why it seems 'the same' even though in reality it certainly looks a lot better.

Then you have a game like star citizen, designed for a PC only, and in pre-pre-alpha is stupidly good looking.

But the main advantage is just flexibility as well. I can play any game how i want it on PC Whereas i can't on console. Want to play an FPS with a mouse so you don't feel cramped and restricted? not on console! Want to play a game with a yamaha keyboard just for fun? you can very likely do it on PC!

It's like how i'd quite like to be able to play halo 4 with a mouse, even though i know it'd end up really easy but i can't because of ... erm ... microsoft says so?

 

[Folji]

No, as the 360 has a HD2000 based GPU, and the PS3 has an nvidia 7 series GPU. Nothing special, nothing unique, instantly surpassed by PC graphics cards Consoles are not the major target market for AMD/Nvidia, so they will not spend money developing 'new architectures' for it. Same as the CPU aspect of it too, the reason both consoles have IBM based processors is not because IBM are amazing, it's because IBM aren't relevant enough in the CPU world to charge high prices (relatively) for developing the chips. AMD and Intel would laugh at anyone asking them to design a new CPU architecture just for console. The rumors are that the PS4 will use an AMD APU, which is fine as AMD already make them. Same as the Wii U which uses an 'off the shelf' low end AMD embedded GPU.

The reason consoles are still around is not because they're good enough, far from it. They're still around because marketing got it's claws into people, and people suddenly start believing that what we have is all we'll ever get. Do you honestly think that this gen was somehow far more powerful relative to PC's than the ps2/xbox generation was? or the ps1 generation? When it's only this generation where PC components have increased dramatically in cooling requirements?

No, it's not the hardware being amazing, it's the marketing.

P.S. A 360 level PC plays PC games at roughly 360 level, it's just that no-one plays PC games at <30fps at 1280x720 the glorified 'optimization' doesn't amount to much. Especially when non-gaming laptops picked up from PC world for £300 are now better than a 360 for gaming.

No it's noooooot. :b You're not far away from it, but if you're gonna be picky about details then the Xenos chip has more in common with the X1000 chips. Then after that, some of the architecture changes in the Xenos chip wound up as the base for the X2000 ones.

But even if you were to have a "360 level PC", as you put it, it's not a given that you would be running the same games at an average 30 FPS at that resolution, with the same settings, getting the same quality. Nobody's talking about amazing hardware here but you, but there are still real differences between the architecture of a console GPU versus a PC GPU. The point isn't whether a console has more power than the average PC specs at the time, even if they have scored pretty high, the point is that the console is able to take advantage of that power on a completely different level. You can get more juice out of a console's GPU to render a game than a similarly specced PC's GPU, plus the thoroughly detailed capabilities of a console GPU per cycle gives developers a chance to fit the game as close to those capabilities as possible, and those two qualities combined has let it all carry on much longer than usual. It's half a decade of steep graphical advances running on the same system; it's not really advisable, you wouldn't present that as a serious way to run the generation cycle, but that's still what happened and it still worked. That's my point; it worked, so who's to say it won't happen again.

 

[The Comfy Chair]

No, as the 360 has a HD2000 based GPU, and the PS3 has an nvidia 7 series GPU. Nothing special, nothing unique, instantly surpassed by PC graphics cards Consoles are not the major target market for AMD/Nvidia, so they will not spend money developing 'new architectures' for it. Same as the CPU aspect of it too, the reason both consoles have IBM based processors is not because IBM are amazing, it's because IBM aren't relevant enough in the CPU world to charge high prices (relatively) for developing the chips. AMD and Intel would laugh at anyone asking them to design a new CPU architecture just for console. The rumors are that the PS4 will use an AMD APU, which is fine as AMD already make them. Same as the Wii U which uses an 'off the shelf' low end AMD embedded GPU.

The reason consoles are still around is not because they're good enough, far from it. They're still around because marketing got it's claws into people, and people suddenly start believing that what we have is all we'll ever get. Do you honestly think that this gen was somehow far more powerful relative to PC's than the ps2/xbox generation was? or the ps1 generation? When it's only this generation where PC components have increased dramatically in cooling requirements?

No, it's not the hardware being amazing, it's the marketing.

P.S. A 360 level PC plays PC games at roughly 360 level, it's just that no-one plays PC games at <30fps at 1280x720 the glorified 'optimization' doesn't amount to much. Especially when non-gaming laptops picked up from PC world for £300 are now better than a 360 for gaming.

No it's noooooot. :b You're not far away from it, but if you're gonna be picky about details then the Xenos chip has more in common with the X1000 chips. Then after that, some of the architecture changes in the Xenos chip wound up as the base for the X2000 ones.

But even if you were to have a "360 level PC", as you put it, it's not a given that you would be running the same games at an average 30 FPS at that resolution, with the same settings, getting the same quality. Nobody's talking about amazing hardware here but you, but there are still real differences between the architecture of a console GPU versus a PC GPU. The point isn't whether a console has more power than the average PC specs at the time, even if they have scored pretty high, the point is that the console is able to take advantage of that power on a completely different level. You can get more juice out of a console's GPU to render a game than a similarly specced PC's GPU, plus the thoroughly detailed capabilities of a console GPU per cycle gives developers a chance to fit the game as close to those capabilities as possible, and those two qualities combined has let it all carry on much longer than usual. It's half a decade of steep graphical advances running on the same system; it's not really advisable, you wouldn't present that as a serious way to run the generation cycle, but that's still what happened and it still worked. That's my point; it worked, so who's to say it won't happen again.

That's why i called it a 'precusor' i consider it closer to the HD2 series tbh. But it's semantics, it's somewhere in between the two.

Also, it still stands that the difference is only 15-20% in like for like comparisons. A 360 would theoretically weigh in at ~3000 points in 3dmark06 could it run it. I don't know about you, but i've had a laptop with a score of 3500 3dmark06 points running mass effect 3 like a 360 but with better load times (that's 1280x720/30). The CPU was actually a bit worse too as it was a low end core 2 duo. Note that was one of the worse examples, games like Grid looked beautiful on that laptop and far outshone the console version because i could run on high. Source games especially just demolished their console counterparts. Isn't it meant to be the other way?

Optimization really isn't 'all that'. For it to be making a difference like it needs to, it needs to be beating 10k 3dmark06 systems, and it's nowhere close. Not one bit. Note that if 3dmark06 was still relevant so that new cards could do it in any meaningful way, a gtx670 would be hitting around 60k.

In the end the whole fallacy of 'optimization' bugs me because i'm a programmer lol. So few people realize how it isn't the 'I win button'. Optimization can only fix inefficiencies, it can't make hardware faster. Since the optimizations also apply for PC 99% of the time (since they're mainly made in the higher level languages and engines that aren't hardware dependent) it doesn't make a big difference anyway in terms of creating the much desired disparity the consoles need to seem relevant. A Xbox 360 power PC is not much slower than a 360. It never was, it never will be. It's plain wrong to think otherwise.

P.S. the gpu was a 9500M GS by the way. Here's it running mirror's edge (i made this video a long time ago, so excuse the low quality - the laptop is still around but a friend has it now) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ul8x_zSZi4 Note that i had an overclock which got it to the 3dmark score noted above and some tweaking on the laptop as a result (some of the earlier videos were using the unoverclocked laptop, so were running at a lower resolution). But since this is a 'performance to performance' comparison it matters little. Also remember that the laptop is also running FRAPs too! So it's doing much more work than the console would have to.

Put it this way, it's that laptop combined with steam sales which converted me and many of my friends to 'proper' PC gaming and build desktops. We saw that games can look nicer and have so much more flexibility Why would we do that if it looked worse? We were not stupid dudebros, we were all university Physicists, we're buggers for being logical

 

[Rawne1980]

This makes me sad. I was hoping the next gen would make people consider console gamers as on par with PC gamers but it doesn't look like it will. Believe me I would play PC more if the only games I prefer on mine weren't RTS.

This isn't a question of whether console gamers are on par with pc gamers, it's the power of the machines.

We can get into the age old debate on which and who are better but it gets us nowhere, especially when you consider that a lot of folk do both.

Power wise, comparing next gen consoles with "high end" PC's is a non argument. High end PC's ARE "next gen" already, we've been waiting for consoles to catch up.

Which is better is, and will always be, subjective.

But as for this topic, no. Next gen consoles will be nowhere near capable of what high end PC's are. They may come close to mid range PC's.

When you look at some of the top end PC's you can see people with thousands of pounds in their machines, the parts in mine set me back £4000 and it's far more powerful than I will ever need (I got incredibly carried away). Consoles need to maintain a certain price level to sell to the average family.

 

[The Comfy Chair]

This makes me sad. I was hoping the next gen would make people consider console gamers as on par with PC gamers but it doesn't look like it will. Believe me I would play PC more if the only games I prefer on mine weren't RTS.

This isn't a question of whether console gamers are on par with pc gamers, it's the power of the machines.

We can get into the age old debate on which and who are better but it gets us nowhere, especially when you consider that a lot of folk do both.

Power wise, comparing next gen consoles with "high end" PC's is a non argument. High end PC's ARE "next gen" already, we've been waiting for consoles to catch up.

Which is better is, and will always be, subjective.

But as for this topic, no. Next gen consoles will be nowhere near capable of what high end PC's are. They may come close to mid range PC's.

When you look at some of the top end PC's you can see people with thousands of pounds in their machines, the parts in mine set me back £4000 and it's far more powerful than I will ever need (I got incredibly carried away). Consoles need to maintain a certain price level to sell to the average family.

Well, it's not really subjective. The PC platform is better. But it's more expensive for the initial outlay (not £4k though, that wasn't getting carried away, that was insane, £800 is all you need even if you get a bit giddy with the pretties, anything above that is throwing money into a fire - still, it must be one hell of an e-peen machine! ). It's like saying a bugatti veyron is not better than a mini. It obviously is, and we shouldn't have to tread on eggshells about it all the damn time because some people are far too attached to a brand because that's all it is. The 360 is a locked down 2005 era PC with a logo, the sooner people realize this the better the gaming community will be Hell, i can even access what is essentially the 360 home menu from my PC on windows 8 if i wanted. It looks the exact same and i even have a stupid avatar associated with it. But the difference is i can get the hell out of that and do other things

You accept compromises to play on console. Many of them. I think people just don't quite realize that a lot of the time! You get back what you put in (and that isn't just money). I couldn't have a console as a main gaming platform for me for example, i'd lose out on far too much. it'd be like someone used to console gaming having to only play on a mobile device. Does that mean console games are 'bad', no, but they are limited by old tech now. The compromises are made for the games to be a tiny bit easier to start up (but usually slower to do so) and at the expense of graphics, performance, and flexibility. I wouldn't actually put cost as a reason for the compromise, because you can grab £150 desktop PCs (+£70 for windows) from sites like aria that are competitive with the Wii U on GPU performance and substantially better in CPU. But most importantly the compromises are made because consoles don't require effort. A PC is the best gaming platform, but it requires at least a bit of effort to keep it in top condition. Like the Veyron, it'll break down if you treat it like crap but the mini can take a bit more punishment before it explodes.

Also, i can only hope the previous post meant 'games' the people aren't any different as individuals. We can definitely make a good point about overall demographics, but that's neither here nor there as very few of the (unfortunately) major console demographics that buy games like CoD and Fifa every year make any effort to discuss games in forums like this. We're all gamers here, this is about the games, we all want to see this medium grow. Personally, i'm hoping we see a start of crowd funded AAA PC studios who can try something new with a spectacularly powerful platform. It's one of the reasons star citizen is far more important than just saving the space sim genre: it could save AAA gaming. I would like the same for consoles, but there's too much red tape and too little performance to try

 

[Pakkie]

When the Xbox 360/PS3 were being released there hardware could still be out-powered by top-tier PC stuff, this time around I think even a lot of upper middle-range cards will beat the new consoles due to the current recession and MS/Sony's plan to keep the consoles in the 300-400 range, I believe a have seen a few news articles/"leaks" pointing to this too.

 

[Yopaz]

The main question is will the new consoles be more powerful then the current high end gaming PC's ?

No.

Not even close.

The key phrase there is "high end". A high end PC is several times more powerful than next gen console will be.

The funny thing is that most of that power goes to waste on a gaming PC since basically every game released these days is built around being able to run on console hardware, that being where the market is.

Yup, this is correct. A next gen console will maybe be as good as a mid-end PC, but most likely not. Just because Sony or Microsoft release a new system they wont revolutionize hardware. They have to run with hardware that exists and if they make it too expensive they alienate the console buyer who stays away from PC because it's too expensive. There's no fucking way that PCs will be made obsolete by "powerful" consoles. What I like about the next console generation is that the consoles hace to catch up so PCs can finally get games that take use of the powerful hardware we've already had for years.

 

[m19]

Well, next gen consoles are likely going to be based on PC technology from about 2 years ago when they began the development of the things.

If they kept trying to use 'todays' technology the thing would never be finished because new toys are released at quick rates.

I was saying "today's technology" figuratively. The technology of whenever they started, but not the technology of whenever they'll be out.

 

[Something Amyss]

i have a better question

who cares?

it's not like having 'more power' inherently makes games better, sure it CAN, but what can be, and what usually is are two different things

People who cannot properly be immersed if they lack photorealism.

Or people who constantly need to compare e-peens.

Possibly both.

 

[Techno Squidgy]

It's very unlikely that consoles will ever be more powerful than an up to date PC.

Thankfully, that matters little, since consoles are a locked format it means that devs get very good at optimising games for them. So while they will be less powerful, games will look much better than on a PC with similar spec.

[sub]At least, I think so, correct me if I'm wrong.[/sub]

If you had a PC and a console of the same specs the console would run it better as the code would have been optimised for it, where as PC code must be prepared for many combinations of hardware (APIs deal with most of that but it makes a difference). Unfortunately hardware ages fast, and by the time a console is ready for release its hardware is usually equivalent to new mid-range gear. A top of the line PC will always be more powerful than a console, but the point is moot unless the games can take advantage of that power.

 

[Marendithias]

The real thing is that most games are coded initially to run on consoles and then ported to PC (usually very badly too). Because of this they will run much better on consoles despite the fact that the PC has more powerful hardware.


One thing to note is that without a large number of high demand PC exclusives, graphics card manufactures don't really push the technology forward since there isn't any real need for it and more importantly there isn't enough money in it. This is bad for both consoles and PC since we see less improvement in technology.

 

[Lunar Templar]

i have a better question

who cares?

it's not like having 'more power' inherently makes games better, sure it CAN, but what can be, and what usually is are two different things

People who cannot properly be immersed if they lack photorealism.

Or people who constantly need to compare e-peens.

Possibly both.

yeah, but i couldn't care less what they want.

i want devs to use the tech to make something 'fucking awesome', not put a fresh shine on the turds they crap out now.

guess which I'm expecting

(x.x gah.... I'm a bitter old guy gamer)

 

[Tiger Sora]

Ohh, look what this is devolving into.

Just that PC's are constantly upgrading while a new consoles only comes out every 5+ years as is, kinda proves PC's will always have the curve over them.

 

[Darmy647]

Ohh, look what this is devolving into.

Just that PC's are constantly upgrading while a new consoles only comes out every 5+ years as it kinda proves PC's will always have the curve over them.

As much as id love to stroke my ego about that pic, its really not so much that im Rooting hardcore for my PC. Its just how the world has worked so far for PC gaming. Were just ahead all the time, thats all. The only thing that gets me Pissy/Jimmies rustled is the fact i keep seeing people expecting So damn much from the next xbox and ps4 when they havent even taken a good look or studied the 2 companies buisness plans/ where they intend to really donate their time to. I get it, you want to stroke your console lover ego's, we pc gamers do it A lot ourselves, but be honest and realistic here. Its very possible the 2 companies may meet the wii U on terms of power but take drastic different approaches in innovation or even whats bundled or used with the consoles. Im just saying look at it with a studied and careful view, this is a new type of plan for all 3, we cant depend on past experiences only now, this is going to be a game changer for all 3 consoles.

Thats all, no hate ment at all for my console brethren.