So, I brought this up over on the Destructoid forums a little while ago, and got some interesting responses, so figured I'd bring it up here as well and see what the Escapist community thinks.
See, when it comes to gaming hardware, there seems to only be one metric which gamers use to decide whether a piece of hardware is great or shit:
Power! Whether it's Bits, or GFLOPS or clockspeeds, we gamers seem to let hardware live or die purely based on how powerful it is.
Now, my contention is that this is a rather bizarre mindset to be in. If you look at any other field of technology analysis, nothing is ever rated purely on how powerful it is, but on a whole category of requirements that are all measured up. What a piece of technology is worth is how well
all those factors come together.
The example I used was cars- right now, gamers seem to be stuck in the Jeremy Clarkson mindset of:
..wherein the perfect car would look probably something like this:
However, Jeremy Clarkson knowingly portrays himself on Top Gear as a bit of an idiot, and would readily admit that you can never judge a car purely on how much horsepower it has. Yes, a car might have 800bhp, but if it handles like a turd, rides like a trampoline made of grit, and drinks up fuel like an alcoholic at Oktoberfest, then it's not really all that good of a
car. Great automobile engineering is about bringing together a whole host of different things like reliability, efficiency, handling, weight, and so on, and making a car work well within the design limits you set it.
To illustrate this, the following is one of the most acclaimed cars of the past twenty years. There are few cars that can keep up with it on the race track, and it has won plaudits and awards all around the world.
It also only has 134hp.
By any modern metric, the actual
power of the engine in the Lotus Elise is quite modest. Even the 'supercharged' Exige model only offers 192hp, which isn't bad, but certainly nothing compared to a Lancer Evo or a Nissan Skyline, let alone something like a Pagani Zonda or a Mclaren Mercedes SLR. But if the engine is so weak, why is the Elise regarded as so
good? It doesn't have any POWAH! after all.
Because while the engine is fairly lower powered, the car itself weighs next to nothing, and has been designed entirely around offering unparalleled handling. Top Gear themselves called the Elise the best handling car in the world, and its acceleration is also phenomenally fast (0-60 in 5.8 seconds). If anyone wants proof of what a phenomenal piece of engineering the Elise is, especially the Exige model:
Ok, so enough wittering on about cars j-e-f-f-e-r-s, what does this have to do with games?
Well, it seems to me that more and more of us are falling into the Jeremy Clarkson mindset of "More POWAH!" except without the self referential irony. We have an increasing tendency to praise hardware that's seen as powerful, even if it's actually quite badly put together, while sneering at hardware we deem less powerful, even if its put together and runs with incredible efficiency. I'll use a couple of examples, first of which is:
The Gamecube.
When it came out, the Gamecube's on-paper specs were pretty modest. They were better than the PS2's, sure, but they were also absolutely dwarfed by the Xbox's. The Xbox not only had a higher clocked CPU (733MHZ), it had an internal hard-drive... in fact, you can read an in-depth specs analysis sheet
here. Barring a few exceptions, the on paper specs of the Xbox blow the doors off the Gamecube in pretty much every category. More RAM, more memory bandwidth, the whole shebang.
So in theory, that means the Xbox should have had noticeably better looking games than the Gamecube, right? Actually, no. That wasn't the case. Despite its lower specs on paper, the Gamecube was also one of the most efficiently engineered consoles the industry has probably ever seen. Not only were games such as Star Fox Adventure notable for having advanced graphical effects despite being launched early in the console's life, but Rogue Squadron 3 has the highest polygon count of any sixth-generation console game, while also running at 60fps. Wind Waker was one of the most notable games for its advanced graphics. Despite being a cel-shaded game, and therefore ostensibly being simpler, Wind Waker had a whole host of ridiculously advanced programming going on under the hood: early tesselation, running two lighting engines simultaneously, and other neat graphical tricks. Despite having specs that
should have resulted in lesser looking games, the Gamecube was able to match the Xbox with games like Metroid Prime and RE4, and even outperform it with RS3.
Even better, the Gamecube was made with a prime lode of Nintendium. Not only was it a well engineered piece of kit, it was also the smallest of the sixth-gen consoles, and nigh on indestructable. In fairness, the old Xbox was also a durable old machine, but in
this video here, the Gamecube is the only console to survive having weights dropped on it, being hit with a sledgehammer, and dropped from a 1 storey height. Not only did Nintendo engineer the Gamecube to work with an incredible degree of efficiency, they also made sure it could take one hell of a beating.
Conversely, let's look at a system that was praised for its specs at the time, the Xbox 360. Despite being somewhat short on RAM when it came out, tech-heads everywhere praised it for the fact that it had a hefty tri-core CPU, an advanced GPU, and its own built-in tessellation unit. Purely based on metrics of POWAH! the 360 was a superb piece of kit for the time. What happened next? Well...
As it turns out, while the 360 may have been a 'powerful' piece of hardware, the first wave of models were also terribly designed and badly put together. To this day, there still hasn't been a conclusive reason discovered for why so many consoles fried themselves. Some believe it was the poor quality soldering used to connect the components, others believe it was Microsoft cutting corners on the GPU which led to excessive heat production. However you look at it, though, the 360 was a very shabbily put together piece of hardware. High-end PC components were chucked onto a motherboard without consideration of how much heat they'd produce. Extra large fans were then bodged together to deal with that heat, without consideration of how much noise they'd produce. Even if your 360 is working to this day, there's no denying that it's a loud machine which sits in the corner making Concorde impressions every time it fires up.
Even worse, that tesselation unit that's sitting in the 360? For the most part, it's redundant. Some games like Halo: Reach managed to make use of the tessellation unit to render prettier looking oceans, but for the vast majority of games, the tessellation unit has been sat there collecting dust on the motherboard. The consensus apparently being that while
in theory it's nice to have such a unit in the console, in practise Microsoft made it too difficult to use properly to make it worthwhile.
I believe these two consoles make a very direct contrast to each other, and to me, they highlight the disconnect that is becoming more apparent in this industry. Praising something purely for the sake of POWAH! is pointless if efficiency and reliability are thrown out of the window. Conversely, hardware that is put together with the focus on utmost efficiency can be surprisingly effective at outputting great looking graphics, while also offering the possibility for greater reliability, smaller power consumption, and better affordability.
I know there are quite a few PC gamers on here who like to bemoan the current lack of POWAH! in today's gaming machines, but I also believe there are quite a few like myself, who would like to see the emphasis in the industry change from GFLOPS and clock speeds to overall efficiency and cohesive engineering.
Your thoughts? Anyone believe that the industry
should focus on powerful hardware specs over other facets of hardware engineering?
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