Piecewise said:
exactly what it takes to run this game at it's maximum settings with
uber-sampling + ssao is just brutal on any hardware, and no console can support it, they don't have the memory, bandwidth or processing power what you require to run that is
THREE ( yah, really ) gtx480 or higher to run this game smoothly maxed out with an i7 or xeon @4ghz or so and a good helping of ram, 4gb +
two cards might manage it with some pretty hefty over-clocking but you'll still get drops below optimal
so, let's take a look at what's inside a console shall we?
( sony gets so much bad press these days i feel sorry for them, so ill abuse Microsoft for today )
here's a 360 broken down ( and this is microsoft's own list )
Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU
? Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each
? Two hardware threads per core; six hardware threads total
? VMX-128 vector unit per core; three total
? 128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread
? 1 MB L2 cache
CPU Game Math Performance
? 9 billion dot product operations per second
Custom ATI Graphics Processor
? 500MHz processor
? 10 MB of embedded DRAM
? 48-way parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines
? Unified shader architecture
Polygon Performance
? 500 million triangles per second
Pixel Fill Rate
? 16 gigasamples per second fill rate using 4x MSAA
Shader Performance
? 48 billion shader operations per second
Memory
? 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM
? 700 MHz of DDR
? Unified memory architecture
Memory Bandwidth ? 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
? 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
? 21.6 GB/s front-side bus
Overall System Floating-Point Performance
? 1 teraflop
pretty hot stuff for 2005 ama right?
so,
for funsies, that's half the memory bandwidth of Intel's extreme processors / memory kits
1 terraflop total system performance?
you can pull those kind of numbers from a single £200 graphics card, let alone a whole gaming system these days ( nearly 6 years later guys, yah, that long!! )
( however we are mixing programable and non programmable ALUs, the flops of these two different architectures should NOT be compared due to hardware multiply / add differences, so the total system performance of the device may well be lower or higher overall )
but if Microsoft feel they can mix them so will i.
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/Xbox-specs-revealed/2100-1043_3-5705372.html#ixzz1OjgLgnpK
now, i'm not saying the game even looks a whole lot better just that the max settings guzzle resources like a sumo wrestler downs sushi
and you don't need most of these effects for great visuals anyway
which is why the game designers fine tune titles for the hardware they know console gamers have and they still look great because they do a good job of optimising the game to the hardware
which is what people mean when they rather uncharitably say
'console games ship with low graphical settings'
which is technically true, but it makes little difference!
the whole point of optimising for the hardware is you don't notice the differences
that's why crytek made an unusable game, then crysis 2 that would run on anything that had a screen and an input method
consoles are always good when they launch, and vastly outstrip a gaming pc of the same price range, but this long after launch they cant hold a candle to the new, high end hardware
i wish people on both sides of this bizzare pc / console war would just understand this and let it lay
