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[Marco1]

But then I have to turn your "Do Gamers really think..." around on you.
The Witcher 2 is currently being shown to run on 360 with what they say are medium PC settings.
I personally would be extremely disappointed in the next-gen consoles if all they could do out of the game is moving The Witcher 2 up from medium to high settings.

I think I will wait until it's released to see what it looks like. But then I am sure it was built with multi-platform in mind. Also look how the devs treated PC gamers.

 

[ghst]

Even here there are examples of this type of person mindlessly shitting on any reference or questions about controller support, though there is a fairly large defense force here to smack it right back.

check out this particularly obnoxious example. they're practically drawing blood.

 

[mxgt]

I understand why he wrote this piece. If you want to see his points about these hardheaded, mouth-foaming PC enthusiasts proven, just venture into any PC gaming thread on the entire internet and mention a controller. Any attempts or suggestions to make PC gaming more approachable and user friendly (be it universal controller support, more unified hardware, etc...) is just savagely shit all over by this relatively small group of like-minded super nerds. The responses are so similar and predictable, you would swear it's all just one guy trolling the internet with thousands of different forum accounts.

I love my 360 controller for some PC games.

If PC gaming was standardised and made user friendly who would even buy consoles?

 

[HeadlessRoland]

Shit is so stupid it doesn't even merit a response or consideration.

 

[Durante]

bandresen, you previously talked about the 10x power difference and where it is going, and also brought up Portal 2 as an example. Let's do a small calculation.

On PC, you get 60 FPS (2x) at 1920x1200 (2.5x) with 8xAA and AF (let's say 2x as much power required, I think that's really generous). 2*2.5*2 = 10. Hey! So if we use 10x the performance on a platform 10x as fast where is that miraculous overhead and abstraction that is greatly holding us back?

 

[Freshmaker]

I confess.


My tinkering, graphic whoreness and reluctance to accept standardization of the platform has ruined PC gaming.


I did. I killed it. I killed PC gaming dead.

I hope you're proud of yourself.

 

[Zeliard]

This is a console centric board where most of the PC gamers are platform agnostic or converts in one direction or the other. Even here there are examples of this type of person mindlessly shitting on any reference or questions about controller support, though there is a fairly large defense force here to smack it right back.

Again, what you're saying doesn't make much sense. There's nothing hardline about dismissing controller support, since it's just another in a long list of things that makes the PC so versatile. It's one of PC gaming's major benefits that it can adapt to so many different controller inputs.

 

[mxgt]

Unfortunately most don't know what they're talking about then, cause I dare you to Google "Game Name" PC + Controller Support, and skim through some of the threads that pop up. It is mind blowing, the ignorance on display.

Depends what kind of game it is.

If it's a FPS then they should be rightfully laughed at.

 

[benny_a]

bandresen, you previously talked about the 10x power difference and where it is going, and also brought up Portal 2 as an example. Let's do a small calculation.

On PC, you get 60 FPS (2x) at 1920x1200 (2.5x) with 8xAA and AF (let's say 2x as much power required, I think that's really generous). 2*2.5*2 = 10. Hey! So if we use 10x the performance on a platform 10x as fast where is that miraculous overhead and abstraction that is greatly holding us back?

I don't think your calculation seems to be based in reality.
As I wrote in my other reply, if you think the difference between The Witcher 2 on high is an order of magnitude better looking than The Witcher 2 on medium then that's just the way you see it.

It's hard to quantify, but for me I don't see it.

 

[ghst]

bandresen, you previously talked about the 10x power difference and where it is going, and also brought up Portal 2 as an example. Let's do a small calculation.

On PC, you get 60 FPS (2x) at 1920x1200 (2.5x) with 8xAA and AF (let's say 2x as much power required, I think that's really generous). 2*2.5*2 = 10. Hey! So if we use 10x the performance on a platform 10x as fast where is that miraculous overhead and abstraction that is greatly holding us back?

you're forgetting things like texture resolution, LOD, shadow fidelity and a hundred other trees that apparently block your way to the forest. not to mention your rendering times have to be twice as tight in order to meet a mouse+keyboard's demands for minuscule input lag.

 

[ZombieSupaStar]

If a PC essentially became another console, why would anyone prefer to buy games for it?

I guess I've never understood this argument.

*looks at bethesda titles*.... "mods"

 

[rvy]

Dumbtaku.

 

[benny_a]

you're forgetting things like texture resolution, LOD, shadow fidelity and a hundred other trees that apparently block your way to the forest. not to mention your frame buffers have to be twice as tight if you're going to rendering in time for the minuscule input lag that a mouse and keyboard demands.

So now we're above the order of magnitude Carmack is talking about. How is the PC pulling that off while at the same time replies here have said that the reason it doesn't look that much better is because they are multi-platform titles. Those are two incompatible statements.

 

[SamVimes]

I understand why he wrote this piece. If you want to see his points about these hardheaded, mouth-foaming PC enthusiasts proven, just venture into any PC gaming thread on the entire internet and mention a controller. Any attempts or suggestions to make PC gaming more approachable and user friendly (be it universal controller support, more unified hardware, etc...) is just savagely shit all over by this relatively small group of like-minded super nerds. The responses are so similar and predictable, you would swear it's all just one guy trolling the internet with thousands of different forum accounts.

Only if you ask for controller support on multiplayer FPSs (with autoaim, otherwise how can you compete!?) and strategy games.

 

[Chinner]

So now we're above the order of magnitude Carmack is talking about. How is the PC pulling that off while at the same time replies here have said that the reason it doesn't look that much better is because they are multi-platform titles. Those are two incompatible statements.

what are you examples again?

edit: god why am i replying to someone who is obviously trolling/look at the avatar.

 

[SatelliteOfLove]

"Hi! I'm a pundit with soapbox. So glad of you to notice me up here! I don't like something, it makes me so mad; I just don't understand it! Lucky I got this soapbox, huh? I say this thing/concept/person/company/franchise/game is bad because I hate it, and despite the fiscal and critical success it finds, I wish it to go away! I don't understand the repercussions of what I want on myself, others or the industry! I use flowery, charismatic language! Listen to me!!!!!!!!"

Copy-paste the above to replace any article like this this generation. I promise it will do so perfectly.

 

[Frankfurt]

It's really not hard at all considering 99% of games are developed with the console in mind meaning cheaper parts on PC will do the trick in most games unless they're crappy, unoptimized ports which wouldn't matter then since it'd run shitty no matter what hardware you have.

That's why the BF3 thread is filled with spec talk because it's the one game that's a true PC game that will require some beefier hardware to max out so graphics whores are going nuts with speculating how it will run. In this generation of gaming, it's mostly been about easily running PC games since they're made with the consoles in mind making it easy to run as long as it's optimized.

EVERY PS360PC multiplat thread is taken over by spec talk, Steam talk and screencaps. Not just BF3. Assassin's Creed, Deus Ex, NFS, Dead Island, pick any game that is on console and PC... or hell, just PC. It's like you're transported to some strange mix of LensofTruth and a Valve fansite, only you clicked in a thread to read about the actual a game.

 

[mxgt]

So now we're above the order of magnitude Carmack is talking about. How is the PC pulling that off while at the same time replies here have said that the reason it doesn't look that much better is because they are multi-platform titles. Those are two incompatible statements.

Who has said the games don't look better besides console users?

PC versions of multi platform games always look considerably better because of resolution, framerate and assorted other effects which you seem to enjoy downplaying for some bizarre reason.

 

[benny_a]

what are you examples again?

Page 3 (50 posts per page); Portal 2, RAGE & The Witcher 2.

Who has said the games don't look better besides console users?

PC versions of multi platform games always look considerably better because of resolution, framerate and assorted other effects which you seem to enjoy downplaying for some bizarre reason.

I haven't said they don't look better. I have repeatedly said I don't consider the difference a generational leap or order of magnitude difference.
My argument can not be more concise than TW2 on medium vs. high.

 

[MrNyarlathotep]

This is a console centric board where most of the PC gamers are either platform agnostic or converts in one direction or the other. Even here there are examples of this type of person mindlessly shitting on any reference or questions about controller support, though there is a fairly large defense force here to smack it right back.

Even specifically PC-centric websites and forums are primarily populated by people who use controllers on their PC and also own consoles.

It's almost like people prepared to shell out the money on a gaming PC and learn how to tweak it care enough about gaming as a hobby that they then don't also mind shelling out for a console for its inevitable exclusives.

If your opinions on 'PC nerds' stems from their dismissal of the controller as a replacement for M+KB in FPSes, well, you're right. The controller is objectively an inferior input device.

 

[Dennis]

I hope you're proud of yourself.

Oh absolutely, most high def.

 

[Tallshortman]

Does this prophet have a name?

 

[Chinner]

Oh absolutely, most high def.

wait a minute, you killed pc gaming with your sli 580 and you still haven't played witcher 2 and you're using an avatar of geralt with a model they don't even use anymore.

 

[Reallink]

Again, what you're saying doesn't make much sense. There's nothing hardline about dismissing controller support, since it's just another in a long list of things that makes the PC so versatile. It's one of PC gaming's major benefits that it can adapt to so many different controller inputs.

Huh? I said I understand why he wrote this article, because there is a fairly sizable group of PC enthusiasts that actively and very vocally make it their mission in life to shit on these types of suggestions. I simply referenced PC controller support because it is a very common example that group berates. The entire article is obviously just a commentary on that overall (seemingly prevailing) mentality in the PC community. I was just providing another example more people might be familiar with.

 

[ghst]

If your opinions on 'PC nerds' stems from their dismissal of the controller as a replacement for M+KB in FPSes, well, you're right. The controller is objectively an inferior input device.

i think you've found gaf's only competitive halo fan.

 

[Psi]

wait a minute, you killed pc gaming with your sli 580 and you still haven't played witcher 2 and you're using an avatar of geralt with a model they don't even use anymore.

He's waiting for the Xbox 360 version to play it.

 

[Septimius]

So brendsen is the kind of guy that listens to 96kbps mp3s and says it's all he needs. Who cares.

 

[Dennis]

wait a minute, you killed pc gaming with your sli 580 and you still haven't played witcher 2 and you're using an avatar of geralt with a model they don't even use anymore.

Yeah, I like to think of it as dancing on the grave.

 

[dLMN8R]

I think the best part in all of this is how swept up he got with Razer's marketing.

The Blade has worse specs than the Alienware m14x, yet costs almost twice as much.


Where was he when the m14x was announced?

 

[Durante]

you're forgetting things like texture resolution, LOD, shadow fidelity and a hundred other trees that apparently block your way to the forest. not to mention your rendering times have to be twice as tight in order to meet a mouse+keyboard's demands for minuscule input lag.

Erm, I think you're misunderstanding what I'm trying to say.

My point is that just looking at pure rasterization improvements, Portal 2 on PC already uses 10x as much performance as the console version. So, if the overhead introduced by APIs like DirectX was as large as bandresen seems to believe, that wouldn't even be possible. Ergo, there is no such overhead.

 

[Chinner]

He's waiting for the Xbox 360 version to play it.

he can play on a comfy couch with a controller! superior version confirmed!

 

[mxgt]

My argument can not be more concise than TW2 on medium vs. high.

Are you factoring in resolution, frame rate and other effects that the 360 version won't have?

Because the difference will be large. It's about a lot more than just default setting levels

 

[water_wendi]

This nonsense makes me want to uprise.

 

[angular graphics]

Why does RAGE look as god on consoles as on PC?

Because Carmack admitted when he was designing RAGE he was derping and thinking "when it comes out consoles will still be as fast as PCs right? No need to target anything other than 2005 hardware...". He has already admitted that it was a mistake and it's his fault the game doesn't look much better on the PC.

In his own words:

“When we started on the game six years ago, I looked at the consoles and said ‘These are as good as the PC’, and our development strategy was to develop live on all the platforms. And now we’re looking at PCs that have ten times the horsepower of the consoles. I’m making a large change in my direction just saying ‘We should be building things efficiently on the PC and then deploying on the consoles.’ And we didn’t make that as crisp of a distinction as we could have.

“What I look back as one of the biggest mistakes I made in this generation,” Carmack says, “was at the beginning, five or six years ago, looking and saying, “Consoles are basically as good as PCs,” at the time, and developing the workflow so it worked across both of them.”

The id Software technical genius admits that he underestimated just how much progress PC technology would make during RAGE’s protracted development: “Looking back now, we have PCs that are an order of magnitude more powerful, and if our workflow is instead focused on explicitly on just… you build and develop on the PC,” he told Gamasutra, “and you decimate things into a target for the consoles.”

“There are things that I would do very differently,” he concluded.

 

[patrickthehedgehog]

Where is that Kotaku news room picture!? I keep losing it!

 

[benny_a]

Are you factoring in resolution, frame rate and other effects that the 360 version won't have?

Because the difference will be large. It's about a lot more than just default setting levels

I'm not specifically factoring those in. I'm not a human benchmark.
I'm going purely from the way screenshots and how the gameplay videos look.

 

[Septimius]

I'm not specifically factoring those in. I'm not a human benchmark.
I'm going purely from the way screenshots and how the gameplay videos look.

And on what platform did you watch those gameplay vidoes?

 

[Dennis]

Where is that Kotaku news room picture!? I keep losing it!

 

[ghst]

Erm, I think you're misunderstanding what I'm trying to say.

My point is that just looking at pure rasterization improvements, Portal 2 on PC already uses 10x as much performance as the console version. So, if the overhead introduced by APIs like DirectX was as large as bandresen seems to believe, that wouldn't even be possible. Ergo, there is no such overhead.

it's a bad place to be when my caustic tone burns through even my supportive posts.

 

[benny_a]

Because Carmack admitted when he was designing RAGE he was derping and thinking "when it comes out consoles will still be as fast as PCs right? No need to target anything other than 2005 hardware...". He has already admitted that it was a mistake and it's his fault the game doesn't look much better on the PC.

Thanks for those quotes. It allowed me to find the interview which I base my arguments on.

It's pretty sad, the fact that we have these PCs that are sometimes 10 times as powerful, and we have more trouble holding 60 frames per second on the PCs because of drive and OS unoptimalities. And there are reasons for all of them. I've done enough driver work on OpenGL to understand why things wind up the way they are.

And sure, on the PC, you can go ahead and you're running two megapixels. You can turn on anti-aliasing, and you can have much bigger page tables for the virtual textures, and all this stuff. But still, if you want it to get done in like 16 milliseconds, the graphics drivers are a huge hindrance right there.

Edit: Also I think it's funny to me that I'm considered a troll if you look at the image that is being used for PS3 in the below post. A still taken from a video in motion.

 

[Gully State]

Page 3 (50 posts per page); Portal 2, RAGE & The Witcher 2.


I haven't said they don't look better. I have repeatedly said I don't consider the difference a generational leap or order of magnitude difference.
My argument can not be more concise than TW2 on medium vs. high.

Portal 2 PS3

Portal 2 PC

 

[Foliorum Viridum]

A few slithers of valid points amongst click hunting ignorance.

I don't understand why Kotaku aren't on the banned list.

 

[subversus]

I don't know Y U GUYZ MAD because his point is valid. He trolls of course but how else you get all those clicks.

 

[Zeliard]

Huh? I said I understand why he wrote this article, because there is a fairly sizable group of PC enthusiasts that actively and very vocally make it their mission in life to shit on these types of suggestions. I simply referenced PC controller support because it is a very common example that group berates. The entire article is obviously just a commentary on that overall (seemingly prevailing) mentality in the PC community. I was just providing another example more people might be familiar with.

I'm saying that your entire premise is off-base. I can assure you that the "prevailing mentality" in the PC community is not to shit on controllers as some rule. Again, it's a benefit to PC gaming that you can plug in something like a 360 controller and it will work with almost anything.

It's something PC hardliners in particular would bring up as a positive for the platform, given that the consoles are usually very limited in that area, and it simply reinforces what the PC does best: greater freedom and individuality to the end-user.

If you have seen any downplaying of controllers, it's almost certainly been due to the basic but critical mechanical differences between kb/m and controllers, i.e precision and the number of buttons. For certain PC staples like the RTS genre, one control method is clearly superior to the other. Stuff like the controller + comfy couch meme is in fact mocked in large part because the people who put forth that idea don't realize it's easily possible to reproduce with PC, and it's as simple as just plugging one thing into another.

 

[Foliorum Viridum]

Portal 2 PS3

Portal 2 PC

Come on, do it right or don't do it at all.

I played Portal 2 first on PS3 because of them being hacked (couldn't redeem on Steam due to PSN being down) and when I played it on PC it was like night/day. Totally superior in every way. That comparison, however, is awful.

 

[Curufinwe]

I understand why he wrote this piece. If you want to see his points about these hardheaded, mouth-foaming PC enthusiasts proven, just venture into any PC gaming thread on the entire internet and mention a controller.

That's nonsense. There's been plenty of discussion about controllers in the PC gaming thread right here on GAF with no mouth-foaming to be found.

I love using my wired 360 pad to play games like Beat Hazard Ultra and Pro Evolution Soccer on my PC.

 

[Gully State]

Come on, do it right or don't do it at all.

I played Portal 2 first on PS3 because of them being hacked (couldn't redeem on Steam due to PSN being down) and when I played it on PC it was like night/day. Totally superior in every way. That comparison, however, is awful.

Not an obvious difference? I personally think it is..

 

[Foliorum Viridum]

There is, I even said so much in the quote you posted, but do you think that picture, which looks like a screencap of a video with all of the compression, is a fair representation of the PS3 version?

It's not.

 

[f0rk]

I understand why he wrote this piece. If you want to see his points about these hardheaded, mouth-foaming PC enthusiasts proven, just venture into any PC gaming thread on the entire internet and mention a controller. Any attempts or suggestions to make PC gaming more approachable and user friendly (be it universal controller support, more unified hardware, etc...) is just savagely shit all over by this relatively small group of like-minded super nerds. The responses are so similar and predictable, you would swear it's all just one guy trolling the internet with thousands of different forum accounts.

What are you talking about? I don't think anyone on GAF would disagree with me when I say one of the best things Microsoft have done for PC gaming recently is put out a standardised controller with great plug and play support.
The difference between that and the PC hardware itself is there isn't room for a controller to be iterated on every 6 months. Imagine if graphics cards were stuck on a 3-4 year cycle instead, people would still be sitting on the comfy couch in a barely 720p hovel thinking it was a mansion.
Introducing standardisation at the top of the range would kill progress. The floor vs ceiling comparison someone made earlier is a great way of putting it.

 

[Gully State]

There is, I even said so much in the quote you posted, but do you think that picture, which looks like a screencap of a video with all of the compression, is a fair representation of the PS3 version?

It's not.

NM...found one