PC Games Will Never Look Exceedingly Better Than Consoles
By William Countiss
For the price, it better look amazing.
I was once asked why PC games never look exceedingly better than console games in terms of graphics. The logic behind this question makes perfect sense if you think about it. PC gamers spend an absurd amount of money on graphics cards with features such as geometry tesselation, which smooths polygons by adding more polygon segments to game models in real-time. These cards are also capable of above 16x antialiasing, which smooth shadows and textures by removing the pixel stair-stepping normally associated with console games. The computers themselves are capable of running with 8, 16 and 32 gig RAM configurations. Quad core processing has also become the norm among PC gamers with the CPUs having the ability to run 4-8 threads of data at one time. In theory, PC graphics should put console systems to shame, but in practice many PC games look like high resolution console games. Sure the texture resolution is often much sharper, but generally speaking, a maxed out PC doesn’t offer the generational leap in graphics that it really should, especially for the price.
Let’s use God of War 3 for the
Playstation 3 as an example. While playing that game I would often just pause and look out at the amazing environments. You’ll be hard pressed to find anything in that game resembling game geometry. Everything is rendered so smoothly with ambient occlusion, diffuse textures, bump and normal mapping, that even the most jaded PC fanboy would silently wonder where a game of similar quality can be found on their $1,000 system.
So why on earth can’t the PC exceed console graphics beyond screen and texture resolution? The answer is simple really, PC games must be designed to scale graphics down to the lowest common denominator. It’s just not worth the financial risk for PC game developers to make a game which can only run on a maxed out super computer. If one day services like onLIVE which utilize cloud computing become superfluous, then we’ll begin to see the graphics leap PC gamers should expect. The reason would be that cloud computing doesn’t rely on your particular machines specs to render graphics. Instead a cluster of computers with the highest specs possible dole out video from a centalized location to client computers, almost completely eliminating the need for a high spec system. Until that time PC gamers can’t expect their games to look much better than their console counterparts aside from an increased graphics and texture resolution.
