Topic: Eye-opening article on why PCs don't blow away aging consoles

[Cobra951]

This article points out some concepts I hadn't thought about.  In a nutshell, PCs are hamstringed by their need for an abstraction layer.  Most shocking is having far more headroom in draw calls on consoles than on PCs, due to the design and overhead of DirectX (versus programming directly for hardware on consoles).  So while current top-end PCs are estimated (in the article) to have 10 times the power of a current console's, their effective performance is too bogged down.  While bypassing the DX API and going straight for the hardware is proposed, the article itself later points out how impractical this would be.  There are too many configurations, too many competing hardware designs.  You could make the best performing game ever seen, for one computer parts list.

[scottws]

I didn't read the article, but I think biggest reason is that PCs are rarely the focus of the developers.  They design for the consoles and port to PC.  Since PC sales aren't that great, they don't bother very much to make sure the game fully utilizes the power of modern PCs.

Sure, that other stuff you mentioned is probably true, but I don't think it is THE reason or even a very big reason why.

[Cobra951]

That's touched upon in the article.  But what made me take notice is the significance of the technical issue.  I didn't know it made that much difference.  I've never programmed under DirectX, but I assumed it was an efficient standardized API to let you reach directly into the capabilities of the hardware.  If these folks are to be believed, the truth is much uglier.

[Cools!]

Yeah, the API/engine/SDK vs direct hardware access debate comes up from time to time in programming.

The APIs simplify things a lot but you lose performance. With consoles there's only one hardware configuration so both your game and the API it uses can be optimized heavily. On the PC, with so many possible hardware combinations, that's a lot harder to do. However because PC hardware improves so rapidly any loss in performance due to a *slow* API/engine/etc. is often quickly offset by faster processors, graphics cards, etc.

DirectX is probably fairly bloated at this point as well with all the possible hardware configuration it's supposed to support. So are all the game engines that use it now. It's just hard to maintain and optimize something that big. At the same time, creating something new is just so time consuming. Even on a console you code on an API rather than directly "on the metal" so you have to rely on the API provider to do the optimizing for you.

Having said that, I think Scott is right that because consoles are the priority these days there's less time invested in optimizing games on the PC and to push the graphics even further by utilizing all the power available on the platform.

[MysterD]

Well - if there's that much loss of performance (about 10x's) b/c of the API getting bigger and bloated and all, that really does suck. But really - isn't DX the reason why so many games - especially olders one - run on Windows? Even w/ a bunch of tweaking - you can still get a lot of older stuff going.

I don't know - but I don't see DX going away really anytime soon. Especially since John Carmack of all people seems to finally prefer DirectX over OpenGL. Given that link and what Carmack said, I think maybe the world really will end in 2012.

I fear that if DX went away, we might get a royal pissing contest going here. If I start seeing say NVidia-exclusive games and AMD/ATI-exclusive games, I won't be very happy. What kind of other chaos might happen? Would AMD and NVidia even think of then doing their own API's?

Another thought - how come we can't say install multiple versions of DX and just run a game rendered in whatever version we pick? I'm guessing that might help some of the much, much, much older games out a bit more and all. These days, we got PC's w/ 100's of GB's and even TB's of space - we got room for this stuff.

[MysterD]

AMD elaborates more on this.

Seems like basically DICE and Crytek were some of the very few really wanting more so to go direct-to-metal.
Sounds like most want to stick w/ the "stability" of DX or OpenGL API's.