How the PC Is Making Consoles Look Out of Date

An anonymous reader writes "What has been clear from this year's Game Developers Conference is that consoles are beginning to show their age. With nothing beyond a possible Nintendo update on the horizon, developers at this year's GDC have turned their eyes to the PC. The article includes three videos that give a fantastic insight into where PC graphics are headed, including a version of Epic's Unreal engine, Crytek's Cryengine 3, and DICE's Frostbite 2 engine. Considering that these leaps in eye candy are only possible with the current state of PC graphics, we wonder how long consoles will be the target platform for development of blockbuster games."

Re:Consoles need to invest more on hardware.

[Idimmu Xul]

There was a time when Sega, Nintendo and Sony would all design unique hardware. Later on these unique designs became less common, and now thanks to consoles like the Xbox, the common design is an intel chip (or IBM), a standard PC graphics card, etc.

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Wii :
        * CPU: PowerPC-based "Broadway" processor, made with a 90 nm SOI CMOS process, reportedlyâ clocked at 729 MHz[120]
        * GPU: ATI "Hollywood" GPU made with a 90 nm CMOS process,[121] reportedlyâ clocked at 243 MHz[120]
        * "Starlet", part of the Hollywood package: an ARM926EJ-S processor reportedlyâ clocked at 243 MHz.[122]

PS3 :
CPU 3.2 GHz Cell Broadband Engine with 1 PPE & 7 SPEs
550 MHz NVIDIA/SCEI RSX 'Reality Synthesizer'

XBox 360 :
CPU 3.2 GHz PowerPC Tri-Core Xenon
500 MHz ATI Xenos

Not really off the shelf parts you'd find in a Dell!

Re:Until....

[h4rr4r]

Fun fact, you can play those games on a PC in the living room. The Wii emulator dolphin can do HD. Which a real wii cannot.

Upgrade every year? Not needed.

[dstyle5]

Hundreds of pounds every year? My 3.5 year old PC still plays games well enough and the only things I've done to it are add more fans and hard drives. If you are forced to upgrade every year you either bought a very cheap PC to begin with or are upgrading without reason. My PC is finally starting to strain under new games like Dragon Age 2, but my 8800GT and 6850 still get by well enough for most games. The need to upgrade ever year is a fallacy.

Re:Consoles as Target Platforms

[MemoryDragon]

Actually the cheaper argument is moot if you count in the price difference in pc and console games. And face it the ultimately needed upgrade cycle nowadays is as fast as the console upgrade cycle, and giving the shitty console processors usually the graphics card is the only part updated on the pc for about 10 years now.
(Which means a pc bought 3-4 years ago will last until the next gen consoles hit the shelves and even then it is very likely that you only have to change the graphics card. Add to that about 20 USD dollars prices difference and a faster bargain bin period than on the consoles, than the price argument is non existent. Consoles simply follow the razor model by ripping you off afterwards big time.

Re:Not only graphics

[bberens]

I've always been of the opinion that it doesn't matter much, PC or Console for FPS type games. If everyone is playing from the same (or similar) input devices, then everyone is on equal footing. There is no "mouse point and click" on the console, so if PC provides more accurate input, so what? That doesn't mean that the console requires more or less skill than the PC version of a game, it just means that the two different versions are slightly different in that regard. The last time I was really into a FPS was when Counter Strike was still fairly new on XBox. I had some friends who were big PC players and they would always tout that if we could play against each other (them on PC, me on XBOX) then they'd roast me. That's probably true, but if we were both on XBOXes I probably would have roasted them. It didn't make much difference to me one way or the other.

Re:Not only graphics

[Shikaku]

So, Valve is going to file for bankruptcy soon right? All their games are being pirated and Steam was a total bust.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/02/14/steam-controls-up-to-70-of-the-pc-download-market-and-is-tremendously-profitable/ [pcgamer.com]

Any day now...