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Why does a game that can play on an Xbox 360 need...
dougmysticey
Member Posts: 1,176
...high requrements for the PC? I thought that Xbox 360 was based on active X typical windows based technology.
An example, Dragon Age Origin is coming for the XBOX as well as PC.
Here are the recommended PC specs:
Hard Drive Space : 20 GB HD space
Operating System : XP SP3 (Windows Vista with SP)
Processor : Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4Ghz Processor or equivalent
RAM : 4 GB (Vista) or 2 GB (XP)
Video Card : ATI 3850 512 MB or greater NVIDIA 8800GTS 512 MB or greater AMD Phenom II X3 Triple-Core 2.8 GHz or greater
Now, these are not the minimum specs but lets face it, what game these days runs OK on the min spec? Those are pretty beefy specs.
Another example was GTA 4 that ran horribly on the PC.
I understand that being able to alter resolutions,etc will have an impact but if you rant it at the "recommended" specs should that not equate to the specifications for the PC in some way? Maybe I am wrong, maybe you can help. Maybe it is about bad porting and poor optimization.
Some examples of games that are not spec heavy and still look and play great:
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
Thoughts?
Comments
The problem is when they optimize a game for the 360 they know exactly what everybody's specs are so they can get the optimization fine tuned very accurately but when they do the same for the PC version they have no idea what specs the end user will have so the best they can do is a general optimization. This means that the game will run flawlessly for some and not so great for others even though they seemingly have similar systems. It's impossible for developers to foresee every possible PC system configuration out there so they have to try to shoot for the middle ground. This is not so on the 360 as everyone is using the exact same hardware. It's not really bad porting as any porting between platforms is dicey at best. The problem is the wide diversity of PC hardware so when optimizing the developers have to use a "best guess" as to what will work well on the most configurations.
Bren
while(horse==dead)
{
beat();
}
Thanks Bren, that all makes sense,
So- why would the developers not use the hardware specfication in the XBox 360 as the base line or best guess as they know that will work? When I look at the recommended specs for Dragon Age I absolutely know that the processor and video card in the 360 are not comparable to what is recommended.
I wonder if part of it is the coding is a little lazy because the 360 does have such a specific development spec. They are not as focused on optimizing for the variety of PC components out there.
Thanks Bren, that all makes sense,
So- why would the developers not use the hardware specfication in the XBox 360 as the base line or best guess as they know that will work? When I look at the recommended specs for Dragon Age I absolutely know that the processor and video card in the 360 are not comparable to what is recommended.
I wonder if part of it is the coding is a little lazy because the 360 does have such a specific development spec. They are not as focused on optimizing for the variety of PC components out there.
While this is technically true you have to remember that the Processer and GPU in the 360 is already fine tuned for gaming as this is all it needs to do. This is not so with a PC as they are more of a "Jack of all trades" type of hardware configuration. It's the multi-purpose ability of the PC that is it's major selling point but also it's greatest draw back when it comes to gaming. This means that to get a game to run comparably well on a PC the system specs have to be at the very least slightly higher than they are on the 360. The 360's hardware is engineered with gaming as it's sole purpose whereas the PC is engineered with gaming as one of many possible functions.
Bren
while(horse==dead)
{
beat();
}
Thought I would also mention that a PC with a modern GPU is capable of displaying much higher resolutions than even a HD tv can display and will normally allow for other options that will make the game look better on a PC such as higher levels of anti-aliasing and texture filtering. These are things PC gamers have come to expect and the developers expect users to be able to take advantage of. Hence the higher system requirements, though the end result is often a better looking gaming experience on the PC than on the console equivalent. As an example a jump in resolution from 1280x1024 to 1900x1440 is more than a doubling of pixels displayed on screen and requires twice the resources for calculations that are per-pixel like anti-aliasing and most shaders. Not sure about Dragon Age, but not even all 360 games are 1080P some are still 720P and that lower resolution frees up a lot of overhead and because it's displayed on a TV it's acceptable but those resolutions on a computer monitor would look horrid by today's standard (Think Diablo 800x600)Hope that sheds some light on the situation.