Are Consoles Holding Back PC Gaming?

[wraggster]

Despite all the excitement over Nvidia's upcoming Fermi GPU, there is still a distinct lack of DirectX 11 games on the market. This article points out that while the PC has returned to favor as a gaming platform, consoles are still the target for most developers, and still provide the major limitations on the technological sophistication of game graphics. Inside the Xbox 360 sits an ATI Xenos GPU, a DirectX 9c-based chip that bears similarity to the Radeon X1900 series of graphics cards (cards whose age means that they aren't even officially supported in Windows 7). Therein lies the rub. With the majority of PC games now starting life as console titles, games are still targeted at five-year-old DirectX 9 hardware.

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/03/28/1324203/Are-Consoles-Holding-Back-PC-Gaming

[symbal]

I'll bet only a small percentage of people here have a Pc that can outdrag a 360 and not be a glitchy badly compatible mess, personally i hate it so much i just don't play any game that uses a keyboard and mouse and for Pc emulators i use a Xbox controller, and there's no way in hell i'm buying a graphics card that costs more than a Ps3 just to play a handfull of games that make use of it.

[VampDude]

Consoles are the direct target for developers because they can use (recycle) the same game engines, which means they can make several games at a lower cost to themselves whereas with PC's having upgradable graphics cards, developers have to cater to the needs of those gamers at the higher end of PC gaming.

Hopefully in the near future, it wont just be the hard drives we can upgrade. Fifteen years ago, SEGA had a RAM update which improved certain games, so there was the first example of upgrading. Both Microsoft and SONY are in the PC market aswell as the console market, so there is really no excuses for having to play with outdated engines. But then five years always was the console limit during the 80's and 90's.