Here John Carmack claims that PCs are still slower that current gen console hardware because of the overhead.
"A lot of it's driver overhead issues, where there's so much that we do in the game, all of this dynamic texture updating where on the console we say 'alright, we've got a new page of data', we put that page in and update the page table that points to that.
"On the console that may just be a matter of writing it to memory, it's like 'here's the texture, let's calculate exactly where this part of the page table is' and then we just poke it right in there," he explained.
Is the situation really that dire? And are there any features or changes in Windows 8 planed that will improve the current state of the PC Gaming ?
Answer
Console: static hardware that never varies across every single iteration. Home PC: hardware that changes from day to day, with a million different chip designs.
Console: closed system that lives in its own, secure environment from birth to death. Home PC: wild west, barroom brawls and your OS is the sheriff keeping everyone from getting shot.
Carmack: writing a system that depends on slinging around large texture blocks and is apparently sad that he doesn't get to personally write a hardware interface to every single graphics chip and OS variant from the last 5 years. Not to mention that he also apparently wants to give customer support to millions of people, hundreds of thousands of whom will have some kind of compatibility issue that Id must solve for them.
What's there to improve, given that on home PCs you have to support tens of different chipsets that have to work flawlessly against millions of programs written across the past decade or more? Personally I think that it's a miracle that the house of cards keeps standing!
Not much of an answer I know, but PC gaming is actually quite good and easy to develop for outside of certain esoteric optimization issues. A better question might be why are consoles so extremely limited?
No comments:
Post a Comment