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The current gen hardware is over 6 years old, and when writing for it you can definitely feel its age. Modern PC hardware even at the lower end is so much bette
by daemin 7y ago
The current gen hardware is over 6 years old, and when writing for it you can definitely feel its age. Modern PC hardware even at the lower end is so much better and easier to deal with. Also you are forced to make the game run on the lowest specification of any console version, so that means the least powerful machine of all the consoles of this generation.
For a low end PC system we are talking about having 8 cores, 16GB of ram, a decent video card, and an SSD usually or at least a disk capable of 100+ MB/s. Also the platform is pretty easy to develop for and release on.
For a console you get 5 or 6 cores to use, each of which is not as good as a modern CPU core, 8GB of shared ram, and a disk where you have to handle being only able to read from it at 30MB/s. You also have to deal with the black box of vendor tools, that don't necessarily work easily.
So the whole team ends up spending a lot of time actually optimising the game to actually run on these underpowered and lowest spec'd consoles. Removing extra details, downgrading graphics, culling data, compressing, managing memory, just so it can run at 30fps.
- zokier 7y ago> The current gen hardware is over 6 years old, and when writing for it you can definitely feel its age But it is also very much a known quantity and games should be designed to take that into account. Arguably it should be easier to write games that hit 60fps today than it was 6 years ago.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- daemin 7y agoIf you want to make the same game now that you would have released 5 years ago, sure. But games have become way more complex in that time, and the expectations of players have grown considerably. So you end up having to put more content in, more features and more data. The disk and memory become a bottleneck and you need to write and optimise some pretty complex systems to be able to handle that well. PC Hardware has actually advanced since that time as well, so the artists have now more power to create better looking and feeling things in their tools, which means more data to process and get into the game. Also designers will often surprise you as a programmer with the features and creative solutions to problems. They don't really think and design the same way a programmer would, and don't really design for the system hardware (except for the input/output devices of it).
- jfkebwjsbx 7y ago> For a low end PC system we are talking about having 8 cores, 16GB of ram, a decent video card, and an SSD usually or at least a disk capable of 100+ MB/s. That's definitely not low-end. More like mid to high-end. Low-end is still 2 cores, 4 GB of RAM, with integrated graphics.
- kevingadd 7y agoMost games simply don't target integrated graphics.
- Retric 7y agoMost AAA games don’t, but a lot of games do. Sims 4 for example is still a very popular 3D game, but it’s not very demanding. MMO’s are often designed for very low minimum hardware.
- jfkebwjsbx 7y agoFalse. Most games do target iGPUs, including most eSports and most indie games, which are the /most popular games. The console AAA games are the ones that target proper GPUs because consoles have them. If they were targeting PC only, you wouldn't see them.
- daemin 7y ago8 processor threads, 4 physical cores. Yes it's more of a mid tier system but it's a low end system that you would get to play games on. Also given that games still target the consoles you can get away with 8GB of ram easy.
- jfkebwjsbx 7y agoYou said cores, not threads. In any case, 2 cores are still a thing. Even the new Macbook Air has 2 cores, so yeah... Further, no one targets 16 GB RAM for a game. Not even the non-released, next-gen consoles have 16 GB dedicated CPU memory. Similarly, not everyone one has an SSD and therefore companies cannot target that. Only in a few months with the new gen of consoles we will see actual games targeting SSD speeds.