Xbox 720 Reveal

[AwesomeOcelot]

Direct comparison of computation power between Consoles and PCs is a pointless effort.

Not only are consoles designed to avoid the traditional bottlenecks that hamper PC performance but also allow more direct access to hardware that PC just won't do. Couple that with hardware standardization and you have a far better long-term result than any TFLOP count would indicate.

I don't think there are differences in bottlenecks that significantly effect anything and not having direct access to the hardware is more annoying for a developer than actually an impact to performance (for over 15 years).

[Elerond]

You can do much more draw call on consoles than what you can do on pc, because going through drivers and graphic api causes draw calls to be more demanding than consoles more direct access to GPU. Which is also reason why you can in most cases do better looking graphics on consoles than on pc with same computing power. Although DX11, OpenCL, CUDA and Direct Compute have made cap between consoles and PC smaller and they or some new innovation probably will decrease it even more in future.

[AwesomeOcelot]

Console developers also use drivers and API? There are benefits to using drivers, Nvidia or AMD know their hardware. DirectX was used on Xbox and 360, and an OpenGL based API was used on PS3. It really depends what the developer is doing, if it's something not supported in the API then not having direct access could be expensive. Developers on PC could have written their own drivers and gotten direct access to hardware, or made their own OS and gotten direct access, if it was a big deal they would have.

 

I think the differences in graphics between console and similarly spec'd PCs is more down to which was the target platform, having narrower FOV, massive gun models (if FPS), sitting further away.

[pmp10]

Developers on PC could have written their own drivers and gotten direct access to hardware, or made their own OS and gotten direct access, if it was a big deal they would have.

Because writing drivers and operating systems for the myriad of PC configuration just so your game could have a better access to hardware is realistic.

[alanschu]

Remember the good old days when you had to manually configure your sound cards for games like Doom?  Ah, good times....

[Tale]

Remember the good old days when you had to manually configure your sound cards for games like Doom?  Ah, good times....

No I do not. Because I did not have enough memory to run sound drivers and DOOM at the same time.

 

I played that game completely deaf, nonstop, for 2 years.

[Rosbjerg]

Closed due to length. New Thread here.