XBOX VS PC

[Pinefang]

Heading should read Playstation VS PC. My son says that he has never experienced any kind of frame rate loss on any games he has ever played on his Playstation. If that is true why don't computer manufacturers use graphic engines like the Playstation uses. Please educate me on the difference between Playstation and PC graphics.

Edited May 20, 2016 by Pinefang
Changed heading

[SkateZilla]

Consoles have LIMITED Power, both in Architecture Design and In Terms of Power Consumption.

 

-The Engines they use are designed to Run on ONE and ONE Hardware Set only.

(Every PS4 has the Same CPU and GPUs, Every Xbox One has the Same CPU and GPUs, it's a Locked Hardware Set).

 

-They are Designed w/ high FPS, and Low Draw Distances.

 

DCS Would bring a Console GPU/CPU to it's Knees.

[Pinefang]

Thanks for the reply SkateZilla. Most of it went over my head. So does this mean that at this time DCS cannot be played on either of those machines? I wasn't aware of that. What do you mean by low draw distance?

[TomOnSteam]

Thanks for the reply SkateZilla. Most of it went over my head. So does this mean that at this time DCS cannot be played on either of those machines? I wasn't aware of that. What do you mean by low draw distance?

 

Also because consoles have only one set of hardware, the instructions and calculations that a game needs are sent directly to the processor and memory.

 

Where as on a PC there is a bunch of "middle-man" software that looks at the instructions from the programs/games and works out where to it needs to send them. It needs to do this because everyones computers are slightly different, so there is some translation going on between the program, the middle man (DirectX) and the hardware components. The overhead slows it down a fair bit. (this is all about to change though with a thing called Vulkan that will allow programmers to target the hardware more directly, similar to consoles). Imagine having to give someone instructions in a different language, first you'd need to work out what language they speak and then translate etc, it takes longer. (vs consoles everyone already knows what language it is because there is only one).

 

The other thing with having standardized hardware on consoles is, that the games will always behave the same way on every single console. So if there is level or section of the game which starts slowing down, the game developers will tweak that area of the game to have less scenery or fewer objects, fewer characters, lower texture quality etc to keep it running smooth.

 

Consoles also tend to run many of their games at 30 frames a second (instead of 60+) to give the impression things are running smoothly all of the time. Basically they have a lower baseline performance, but that means a more consistent frame rate is less jarring too. Not many console games either run at Full HD, majority running at 720p, and others even lower resolutions to lessen computing requirements. (And it's not as noticeable when you're sitting further away at a TV, instead right up close to a monitor). If you ever plug a console into a monitor and sit up close, you really notice the lack of resolution and texture clarity.

 

It's much harder to do this optimization stuff on PC because everyone has different configurations (essentially unlimited variations in hardware and software too) so it's impossible to test all scenarios for every type of configuration, so there is inevitably some slow down at certain points.

 

Even games that are made for PC/Xbox/PS4 - if you were to compare them side by side, generally the PC ones will run twice as fast at 60 frames a second, with higher resolution, clearer texture quality, more effects, cleaner shadows etc. The PC is doing a lot more work to make it look nice. (of course you can lower the quality to console level if you have an older PC, but on a modern PC doing this usually gives you a very high frame rate so you get to see how much more powerful a PC really is).

 

For flight sims, especially DCS to run on consoles they would have to probably use the simple flight model dynamics to lessen the amount of complex calculations. They would also have to have scenarios and missions that cannot be edited and with only a small amount of enemies at any one time to ensure it runs smoothly all of the time. Probably even would need to lower the resolution, and that would make it difficult to read the HUD and gauges, oh and yes lower the draw distance (the more you see on screen the more processing power and memory you need) So perhaps in order to have long draw distances, they'd need to severely lower the terrain quality, or just make you fly up really high, or only over water, to lessen the amount of things there are to calculate at any one time.

 

That's why you don't see many true flight sims on consoles, they would be quite limited in what they can do.

 

EDIT: also games tend to do a lot of magic tricks and clever things to give you the impression something is happening. For example pre-calculating a shadow on the ground(the shadow is calculated by the game developer, and the results placed in a file, so it doesn't need to be calculated while the game is running) - Because in a game it will always be the same time of day when you play that one level - But for DCS it's computing the shadows in real time, every single frame.

Edited May 21, 2016 by TomOnSteam

[Pinefang]

TomOnSteam Thank you for the thorough answer. I actually understood what you described. It is amazing to me how 1's and 0's can be manipulated to make these fantasy worlds for us to play in. Thank you for the time you spent answering my question. I hardly feel worthy.

[TomOnSteam]

TomOnSteam Thank you for the thorough answer. I actually understood what you described. It is amazing to me how 1's and 0's can be manipulated to make these fantasy worlds for us to play in. Thank you for the time you spent answering my question. I hardly feel worthy.

 

No problems at all, gotta do something while DCS updates ;)

 

There are definitely some clever people out there, and a lot of them work at Eagle Dynamics lucky for us :D