Yes, PCs are a few generations ahead of consoles. Look at this:
- The GPU in the PS3, dubbed the RSX ‘Reality Synthesizer’, is based on the NVidia Geforce 7800. I don’t know if it’s the GT or the GTX.
- Next came the Geforce 8000 series.
- Then the Geforce 9000 series.
- The next series, the 100 series, was a rebrand, so it doesn’t count. The 200 series was a real series though.
- The 300 series was also a rebrand. The 400 series is the next one. Now one might count the 500 series to the 400 series as it shares a lot of its architecture with the 400 series and came out shortly after.
It’s just 4 generations behind. I remember owning a 7900 GTX a few years ago. Bought a new one as it couldn’t play CoD 4 at at least 40 FPS at 1440x900. No anti aliasing, of course. Just you wait. I’m gonna do some screenshots for you between a simulated console version and the settings I play with on my laptop.
Concerning build quality: What? I’ve always thought that consoles have much more fan failures, general overheating and red rings of death, etc, than PCs. I’ve only ever had hard drive failures (2, to be exact) on all the computers I’ve owned so far. 50 bucks for a new 1TB hard drive is so expensive though…
Aren’t console games patched and installed just like on PCs on PS3s? The hard drive itself is really small too, and the BD drive has 8x DVD read speed (speed is even slower for Blu-rays) compared to my 20 buck DVD drive that reads at 24x it shouldn’t be possible for it have faster installs, unless the games are so much smaller because of lower resolution textures and models. And what kind of argument is install times? You only do it once! And are PC games plagued by bugs, while consoles work great? Pff. http://compactiongames.about.com/b/2010/11/15/call-of-duty-black-ops-pc-patch-bug-list-known-issues.htm I’d like to turn your argument around: PC games have patches released faster.
EDIT: Quick comparison between the PS3’s graphics settings and PC’s.
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/78480
I used the “High” texture quality setting. This resulted in a VRAM usage of about 220MB (excluding the 40MB used by Windows). “Extra” used almost 400MBs of VRAM.
Slightly more on topic: look at the quality of all edges! =D This is 16xCSAA (4xMSAA + 12 coverage samples). It DOES indeed look better than 4xMSAA. I also enabled Transparency Supersampling (which would’ve been redundant with DX10.1/11 support for coverage mask outputs in shaders), just to leave the PS3 in the dust a little more. PC version is also in 1920x1080. PS3 is 720p upscaled to this 1080p using bicubic filtering. Note the texture quality on the ground and on the clothes of the guy to the left. The shadow maps are bigger than on a real PS3 though.
For some interesting AA comparisons, look at the barbed wire to the left, and also the thin antennas sticking up from the Humvee and the air control tower. They look slightly better on the PC.
Things FXAA would not fix:
- The camo net covering half the screen also shimmers and flickers like there’s no tomorrow as it moves on the wind on the PS3.
- The recruit’s subtle movements snap a lot making it hard to actually see/register them as motions. They look like they are changing shape and/or size.
- Any other movement related shimmering.
- The antennas. They would keep on appearing and disappearing.
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