COOL explination of Xbox v PC graphics.
This is the best ive seen yet taken from Team Xbox forums
Maybe I can help spread some light on this matter and maybe keep people from making dumb comments like this
"Hello??!! Doom 3! The PC Version of Doom 3 blows away the Xbox version....and yes the PC has surpassed the Xbox...like two years ago......not that alot of game developers use the hardware...but it is available....."
If you want to talk about specs/power, then PCs were already better and more powerful then xbox the day xbox came out. Altho at the time xbox did have a better graphics card, but that is no longer the case anymore with the 9700 out. PCs are far more powerful then xbox, but that doesn't mean much at all. PCs have many flaws in there arcatecture that limit what they can do somewhat, but that is becoming less and less now. The real problem with PCs, and its a big big big one, is the fact that no 2 pcs are the same. They have diffrent drivers, diffrent hardware, diffrent software installed and so on. Take ram for an example, You and your friend could both have 512 mb of ram, but is it ddr? ddr II? sdram? sdram pc100? sdram at pc133? Even if you both have the same amount and type of ddr, yours could be faster with better seak times and so on. And thats just ram, the same thing goes for graphics cards (which there are 100s of diffrent kinds) Cpus, sound cards, mother boards and so on. Each card having diffrent specs, diffrent drivers. Its one big mess. This is what PC developers face, even tho we have a radeon 9700 out, which is easly the best gfx card out right now by a lot, developers will never come close to useing even 50% of its power on the pc platform. Hell to really use it well you need a mother board with 533 system bus that supports AGP 8x and a cpu with a 533 bus as well. Something that 98% of pc gamers do not have right now. Developers can not develope for only one card when they make pc games, so they can not max out or even use one card all that effectivly. On pcs there are also lots of bottle necks like the OS and things like that, all of this makes a big big big diffrence in how they can program a game.
There is no game out on pc right now that could not be done on xbox. Even doom 3, which if you take one look at it you will be amazed, and think right away that the game is really maxing out the pc graphics cards or at the very least using a great deal of their power. That is far far far from the case. Doom 3, wile it looks stunning, is not push anymore polygons then halo, or most other current PC games. The whole doom 3 engine that carmack made, is not some beast that pumps in 10000s apon 1000s of polygons, its really the exact opp of that. The thing that makes the doom 3 engine so groundbreaking is that the levels and people models are using very low polygon counts. They make CG quatly models and levels, then they feed them through the engine and it makes these texture skins. They then put these skins on low polygon models and on the levels. Also there is little to no bump mapping used in the game, there using polybumpmapping, which is doing the same things as bump mapping but on the textures, not polygons. So basicaly its doing things that before, were only done with polygons are now done with textures, which means the gpu does not have to render millions of polygons, saving it for other things like advance shader effects. Doom 3 can and will run on a gf2 and up, and if you have a gf3 it will be able to do all the advanced lighting and shadowing effects the game uses. So wile in screens the game looks like it would not be possable on the xbox, it easly will be, since its not pushing all that many polygons.
The reason why xbox games look as good and even better then pc games is simple. Xboxs hardware arcatecture is better then a pcs, its a fixed platform and it has a low level OS. This let developers code for the highest level possable instead of the lowest level like on pc games. On xbox, developers can really max out the hardware and get the most out of it, and do effects that are so advance there not even being used on PC games yet because only a handful of gamers would be able to use them. You can get 2-3 times more power out of a fixed platform then a non fixed platform. This is how xbox is able to keep up and surpass pc games right now in terms of graphics. The only real thing pcs can do better then xbox is frame rate, with there faster cpus the frame rate is the one thing that will be improved no matter what game it is. But xbox still does a good job with the frame rate, more and more games are running at 60 fps and wile its harder for xbox do run really advanced games at that speed, it can still be done. Games like fable, B.C., UC, doa3, halo, halo 2, and many more all look better then what is currently out on PC right now. Right now a lot of you are saying, "why is UC in that list, ut2003 looks a lot better!), well thats not the case. Both games look great, but UC acutaly looks better. "what you say?" This is a great example of how developers can get more out of xbox right now then PCs. The version of Ut2003 looks great, but its not doing a lot of the things that the xbox version is doing. Ut2003 is not using any ture bump mapping, its using standard software bump mapping by DX8. This does make the textures look good, but no where near as good as real bump mapping. UC on the xbox is using full bump mapping on all of its textures, and its used more on the levels then the software bump mapping is on the pc version. So the xbox versions textures look better, also the xbox version lighting and shadows look more realistic. The lights cast there light and shadows much much more realisticly on the xbox then they do on the pc version, and the color of the lighting on xbox is brighter and more realistic looking. The xbox version only supports 16 people right now, but this is due more to MS limiting it to 16 then the engine not being able to support it. If it did support 32 players with all these effects, it would probably be limited to 30 fps instead of 60 like it is now.
To sum it up, PCs are many times more powerful then xbox, but developers can not tap into much of this power. So for the next year or 2 xbox games will be right up there with pc games and in some cases looking better. Xbox is not a pc in a box, it does a lot of things better then a PC, so saying its a low end pc in a box is a wrong statment. The basic thing is, if you bulid any console pretty powerful like xbox, its games will look as good and better then the current pc games at the time. Just because developers can use and maxamize the gfx card right away from the start and get the most out of it. If we ever get to the day where PCs start accecpting one or 2 hardware standards, instead of the 1000s they have now, then PC games will be amazing and far better then any console, but that doesn't look like it will ever happen.
aint that some Techno stuff i love it..
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