Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Why PC Gaming Rocks: PCs Are Already Emulating the Xbox One…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 17, 2013

XbonerIn terms of scandals currently making the rounds in the news here in the U.S.A., this would definitely be such small potatoes as to hardly warrant a comment. But it’s funny, and game-related.

Those Xbox One games played at E3 last week? Thanks to some well-timed pictures and a crash to the desktop, we know what they were really running on…

Xbox One Games at E3 Were Played On Windows 7 PCs with NVidia GTX cards.

By itself, this is hardly unprecedented.  It’s just more on the amusing side, especially when you consider that Microsoft Games couldn’t depend on either ATI or Windows 8 for meeting the target environment.

It also makes me wonder what the launch will be like if developers still don’t have their hands on “final” hardware. This thing is supposed to be out to consumers in November. If they did, unless they had *barely* received them – why would they be supporting the PC version for the E3 demos? Microsoft has launched two consoles already, so I wouldn’t want to assume that they don’t know what they are doing with this launch, but…

Now, there was a time when the dev system for a console I was working on consisted of a couple of cards installed on a PC. But in this case, the cards really were the main hardware for the console, and the output was all the console O.S. – there was no access to the computer from the cards.

Anyway, I just find it amusing that in order to get the most awesome gaming technology that will become available in a half-year, you can just upgrade your existing Windows 7 PC with a high-end NVidia GTX (not even an ATI, which is supposed to be fuelling the Xbone) to get a similar performance. That might be a better use of the $500.

No, many of the games showcased at E3 will not be available on the PC, in spite of being developed on PC originally. And PC gaming technology has regularly been equal or superior to consoles  (at least for the last couple of generations). This is really just a source of private amusement that I’m sharing. And in all the new-console, mobile-gaming hubbub, PC gaming is still going strong. Maybe not a strong growth industry, but it still rocks. Booyah.

 


Filed Under: Biz, Mainstream Games - Comments: 4 Comments to Read



  • Albert1 said,

    Did SingleTrac have access to a PS2 kit, or something like that, in late 1998? Were there PS2 projects?

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    I was on a PS2 dev kit at Sensory Sweep, but I didn’t use one while at SingleTrac. I can’t remember if we had ’em before things hit the fan or not. But I always had a PS1 dev kit in my computer.

    As far as consoles are concerned, I’ve worked on (if only briefly in one instance) the PS1, PS2, Dreamcast, Nintendo 64, Wii, and XBox 360.

  • Greg Squire said,

    That’s hilarious! Why buy an XBone when a PC with an Nvidia GTX will do the same job? Also without all those onerous restrictions too. Chalk another one up to PC gaming!

  • LateWhiteRabbit said,

    This and the practice of “simulated” gameplay trailers drives me nuts. I don’t understand why more gamers and the public don’t get up in arms over this. It is blatantly false advertising.

    Like EA Sports’ trailer for the Xbone being “prerendered” using in-game assets. SO? I know we can create pretty high-poly mapped models, but it makes a big difference if they can all play nice together in realtime while the CPU chugs out calculations. Showing 60 FPS footage when the console will only be able to hit the 20-30 FPS range with your assets is dishonest.

    After playing games on PC so much and getting 50-60 FPS, console games feel like a stuttering mess with jerky movement in comparison. I would actually prefer developers use the new hardware to give us current gen graphics with high, smooth framerates and more calculations for AI behind the curtain. But, no, lets through another million polygons in there and add a sparkle shader to eat up any framerate gains we may get….

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