9 Aug, 2011
We all know that PCs have distinct advantages over consoles. They’re more customizable, they possess more power in the right configurations… You can do more. But you have to update them every once in a while when spiffing new games come out, whereas a console has less power, but will always play the games that were designed for them.
It’s frustrating. Sometimes, we just want it all in one simple machine. Will we ever see that day? Maybe, maybe not. We do know that the divide in power exists, and id Software’s John Carmack says the divide between power on a console and a PC is extremely frustrating from a developer’s point of view.
“It is extremely frustrating knowing that the hardware we’ve got on the PC is often ten times as powerful as the consoles but it has honestly been a struggle in many cases to get the game running at 60 frames per second on the PC like it does on a 360,” said Carmack during his keynote speech from last week’s QuakeCon.
While the power of a PC is significantly more, Carmack continued to say that developing for a console is easier. Updating codes? Simple on a console, but an absolute nightmare on a PC, capable of making people cry. “…there’s so much…of this dynamic texture updating where on the console we say ‘alright, we’ve got a new page of data’, we put that page in and update the page table that points to that,” he said. “On the console that may just be a matter of writing it to memory, it’s like ‘here’s the texture, let’s calculate exactly where this part of the page table is’ and we just poke it right in there.
“On the PC that turns into potentially a tech sub-image 2D and if you’re a programmer and you start single-stepping through that you’ll cry. You won’t make it back out. It’ll just take forever.”
We can go on wishing that consoles were as powerful as PCs, but now we have to wonder if that would make working with consoles just as frustrating.
Via CVG.
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