Not really, try again.

The consoles don't need to match $2,000 to $3,000 pc gaming rigs to still produce superior looking games, which they will. There isn't a single high end $2,000 to $3,000 gaming pc that has an equivalent pc game that has been developed to fully utilize that hardware. There will be console titles that look better than Crysis 3, simply based on the fact that all that super powerful pc hardware, or those rigs with 3 or 4 graphics cards that are described in that article, will never come anywhere close to being fully utilized by any of the games on the pc. You will never see on the pc what all that power is truly capable of, hence why next gen playstation and next gen xbox games will look better.This pretty much tells you all you need to know. A badly optimized game on a pc is basically seen as a badge of honor.

We go through this crap every time, I don't know why we need captain obvious to tell us this thing over and over.

At launch there will be games that look amazing yet the same essentially on PC and consoles (COD), and some games in some genres will look better on consoles and nothing on PC will come close until 1 or 2 years later (see racing games like PGR3). At some point it is clear every new PC game looks amazing, but then console developers start squeezing every bit they get from the consoles and we get a few amazing looking games by *any* standards yet know if it was running on PC you'll get higher res and some other stuff (Heavy Rain, and the like).

Then towards the end of the generation the divide is almost too big and that's when you have this jaw-dropping PC games you can't dream of running on your console, then you wait it out for another ~2 years and the new consoles come out and the cycle continues.

What's more, all you need to build a high end gaming pc these days is $900 or a little over $1,000. For that kind of money you can have the fastest flag ship GPU out there, with a high end Intel CPU, a good bit of performance memory, and a nice motherboard. You can likely even slip in a solid state hard drive. So even in saying what they are, raising the bar to $2,000 - $3,000, even dragging 3 or 4 gpu setups into the discussion when you don't need nearly that much to qualify as having a high end gaming rig, speaks volumes as to the kind of heavily wasted hardware potential that exists in pc gaming.

Far too often on the pc, devs believe that by tossing in ridiculously un-optimized features that will bring the performance of a powerful pc rig crashing down to earth, or bringing performance into unplayable territory, makes their game a technical masterpiece. The practically celebratory fashion by which Crytek talks about how excited people get when they find out their powerful rig can't run the game, is brutal evidence of this fact.

Do people, for example, think that Crysis 3, in any way, remotely represents anywhere close to the peak of what a high end gaming rig of today is capable of? No, far from it. Crysis 3 more appropriately represents the reasonable base foundation of what should be expected of high end hardware from a team with enough man power, a decent budget and the necessary skill to pull it off. That's pretty much all that is on display in Crysis 3. Seeing performance crash down to earth on your monster pc, running at a ridiculous 5760x1200 or 2560x1200 resolution with all the heavily un-optimized bells and whistles turned on, does not represent anywhere close to pushing your powerful gaming pc hardware to its max potential.

Games on the next xbox and ps4 will exceed Crysis 3 visually not because they are any more powerful than those monster pc gaming rigs that can run Crysis 3 at 2560x1600, but because there will be skilled developers with big budgets and plenty of man power properly optimizing and squeezing every bit of performance possible out of the consoles that is within a reasonable reach of their respective game engines.

This we can definitely agree on. Consoles push pc game development, as we get into the territory of higher base development guidelines. :D

Grift, you seem to envision a version of pc gaming that simply doesn't exist, where only the absolute best and most technically impressive looking games have absurd hardware requirements, or have a tendency to be horribly optimized. Battlefiled 3 was one of the best optimized pc games in ages, so it really doesn't belong in my criticisms, nor really does games like COD4, but the original Crysis was an embarrassment in more ways than one, as are a multitude of other pc titles. The fact that you pretend that only BF3, the Crysis games and Witcher 2 have outrageous requirements, glossing over just about all the other crap that gets released on the pc with minimum and recommended system requirements that such games simply have no business having in the first place, really speaks for itself.

It's no wonder developers basically take pc gamers for idiots sometimes, to the point that they are bragging about how much people love finding out that their expensive gaming rig can't run their games properly. Their eagerness for free to play is starting to make sense, as nobody should have to spend so much money building high end computers that should be perfect for a game (according to the dev's own words), only for it to turn out a complete lie. Crysis when it came out struggled on even the most unbelievable systems, and that isn't acceptable. Crysis 2 really is a well optimized game, but that doesn't just excuse everything else, nor does it excuse other crappy releases that have similarly absurd pc hardware requirements. I still remember how outrageous this spiderman game's requirements were at the time. Bizarre beyond words.


Talk about stating the obvious...I wasn't aware that anyone was arguing against this.

LOL Grift you're so busy talking shit whenever you decide to say something that, in the process of trying to make yourself look tough in order to feel better about yourself, instead just expose yourself as a clueless and needlessly combative clown that craves attention, but in reality is pretty unequipped to back up even a third of the shit that you say, hence why you never do. You want examples? Take your head out of your ass and go look them up yourself. If I go ahead and prove my point with a farrr longer than the one I intend to make, you'll cry about how it's too long for you to read it, and you are hardly worth the effort required to prove you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

You think pointing out an example of you playing Crysis 1 comfortably on a powerful dual core CPU combined with a graphics card that came out like 6 or 7 months after the initial launch of Crysis, when a lot of very capable graphics cards before that one were showcasing horrific performance for a lot of people at launch and beyond, forcing people to go in and perform elaborate customizations and download third party shit well beyond the scope of what the developer intended, proves your point? Surprise, surprise, a high end GPU that comes out many months after the game actually launches, and that AMD specifically advertised as perfect for playing that pesky Crysis game that came out months ago, runs the game pretty damn well. Damn good thing Crysis was so perfectly optimized for that more than two times more powerful graphics card that didn't even exist yet, right? In the process of trying to make a point, you basically prove my entire fucking argument. And, please, I beg you, don't give me that designed ahead of its time bullshit, either, that people use solely to try and cover up for the fact that the game was optimized like rubbish.

There you are acknowledging, albeit in a tail between leg fashion, that the reason Crysis ran like crap on so much fully capable hardware at the time of its release is because it was optimized like shit for the fully capable hardware at the time of its release. For what it's worth... for what it's worth? To hell with that, 'for what it's worth' the game should fucking work and provide a fantastic experience without people needing to have an overkill crossfire or sli setup, or without having to wait 6 or 7 months later for hardware that can brute force a badly optimized game. People are turning off AA, they are turning off AF and lowering resolutions and quality and tinkering with settings and third party solutions on high end computers to play a game the developer said would be perfectly able to handle just well on powerful machines at the time of release.

And am I supposed to be impressed that a cpu from one of the most powerful class of processors still on the market can run a high end game when combined with a newer, more powerful graphics card? You put emphasis on Core 2 Duo and then again stress the dual core nature of the architecture like you were making a fucking point or something.

If you can't make a point without trying (and failing) to conveniently cover your ass while treating your own personal experience with even more powerful hardware that didn't even exist at the time of the game's release as somehow evidence that what so many people experienced all over simply didn't happen, then just stop talking, period. If you played nearly as many pc games as I do, maybe you would realize just how full of shit you actually are. Assumptions, assumptions. You think because I like the 360 or consoles in general that I don't game on the pc far more than you do? There's a reason why I can probably guarantee I have among the lowest Gamerscores on the xbox 360 of anybody on this forum. I have gone through more badly optimized pc games on pretty powerful computer hardware of the day than you likely have hair on your head (You're still bald, aren't you?).

What happens when an Immovable Object meets an Unstoppable Force? The answer is simple:

Somebody gets run the fuck over.

Yeah it's shocking how badly current gen games run on consoles.

Metro also took huge hit from DoF setting. Which is useless anyway :)