Consoles And PCs

vdanhalenv

This is a question i have had for sometime


How are consoles designed differently so that they can run games that often have minimum requirements on a PC that usually exceed the consoles specs?

FaceballMcDougal

This is a broad question but it comes down to being able to code for specific hardware, some of which is highly specialized (even the XBOX1 had nifty audio hardware) combined with development tools to even further optimize processing.

Cronus

FaceballMcDougal wrote: »

This is a broad question but it comes down to being able to code for specific hardware, some of which is highly specialized (even the XBOX1 had nifty audio hardware) combined with development tools to even further optimize processing.

Also, you have some games being ported straight over with as little code change as possible. For example, the 360 and PS3 both have inline processors that can do vector math much faster than a PC, but handle if statements extraordinarily slow. When writing code for the 360 you may inadvertantly make the game run much slower on the PC.

Also the OS on consoles is doing a lot less in the background and combine that with computers that come from Dell with 15 crapware applications running at startup.

Finally, I've heard a great phrase about making PC games - "It gives you a lot of rope to hang yourself." You can do so much, but in doing so you may forget about lower end computers or people that don't have graphics cards with advanced pipelines or people that don't have surround sound or lack mics.