Savyg wrote:Consider that this is comparing to the Xbox 360/PS3
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphi ... -directx/1Now the PC software architecture – DirectX – has been kind of bent into shape to try to accommodate more and more of the batch calls in a sneaky kind of way. There are the multi-threaded display lists, which come up in DirectX 11 – that helps, but unsurprisingly it only gives you a factor of two at the very best, from what we've seen. And we also support instancing, which means that if you're going to draw a crate, you can actually draw ten crates just as fast as far as DirectX is concerned.
But it's still very hard to throw tremendous variety into a PC game. If you want each of your draw calls to be a bit different, then you can't get over about 2-3,000 draw calls typically - and certainly a maximum amount of 5,000. Games developers definitely have a need for that. Console games often use 10-20,000 draw calls per frame, and that's an easier way to let the artist's vision shine through.'
Until the PC can come to performance parity on the most basic things, it will never be the frontrunner again.
That was an interesting metric, but I don't know if focusing on that one statistic is a wise idea.
There are certain apples to oranges issues - even ignoring the removal of the API overhead.
For example in the PS3 each of the SPUs is a mini-GPU. The Uncharted series notably used the GPU largely just for basic triangle and texture work. The Cell SPUs applied all the post process effects like DoF. PC don't do this, nor do they need to subdivided their resources like this.
Frankly if singular elements like that truly gave consoles a huge advantage you wouldn't have immense graphical disparity in titles like Battlefield 3 or even Crysis 3.
It was a neat article, but I can't help but walk away from it saying it lacked some real meat. It lacked context and I suppose it can afford to lack that context. The article wasn't supposed to be about the power of a console versus the PC. It was supposed to be about if DirectX is a hindrance.
I feel like even in that job it sort of fell down. The comments in the articles did a much better job of talking about the difficulty in coding to metal and reminded people of the old DOS days when developers did touch the metal and the compatibility issues that created. Compatibility issues that have gone on and spurned developers to build complex VMs like DOSBox.
This doesn't even get into the serious security issues of allowing direct hardware access.
I guess in writing and collecting my thoughts on this a little further I'm finding the article a little silly. It compared a closed platform to an open platform, focused on one metric (graphics performance) and managed to ignore all the issues that require the two platforms to be wholly different. Not to mention simply ignoring that developers have built bigger and better versions of their titles for the PC versus the consoles even without access to the metal.