A disturbing trend seems to be taking hold in the gaming industry: delays to the PC versions of cross-platform releases that otherwise come out on time for consoles. Having to wait longer than everyone else to play the latest big-name title is never fun. However, after spending hours watching blurry textures pop in and out of Rage, it’s clear that some games should be using much higher-quality art assets on the PC. Crytek released a high-res texture pack that ratcheted up the eye candy in Crysis some time after that game’s official release. Delayed PC versions of the next Batman and Assassin’s Creed games have promised improved graphical fidelity, as well.
In a perfect world, developers would have all the resources they need to make PC games look as good as they should and arrive alongside their console counterparts. Since that’s not going to happen, we’ve whipped up a new poll to gauge your interest in the likely alternatives. Would you rather see PC games released with their console kin and then updated with higher-quality art assets some months later, or are you content to wait for prettied-up PC versions even if they arrive late? Or maybe you’re all about the gameplay and don’t understand all the fuss about high-res textures. You can vote below or in the middle column on the front page.
Our last poll sought to lay out some performance expectations for AMD’s fastest Bulldozer CPU. Most of you expect to see the chip keep up with Sandy Bridge, with 40% thinking it’ll be competitive with the Core i7-2600K and another 36% expecting the fastest FX processor to pull even with the i5-2500K. Among those less optimistic about AMD’s chances, 13% expect Bulldozer to be no faster than a Core i5-2400, 4% expect it to be closer to a Phenom II X6 1100T, and just 1% see it opposite a quad-core Phenom. 6% voted for our obviously tongue-in-cheek Via QuadCore option.