Consle ports and their (often) ridiculous sys. requirements!

[nightsilencer]

Wow. Console ports seem to be taking steroids recently!

Were the consoles upgraded with brand new hardware and I missed it? Because there's just no reason for this crap.

Take a look at the following MINIMUM system requirements from some console ports (released and still to come):

GTA IV, of course:

Processor: 1.8Ghz Intel Core 2 / or

AMD Athlon64 X2 equivalent

Display Card!: NVIDIA GeForce 7900 256MB /
ATI Radeon X1900 256MB

Memory: 1536MB


Saints Row 2:

Processor: 2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo /
AMD Athlon64 X2

Display Card!: NVIDIA GeForce 7600 128MB /
ATI Radeon X1300 128MB

Memory: 1024MB


...and now take a look at this sh*t:

Lord of the Rings: Conquest

Processor: Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz or equivalent /

Display Card!: NVIDIA GeForce 7800 Series /

Memory: 1024MB

WOW! It's the only thing I can say! These 3 YEAR OLD consoles must be real powerhouses, because their games require a PC that should just kick the console's hardware back to stone age, if these games were ported right.

The thing is, our computers ARE WAY MORE POWERFUL than these consoles.

________________________________________________________

Now let's take a look at some other games available on both the PC and the consoles. Again there are the minimum requirements.

LEFT 4 DEAD:

# CPU: 3.0GHz P4, Dual Core 2.0 or AMD64X2 (or higher)
# RAM: 1 GB for XP / 2 GB for Vista
# Disc Drive: DVD-ROM Drive
# Hard Drive: At least 7.5 GB of free space
# Video: DirectX 9 compatible video card (Video card must be 128 MB or more and should be a DirectX 9 compatible with support for pixel shader 2.0)

See, the thing is Valve codes primarily for the PC, and as you can see even an old Pentium 4 does the job. I can testify to that because I have an old P4 2.8ghz in my download rig, and installed L4D just to see how it runs, and surprinsingly it didn't run bad at all!
And if you play L4D, you'll know that this game also demands a lot from the CPU because of the IMMENSELY HUGE hordes of zombies the game's AI throws at you. Yet, even a lowly Pentium 4 is deemed sufficient for the job (and actually works and runs the game acceptably).

Prince of Persia (2008 Remake):

Processor: Intel Pentium D 2.6Ghz /
AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+

Display Card!: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 256MB /
ATI Radeon X1600 series 256MB

Memory: 1024MB

Another game that suprisingly is relatively low on the requirements. Especially because anything the runs on Pentium D, will for a fact run on a Pentium 4 (Hell, people were even able to max out Assassin's Creed with a P4, when the game "required" dual core).
I haven't played this game, but you can look on youtube for videos of this game with a P4 an still mustering 30+ FPS, which for a 5 year-old CPU is respectable at the very least. Again, a game by Ubisoft, which to the best of my knowledge, is still primarily a PC softwarehouse.


Far Cry 2:

* CPU: Athlon 64 3000+/Intel 2.8ghz
* Graphics: Nvidia 6600 or ATI X1600 - Shader Model 2.0
* RAM: 1GB

Again, a good optimized, scalable game by Ubisoft.


Call of Duty 5: WaW:

Processor: AMD 64 3200+/Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz or better

Memory: 8 GB free hard-drive space, 512MB RAM (XP)/1GB RAM (Vista)

Graphics: Shader 3.0 or better, 256MB Nvidia GeForce 6600GT/ATI Radeon 1600XT or better

Need I say more? Call of Duty has always been a PC classic!

So... i'm not trying to "prove" anything with this, it's just highly suspicious that some games, all available on PC and consoles, share such different system requirements.

I would say this is due to bad ports, developer laziness and just pure comtempt for PC gamers and industry.

As you can see, some of the "faithful" PC developers never fail to make their cutting-edge games run on older hardware. When a game is coded for PC first or at least developed for PC at the same time as the console counterpart, we can clearly see that system requirements are more than acceptable.

Computer hardware, is vastly superior to console hardware (hey, Apple turned down X360's CPU for their Macs because it was sh*t slow! Apple went with C2D, so that hould tel you smoething).

This is outrageous and revolting! PC games are suffeing because developers can't even be bothered to ACTUALLY PORT a game!

Running your code through a meat grinder does not make a good port!

 

[nightsilencer]

PS: For some stupid reason you can't edit your posts around here, but the main focus of this thread is the CPU requirements. GPU requirements are not surprising at all. a game requireing a 7800GTX or something. But... that's also suspicious because that's exactely what the consoles use: a spin-off of the 7800 / X1900 GPU families.

Which makes it even more blatant that these ports are NOT EVEN OPTIMIZED for PC.

 

[pr2thej]

Interesting post, but in the real world do you expect it to be different?
I dont have an figures to hand but im confident in saying the console market is bigger than the PC gamer market, therefore you would expect a company who spreads resources across both to allocate no more than they have to into the smaller market.

Either way, its something i admit ive never noticed before - good observation.

 

[MarkG]

I dont have an figures to hand but im confident in saying the console market is bigger than the PC gamer market, therefore you would expect a company who spreads resources across both to allocate no more than they have to into the smaller market.

As far as I'm aware, total game revenue on the PC is still well above revenue on consoles; but individual games may well sell less on PCs. Of course so long as they continue with annoying DRM and excessive requirements from cheap ports, their sales figures are hardly likely to improve.

GTA3 performance, for example, was crippled primarily by some bad assumptions in the rendering engine, which just happened to work OK on Nvidia card but chugged on most others; it could easily have been made to run faster on pretty much every system if they'd bothered to spend a few hours figuring out the problem.

 

[ulysses35]

The bit that annoys me most is the "Minimum / Recommended" hardware configurations often quoted on PC software and games.

FSX is a classic example of "Recommended" hardware being nowhere near good enough for the game to run everything at decent levels of detail etc.

 

[nightsilencer]

Take the example of Lord of the Rings: Conquest given in my first post.

Do you even realise how much technically and technologically superior a game would have to be (assuming it was made from the ground up for PC solely) to require a 2.4ghz C2D as MINIMUM specs?

Just so you can compare, games made primarily for PC (check the examples above) still requise a measly P4! and Fallout 3 is another example. Bethesda is a PC developer by default, so we should expect nithing else other than acceptable requirements for their games (it only asks for 2.4ghz P4). So think about that.

 

[wh3resmycar]

as a pc gamer for like 8 years already i never trusted any of those requirements may it be recommended/minimum.

current gen game = current gen hardware.

most demanding pc games looks better as time goes by btw (doom3,farcry,crysis).

anyway, ive been there done that, so its not shocking to me if a game happens to be too demanding may it be a console port or a pc exclusive title.

some developers play it safe thats why they add a little more juice with the min requirements.

i had a similar argument with somebody here. The engines powering L4D/Fallout3 have been out for quite sometime already so expect the software/hardware for it to be optimized (none of these 2 games gave me a wow factor though, it just always made me say "meh, ive seen that before").

and assuming you did meet the min req of a game, however profoundly coded that game be, you'll be missing 90% of the experience as you'll be gaming on low res/detail. play it on a console instead (case in point: farcry2 on that min req hardware). definitely not my cup of tea.

 

[purplerat]

A) None of those specs are "ridiculous". C2D/A64X2 CPUs and 7000/1000 series GPUs are 3 generation old technologies. A moderate gaming PC from 3 years ago would meet those requirements.

B) Do a little research and understand why a game developed for a console requires much more power when ported to the PC. It's really not a difficult thing to understand if you do a little research.

C.) Console revenues dwarf PC gaming revenues. There's no argument about it.

 

[pr2thej]

Wondered where you got to Purplerat ^^

The comparison was with that 3 generation old tech Vs the power of a console i believe which off the top of my head (xbox specs anyone?) is quite a gap. Its justifiable to an extent.

 

[nightsilencer]

A) None of those specs are "ridiculous". C2D/A64X2 CPUs and 7000/1000 series GPUs are 3 generation old technologies. A moderate gaming PC from 3 years ago would meet those requirements.

B) Do a little research and understand why a game developed for a console requires much more power when ported to the PC. It's really not a difficult thing to understand if you do a little research.

C.) Console revenues dwarf PC gaming revenues. There's no argument about it.

So, Core 2 Duo is old technology, hun? And according to you, 3 generations old. Let me see... Starting with the pentium 4, then we had Pentium D, then we had Core 2 Duo/Quad in 2006, and now we have i7. Is that 3 generations old to you? Since you're so sure about what you're saying, I'm probably wrong, right? Oh wait... I'm not.

if you did a little research yourself, or even from playing PC games from your personal experience, you'd see that "next-gen" games would run perfectly with old hardware. Don't think so? Let's see then:

Doom 3, Far Cry and HL2 were the hottest next-gen shooters of 2004 (Q4) . Lets take a look at their system requirements:

Doom 3: CPU: Pentium 4 @ 1.5ghz (they were out in 2000/2001) / GPU: Lowest supported GPU was a Geforce 4 MX (worse than Geforce 3). Which also came out in 2001.

HL2: CPU: 1.2 GHz Processor
GPU: DirectX 7 capable graphics card

Far Cry: Processor: AMD Athlon / 1 GHz or Pentium® III 1 GHz (also out in early 2000)
Video Card: 64 MB DirectX® 9.0b-compatible graphics card

Not bad for next-gen titles, hun?

And before you start rambling: I played all of these games back then with my P4 @ 1.4ghz and a Geforce FX 5700. And yes, they ran absolutely fine.


So now, comes the expert and tells me that "core 2 duo is old technology". Wow. Apparently you don't know that C2D/Quad is still considered current gen, do you?

And if you do a little research again, you'll see what kind of GPUs those consoles have: Oh yeah! they have 7800 / X1900 GPUs! So tell me: Why are the CPU requirements so high, and the GPU requirements stay the same?

Does not make much sense, does it?

 

[mi1ez]

Besides the slip up on the processor generation front, I'm with Purple here...

 

[ssj_curly]

I would have thought the inflated system specs would be an excuse to keep upgrading our computers

But on a serious note it does suck how under optimised some pc games are compared to the console versions, I wonder if windows has any input to this (bloated over the top operating system getting in the way of our premium gaming hardware)

 

[nightsilencer]

I would have thought the inflated system specs would be an excuse to keep upgrading our computers

But on a serious note it does suck how under optimised some pc games are compared to the console versions, I wonder if windows has any input to this (bloated over the top operating system getting in the way of our premium gaming hardware)

How would you like to spend 1500+$ on an i7 now only to see it as minimum requirement in games in a year from now? It's all a bit ridiculous you know.

You people are missing the point. You can argue thata console is a dedicated gaming platform, that's true. But so is your PC if you want it to be!

Of course that with the minimum requirements in most games today, if you play with that hardware, you will get a bit limited in gameplay, but the important thing is: It runs.. Regardless of graphic detail or resolution, some people are happy just by being able to play the game.

And are you seriously sane when you say that it is normal for a ported game to ask for a CPU that is multiple times more powerful than the console's CPU?

In that case, why does Fallout 3, COD 5, Dead Space, Oblivion, and some others require MUCH LESS CPU power than other titles? You wanna knw why? Because they weren't ported! They were made from scratch for PC and consoles respectively.

Do you even know how much powerful a C2D is, compared to the CPU in Xbox360, for example? Do you? and yet they show up as MINIMUM? ****. Plain and simple.

 

[squatchman]

If you consider Core i7 first(current) generation hardware, and then see Core 2 Quad as second(previous) generation. It only follows that Core 2 Duo would be third generation(garbage) at this point.

Edit: I can't read
Real Quad core processors didn't come about for Intel until the end of 2007.


The problem with PCs is that the hardware varies greatly from platform to platform.

 

[nightsilencer]

My point is that I bought a new PC back in October 2008, with an E8400, ASUS P5Q Pro and a GTX 260.

You have no idea of HOW SO MUCH MORE POWERFUL this computer is when compared to a console. Yet, I risk seeing my CPU as a minimum requirement by the end of this year?

I find that unacceptable. A fast Dual Core is (or at least SHOULD BE) a very viable gaming platform for at least another 2 years.

I'm confident that will happen, my CPU will still be kicking by 2011 or so; apparently I just have to stay away from piece of sh*t ports.

 

[nightsilencer]

If you consider Core i7 first(current) generation hardware, and then see Core 2 Quad as second(previous) generation. It only follows that Core 2 Duo would be third generation(garbage) at this point.

Edit: I can't read
Real Quad core processors didn't come about for Intel until the end of 2007.


The problem with PCs is that the hardware varies greatly from platform to platform.

Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad ARE from the same generation. They are just different models. You do know that, right?

 

[squatchman]

This must have been your first computer.

Computer Hardware is obsolete even before you have bought it.

 

[nightsilencer]

This must have been your first computer.

Computer Hardware is obsolete even before you have bought it.

It's ridiculous to say that Core 2 Duo is obsolete when even Pentium 4's and Pentium D's aren't even phased out from gaming yet.

And Core 2 architecture mops the floor with Pentium 4' and Pentium D's with it's arms and legs tied.

 

[squatchman]

Core i7 does the same with Core 2, and just wait for the 8 core i7's to drop to see all the early adopters whining.

You chose to buy hardware based on years old tech. HPSMP is the future.

 

[badaxe2]

This must have been your first computer.

Computer Hardware is obsolete even before you have bought it.

Which is why it's pretty much pointless to try and stay on the "cutting edge" of PC hardware. Unless you like burning money and bragging rights. I'll be happy upgrading to a C2Q and 4870, and milking them until a good while after the next "Crysis" comes out.

 

[purplerat]

If you consider Core i7 first(current) generation hardware, and then see Core 2 Quad as second(previous) generation. It only follows that Core 2 Duo would be third generation(garbage) at this point.

Edit: I can't read
Real Quad core processors didn't come about for Intel until the end of 2007.


The problem with PCs is that the hardware varies greatly from platform to platform.

Yes that is roughly what I meant but I was speaking in more general terms.
Conroe (1), Wolfdale(2), i7(3). But those specs also say AMD X2 equivalent, so you could even push some of those processors back another generation to the pre C2D Athlons which are still pretty good for gaming. Point is that 2005/2006 decent dual core CPUs are plenty for those specs. Some goes for the video cards and the RAM specs are laughably low for any modern system.

Truth is that fully priced out a system that far surpasses those specs cost about $500.

 

[nightsilencer]

Core i7 does the same with Core 2, and just wait for the 8 core i7's to drop to see all the early adopters whining.

You chose to buy hardware based on years old tech. HPSMP is the future.

I'm not asking hardware to stop. And Core 2 technology is just over 2 years old. I know it's not "brand new" but you have to admit that C2D and C2Q still have the power to be decent performers for another 2 or so years.

I don't see it as old tech, I see it as mature tech. There's a difference. And most dual core and quad core CPUs will be enough to last through the i7 generation. It has happened in the past and will happen again.

Look at this: When Core 2 was introduced back in mid-2006, Pentium 4 was still more than acceptable and adequate to play any game you wanted. Hell, it still plays most games.

A CPU generation usually lives through the generation of it's successor. Pentium 4 / Pentium D were viable gaming CPUs throughout all of the Core 2 generation.

It is only natural that Core 2 will live and maintain its usefulness through the i7 generation.

 

[purplerat]

You have no idea of HOW SO MUCH MORE POWERFUL this computer is when compared to a console. Yet, I risk seeing my CPU as a minimum requirement by the end of this year?

You're being a drama queen. As I said before none of the requirements you listed before couldn't have been had in a PC 3 years ago.
You also seem to miss that the CPU requirements are somewhat inflated while the GPU requirements are somewhat underestimated. That's because these specs are meant for the average non-gamer who might pick up a game to play on a PC which isn't a dedicated gaming rig. Who's going to have a gaming rig with a 2.4Ghz C2D but only a 7800 (which btw is a 4 year old GPU)? Personally I have a secondary gaming rig with a 8800GTS 320 which more than makes up for the Pentium D POS CPU for gaming (but it really sucks for Blu-ray playback).

I know people who are still gaming with good single core AMDs (4000+) and as long as they have a decent GPU it's not all that bad. The only people who are really going to be suffering from CPU performance for current games are people using P4s, older AMDs or business class CPUs.

 

[purplerat]

A CPU generation usually lives through the generation of it's successor. Pentium 4 / Pentium D were viable gaming CPUs throughout all of the Core 2 generation.

Sorry but P4 and PD were never really viable gaming CPUs, at least not for anybody serious about building a gaming PC. Like I mentioned above you can over compensate with a good GPU and lots of RAM, but there was never a time when those CPUs were considered "good gaming CPUs". It was all AMD until 2006 which is why the:
or
AMD Athlon64 X2 equivalent

part of those requirements makes them completely acceptable.

 

[nightsilencer]

A CPU generation usually lives through the generation of it's successor. Pentium 4 / Pentium D were viable gaming CPUs throughout all of the Core 2 generation.

Sorry but P4 and PD were never really viable gaming CPUs, at least not for anybody serious about building a gaming PC. Like I mentioned above you can over compensate with a good GPU and lots of RAM, but there was never a time when those CPUs were considered "good gaming CPUs". It was all AMD until 2006 which is why the:
or
AMD Athlon64 X2 equivalent

part of those requirements makes them completely acceptable.

By "viable" I meant that they ran games fine. You can't say they didn't. I know they weren't powerhouses to begin with, but they never fell horribly behind in gaming to point of making them "not viable" for games.