It seem to me that console or some PC architectures different then the common PC architcutre (I don''t know how it is called the one with intel, amd processors and PCI slots and stuff like that), have a much better I/O reaction and a much more steady FPS. I don''t know about todays consoles, but in older consoles the game''s FPS was always steady and extremly high. Everything seems to respond a lot more faster and smoother. I think that the common PC archtecture sucks, it''s components don''t interact very well with each other. I would like to hear opinions about it.

I don''t think it''s becuase it''s harder for game developers to develope a certain FPS game on all the PCs. Let''s say you developed a fast simple 2D game for the PCs. I think it would still won''t be as steady and the reactions between all the I/O won''t be as fast as in a console system.
In PC the FPS doesn''t seam to be steady even when it''s fast, and the I/O doesn''t seam to have the split second reaction like in consoles.

I think another reason is because it is intened by the industry that you will never get your perfect performance from you OS and hardware. The computers are getting more and more faster, but the OS are becoming more resource consuming.
It is stuiped that you never get best performance for a single program you run in winOS, just because there are all kind of other programs running which you don''t use during the game.
They could have done it in a way that single software will run effitiently ad that you could also have multitasking. But they just don''t want to do it, because then they will have to make a lot more effort in their next OS so you will have a good reason to buy it.

BILL GATES MUST DIE!

Agreed,

Some people *WANT* to multitask whilst playing a game - say I was downloading a 100Mb file and I was bored waiting for the download to finish, it''s quite feasible that I might want to play a game while I wait (provided the game is properly written so it multitasks properly...).

Furthermore if the *user* is concerned about a virus killer running in the background interfering with their gameplay they can turn it off. Apart from user chosen things (virus scanners, Word/Windows indexing etc), the other things in the system usually don''t interfere too much since their threads are either sleeping or on a low priority.

I''ve developed commercially sold PC games (i.e. I''m "industry"), and I can assure you 100% there isn''t some conspiracy between us and Microsoft to create slow/glitchy games on the PC.

The biggest problems with the PC are it''s backwards compatibility (e.g. the x86 CPU arch. from a programming perspective is nasty compared to recent advancements), badly written programs (DLL conflicts when installing, machine crashes due to missing DLLs after uninstalling, people using obsolete functions and assuming return values etc) and the fact that it''s really 10000 different platforms rather than 1 due to differing hardware and software configs.

With console hardware there''s at most 3 configurations of hardware - we can develop on all of those 3 and during development keep an eye on the framerate at every stage - thus the end result is rock solid VSYNC''d framerate on the console (some games excepted ). On the PC it probably runs smoothly and at a solid frame rate *on the developers PC*, but won''t on many others.

FWIW MS have stated to developers (at conferences like Meltdown) that increasingly they want the games playing experience on the PC to be like that of a console.

--
Simon O''Connor
Creative Asylum Ltd
www.creative-asylum.com

The gents at ArsTechnica have written a few articles on this kind of thing:

http://arstechnica.com/cpu/index.html

Helpful links:
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way | Google can help with your question | Search MSDN for help with standard C or Windows functions


[edited by - siaspete on April 12, 2002 1:04:27 PM]