[shmerl]

> API works around just fine like I said. I cannot recall any recent (in the past 10 years) AAA games, which don't run on the consoles.

But they all run with reduced settings, and their non console versions offer higher quality on better hardware (if developers of course took care of taking advantage of that and make it all configurable).

So I'm really not sure how API can change the simple fact that current day consoles are underpowered in comparison with modern high end PC hardware.

[pandaman]

>with reduced settings

Not sure what you mean by this. MGS V, for example, runs with more effects on PS4 than on my PC with Geforce 980Ti (which alone costs as much as two PS4s btw). Anyways, this conversation is stupid. It's not a Console vs PC flamewar. Nobody forbids you from buying a $10K PC with colored lights everywhere and setting all the settings to 11. And if you think it's a good business, this being an entrepreneur site, you should starting making those and selling to others, driving stupid console developers out of business and laughing while doing so.

[pjmlp]

SteamMachines have proven how receptive the market is to such ideas.

[shmerl]

Steam Machines forced incumbents to start moving faster. Which actually highlights the point. There will be high end incumbent consoles.

[shmerl]

I haven't played it myself yet (waiting for Wine to support it on Linux), but I'm sure I've red somewhere, that The Witcher 3 uses reduced settings on consoles and you can't change them there. Developers explicitly recommended running the game on better hardware for those who want max graphics settings. It makes perfect sense to me. Developers use what the hardware allows.

[fsloth]

"Developers use what the hardware allows."

Nonsense. Developers use hardware as well as they understand within given project constraints.

Optimizing modern game engine to run fast is generally considered a non-trivial task. The more arbitrary the hardware platform, the harder it is to optimize.

Yes, if PC port had to target only a specific, known, hardware and software combination (say a specifiv i7 with gtx 1080) then they could probably optimize the shit out of it.

A console is a fixed, known target. Thus it takes much less resources to optimize for it - thus developers can reuse their understanding from project to project.

The AAA game scene is full of recent examples with crawling PC ports, such as Arkham Knight.

[shmerl]

All that doesn't change that fact, that some hardware can push more frames at higher resolution. No matter how fixed the target of console is, you can't leap beyond hardware limits there.

> The AAA game scene is full of recent examples with crawling PC ports, such as Arkham Knight.

Poor quality games isn't an good example of proper hardware usage. There was a time when AAA meant quality. Today it can mean any junk as long as it's funded by big publisher.