Arcania - Updated System Requirements?

[GothicGothicness]

Interensting, to make this simple you can try with superpi, that only uses the proccesor and memory so drivers should be a minimal issue.

The guys over at testfreaks tried to make a completely fare comparasion and didn't manage to make it any less than 3.4997131382674 %.

 

[Maylander]

Any game with half decent programming will run considerably better on a modern PC than any console. This is not up for questioning, as there are dozens of tests indicating better graphics and higher FPS.

The hardware we're dealing with is five years old. In terms of computer hardware, that's a very long time. Everything from motherboard to harddrives, RAM and CPU is simply a whole lot faster now - even in cases where "outside specs" might look similar.

For example: The 512 MB of an XBOX 360 is not the same as today's RAM. We're talking 700 MHz compared to more modern standards like 1333 MHz. Nearly twice the speed. If it was only a single component, it probably wouldn't have mattered much, but such differences can be found on every component.

Consoles are currently holding PC games back in terms of graphics.

 

[GothicGothicness]

Any game with half decent programming will run considerably better on a modern PC than any console. This is not up for questioning, as there are dozens of tests indicating better graphics and higher FPS.

Yes I agree 100% with this statement. But there are many ports which prove that half-decent programming is not that common if you do the console version first and optimize that and after that port to PC.

 

[kalniel]

For example: The 512 MB of an XBOX 360 is not the same as today's RAM. We're talking 700 MHz compared to more modern standards like 1333 MHz. Nearly twice the speed.

RAM works a little different than you understand. The highest supported RAM speed is 667mhz DDR3 on PC (skt 1156, core i7 chips). Because you carry data on the front and back of the signal, you carry 2 bits per cycle, so it's effectively the same speed as 1333mhz SDR.

GDDR3 is nothing to do with DDR3. Instead it's a high speed/high voltage part designed for graphics card well before DDR3 was around. But it also plays the same DDR speed trick.

DDR3 1333 has a peak bandwidth per module of 10.6 GB/s, dual channel puts that up to 21GB/s roughly

X360's 700mhz GDDR3 has a peak bandwidth of 5.6 GB/S. However it effectively runs in octo-channel, giving a peak bandwidth of 44.8 GB/s.

So if you're talking speed, the X360's RAM is way faster. However we've also got really fast RAM on our graphics cards, it's just the X360 uses that same RAM for system as well.

Don't underestimate the huge advantage of having one standardised system spec either. When you know exactly how much resource you have you can make full use of it, rather than having to either code for the lowest common denominator or code several versions of things to cater for different system builds.. which leaves less time over for optimisation etc.