Quote Originally Posted by SKYMTL View Post
Personally, I feel the massive power of the PC gives game developers a crutch so to speak. Instead of properly optimizing their games, they can use the GPU's power as a fall-back option for somewhat adequate gameplay due to a bare minimum of optimizations. Sometimes I wonder if the PC gaming industry as a whole (let's forget about the hardware vendors) would be better served if NVIDIA and AMD simply idled for a year or so.

It is the epitome of irony that some of the best looking games have been released on consoles. To this day, I still struggle to find a PC game that can match the visuals presented in Killzone 2/3 and the Uncharted series without relying on a $300 graphics card. Meanwhile, both of those games are perfectly playable on 6 year old hardware.

I'm not saying that it isn't exciting to see a new GPU coming. Rather, I think it is time game developers are held accountable for performance shortcomings rather than the hardware or drivers from AMD and NVIDIA....
I completely agree that what is holding back PC gaming is in fact the game development. but I would point the finger at the publishers equally to the devs. this issue I think comes down to optimization. I cant remember the last AAA game that was made by a major dev that was a PC exclusive on an engine that had proper PC optimization. an in the end it comes down to money. Devs and publishers think (and they might be right) that the only way to make money on AAA type games to is have them on consoles primarily.

i think they assume (and again they might be right) that the market of gamers who would by a PC only AAA game that costs over 10 million to make would not offset the cost of development. thus we get games that made to squeeze every single bit of juice out of the consoles of today (killzone 3, unchartered and Halo 4 being great examples of GREAT looking games) and then we get rushed and sloppy PC ports that waste the PC's processing power. i would guarantee you that if devs put the time and effort into squeezing all the power possible from something like an i5, 4GB of RAM and even a GTX 550 Ti we would get the best looking games ever created and by a substantial margin to boot.

consoles also serve to limit (to an extent) the innovation and gameplay current games can offer. while i would also argue that the publishers force devs to stick to the tried and true to sell rebranded crap (look at COD), when you think about how limited Devs are by things like current consoles RAM (512MB of SHARED in both units IIRC), devs can't play around with larger environments, advanced physics or complex AI models just due to hardware limits.

i am 10% with you in saying that publishers and games devs are the biggest problem with PC gaming right now but i don't think that holding graphics cards for a generation would help the matter that much. game devs would make there games run better on lower end hardware yea but it would not push innovation or better features and graphics to the PC. to do that we need a serious PC game developer and publisher.

my 2 cents