MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin

> By generic, I'm talking about the engine that drives the game. Audio. Video. RAM use
> (system AND video)... For a PC, they have to test on a variety of hardware and
> sacrifices have to be made to play acceptably on lower hardware, and even with high
> end hardware, such as video cards, you still have no less than 2 manufacturers to
> support, each with its own unique tweaks and such. Hell ram quantity, ram speed, cpu
> manufacturer, cpu speed, motherboards... I could go on and on about things that will
> affect performance from PC to PC.

I see what you're saying. I have heard of game developers having to scale down their games a little, so they run on PCs that people can actually afford, but those are typically bleeding edge features that are likely beyond the abilities of contemporary consoles anyway. PC games have to be a little more flexible and let you turn off the eye candy to run on lower-end PCs, but if you're running fully maxed out, I don't think you're sacrificing much of anything in visual quality compared to a console in most cases.

The need to support specific hardware has basically been a non-issue since DirectX and OpenGL gained traction as standards, at least on Windows. Creating a game, you use DirectX (and/or OpenGL) and it's the hardware manufacturer's problem to support you. You see it all the time in video driver updates, they tweak (and occasionally break) their drivers like crazy to make sure the hot game du jour runs as fast as possible.