Hyper New Games Hype

The gaming press is currently awash with hype about the forthcoming consoles. It seems that people can't resist articles about new hardware and the wonderful specifications it may or may not have. Commentary ranges from the ill informed and speculative to the 'insider' tech news genre. I contend that the main thing being overlooked in all these articles is that none of this new hardware's specification matters at all.

We can take for granted that the next generation of console gaming will deliver more rendering performance than the last. We've learned that it will also bring us wireless controllers as standard, but we could already buy those anyway. What's left is mainly spin and hype. However, make no mistake, there will be changes for gamers, but the hardware specification is almost completely irrelevant to them.

Developers make games, not hardware

So, what about Cell and all that jazz, isn't that going to bring us to a new gaming nirvana or something? Will games now have lovingly crafted, amusing and involving physics? Well maybe, maybe not - the PC has been quite capable of this sort of thing for several years now, and yet games that make any proper use of it are few and far between indeed.

What about the rich world of emotions and story that Cell will open up to us? Oh wait. REALITY CHECK: since when has a CPU made stories more involving, game designs better, or characters more emotive? There's more emotion in the textureless little midgets of the original PS1 Final Fantasy VII than in <pick latest Unreal Engine game of your choice> with it's shadertastic rendering system with its cathedral scaled bells and whistles.

In the end, what we get from the next generation of consoles will depend on developers: game designers, artists, programmers. Publishers and what they dare to do will also matter enormously: every single fancy feature costs time and money to develop. Those who take time to put these things in properly will be later to market and will spend more money developing the game. These things really matter, especially to publishers, who are under the impression that if your game is available on a console in its early life, with a shortage of titles, then people will buy it no matter how poor it is. This has never been true, but they usually rush products out anyway, with the same old consequences.

There are a lot of factors that make people buy a game, or not buy it: a popular license, a proven history, good marketing, good graphics, good gameplay, cult status and occasionally a product becomes so popular that people just buy it because everyone else did.

As you can see, only two of the key games 'sales' factors are related to hardware at all, and those only tenuously.

The quality of game graphics is determined very much by the artists that work on them. No amount of rendering technology can make up for bad art, but the reverse is true - good artists can do an enormous amount to compensate for weaknesses in a rendering engine.

The quality of game 'play' is supposed to be enhanced by increased CPU power, but usually it doesn't happen. Most of the CPU is used to drive the rendering side of the game anyway, and the 'game' gets the tiny slice that is left. This will not change. It doesn't matter how many execution units you've got on your Power Processor, most of them will be tied up doing something to do with rendering.

It's a simple fact that good graphics are instantly identifiable in a game: in reviews all you can see are screenshots, in the demo reel, all you really see are graphics. The gameplay won't show up until you get the game home and spend solid hours grappling with it. In a really good game, some of the best experiences won't show up until you are a long way into the game. This is the tragic dilemma: the part of your game that brings the most joy and lasting pleasure doesn't help sell it directly - only through word of mouth is the excitement conveyed. As so many reviews are full of glowing joy and satisfaction, it won't show up there at all.

So, the end result is that pubishers and developers devote most of the hardware resources to graphics. It doesn't matter how much power there is, it can always be directed at graphics to achieve a flashy effect rather than used for 'gameplay'. The companies that do this best have the best looking games. If you played the beautiful looking Final Fantasy X, did you look at the graphics and then wonder why the game mechanics were ten years old? They were still good enough to keep hundreds of thousands of gamers happy, but they weren't exactly pushing the hardware.

There will be teams that bring us great new gameplay, physics, AI, and all that stuff, but in the end they will do it mainly because of a gradual evolution in software devlopment, game software libraries, middleware and know how than because of simple hardware power - that's why we haven't really seen the 'physics revolution' on the PC yet: the software and the developers both need to mature in this area. Powerful new hardware may give them a nudge, but it can't take them all the way.

High Definition Hype

Microsoft, desperate to find something new for Revolution to revolve around is telling us it's all about high definition. This isn't going to make much of an impression, as there are still plenty of people who still watch 4:3 ratio television, which should give pause for thought about how many people actually have high definition televisions.

A few people with expensive DVD players may have genuine high definition televisions (capable of 1080 progressive scan) in the UK, and for practical purposes the penetration of high definition into Australian market is insignificant. The US penetration is probably the best, but much of that is still not 1080 progressive capable.

Really, all this talk about fancy televisions is boring. It's a small evolutionary step: high resolutions already exist on the PC and they don't make the same games an order better than on the consoles. Xbox was just about capable of delivering this stuff already, so it's not much of an innovation. As a programmer, I would rather avoid a high resolution that most people can't exploit, because you are always short of fill rate and higher resolutions only make this problem worse. Supporting silly resolutions five years ahead of their time seems only to handicap the machine.

And in the end it's all yesterday's news

When the fancy console hardware actually gets into living rooms in sufficient quantity to make a difference, it will already be behind the desktop PC. The graphics processors will probably lag top PC cards at launch, it's realy no big deal either way.

As for CPU power: no matter how Sony spins it, a Cell with a few specialised signal processing engines is not going to 'blow away' a dual core AMD64, or even Intel's latest clunky Pentium-D, or whatever they hope to have by then. By the time the PS3 hits volume in Europe, we'll be looking at quad core AMD64s for the motivated wealthy. Solid general purpose computing power (with stuff like good branch prediction), coupled with a big cache and lots of memory means that PCs will still be able to compete with the specialised gaming CPUs.

A technology lead has never brought genuinely better games to the PC, though the platform does have some different games, the differences are related more to culture, input device and display technology than anything else.

posted by Peter Wake @ 1:21 am