On 4/17/2011 1:13 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/16/2011 16:59, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> No, I want the damn thing to bloody run.
>
> Here's what I think is happening.
>
> Game designers like to target the consoles, not because they're
> particularly good, but because they're only broken in one way.
>
> Given that some 85% of BSODs are video drivers crashing, it's clear that
> nobody really builds video drivers that work 100%. OK, so maybe your PC
> works 98% of all its functionality perfectly. Maybe the xbox works 95%
> of all its functionality perfectly.
>
> So you write the game, you test it out on the xbox, and you don't do the
> stuff that doesn't work on the xbox. 5% of your rendering code consists
> of working around bugs in the xbox hardware and software.
>
> Now you have to port it to the PC. But not just Patrick's PC. Everyone's
> PC. Maybe 20 different graphics cards/chips/OS version combinations.
> Each of which have only 2% instead of 5% of the stuff not working. So
> you wind up with 95% of the stuff you want to do on the xbox working,
> and 60% of what you want to do on the PC working. Sure, you can
> compensate on the PC for each broken thing, working around each bug,
> rewriting that code 20 times, testing against the versions you can get
> your hands on. Or you can release a game that people will buy anyway and
> just turn off any optimization that doesn't work on every card.
>
In my experience, the assumption is that if its supposed to do it, they 
assume it will, and hope the next driver doesn't break it (which can 
happen). Sometimes they *may* include the feature, but off, waiting for 
the time it will go live, but not often. So, there are things that 
"known" stages of card development will always, generally, do right, 
with minor exceptions, recommendations on the box, telling you what the 
one they developed it for was, usually a copy of the driver that they 
had at the time *with the game*, and dozens of forums on the net based 
around, "I have this card, which is better than the other one, but 
everything looks fuzzy!", problems. So, no, that isn't what is going on 
here, from what I can tell.

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