XBox 360 Games, play better on R600?

[jAkUp]

Something I thought of, its pretty well known that straight XBox360 ports simply do not play well on PC. Sadly, most ports are programmed as straight ports.

COD2 is a good example. It simply runs terrible on PC. Possibly because of the unified architecture? Say you have a scene that uses close to all 48 shaders for Vertex Processing in the XBox 360, how will that translate over to the PC in a straight port? I don't think a 16 vertex G80 will appreciate that much. It seems like the R600 would be able to handle that scene with ease.

Am I making sense here or is there something I am missing?

[pkirby11]

Something I thought of, its pretty well known that straight XBox360 ports simply do not play well on PC. Sadly, most ports are programmed are straight ports.

COD2 is a good example. It simply runs terrible on PC. Possibly because of the unified architecture? Say you have a scene that uses close to all 48 shaders for Vertex Processing in the XBox 360, how will that translate over to the PC in a straight port? I don't think a 16 vertex G80 will appreciate that much. It seems like the R600 would be able to handle that scene with ease.

Am I making sense here or is there something I am missing?

I don't know too much about the XBox 360 and the way the GPU on the system works, but it sounds like the R600 is going to be closer in hardware to the XBox360 then the G80. So to me it sounds like you might see better performance on an R600 GPU over a G80 in a straight port. It sounds like R600 with it's unified shaders would handle that situation better.

[retsam]

i always thaought the performance delta had more todo with the hybrid dx9/10 api and the fact that you have so many threads to handle cpu loads on xb360. if you think about it they probably developed it for the xb360(because they sell more value on the 360 then pc) then ported it over to the pc. now you have to recode for dx9 and single threading with fall back paths for slower cards... i just think it has more todo with unoptimized code then anything else.

[Nitz Walsh]

Something I thought of, its pretty well known that straight XBox360 ports simply do not play well on PC. Sadly, most ports are programmed as straight ports.

COD2 is a good example. It simply runs terrible on PC. Possibly because of the unified architecture? Say you have a scene that uses close to all 48 shaders for Vertex Processing in the XBox 360, how will that translate over to the PC in a straight port? I don't think a 16 vertex G80 will appreciate that much. It seems like the R600 would be able to handle that scene with ease.

Am I making sense here or is there something I am missing?
Infinity Ward has stated in the past that the graphics engines for the 360 and PC versions of COD2 were created seperately - neither is a "port".

You can tell the game is far from vertex limited by simply running it in DX7 mode. Even with tons of soldiers on screen, good rigs will easily average over 100fps at very high resolutions. Bear in mind modern GPU's "emulate" hardware T&L with vertex shaders, so even though it's in DX7 and technically doesn't use vertex shaders, the GPU is using them. The bottleneck in this game doesn't appear to be vertex.

So is it pixel shading power? Don't really know, but in DX9 mode you can activate the console and turn off many features, such as shadows, some lighting, etc. I've done that where basically the only difference between the DX9 mode and DX9 is bumpmapping, and the framerate barely changed.

The R500 is quite different in architecture than a PC GPU (currently), so I'm sure there will be some games that will run poorly on current PC GPU's due to the fact it's texture/pixel shading load will vary significantly in some scenes, but I don't think this is the case right yet. I believe it's just rushed porting jobs with less skilled development teams, remember that the PC titles are expected to sell far less than the console titles so the resources just aren't poured into them to the same extent as the 360 version.

Bear in mind there have been very few - if any - 360 "ports" that perform and look worse on the PC than the 360, it's just that with some you need a $450 GPU to do so - but that's now. That power will likely be sub $250 this time next year. COD2 will look better and run comparably to the 360 version (in higher resolutions with aniso filtering) with a 1900XT, no question. That's doesn't justify the absolutely massive speed drop you get over DX7 mode, but it's not as if the title is unplayable on current hardware.

[johnkeel105]

Call of Duty 2 wasn't ported properly and I know the technology will catch up and it will someday play fine on directx9. As for gameplay, it should have stayed with the console as it was far from being the best Call of Duty game made.

[shabby]

I think this has more to do with the game being programmed for a closed system. I mean look at riddick, it was an xbox 1 game and thats a 733mhz intel chip with a gf3.5 and it played just fine. While the pc version needed a much beefier system, pc programmers are just lazy because if an xbox 1 can play it then why cant an equal pc play it?

[|MaguS|]

I think this has more to do with the game being programmed for a closed system. I mean look at riddick, it was an xbox 1 game and thats a 733mhz intel chip with a gf3.5 and it played just fine. While the pc version needed a much beefier system, pc programmers are just lazy because if an xbox 1 can play it then why cant an equal pc play it?

Yet you fail to mention that the PC version looked far better then the Xbox version... If you lowered the PCs Version to the Xbox Resolution and put all the settings equel to it it would run fine on a normal rig.

PC games usually require more then consoles though due to overheard. PCs by nature have it, consoles do not. In all honesty its harder to program a game on the PC then it is on a console today... consoles have tools that allow developers instant access to specific hardware that they know the limits of. For PCs developers have to program a general operation that most PCs will run and then sometimes program a second operation that the ones who can't run the first, can run. This is also why you see many developers who were PC Only starting to switch to consoles aswell...

Maybe Vista will help but as long as there are MX Series cards out there PC games will never totally take advantage of hardware available.