id On RAGE "Cluster!@#$" and Lead Platforms [Oct 07, 2011, 8:33 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Kotaku asks the musical question "Why Was The PC Launch of Rage Such A "Cluster!@#$"?," getting answers from id on the topic, who express frustration with problems that were largely caused by driver issues. Along the way they also address how the game being designed for consoles holds back the PC edition. "You can choose to design a game around the specs of a high-end PC and make console versions that fail to hit the design point, or design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements," John Carmack tells them. "We chose the latter." He also bluntly addresses why this makes sense for id (emphasis Kotaku's):
"We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games," Carmack added. "That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version. A high end PC is nearly 10 times as powerful as a console, and we could unquestionably provide a better experience if we chose that as our design point and we were able to expend the same amount of resources on it. Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on. A game built with a tenth the resources on a platform 10 times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases."
Krovven wrote on Oct 8, 2011, 00:16:
Half-Life 2? I seem to recall having my 9800 and having problems with HL2 at launch, which was ironic since there was the whole "developed for ATI" promo.
I switched to an nVidia card shortly after and never had drivers problems again.
No, HL2 ran fine for me, though I didn't get around to playing it until like four months after it was launched. And I may have had an Nvidia card at the time anyway.
I tend to switch between the two based on who delivers the most power for the least amount of noise. And noise was a major issue with Nvidia for quite awhile until the second generation Fermi cards came out, and they apparently finally realized that not everybody enjoys having their card sound like a vacuum cleaner.
Creston
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