although there's still a lot of arguing between gamers who prefer the power of a
pc and those who prefer the convenience of a console
one thing most of us can agree on is that any particular title should just
plain work as advertised regardless of
the platform be it pc xbox playstation
or atari 2600 but unfortunately there's been a
noticeable trend over the years in which games initially developed for console
just don't translate that well to the pc
and when these games drop on steam they might have wonky controls underwhelming
visuals or even outright game breaking
bugs so why does this happen
well a huge part of the issue is that at
any given time there are only really about three or four major living room
consoles and aside from minor updates
every two years or so every single xbox one or playstation 4
in existence is using the exact same
hardware inside this means that developers writing games
for these platforms know exactly what
configurations and apis they're coding for making it easy to optimize
performance and functionality for that specific device
especially as consoles tend to have exclusive developer features to make
programming for them even more straightforward
pcs on the other hand present an additional challenge in that games must
be written to work on an enormous
variety of different computers and
although the dominant setup is a modern
64-bit version of Windows and a CPU and
GPU from one of just two different manufacturers each
there's still tons of variation in terms of
performance driver revisions and what other kinds of
hardware and software are installed and remember that on a pc
games are sharing resources like memory and CPU time with other programs to a
far greater extent than on a console that was built to consistently
prioritize gameplay and because of all these factors every
time a game is installed on another pc
chances are high that it's a brand new
environment the game has never actually
seen before so the game's code has to be
adjusted to work with general technologies such as directx and
the x86 instruction set which can be an
imperfect solution that as we know doesn't work flawlessly on every pc
every time and even to get it as close as possible
can be very time consuming and sometimes
tens of thousands of files have to be rewritten to play nicely with an NVIDIA
or AMD desktop graphics driver instead
of some specialized API that was specifically designed for the
playstation 4 meaning that pc ports also
add months to development time which by
the way costs money money that many game studios would rather spend on making new
games marketing existing ones new dlc or
heck why not ice cream at that point
and since consoles are generally underpowered compared to current gen
gaming computers games originally developed for consoles
are often designed to be less graphically demanding so
creating more high def visuals for
you know whiny vocal minority customers with top of the line graphics cards like
gtx 1080s and rx 580s can also result in
months of additional work and this combined with the translation of visual
elements so pc apis and drivers can understand them has resulted in more
than a handful of games looking like a mess
on a computer and of course a game being written for a
certain console means it was also written with a specific controller
scheme in mind meaning that the experience may not map well to a
keyboard and mouse and although the concept of simply mapping a controller
button to a keyboard key seems very simple this process can still involve
modifying a great deal of code under the hood the good news is that while there
are still plenty of bad pc ports floating around consoles have been
moving towards more pc-like architectures and tools like microsoft's
new universal Windows platform might make porting games at least from xbox to
pc much less labor-intensive as games
written for uwp like gears of war 4
don't have to be rewritten for desktop computers
but with that said at least for now underwhelming ports are just part of the
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