Why Are PC Video Game Ports So Bad?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
933 words · ~4 min read
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although there's still a lot of arguing between gamers who prefer the power of a
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pc and those who prefer the convenience of a console
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one thing most of us can agree on is that any particular title should just
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plain work as advertised regardless of
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the platform be it pc xbox playstation
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or atari 2600 but unfortunately there's been a
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noticeable trend over the years in which games initially developed for console
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just don't translate that well to the pc
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and when these games drop on steam they might have wonky controls underwhelming
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visuals or even outright game breaking
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bugs so why does this happen
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well a huge part of the issue is that at
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any given time there are only really about three or four major living room
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consoles and aside from minor updates
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every two years or so every single xbox one or playstation 4
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in existence is using the exact same
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hardware inside this means that developers writing games
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for these platforms know exactly what
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configurations and apis they're coding for making it easy to optimize
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performance and functionality for that specific device
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especially as consoles tend to have exclusive developer features to make
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programming for them even more straightforward
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pcs on the other hand present an additional challenge in that games must
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be written to work on an enormous
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variety of different computers and
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although the dominant setup is a modern
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64-bit version of Windows and a CPU and
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GPU from one of just two different manufacturers each
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there's still tons of variation in terms of
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performance driver revisions and what other kinds of
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hardware and software are installed and remember that on a pc
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games are sharing resources like memory and CPU time with other programs to a
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far greater extent than on a console that was built to consistently
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prioritize gameplay and because of all these factors every
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time a game is installed on another pc
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chances are high that it's a brand new
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environment the game has never actually
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seen before so the game's code has to be
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adjusted to work with general technologies such as directx and
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the x86 instruction set which can be an
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imperfect solution that as we know doesn't work flawlessly on every pc
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every time and even to get it as close as possible
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can be very time consuming and sometimes
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tens of thousands of files have to be rewritten to play nicely with an NVIDIA
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or AMD desktop graphics driver instead
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of some specialized API that was specifically designed for the
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playstation 4 meaning that pc ports also
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add months to development time which by
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the way costs money money that many game studios would rather spend on making new
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games marketing existing ones new dlc or
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heck why not ice cream at that point
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and since consoles are generally underpowered compared to current gen
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gaming computers games originally developed for consoles
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are often designed to be less graphically demanding so
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creating more high def visuals for
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you know whiny vocal minority customers with top of the line graphics cards like
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gtx 1080s and rx 580s can also result in
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months of additional work and this combined with the translation of visual
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elements so pc apis and drivers can understand them has resulted in more
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than a handful of games looking like a mess
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on a computer and of course a game being written for a
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certain console means it was also written with a specific controller
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scheme in mind meaning that the experience may not map well to a
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keyboard and mouse and although the concept of simply mapping a controller
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button to a keyboard key seems very simple this process can still involve
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modifying a great deal of code under the hood the good news is that while there
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are still plenty of bad pc ports floating around consoles have been
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moving towards more pc-like architectures and tools like microsoft's
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new universal Windows platform might make porting games at least from xbox to
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pc much less labor-intensive as games
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written for uwp like gears of war 4
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don't have to be rewritten for desktop computers
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but with that said at least for now underwhelming ports are just part of the
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