In an interview with GamesIndustry, Phil Spencer shared some pretty interesting thoughts. According to the head of Xbox, the highest fidelity PC games rival anything that anybody has ever seen in video games.
As Phil Spencer told GamesIndustry:
“Every developer is going to find a line and say that this is the hardware that I am going to support. However, the diversity of hardware choice in PC has not held back the highest fidelity PC games on the market. The highest fidelity PC games rival anything that anybody has ever seen in video games. So this idea that developers don’t know how to build games, or game engines, or ecosystems, that work across a set of hardware… there’s a proof point in PC that shows that’s not the case.”
To be honest, this makes sense. Red Dead Redemption 2 in 4K looks absolutely stunning, as does Control and Metro Exodus. Let’s also not forget that these games run with more than 30fps in 4K on high-end GPUs. However, and as we’ve already stated, PC games are held back by consoles.
Ironically, and prior to that statement, Spencer claimed that most developers are not being held back by the console hardware.
“Frankly, held back is a meme that gets created by people who are too caught up in device competition. I just look at Windows. It’s almost certain if the developer is building a Windows version of their game, then the most powerful and highest fidelity version is the PC version. You can even see that with some of our first-party console games going to PC, even from our competitors, that the richest version is the PC version. Yet the PC ecosystem is the most diverse when it comes to hardware, when you think about the CPUs and GPUs from years ago that are there.”
Now I’ll be honest here; I really laughed when I read that statement. I get it that Spencer wants to promote Microsoft’s ecosystem (which includes both Xbox X and Xbox Series X). However, that statement is not that accurate. For instance, Obsidian has stated that the current-gen console hardware restricted it from creating bigger worlds in The Outer Worlds.
Yes, multi-platform games will look better on the PC because the PC has… wait for it… better hardware. However, this does not mean that cross-gen games are not held back by current-gen consoles. I mean, seriously… take a look at what happened with Crysis 2. Go ahead and tell me that consoles did not hold back this game. Crytek went out of its way and literally designed the game so it could run on consoles. So no, “held back” is not a meme.
It will be interesting to see how all cross-gen games look, and whether the truly next-gen games will look better.
Hint: they will look better, we all know that.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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