Say What? Average PC Cannot Handle EA's Ignite Engine

[jack1982]

Luckily EA either ruined or cancelled every game of theirs that I was interested in, so I don't care what they say or do now.

 

[lunix]

We're talking EA sports games, right? So who cares?

 

[Taintedskittles]

tbh I could care less about the game, big "but" here, but the average gamer has a more powerful PC compared to the average PC user. You see steam survey data & quad core is just becoming the norm now. But what it doesn't say in those steam surveys is who's a gamer & who just owns 1 or 2 games with low req. This is just them saying their profits aren't high enough with today's PC market to justify it yet. Also I bet everyone on this website knows their PC spec's far exceed the new consoles.

 

[DRosencraft]

This does sound about right to me. Remember, most of the world of PCs aren't directed towards gaming, and those who are gamers have a varied set of tech. To make the best game possible, you want to take advantage of the components as much as possible. If you sit down with a very select hardware list and program to that, you'll get better consistency and quality than trying to design the software to respond to anything it's thrown at. That's all that this sounds like to me. It may be true they're using it as an excuse to not work on a PC version or whatever, but it's a valid excuse in this case.

 

[tomc100]

This is the same bullcrap excuse that LucasArts used for The Force Unleashed. When sales on the consoles were exhausted the game eventually made its way to the pc and the graphics suck. It wasn't even dx10.

 

[totoroty]

No wonder even the 5650M with i5-430M can run FIFA 13 smoothly at 1080p, high detail, 4x MSAA...
It must be so hard on the hardware level on PC.

My god, people aren't stupid enough to believe EA's shit... Cutting costs on development is enough of a reason... don't bother to mask it. Especially your PR department cannot mask for shit.

 

[ilikegirls]

As much as I would like to rage about EA as the next guy, this can be explained very simply,

It's a business decision that is claimed to be made due to technical limitations.

Plain and Simple.

 

[ram1009]

If a gaming system OS designed almost 10 years ago was more advanced than the (then) current PC OS why wasn't the same technology applied to the PC OS?

 

[jackbling]

It's late in the comments, but i hope people realize they dev for directx, not each individual gpu; to state that the average pc cannot run the engine is misleading, since the average "gaming" pc can crush any console......most console games are 720@30fps.

 

[hardcore_player]

consoles are made for people that can't afford a decent PC hardware , and consoles are optimized only for gaming purposes , a PS4 simply is a downgraded version of an 8 core AMD CPU and a lower clocked HD7870 GPU , now if you complain and say its way better than some IGNORANTS said before well , gddr5 ram its good for transferring large amount of data but DDR3 is faster because of its low latency in tranfering small amount of data Timings for GDDR5 would seems incredebly slow in relation to DDR3 and neither of them have any BIG impact on gaming performance the CPU does the calculations and the gpu does the rendering
so any midrange rig can handle most next gen games well , say i5 and a 7870 .

 

[billgatez]

lol at all the angst up in here.

There's one clear advantage the consoles have that you will not find in any PC, and that's a combination of fast access to unified-memory with a decent powered GPU.

Independent purpose built memory will always be better then one unified pool. Consoles makers just like to use a single memory pool because it's cheaper.
Also DDR3 memory is faster then GDDR5. GDDR5 memory just has more bandwidth.

So, if their engine depends on lots of GPU compute, that could be the reason it'll run poorly on PCs. Because APU-based PCs have a weak GPU and graphics cards have nowhere near the bandwidth to the CPU that the consoles do. Even over x16 PCIe 3.0.

You do know that no video card not even dual GPU cards can saturate a PCI-E 16x slot right? And that the CPU and GPU in an APU are linked via a internal PCI-E lanes.

 

[quotas47]

What do they consider a "Mainstream PC" for the purpose of this comparison? I really want to know, if anyone here has a hunch.
This descriptor has to follow the "Lion's share of PCs on the market" comment as well.
Please reply and guess what EA means by this.

I would also like to say, that the "Lion's share" of computers and the "mainstream" systems are most likely owned by users who don't intend to play these games. One of the first questions thrown around when a consumer expresses interest in buying a computer is "what are you going to do with it?"

This is reinforced by retail staff who frequently gain notice in their businesses by upselling systems and value. Those who intend to purchase for gaming, purchase for gaming. EA should have no problem writing a game to work with "above mainstream" systems, and shouldn't even worry about a system below what EA intends its game to run on.

It's what the system requirements label is for.

 

[bluekoala]

Console optimization is BS IMO. I don't think they actually make the hardware perform a lot better. Maybe marginally. I think the effects, draw distance etc are being scaled back so that it actually performs somewhat well.

I also think that the argument that PC's have so many different configs is all BS. There are standards that manufacturers are responsible for meeting and if your game is standard compliant there should be no issues. The fact that their games are shitty on PC is because there are bugs they are not fixing. Blaming it on the platform is not only irresponsible, but also dishonest. They may be fooling the fisher price crowd, but people who have the least bit of intelligence can see right through EA's BS.

Fix your shitty games, for the price your'e asking for them, it's the least you can do.

 

[Mike Honcho]

This is EA's way of saying, "We don't feel that taking the time to develop a proper PC version will be worth our money."

 

[michael ninja]

Microsoft has really missed the boat here.
One of the biggest "advantages" of Windows 8 was that it runs on the same PCs that used Windows 7, and for that matter, Windows Vista.
Windows Vista is 8 years old.
So, the PCs of the world today... have no drive to update beyond an 8 year old machine.
Give us a reason to upgrade. Make the user experience AWESOME!
Make us WANT to buy a new machine.
My computer is faster/better than PS4 and XBoxONE - and those aren't even released yet.
So why doesn't everyone upgrade like I (we) do?
No need to. Microsoft hasn't given anyone a reason to.
Make a user environment that actually requires the compute power of the day... and we will be blown away by it. People will want to upgrade.

 

[none12345]

While i rag on EA a lot, they are technically right. The average PC cant game, this is a fact. The average pc just has a worthless intel integrated graphics chip.

It would be just as accurate to for them to say, they arent going to put the engine on the ps4/xbox1 because the vast majority of consoles cant run the engine. That is also a true statment, the xbo360, wii, ps3, ps2, etc, etc cant run it.

To compare apples to apples, we need to compare a gaming pc built this year, with the ps4/xbox one. And a midrange graphics bought today, along with a midrange or lower cpu bought today, then it should have no problem running the engine.

So, while technically a true statement, i think its quite disingenuous.

 

[Gabriel Rompf]

They should make it so that the averege pc can play a game at low specs and the powerful Oc can play it at ultra specs. That way the whole market is satisifed. Or if its not to much trouble develope the game in two sepearte engines, one for low spec pc´s and one for high spec pc´s. That way they could reach the whole gaming market.

 

[jdwii]

EA is a POS company that can't understand anything and that is why their rated so bad. they ruined sim city for me a game with such a high name, NFS is always a Hit or miss and i can care less about any other shooter they make sense i'm not into those games much.

 

[bit_user]

There's one clear advantage the consoles have that you will not find in any PC, and that's a combination of fast access to unified-memory with a decent powered GPU.

Independent purpose built memory will always be better then one unified pool. Consoles makers just like to use a single memory pool because it's cheaper.

Like anything, it depends on what you're doing. If the GPU and CPU are both just using the memory as private working space, then you'd be right. But unified memory means the CPU can update the scene gemetry and the GPU can potentially read it in-place. Similarly, the CPU can offload some computation to the GPU and avoid copying the data back and forth across the bus.

Also DDR3 memory is faster then GDDR5. GDDR5 memory just has more bandwidth.

At this point, I should just run away, screaming.

So, if their engine depends on lots of GPU compute, that could be the reason it'll run poorly on PCs. Because APU-based PCs have a weak GPU and graphics cards have nowhere near the bandwidth to the CPU that the consoles do. Even over x16 PCIe 3.0.

You do know that no video card not even dual GPU cards can saturate a PCI-E 16x slot right?

It's not a bottleneck in conventional games, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about their next gen engine, which is tuned to next gen console hardware. I just pointed out what's technically different about those consoles and offered a plausible technical explenataion for why games tuned for them could actually run worse on PCs with even faster CPUs and GPUs.

Of course, we're all just speculating. But, if you take what they said at face value, I haven't seen any better technical explanation for it.

 

[Thorfkin]

EA most likely has a different definition of "average PC" than most PC gamers. Any PC gamer will have a moderate to good CPU and a discreet graphics card in the upper range of the recent generation cards from AMD or nVidia. But gamer oriented PC's most likely only represent a small percentage of the PC market when you include all of the netbooks and entry level PCs running barely functional Intel graphics. I get the impression EA looks at the entire PC market rather than just the gamers who'll be buying their games.

E.G. they look at the stats for the overall PC market and say "Only 10% of PCs have the ability to run our engine so the PC market isn't ready for it yet". If they limited their consideration to just gamer equipped PCs, I'll wager they'd find most of them are more-than-able to run their game engine just fine.

 

[v90k]

EA secret DRM strategy: Consoles are better than PCs.

 

[cscott_it]

I'm a little tardy to the party but http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
I'm not going to mashup facts, but the most common configurations are a little underwhelming.

 

[Zijn]

*sniff sniff*... can you smell the BS?

 

[quotas47]

What do they consider a "Mainstream PC" for the purpose of this comparison? I really want to know, if anyone here has a hunch.
This descriptor has to follow the "Lion's share of PCs on the market" comment as well.
Please reply and guess what EA means by this.

I would also like to say, that the "Lion's share" of computers and the "mainstream" systems are most likely owned by users who don't intend to play these games. One of the first questions thrown around when a consumer expresses interest in buying a computer is "what are you going to do with it?"

This is reinforced by retail staff who frequently gain notice in their businesses by upselling systems and value. Those who intend to purchase for gaming, purchase for gaming. EA should have no problem writing a game to work with "above mainstream" systems, and shouldn't even worry about a system below what EA intends its game to run on.

It's what the system requirements label is for.

 

[Fulgurant]

i understand what they're trying to say actually. the number of pc gamers is a niche of all pc's out there.

but that's where the logic ends. they're including people that don't even play games on their pc's. i'm sure the average pc gamer that has 20+ legitimately purchased games can run your crappy games. basically, if they're willing to purchase games, they probably are willing to buy some decent parts.

Spot on. The average PC isn't relevant if the average PC user isn't part of the gaming market to begin with. If EA feels that it wouldn't be profitable (or profitable enough) to port certain of their games to the PC, then that's fine; EA should just say that. But lately it seems like EA's on a bit of a misinformation campaign, aimed for whatever reason at smearing PC gaming in general.

I guess it's just an attempt to pump up the hype about the new consoles, at the PC's expense. As if the console market needed any more hype.