Kaldaien

I intend to buy the XBOX 360 version because I have not upgraded my primary gaming machine in almost two years and because I have a nice 30” SONY Super Fine Pitch HDTV in my bedroom. That picture on that TV is absolutely gorgeous, it rivals the picture on the professional 21” SONY monitor I use for work, which cost > $1,200. I do not know whether Oblivion will run at 720p natively and upscale to 1080 or if it will actually be able to run at 1080; if it will run at 1080, that gives HDTVs a 100k+ pixel (16:9 1080 resolutions have more than 2 million pixels) advantage over the 1600x1200 resolution the PC zealots keep harping about.

The argument that PC hardware is more powerful than the XBOX 360 is simply not true. The thing that sets even the latest generation PC hardware and the XBOX 360 hardware apart and makes the difference in this game is the unified shader architecture. Where this really begins to shine is in games that use stencil shadows – stencil shadows require a significant deal of vertex processing and vertex pipelines have taken a backseat to pixel pipelines in modern PC GPUs. The XBOX 360 GPU has a huge advantage in that it can dedicate as much of the GPU to vertex processing as any individual frame requires to render. PC hardware, on the other hand, may have 24 pixel pipelines and only 8 vertex – a pipeline is only as fast as its slowest link. If the vertex pipeline is stalling, those 24 pixel pipelines will never be fully utilized, because you cannot raster polygons until their vertex data has been computed.

I will admit that Quake 4 looks and runs better on the PC, but that is because the Doom 3 engine uses a ShaderModel 1.2 (GeForce 3)/2.0(Radeon 9700/GeForce 5xxx) architecture. Moreover, GeForce 5xxx+ hardware was designed with provisions for Doom 3 (the ability to omit Z values in the pixel pipeline, allowing it to process more pixels at one time in Doom 3); ATI hardware (PC and XBOX 360) does not have support for this feature. A game designed for Shader Model 3.0, particularly on hardware that does branch prediction well (and the XBOX 360 does it best right now) can throw out pixels that the engine determines do not need to be processed – which can be a LOT in a game that uses dynamic lighting and shadowing heavily.

I program a PC-based 3D engine for a living, but I have to give props to the XBOX 360 hardware for Oblivion at this time. I know – better than most – that PC GPUs will advance beyond the 360’s in a matter of years, but right now the 360 offers the most bang for your buck. I have a giant 21” monitor on my desk and I run it at 2048x1536 for everything, but I feel the best Oblivion experience will come from a nice wide 16:9 HDTV and a game pad from the comfort of my couch/bed.