In an article about the influences of console games on the development of DX10 PC based video games PC News interviews Mark Rein - CEO of Epic Games and he had some interesting things to say - read more!

Mark doesn't expect developers to try to get the most out of PC-hardware with DirectX 10 games, according to him developers will mainly focus their developing efforts on console-games.

The ever increasing differences between high-end and low-end PCs is a part of the problem because this results in hugely different Window performance ratings. This makes the Windows a less economically viable platform for High-end PC games. The coming years will be booming years for the console industry according to mr. Rein. Developers will invest in console-games because they will provide the biggest net-return.

Rein thinks that only some developers will make use of DirectX 10 capabilities for their PC games which will hardly provide improvements over console-visuals. Rein predicts that during the next 5 years, PC games will be nothing more than slightly polished versions of their console counterparts. The difference will be found in the higher PC-monitor resolution, higher frame-rates and enhanced special effects. Epic Games is doing exactly that with the upcoming PC-version of Gears of War that is scheduled for release late 2007. I myself have actually played the Gears of Wars PC-demo on my Vista PC running on a 3.4Ghz Intel P4 CPU and 6600GTS Nvidia card and a Vista Windows Rating of 4.6 and I was only able to play the game at 640x480 at the lowest graphical quality, whereas the game is unplayable when I increase the graphics-settings comparable to a Xbox 360 high-def resolution. My system is quite adequate for regular computer tasks, encoding video, media center stuff, emulation stuff, retro-gaming but not for playing the latest PC games.

The difference between Xbox and Xbox 360 on a regular TV set are very hard to notice - some games even seem to run better on the old system. A good example is Need for speed most wanted that runs smooth on the old box but the 360 incarnation suffers from stuttering and inconsistent frame-rates. Only when you connect the next-gen consoles to a high-def output the differences become clear. According to Mark Rein only the future successors of the current consoles will be able to significantly enhance the graphical capabilities in such a way that it is very obvious to the untrained eye.

Source: PC News