Today’s PC’s have powerful video cards; very powerful when compared to the current console versions out and about. So why is it that PC games don’t blow the consoles graphics out of the water? Unfortunately some of today’s game developers, make their games for the console; then just port them to work on the PC, not taking advantage of any of the newer technologies available on the PC side of things. But even those titles that are developed with the PC in mind might not be able to deliver what the video card is actually capable of, because of the limitations of DirectX. If game developers are given direct access to the video card instead of interfacing with it through DirectX, they can innovate and do things not possible before. One might ask why Microsoft isn’t stepping up to the plate with DirectX to offer all the next killer features. Maybe it’s because Microsoft isn’t developing the games, so they don’t know exactly what the game developers want; and when the game developers do give them feedback it might take a while before they even see it as a usable feature in DirectX, not to mention your video card would need to have support for it. Now all this could change if a video game developer who knew what they were doing, got direct access to the hardware, to make all the nice new eye “candy” for us all to enjoy; and  then the PC gamers will defiantly have a big advantage over their console brethren.

But one con to this method would be compatibility issues. Because there are so many video cards out in production, and many different manufactures; they might not all just work as excepted. This is where DirectX shines, since it is the one that handles all the compatibility issues, so the game developer can just focus on making the game. But because of this compatibility layer, there is a performance hit as a result.

With that being said, today’s games are sill amazing. But glad to see that the future will probably bring more innovation in this field, to give us all better performance with the same hardware. To see an in depth explanation for all this see: [ www.bit-tech.net ] it’s quite a nice article.