Activision and the abandonment of PC gaming

Eliminating the Blizzard side of Activision\Blizzard leaves a barren desolate wasteland of half-baked console ports limping their way to PC. The recent news of the exclusion of PC from the public multiplayer beta of Call Of Duty:Elite is one more slap in the face to PC gamers at time where the rest of the industry find innovation everywhere on the platform.

Full Disclosure: I full on hate Activision due to recent profit-mongering and closures of veteran studios that underperformed over a short period of time. They are the best example of the “selling soap” method of corporate management and while I truly respect the ability of the executive team to squeeze ROI for stockholders, the company has a historical reputation of milking IP and then abandoning it.

PC is my platform of choice for FPS. The tight response control given by a mouse and keyboard is vastly superior to even the finest of console games. Generally, PC games offer higher resolutions, better textures and fine-grain control over feature sets to allow the user to manage their experience to the best of their hardware.

Activision will have none of that.

Over the last two years, every non-Blizzard Activision PC game I have purchased (often seduced by the lure of a steam sale) has been a middling mess at best. The most recent examples are as follows:

“I don't have to take this abuse from you, I've got hundreds of people dying to abuse me”-Ghostbusters (PC)
Written by Dan Arkroyd and Harold Ramis, Ghostbusters was perhaps the last best hope of a true sequel to the two original films. Set in the early 90’s and voiced by the original cast, the game sets the player as a new hire joining Ghostbusters at a time where the team is celebrated, successful and overworked. Stymied by false endings and un-even pacing, Ghostbusters successfully rekindles some nostalgia for the films but is an average game at best. It is an unqualified disaster on PC.

Like my earlier experiences with Bioshock 2, Ghostbusters is a resource sucking pig, engineered to leverage the closed architecture of the Xbox 360. Designed specifically to stream processes through a high cpu, low memory, low GPU console, Ghostbusters has no apparent optimizing for PC architecture.

Quick catchup on the specs of the Xbox 360:

The Xbox 360 has a tri core custom PowerPc CPU named Xenon. While the most current console has a smaller cpu die at 45 nm, the actual architecture of the chip has not changed since 2005.

The 3 cores run at 3.2 GHz, with 1 MB L2 cache, 512 MB of 700 MHz DDR3 RAM and the Xenos graphics card. ATI designed the Xenos with a 500MHz GPU and 10 MB of eDRAM, making it the semi-equivalent of the ATI X1900 series architecture and even included aspects of the later HD 3000 series.

PC specs for Ghostbusters (via Steam)
System Requirements Minimum:
OS: Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista 32-bit and 64-bit
Processor: Intel® Core™2 Duo E4300 or AMD Athlon X2 +3800 *
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: ATI Radeon X1800-series 512MB, Intel G45 Express Chipset, NVIDIA GeForce 8400 512MB **
DirectX®:
Hard Drive: 9 GB free hard disk space
Sound: DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card

* Dual core processors, such as the Intel Pentium D 805, are not supported
** Video cards that have only 256MB of RAM are not supported

Recommended:
OS: Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista
Processor: Intel® Core™2 Duo E8400 or equivalent
Memory: 4 GB System RAM
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 4800 series, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 series or higher video card

Missing from the PC specs are actual numbers attached to processor speed. Top heavy on CPU power with relatively low GPU requirements, the minimum CPU is a 1.8 GHZ Core2Duo E4300, 2 M cache running at 800 FSB tied to a 512 MB X1800/8400 era video card. The recommended specs are a E8400 3 Ghz Core2Duo 6 MB cache running at 1333 FSB tied to a 4850/260 era video card.

As a comparison, the visually striking Batman: Arkham Asylum, a physics-heavy Direct X 9 game released in the same year running on Unreal rather than the Infernal engine used in Ghostbusters has the following specs.

System Requirements OS: Vista/XP
Processor: 3Ghz Intel or AMD or any Dual Core
Memory: 1GB Ram(XP)/2GB Ram
Graphics: PCI Express SM3 NVidia 6600/ ATI 1300
DirectX®: 9
Hard Drive: 8GB free space
Sound: Any onboard sound card
Other Requirements: Online play requires log-in to Games For Windows – Live

Both games are third person action/adventures with heavy physics and A.I., and multiple characters onscreen simultaneously. Ghostbusters also has a large amount of particle effects in use particularly with the various proton streams and on the ghosts themselves.

Notably, AA has far lower system requirements.

Initially I ran Ghostbusters on an E2600 1.8 Ghz dual-core 1M cache and 800 FSB paired with an ATI HD3850 and 6 GB of DDR2 RAM. Unable to get the game to run at native 1440 x 900 initially, I disabled antialiasing and anisotropic filtering as well as all post-lighting and texture effects and set the details to medium.

Jaggy with a frame rate stuttering around 20 FPS, the level of detail in the proton pack is astounding, but the environment and character textures are lacking.

I recently upgraded both CPU and GPU, now running an E5700 3.0 Ghz dual-core 2 M cache 800 FSB and an HD5770 1 GB video card. Even with specs at or exceeding the recommended I was still unable to run GB higher than 1440x900 (despite the monitor now at native 1680 x 1050) without antialiasing . I was able to up the detail settings to high and enable some effects, but never broke 30 FPS while finishing the game.

I was able to capture constant 100% cpu usage on both cores, with virtually no usage of the video card’s texture memory or gpu cycles. The most obvious conclusion is a game designed for a processor heavy system that streams graphics data through the video processor constantly has virtually no optimization coded to off-load physics calculations or rendering to the GPU.



Strangely, the much more highly regarded and visually striking AA performed magnificently.

Using the most current setup, I ran AA at 1680X1050, settings at max, all effects enabled, with 16x Anisotropic and 4X MSAA.

Granted AA has a far lower recommended CPU and GPU, however, unlike GB, the CPU requirement is not grossly out of line with the GPU. In real-world testing, CPU and GPU as well as their respective memory and cache were burdened, leaving the impression those processing threads that would normally be CPU dependant in the 360 version, are now parsed out to the GPU as appropriate.

This has been a valuable lesson not only in what can be gleaned from system specs regarding coding ethic, but the turn in experience expectation. The great joy of PC gaming is the ability of the user to tune their system so while it may not quite meet minimum specs, every last bit of processing power can be adjusted and brought to bear. While the experience can became more aesthetically pleasing with more power, traditionally the experience is still available. In the case of GB, this is no longer the case. Armed with code optimized for a closed resource loop and no time or willingness to optimize for open hardware specs, the PC gaming experience in this case is deeply flawed.

Next: Wolfenstein