Cross-platform gaming: from simple ports to the Gates of Oblivion
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3The highly anticipated third part to The Elder Scrolls series, Oblivion was released in March 2006 and marked some major changes in this first-person action role-playing game franchise. Eighteen months ago, it was a technological tour de force: as a testament to this, many hardware review sites still use Oblivion as one of the benchmarks to measure graphics card performance. With Oblivion, the Elder Scrolls series also stepped into the highly contested world of console RPGs, as it was developed and released simultaneously for the PC and Xbox 360. Oblivion is a pioneer in using modern procedurally created content, including proprietary tools made in-house by developer Bethesda, and SpeedTree technology licensed for creating the game's forests. These tools had two functions - they saved a tremendous amount of work for graphics artists, and overcame the console platform's memory limitation by generating content on the fly instead of having to keep it in memory.
 PS3 version Unlike the two ported games discussed previously in this article, Oblivion is a true cross-platform game - this shows in the interface, which looks almost identical between the PC and Xbox 360 versions, yet is suitable for both platforms. The reason we include Oblivion in this article is the fact that it was ported and released one year after initial launch - for the PlayStation 3. With a cross-platform framework already in place, the porting should have been easy - let's find what the result is like, look at the differences and value proposition between the different versions, and see where this might lead cross-platform development. At the time of its original release in 2006, Oblivion's steep hardware requirements turned a lot of heads. The gaming press and public alike were wowed by the Xbox 360 version's performance and image quality, and disappointed in its performance on midrange gaming PCs. This mostly stemmed from two sources: a lack of graphics card driver optimization on the PC, and superb optimization of the Xbox 360 version. Additionally, the Xbox 360 version was able to render the game in high dynamic range lighting, and apply anti-aliasing on top of that, while PC graphics cards at the time had to choose between the two (at least officially, due to Oblivion's HDR implementation).
PC gamers had the option to use much more detailed textures and models, as well as higher-quality shadows than available on the Xbox 360, but relatively few had the top-of-the-line graphics cards necessary to run the game at good frame rates with those settings. The value proposition seemed to be firmly in Xbox 360's corner. Now, 18 months later, that value proposition has changed, and there is another platform to consider.  The Orc character is modeled and textured very similarly on the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions; the main difference is in his procedurally generated facial features (PS3 version here). Oblivion is still a demanding game for almost any PC, but component prices have dropped, and a new generation of video cards has appeared to chew through Oblivion's graphics with ease on maximum details and massive resolutions. Time has brought some perspective on Xbox 360's performance as well. Newer PC video cards can do HDR and AA simultaneously in Oblivion (in fact, ATI's X1900 cards managed to do this more than a year ago after a driver hotfix), and when compared to screens rendered by the Xbox 360, we see that the console's anti-aliasing is primitive in comparison.
The Xbox 360 version suffers from occasional frame rate drops, where the console's hardware is taxed too much, which the player can do nothing about. The PC version has a variety of quality settings the player can use to keep the gameplay fluid and immersive, and the PC can be upgraded with a faster video card - with an cont..
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