I was having a wander in town yesterday, and stumbled across a 360 in Game running Oblivion. Now on account of the 360 being considerably more powerful than my PC (3500+ Venice, 1gb PC3200, GF6800GT) I was expecting some impressive visuals and decent frame rates. To my horror I found quite the opposite- fuzzy, low detail visuals, chronically short draw distances, choppy rame rates and appaling load times. I can appreciate that some of the fuzziness is due to the screen (a 30 inch standard definition lcd), but the other aspects would still hold true. I would certainly say that both looks and runs worse than my PC. Combine that with a pad with too few buttons and it was a bit of a nightmare. I thought the 360 was supposed to be some all singing, all dancing beauty contest?
Whats worse is they limited the graphics settings on the PC version so the 360 owners didn't feel they were missing out. No ultra high settings that no one has a hope in hell of running for a year or so like they did with doom 3. Thats the advantage of the PC, you can make the grpahics better than anyone can play, and wait for the hardware to catch up so the game doesn't look so dated in a year or so.
To be honest, anyone with half a brain and a few hours to spare can already increase the visuals by in a fairly big way. Get a 2048x2048 texture pack(originals are 512x512) for outdoors, get the weapon and armour packs, get the tweaks that let you increase view distance enough so that you can see from one end of the map to the other. Theres lots you can do, and in modding terms the games just out, in 6 months time the game for PC will look amazing compared to how it did upon release.
