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Saboteur doesn't play well with ATI graphics cards

EA's Saboteur (a Pandemic Studio title) seems to have some serious problems when run on Windows 7/Vista machines kitted out with ATI graphics cards.
Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Contributing Writer

EA's Saboteur (a Pandemic Studio title) seems to have some serious problems when run on Windows 7/Vista machines kitted out with ATI graphics cards.

It seems like a pretty serious bug too. Over on EA's support forum for the game it seems like the vast majority of gamers using ATI cards find the game locking up immediately following the title screen. That's a pretty big bug, and I find it very hard to see how it was overlooked during testing.

Note: The game seems to run fine on NVIDIA-based PCs.

Two issues are at work here. First, game studios now look at games consoles as the primary platform and PCs as secondary. There are a number of reasons for this, but primarily it's down to piracy and the fact that consoles are much easier to develop for. Secondly, it's a matter of deadlines. Games sell over the holiday period, and that means that the game has to be finished by around September. If it's not the studio has one of two options - release late, or release it as it is and hope/pray that users will be happy waiting for bug fix patches to be developed.

Now, for console makers this is all great news and serves as a reminder to us all as to why we should be gaming on consoles rather than PCs (yeah ... riiight). But there are a lot of hardware players (in particular Intel, AMD, ATI, NVIDIA) who stand to lose big bucks if they allow gaming on the PC too wither and die. After all, without the high-end, crazy-spending hardcore gamers out there (and there are a lot of them, each spending a lot of dough on hardware), these companies can effectively kiss goodbye to a cash cow that high-end hardware is. Bugs such as this one show that hardware vendors need to work closer with game studios to make sure that the games and the hardware play nicely together.

Also, you console gamers shouldn't look so smug. As consoles are hooked up the the internet, studios can adopt the same sort of lax "sell now, patch later" attitude to console games too. Unless something changes, your gaming experience will suck pretty soon too.

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