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Gamers Drive High-End PC Market
TibbonZero writes "CNN reports that "Gamers drive souped-up PC market". They talk about the cost of high end computers, as well as their place in the PC Market. For some reason I thought it was playing solitaire that drove us to buy a Geforce 4 ti 4600..."
I had to buy a new video card to play this game. My VooDoo 3 wasn't cutting it anymore....
There is a war going on for your mind.
I mean, cmon, we need 1 gb of ram, a 128 meg vid card, and 2800 mhz P4 for winbloz xp right?
Theonlyuse of monkeys is to testthings onthem.Some peoplemay say"Hey That'scruel!"and myresponse is"I don't like monkeys
It isn't gamers directly -- it's John Carmack, et all, over at id Software who drive the high-end PC market; gamers have to buy the latest and greatest card just to be able to run the next id game. (Doom 3 is going to be HUGE, but it's going to require a beast of a computer to run.)
CNN reports that "Gamers drive souped-up PC market". Good job CNN.
Capt'n Obvious strikes again.
Capitalism: unequal distribution of wealth
Socialism: equal distribution of poverty
It's not necessarily the gamers that drive the market, its the system requirements for games coming out. The target platform/system specs for the next generation of games keeps rising, forcing gamers to upgrade, else they're left out in the cold.
Do you think that they're designing Doom 3 to run on a pentium 2?
pr0n and gamers have always driven the home market.
NEXT!!! *grin*
DUH!
In other news, audiophiles drive the high-end speaker market too!
Christ, I bought my new ATI card just to get shiny water in Morrowind... that's actually kind of pathetic, now that I think about it.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Well, yeah. I will officially give up computing when I need a two gigahertz P4 and a $500 video card to do a Word mail-merge...
What a bunch of weenies. Games, games and more games. This is EXACTLY why politicians can ram shitty laws down our throats. You losers are too busy playing games to vote. Tell the TRUTH, when was that last time, if ever, you voted?
... Right next to "oxygen is necessary to sustain human life" and "enough beer makes ugly people attractive."
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
If you read the article, it's really more of a fluff piece about people who build custom souped up computers that have neon lights and look like battle ships. More of a fringe market, as opposed to the consumers and businesses that actually drive the high end computer market.
Kind of like the people eternally tinker with their cars, adding chrome trim to every possible part in an automobile. Interesting subculture, but not one that really has much of an impact on Toyota or Nissan.
- Aseh
that maybe... but it's the fat DSL pipe and proliferation of pr0n that made me buy a 23" apple cinema display.
playing my PS2.
I still have a old Apple ][+. But pong doesn't have much for hardware requirement.
WhatMeWorry!
CNN reports that street racers drive the market for souped-up stock cars and aftermarket performance boosters.
I've heard a lot of good things about Falcon NW building solid gaming PCs, but I feel bad for people who have to pay their hugely inflated prices from something most avid computer people can do on their own; build a PC.
-- Scientist: You aren't going to leave me here, are you? Boagh! Thump...
In a related story, most people who buy ink-jet printers use them to create hard copies of their electronic documents.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
If you're playing multiplayer games a highend system is defintely a requirement. If you can't react as quickly as your opponent you're dead. This is espically true for FPS, but also goes into mmorpg's and the like where the person with the least amount of graphics lag/etc wins. People will take any little advantage they can get, from the fastest video cards/systems, to the best links. This isn't much of a suprise.
require a 10Ghz system with a 600 gb array?? *grin*
Early Adopters a/k/a Joe 6-Packs are the bread & butter of the high-end market. I'm sure many /.ers have dealt with this type who only need to run IE and Solitaire yet are buying new systems every six months because "this one gives me more megahertz".
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Must be a really slow day to publish this kind of rhetoric for /. and CNN
From the article: "Games certainly are the most demanding (on computers), short of decoding the human genome," said Michael Gartenberg, research director at Jupiter Research.
Hey, this should make the feature list for Quake 7! Frag your opponents, then analyze their gibs in realtime for the likelihood of having developed genetic disorders (had they lived, of course).
I thought I bought a $200 graphics card to run eXcell!
Seriously though, I think that this is one of the big issues keeping Linux from multiplying rapidly on the desktop or at home. I mean it's great that Linux can interoperate with disk shares and do all the backend net service stuff like DNS, LDAP, etc. But that doesn't make my friends want to migrate to it. Where are our games? NWN has clued in, now if only Star Wars Galaxies, UO, DAOC, and EverQuest would figure it out!
-Runz
Bush's comment about the way to prevent forest fires is to cut down the trees. [doh]
It was reported today by reuters that most of the reported news is written by news reporters. Asked why this was not obvious, one news reporter replied "I haven't read the report".
The study also mentions that most newspapers are read by subscribers, and those that purchase newspapers at the news stand. Secondary causes of newspaper reading included finding a rumpled one on the train, and stealing an extra one when someone else purchased one from a machine.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
The specs on Kevin Atkison's latest computer could just as easily be for some newfangled street cruiser: Blue neon light tubes, Corsair XMS 3200 DDR memory and a GeForce 3 video card, all wrapped in a shiny aluminum Lian Li case with a clear plastic side window for easy viewing.
I guess my grandma is writing for CNN now...
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
laff...
Of iMacs...when some people I know bought them just because of how they looked, not because of what the computers were actually like. I don't see why anyone would need blue neon lights and a clear case like that...
Also, unlike fancy looking cars, fancy looking computers don't get you women.
Here I was thinking that people upgraded their PCs to run the latest version of Windows. :)
Having an uberpimped machine will give you superior frame rates and all that kind of stuff.. But it also gives you a huge geek factor at lan parties.. If you ask me, that's also worth the price. :)
I'm sure these guys use some monster systems. You can't just sit around for a half hour while you build the latest kernel.
Four Words:
Type R Factory Option
OK, so three words and a letter....
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Several software genres besides games push the technology envelope. Computation heavy imaging apps or other number crunchers crave processing power in the form of CPU/GPU or both. The reason gaming as a genre forces the issue is that there are more gamers buying hardware than imaging geeks. This tidal wave of demand forces the technology to keep up. Companies see a demand as cash and rightfully so.
However, should number crunching apps that break crypto or 3-D modellers for cyberworlds become more popular than say games like doom3, you could rightfully say that it was the hackers and artists driving the advent of technology, not the gamers.
You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.
quote /quote
i went to school in north carolina... and i thought it was a smart state...they took 15,000 to fund a study to find out why prisoners wanted to escape from prison. Don't you think for 500 dollars they could've asked anyone of us.
but in this case, someone just wasted their time stating the obvious
my last sig was too controversial... now, a new and improved useless sig!
Here I thought it was the guys trying to get their Kernel Compile down under a minute (Rumor has it some guys at IBM can do one in under 30 seconds now...)
I just went and played Little Blue Men for the first time. Of course that one's a little older - its three years old. I don't think it would run on anything less than an XT with 64K of RAM. Yeah, that's not really a fair comparison.
I suppose I should talk about a more modern game, like All Roads. Oh wait - that one has about the same memory requirements. I guess nothing has changed in three years.
If what you were looking for in games was imagination and inspiration, then you wouldn't need a new machine for it. Obviously that's not what is desired - people want better and better graphics. The gamers drive the game market.
If this were not the case, then gamers would not buy faster computers, or better graphics cards. They would simply play the games that worked on their system, content to settle for fun instead of pretty and fun. After all, its not like there is a shortage of games, no matter how old your system is (and the examples I gave are case in point).
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Hah! You must mean Linux! You think you can install RedHat 7.x on a Pentium 166 with 16MB of RAM? Hah!
The f--ing box even says, 500MHz, 160MB RAM, 2GB HD, etc etc preferred for X desktop install
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
The sky is blue, the water is wet and women lie.
Everybody has a purpose in life, maybe mine is to lurk in slashdot.
I just needed a cheaper solution for keeping my apartment warm. Instead of running the heat now...I just put GeForce Vid cards and Athlon XPs in my computers and let the BTU's fly out and keep my apt. warm.
Now if I could just find a way to turn the things into Air Conditioners.
Honesty may be the best policy, but apparently by elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
I've got a GeForce2 MX200. Sure it's a crappy card, but Quake 3, Counter-strike and a lot of others have a more than acceptable performance, around 72fps. (Most other games goes around 60~80fps).
But NWN does a mere 20fps on that card. Very frustrating.
Shhhh! My parents think you need a high-end PC for studying computer science (hah!) and duly support me buying one, you're costing me real money here!
Hey, I needed a Pentium IV at 2.0GHz just to be able to get KDE 3's file browser to display my MP3 directory in under a minute.
And if there were truth in advertising, it wouldn't be called Ximian Evolution. Instead, it would be called Ximian Continental Drift.
www.glowingplate.com/dissent
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I recently loaded NWN and was forced to download the latest SP for Windows before I could play. Yeesh. Overall, it is a symbiotic relationship -- the games push the envelope on what is currently possible driving the hardware and software to go further. New hardware and software drives games to again push the envelope on what is now available.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
Rich assholes drive the high end car market
screw AC.. mod me down..
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
While game designers are using tools like Maya and 3DS MAX to develop more complex models for games, the engines and technologies that are used to power these games are written by entities that have closer connections to the hardware manufacturers. Also, Maya is owned by SGI, which in turn has a huge role in Open GL. "Designed for $os", should actually read, "Designed for DirectX $version"
Does anyone else find it crazy that you can buy both an Xbox/PS2 and a Gamecube for the same price as a GF4 Ti4600 or a Radeon 9700? Talk about the bleeding edge...
You get more FPS on Linux than Windows on identical hardware. Even using WINE. Know what you are talking about.
"Gamers Drive High End PC Market"
But, but, but... what about those adds on shop-at-home TV channels that keep telling me how much faster, better, etc. my dial-up^M^M^M^M^M^M^M web browsing experience will be once I buy their state-of-the-art faster-than-a-speeding-bullet PC?
Are you sure that only "games" will run faster on my new high-end PC but not browsing?!!
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Ask me how shocked I was when my IT group installed a 64MB GeForce 4 card in a coworker's desktop because her old card was bad? All we do here is simple web programming. Talk about overkill, and overspending!?!
If you READ the article, you'd realize it isn't really about the Mhz, the Megabytes and the Refresh rates. It's about the "Hot Rod" appeal. It's about the guys with clear cases, the guys with neon lights, and the guys with flames painted on the sides of their cases. All you would have to do is click the link and see right there in front of you a picture of a clear acrylic computer case. Logic would therefore lead me to believe that the average person tries to get their comment posted to /. before reading the article.
Anyhow, I enjoyed the article. While it wasn't anything new to me, it is a niche culture that has turned their computers into center peices and art. This is the generation that loves the I-Mac, and the same generation where the PC Counterparts want to have cool looking cases too. These are the people keeping Alienware and Thermaltake in business. And while a case fan might be essential, one that has brass grilles and neon lights are not. If you read the article, you'd comment on that, not Mhz and GBs.
How many of you guys are shouting RTFM to the non-geeks that bug you? Maybe we should be shouting RTFA!
My brother built a new computer, and XP REFUSES to work with his whiz-bang 120GB hard drive if he tries to run with NTFS. Strangely enough, FAT32 poses no problems, and Linux and BeOS are fine.
As for the 0 crashes/lockups, I'm honestly not experiencing that. The machine I'm using right now is XP (we're switching over to it at work because the boss decided we weren't wasting enough money yet), and I'm experiencing at least one crash/lockup a day. Plus, the thing seems to have that good ol' Windows 98 lock-up-every-time-you-try-to-shut-down-or-reboot problem. Granted, it's likely a bad driver that is causing the problems and not the OS itself, but then again you'd think the OS would be able to handle errors like these a bit more gracefully. . .
Like all new games it will run best on a beast of a computer. But with Doom 3 Carmack and friends said they made sure you could run it on a low-mid range PC. The only thing is you don't get all the eye-candy turned on.
MMMmmmmmm, eye candy. When Doom3 is released, hopefully nVidia will have their NV30 out to compete with the ATI 9700. (nVidia if you're reading you know you NEED to have the NV30 out when Doom3 comes out)
Peace
-- taking over the world, we are.
...but this was published by CNN, a general media outlet, which makes it an interesting news item. Anytime something that *we* think is priviledged (even obvious) information is reported by major media is significant to some degree. This information may not be obvious to Jane Homemaker who uses her iMac to share photos of the new baby with her parents, or to Joe Schmuck down the street who's still writing socialist manifestoes on his TRS-80. Leave your mom's basement once and a while -- there's a whole world of people out there who are DIFFERENT FROM YOU.
----------
Cheese it! It's the FEDS!
I have heard -- don't recall from where, though -- that EA has future version of it's games already developed, but unreleased because they're waiting for the target hardware to become readily available. (Perhaps this was is an older practice, though.) Certainly, I would think that fast-action video games would be easier to QA on slightly slow hardware.
I think it's actually be the video card manufacturers and the games manufacturers working together -- these to market sectors drive each other, so it would make sense that they ensure their own future viability by working together.
I can spell. I just can't type.
Read some of the articles at Sirlin.net on competitive game design.
The gist is that the best games, although accessible to a wide audience, cater to the gamer by rewarding his time and interest with an even higher level of gameplay.
A game where the boundaries of experience are hard and fast die quickly. Great graphics. Cool storyline. But no replay value. And here we are talking about replay value in terms of multiplayer. The Quakes, Starcrafts, and Street Fighters of the world.
You can see how this is the same with hardware. The more you invest... in tweaking, prodding, learning... the more you can get out of your machine. The better the performance and the more rewarding of the experience. Sure, 99.9% of the population will never do that to their machine... but they will follow where the gamer has gone.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Actualy this was a USEFULL study. Prisoners want to escape, but what triggers them to start acting? If you'd spent some time reading the study instead of just using your little soundbite stupidy you would know that the study examined what triggered their wish/desire into becoming action.
With that information you can reduce/monitor for the stimulus that leads prisoners to act on their desire to escape and reduce the number of prison breaks.
Geforce 4 ti 4600...
;)
Oh please. The GF4 is *SO* three months ago. I mean, the prices are already down to a much more affordable $330 for those 4600s.
Now the big ticket item is the ATI Radeon 9700, as it spanks GF4 performance by almost 30%. It's a steal at only $400, if you can find one!
Talk to me again in a few months and we'll talk about the NV30 chip...
Firstly, let me own up to the same sin in another post
. Now can we get off the "traditional media outlets restate the obvious like some great damn insight -- often giving it an alarming spin" meme?!!! This is slashdot, I'm sure that we're all well aware of the tradional media outlets' tenous grasp of reality. Hell, everyone on the web knows what a great benefactor to mankind Alex Chiu is, but not a damn peep about him on CNN!
I mean, duh! This is a known correlation.
So maybe I'm showing my age here, but a painted red computer case with a great gaping hole in the side and a blue neon light does not inspire me to drool about performance.
I'm much more interested in the specs -- an SMP Alpha or Sparc machine with gigabytes of memory, 64-bit SCSI RAID-5, DVD-RAM for removable storage and a fast pipe to the outside world is much more interesting to me than a single P4 with 512MB memory, IDE hard drive, 56k winmodem and a $2,000 paint+watercool+roundcable job.
Anyway, when I think 'fast computer look' I don't think something that looks like a Pepsi vending machine, I think more along the lines of those old Thinking Machines setups or even just your basic sun4 pizza box.
Damn, I am showing my age. I should have kept my mouth shut.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Likewise, video games can drive computer technology. Though most people have commented on the lack of a business needs preventing the adoption of bleeding edge technology, I think it is more a matter of reliability. After all, if a computer crashes or makes a slight rendering or math mistake in you game, it is not going to affect anything. It is not like making a mistake in a paycheck or bill of lading. The consequences are miniscule. Likewise, if a computer crashes every couple hours in a game, as long as the game is saved, there is little productivity loss. And of course, if the buggy Intel chip were limited to games, as it should have been, we would have not had such a powerful outcry.
We see this with the original Mac. It was a very capable machine. I would spend all day and most of my night on it programming, analyzing business data, and writing. It would not crash, and would not make mistakes. The problem was that graphic technology had not advanced enough to make the machine both reliable and inexpensive. We can absolutely thank gamers for our cheap GUI devices.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
that gamers drove Yugos because they spent all their money on PCs
Water is wet, and water-based ice is cold.
The sky appears blue to most people.
This has been going on for a LONG, long time. I remember a comment years ago (in PC Magazine? can't recall the source) that Wing Commander drove more sales of 486-class machines than any other software of the day.
At least the Media (4th branch of gov) is finally shedding these last bits of falsehood from the general public's mind about computers.
I mean, everybody knows that computers are for playing games, and the internet is for looking at pr0n. Trying to mislead the public into thinking that computers are empowering the public with knowledge and information is just wrong.
I remember playing Solitaire before MS fixed it back in the days of Windows 98 on a P3/733 and when you won the cards jumped so fast you never saw them...the people with the slower hardware were getting the better Solitaire experience. I still wonder if there's an entire of solitaire players out there that don't even know that the cards jump when you win the game.
.
And the first time Wine crashes on you during a game, you'll give up on that shit. Please, God, not the "Wine runs all things windows" flamewar again.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
No, it would be the gamers.
John Carmack doesn't buy a whole lot of computers. Doom 3 doesn't buy ANY computers.
If no one really cared about Doom3, no new hardware would be sold.
It is the gamers that buy the games, then the new hardware to make it run smoother. The consumer drives the market, not other consumed goods.
Restated, computer manufacturers don't build a machine because a game will run on it better, unless a lot of people want to play that game.
More over, the games generally run on what is out today, but they run better on what comes out tomorrow. So it isn't even that to play a game a consumer needs better hardware. It is simply the comfort level of the gamer that dictates the manufacturing of newer, better equipment.
... How does this affect the 2.8 GHz Pentium 4??????
CNN ran out of tapes to scare the American public with.
"A tape aquired by CNN demonstrates that the al Queda have already planted weapons of mass destruction under your bed."
I had Quake III without eye candy running fine on my PII 266 with 256 MB Ram and a GeForce2 MX, in large open rooms with more than a dozen players it would bog down, but other than that it was fine (30+ fps).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
You mean you're not getting the new 3D rendered 1024 polygon phong shaded playing cards with full radiosity?
You poor deprived soul...
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
I ask not be flame you, but to truly ask. I have been racing Go-karts and Cars competitively since I was ten. The Ricers that lower their cars with nothing else done go ahead and shoot them. Those that purchase the coil-over suspension, but on the strut braces, increase the diameter of the sway bars, and finally actually KNOW how to drive, are doing it right.
You mentioned that manufactures are spending millions of dollars working on the design and manufacture of the car. Although, a portion of the money spent in R&D is also spent to cutting cost. This is where the parts that are better for preformance are being tosed with something that will save them $5.00 a car. While 5.00 here and there is not too much money, when you make 1,000,000 cars.... you do the math.
Unfortunately, you will almost NEVER see this on the road as it is way too expensive, and most people are JUST interested in an additional 5 bhp, and looking like the cars that they see in the magazines.
I go on drives in a car club of mainly BMW's and Mercedes's. Most of the people driving spend a significant amount of time on the track, auto-X or actual track time.
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
These souped-up machines use the fastest memory chips and arrays of high-capacity hard drives. Tiny fans and water-cooling systems rapidly dissipate heat, the nemesis of speedy computer parts. A powerful graphics card costing as much as $400 directs the on-screen action.
Tiny fans? Jeez... who wrote that one?
.noitacidem deen uoy siht daer nac uoy fI
After all, these people have been dumping their PC a couple of months, then some Chinese villagers get screwed by the toxic waste generated by these gamers and their obsessive, wasteful hobby.
media is the LAST to realize a fact. I wonder who slapped a reporter with this information. It has been common knowledge in the industry for 3 years now. BTW I just got an ATI 9700....WOOOOHOOO it ROCKS..Playing NWN in 1600x1200 with NO lag locally and only the expected net lag in multiplayer. I ran UT with the max goodies and consistently ran in excess of 150 fps. Very impressed initially, let's hope ATI keeps up the drivers....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
It's good to see people break the "beige-box" mold. The more mainstream this hobby gets the wilder the accessories that will come out. I wonder if this means that someday granny will have a low-rider email box.
I mentioned in my first post that it was probably a bad driver or somesuch. That is usually the case in the Win9x series, too. My complaint is that I think the OS should handle buggy drivers and such more gracefully. I probably don't need to throw in any standard Linux user digs like pointing out how buggy kernel modules I install (or write) don't cause the whole system to hang. . .
Demanding gamers drive the high end consumer computer market? Gee, that's fucking amazing. I thought those people who just load up Mozilla and OpenOffice were the one's who were creating the demand for GeForce 4 Ti4600's and Radeon 9700 Pro's, along with 2+GHz Intel/AMD chips, and 4+GB of RDRAM/DDR-RAM.
Really? Ya don't say. Next, they'll be telling us that the Hollywood follks who make movies like Jurassic Park drive the high end systems in the professional world. And that the people who sequence the human genome drive the high end in supercomputers. That's unbeleivable.
Seriously, I thought that the average user who browses websites needed all that power to handle the pop-up ads. Or that your avg. hormonal male needed that much power to look at porn.
Next thing they'll be telling us that avid downloarders of music, movies, and porn are what's driving the high end in broadband connections.
Amazing insights from CNN.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Running WinXP on my brand new 2.2GHz P$ with 1024MB RAM is a lot slower than Potato on one of my antique 486 machines.
As long as micro$oft keeps improving windows with all those bugs^H^H^H^H nice features it will never get any better.
Logic would therefore lead me to believe that the average person tries to get their comment posted to /. before reading the article.
:p
That's about as obvious as saying that gamers drive the high-end PC market.
...with the Mac heads, right?
"But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever....In the digital world, we don't need back-ups..."
-- Jack Valenti
OOoooohhh. the Evil John Carmack. And his plans to bring down the empire through the use of high target systems specs....NOT.
o n2 002/carmack/
Paraphrased from the GameSpy coverage of Carmack's speech about DOOM3:
He explained that the DOOM 3 technology was, believe it or not, based around the technology that became available with GeForce1-level hardware..."By the time that software comes out that takes advatage of [the hardware it was designed for], usually people don't even have that original hardware anymore. "
http://www.gamespy.com/articles/august02/quakec
He goes on further to say that the NEXT (not the current) will make use of the graphics cards being just now released.
---
He also talks on about supporting a wide variety of graphics cards, to show support for individual features and capabilities. This demonstrates flexibility, rather than demanding people conform to a regimen of high-priced cards.
People like id are just being customer-centric. There has been a clearly demonstrated history throughout gaming of people willing to fork over outrageous amounts of money for hardware to get the "best image/performance". Voodoo 5500, anyone? Hell, people were lining up to buy the nVidia ti4600. Why WOULDN'T id service this demand?
I'm sorry, I didn't realize that UO, EQ, or any of the others were classified as FPS, sorry I don't know what I'm talking about.
g est/forums.jsp>
Star Wars Galaxies discussion groups about it, but not to the volume that I would expect for Lucas Arts to actually take our community seriously.
For those of you who actually care about Linux (NATIVE) clients for stuff:
Turns out that Sony and Origin among others actually store their MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) data on Solaris or Linux machines, but don't actually make a client that runs on Unix or Linux. When I asked some people over at Origin about it, I was told that there is not enough demand for Linux games, so apparently we're not being vocal enough as a community. I've seen some banter going back and forth on the href="http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/di
I think it's time we started bugging game companies to make clients for us. Call them, post to their discussion groups, make youself be heard!
-Runz
Sure anyone can make a Biohazard cut-out case, put plexi on the inside and trick it out with a green and yellow neon light, add some Volcano brand watercooling and make that P4 LOOK fast when the performance is retro, like a TRS-80. Tape drives and all.
These are the same guys that stick chrome coffee cans on the tailpipes of thier rusty '92 Toyota Celica and add a ridiculously oversized spoiler on thier vehicle to improve "performance".
Again its a marketing scheme. Gaming industry is to computers as The Fast and The Furious is to the Riceboys.
"I'll have a positivly scathing retort in twenty minits!"
Why would I want to get my butt kicked by 12-yr-olds with nothing better to do than hone their skillz all day?
Do I sense some bitterness after having your innards strewn all over the wall in Q3/CS/TF/SOF.. (pick one)?
Assuming all l33t gamers are ~12 is a bit weak. I'm nearly 30 and I can't tell you how many times i've heard:
"You f$$#$in kids are cheating"
"I'm sure you've been playing since you got out of junior school at 3:15"
No we're not cheating, no were not 12 yrs old.
The fact is that you're not very good at the game you're playing and clearly unwilling to invest the time to develop decent skills... and that's just fine.
But to blame your current lack of skill on the prepubecent state of online gamers, is a poor excuse.
Nuff said.
Gee, it used to be porn that drove the high-end.
What is the world coming to? Well, my joystick is made out of real live flesh!
PCs and game consoles used to be viewed as complementary products, but they're becoming direct competitors. This has major implications for the PC industry. Essentially all business PCs shipped in the past few years have more than enough power. Only Microsoft bloatware keeps the office PC industry alive. Most businesses don't want to upgrade beyond the Windows 2000 level at all. That market is getting to be like the typewriter market - units are bought only to replace existing ones that wear out. Thus, most further sales, if any, must come from the home market.
Gamers have been driving the home PC industry for two or three years now. An implication of this is that PCs can be viewed as a special kind of game console. The XBox is, after all, a PC in a different case. The main difference between the XBox and a PC is much stronger digital rights management in the XBox. This should tell us something about where things are going.
And it does. The newest generation of PCs are a lot more "locked down" than anything seen previously, with TPM and Windows XP moving towards an environment in which you don't do anything the content owner doesn't want you to. Remember, the XBox is already there. It's worth noting that, unlike previous generations, none of the current generation of game consoles has been fully cracked. Nobody has succeeded in running an "unauthorized" game on an unmodified XBox, Playstation 2, or Nintendo GameCube. Despite the fact that that's legal.
So what seems to be coming is "consumer PCs" that behave more like game consoles and less like open systems. They'll be easier to use, harder to mess up, and thus more reliable for the average user, just like a game console. That's the end result of gamer dominance of the PC industry.
Any questions?
that our desktop PC's will never be any faster than the slowest computer in the field (we do mostly Unix development -- and the compiles are all on the server end...) We have been doing this for so long -- that I have also neglected to upgrade my computers at home. I don't if or when this Retro "PII / Amd K6 500" thing will ever catch on with you kids -- but I have noticed that more performance tweaking and memory leaks get caught by people who develop and or test on lower end machines.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
WHAT THE HELL? These people are doing absolutely NOTHING besides Email and Word Processing, and maybe a little Filemaker Pro. But they manage to fuck up their computers with DeskFlag, Webshots, Comet Cursor, etc, etc. And then they bitch to their Department Heads, and if ONE person gets a computer upgrade, you can bet every adjacent office will be getting an upgrade soon after that. It's the biggest waste of resources I have seen (with my own eyes). Maybe I'm just bitching because I use a PIII/550 at work :-P At least my boss lets me use linux! Citrix is pretty cool stuff.
Games have always drove the pc market. You never needed Qemm to run windows in the 386 days, you used the it to get that little bit of extra memory to run wing commander. You need at least 611K free to launch this game was a common message and its how alot of us learned about memory management.
.1% return on those cards yours still raking in the cash.
They will continue to drive it. Office on a p2K is about the same speed as office on a p333. Sure it launches a little faster on the 2k but in reality it doesnt do much.
Microsoft even recongized the drive and created the game SDK to help drive the hardware up. Now called DirectX its purpose is to give the software vendors new features to exploit in emulation so the hardware vendors will create hardware to do the same requireing more horsepower so they can sell you there next even more bloated OS.
Yes, 1% of the market drives it for the rest of them. Ok, Perhaps Neon glowing cases are a waste of time and money, but the hardware inside is a real issue. My box boots faster then my wifes because I have faster disks, a faster bus, and faster memory. Not because I have faster cpu. Change the components and you change the machine. Thats whats important. Ok. Having a WW2 Army truck case might be a bit cool if you want to drag your machine to a show but it doesnt make the system run faster.
There will always be a niche market for high end anything. Falcon succeeds not only because they build decent system but because of there marketing. Microsoft has survived to what it is today through there Marketing. If you market right you survive and sell. I bought 3 different copies of on of the eq expansions and each one had a Falcon ad in it. If you get just a
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
I think the folks at Alpina, AMG, Brabus and Lorinser will loudly disagree with your assessments.
The companies I mentioned do more sporting modifications to BMW's and Mercedes-Benzes. They very well know that many drivers will NOT accept a vehicle with a rock-like ride and race-car fast steering; that's why the suspension designers at these companies know such design as much as the engineers at the BMW or Mercedes-Benz--sometimes more so. For example, a Brabus-modified Mercedes-Benz E-series car may have a slightly firmer ride, but the ride does not make you feel every bump on the road and handling is VASTLY improved.
I'm glad that I can get this kind of important, breaking news from slashdot, since my subscription to "Duh!" magazine ran out a few months ago.
Raise your hand if you bought a math coprocessor to play Falcon 3.0 in hi-fidelty flight mode.
Or hang your head in shame, either way...
It's the gamers, not the games. Games don't buy and play themselves (yet), and computers don't buy new upgrades and install them (yet) - so while technically the games encourage people to go out and do the purchasing and upgrading, it's the gamers who are actually driving the market, not the game developers or the games themselves.
(Which should be just as much of a "Duh" as the original article, why there's a big argument about it here I'll never know =)
Alari
I use Windows... like a two dollar wh.. why don't I just go ahead and not finish that sentence.
Oh you just gotta have the best 3d card for solitare. If solitare doesn't run at 20000000 fps it just isn't as enjoyable as it could be. Thats why I've invested the most for best card possible :-P
SIGFAULT
Wow, thats some estimate Roger Kay has there.. less the 1 percent of home comps are only with the intent of gaming... I'm wondering how he determined in the the first place that a Dell comp cant be a gaming computer.. Personally my Dell is an great gaming machine and would recommend it to anyone one.. esp since you can customize it on their website.
"Eat right, Exercise daily, Die anyways."
http://www.10angrygamers.com Where purple monkeys attack!!
What exactly is their point? WE KNOW THIS ALREADY
:P
Mind you - I reckon Microsoft put loads of delay loops in their OS's - more with every update - to get you to uprade your hardware in a secret deal with Intel. How else can you explain that with every successive release, Windows performs like a donkey with one leg less than the previous version?
Not to excuse CNN's lack of depth on some stories, but they're not the source of the story - AP is. You may as well be saying "Good Job SlashDot".
Do you think Doom3 will be designed for a 2ghz Pentium 4? When designing a game, you want to direct it to the largest audience possible, while not sacrificing quality. The computers are far faster than the mainstream programs require.
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
Job well done, CNN. Thank you for reporting such a lovely and timely report. We shall now lynch the writer. Why, oh why, must CNN and other idiot places that don't know #%@#% about computers anyway use computer terminology? GHz, DDR Memory (who at CNN even knows what DDR stands for?! Who knows what it actually means for your speed?) the list goes on. I especially like how they said GeForce 3. Excuse me, but anyone with a recent kick-butt gaming setup is going to have a GeForce 4 Ti 4600, or a Radeon 9700 Pro. Either or, peoples. IDIOTS! IDIOTS! IDIOTS! I agree with whoever it was that stated the obvious: it's the games that drives gamers. I discovered long ago it's a vicious circle. New games come out, (Doom III) we buy new computers. New computers come out, we buy them in hopes that they will run future games. Newer games come out, our computers don't run them. It's a conspiracy, I tell you. (-:Stephonovich:-)
"Who needs reincarnation when we've got parallel universes?" -Me
Who else would be dumb... er, crazy... um, smart enought to pay twice as much money for the 4600 that's only 20% faster then the 4200...
:)
Definately noone that didnt get their parents to buy it for them anyway...
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
no shit, sherlock.
this only furthers my opinion that journalists merely state the obvious in a manner that seems new and innovative to idiots. (and i know about these things because i just wasted the past year of my life earning a journalism degree).
"It's only for those fanatical and rich enough to indulge in keeping their systems at the cutting edge." -Kay
:)
I can't afford the best hardware, but I can afford the best software!
Thanks OSS community!
I've heard that ^H^H^H joke got old several years ago!