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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..."
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
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! ;)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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?
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...
... 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
pr0n and gamers have always driven the home market.
heh, pr0n drives about every new AV (or just V) technology.
Though I'd argue that pr0n is more dependent on bandwidth than CPU horsepower.
But, I'm still pretty happy doing all my gaming on home consoles. Why would I want to get my butt kicked by 12-yr-olds with nothing better to do than hone their skillz all day? Cluster some friend's around a 36" TV and have a grand old time, and a much more affordable upgrade schedule.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Like at work...
"Yeah boss, I need a larger monitor to display more code and a faster processor to compile faster!"
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
CNN reports that street racers drive the market for souped-up stock cars and aftermarket performance boosters.
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?"
Bush's comment about the way to prevent forest fires is to cut down the trees. [doh]
Well, It is nice to be watching 10 porn videos, while ripping mp3s of the 70's porn style music, and chatting in #hotseattle on irc. Now Intel has released its 2.8ghz cpu, I can be even more productive!
gotta make sure I post this anonymously...
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.
Four Words:
Type R Factory Option
OK, so three words and a letter....
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Id rather have a larger monitor and a slower CPU than a fast CPU and a small monitor. Size matters.
I want to have more than one xterm open on the screen at a time, alt-tabbing is ok, but I need to see contents in one window while im woking in another.
** THIS JUST IN **
CNN has exclusive information about the availability of high-end surgical equipment and the medical institutions that seem to be driving the market!
Gee, people looking to push the envelope are, hmm, pushing the envelope?
I know every now and then someone comes out with a brilliant study stating what many of us believe is painfully obvious (poor eating habits aren't good for you?!), but it makes you wonder if those performing them are just looking to have data backing the assumptions or are lacking the spark of reason.
--
Error Reporting Failu
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
<HOMER>
Mmmmmm stir-fry...
</HOMER>
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
That was pretty much my reaction. It's primarily (though not entirely) gamers who require the soup'ed up PCs.
Since switching from coding to the business side of things, my computer at work is pretty much used for email, web-browsing and word-processing. MS Word doesn't run noticibly faster on my PIII work than on PII-266 desktop at home, nor my on my previous Pentium-90 home laptop. My typing speed just isn't getting any faster.
Sure, a massive pivot-table in Excel can chew a lot of CPU-cycles sometimes, but overall my business use and most of my home use is mostly I/O-bound applications. (My computer is largely a typewriter and an email client.) I don't play games, so the tiny bit image manipulation and coding I do at home doesn't justify a anything more powerful.
It's been 6 years since I bought my home computer, and so far the only upgrade I've needed (a larger hard-drive and a little more RAM) was for WinAmp and my MP3 collection.
I can spell. I just can't type.
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!
Coming soon, Microsoft Pong XP! With incredible 3D ray-traced graphics rendered in real time with anti-aliasing!
Actually, you could probably do this. Maintain the 2D function of the game, but suspend it above a background and have a lightsource... How long would it take to ray-trace a ball, two walls, and two paddles?
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
I work with high-end 3D visualization of scientific (climate) data, and we've called this "the Nintendo Effect" for at least 10 years. "The Nintendo Effect" just means that (since hardware is sold cheapo to make returns on games) we government scientists each year will be able to update to the "next-to-hottest" generation graphics system at prices affordable to gamers, e.g., $500 or less. And we do, too.
"Er, that quake engine we all just installed was tax-supported investment in the hardware industry. We'll see returns on it. Really."
That's gotta be a close second. At least in terms of CPU/RAM/disk. In terms of video cards, when a 32 MB AGP card can be had for $40, who besides a gamer needs anything higher? Even the CAD geeks get along quite well at 32MB.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
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)
Wow, that's about as good as two days ago, when my local paper put an article on the front page of the business section stating that greed played a part in the Enron accounting scandal.
//////////////BREAKING NEWS/////////////// //////////////BREAKING NEWS///////////////
Good job, boys. You sure scooped the whole industry on that one!
President Kennedy has been shot!
In other news. . .
Graphic artists drive the Wacom tablet market, nerds drive the Linux market, and morons drive the news media market.
"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
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. . .
10 minutes?
Bah. Kids today.
Not five years ago I worked on a project where builds were a day long process. My current project, it's an hour long job.
Humbug.
Clear, Dark Skies
...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.
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Cheese it! It's the FEDS!
Coming soon, Microsoft Pong XP! With incredible 3D ray-traced graphics rendered in real time with anti-aliasing!
It wasn't Microsoft, it was Hasbro, early 2000. The original Pong game, remixed with 3D accelerated graphics. Debuted to a resounding thud.
Think I'm joking? Check out the Gold Guide list of reviews.
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?
No, you see, Linux users drive the nonexistant "low end" computer market, retreiving old obsolete systems from dumpsters and turning them into firewalls, web servers, etc. Not much money changes hands, if at all. :)
you get used to it. its more fun when you've got high karma and spend equal time trolling and contributing like a good little slashboy.
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
You can squeeze out a little more performance with more memory on the graphics card. Also, games that come out in the future will use all that memory. Never mind that you wouldn't be caught dead using a two year old video card when those games finally come out...
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.
Slow news day? Hardly! Why, Intel has already released TWO new 2.8 GHz processors today! Now THAT'S news!
do not read this line twice.
>>Though I'd argue that pr0n is more dependent on bandwidth than CPU horsepower.
Hey, it's not the bandwidth that counts, it's how you use it.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
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.
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 ?
Right on (from another scientist using a Lintel system with a good video card and gigabit ethernet.)
The significant corollary is our preference for quality OpenGL cards in our machines.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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
Hehehe you must not have very demanding CAD geeks, mine use the boards with 256MB frame buffers and like 128MB of DDR primary video ram. They also tend to get new dual CPU workstations with the top of the line CPU's every 12-18 months. Basically if they can shave a couple minutes per operation off they can do twice as much work, and when they are being payed mid 6 figures it makes sense to buy them a $10-15K system once a year or so to keep them productive.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You know, I have no idea why my previous comment has been mod'd up 3...
Anyway, come to think of it... it's not the speed of your machine OR the width of your pipe (err, bandwidth)...it's the size of your drive, baby.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
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?
Do I sense some bitterness after having your innards strewn all over the wall in Q3/CS/TF/SOF.. (pick one)?
.5 frames a second maybe?
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.
I'm not half as bitter as you sound!
But, you're sort of close...my senior year of college (96), my dorm just got wired, and all the underclassman had fresh new Pentiums and I still had my rugged old 486/66...I held my own in Duke Nuke 'Em 'til the level where I was underwater, then my framerate was about...
Sorry if you're bitter about being called a 12 year old...I freely proclaim my relative lack of skills...in particular, I shied away from most PC FPSs after DOOM, ('cept for some Quake) so I never learned how to use the mouse properly, and I know I'd be owned by any half-competent player. (But could probably do OK if we switched to, say, Dreamcast Quake III.)
And sure, it would be more irritating to be beaten by 12 year olds--I'm jealous of how much free time they have...but I wouldn't accuse my opponents of being any particular age. (Though if they talked a lot of 'L33T I might wonder about their mental age at least.)
Nuff said.
Anyone who signs off "Nuff said"...well, they say more about themselves than they do the discussion at hand.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
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.
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.
That's old news, the far more user friendly dMac, vMac, and biMac provide all the hot lovin a PC(1) user could want. http://bbspot.com/News/2000/7/new_macs.html
(1) Where PC stands for "Personal Computer" and not "100% IBM comPatable Clone" and definitely not Politically Correct.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
For a moment there I thought the "Nintendo Effect" was the name given to some part of the global warming that's due to newer and hotter game machines:
Yup - I couldn't agree more, as I said in this recent comment.
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
I don't care about colloquialisms in general, and your use of "Nuff said" wasn't quite as bad as some...when used in a disagreement, it's usually an attempt to pre-emptively declare victory, as if the person has made such a persuasive argument that surely no one in their right mind could possibly disagree. Sort of like yelling "Checkmate" when the game might not even be half done. So it's not that the person using it is an idiot, but they generally have a bad attitude for productive discussion.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
We were stuck with Unary. Try coding with all one's! We were waiting for the Sumerians to finish up the specs for Zero!
Binary indeed. Good day Sir.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.