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Hardware Manufacturers Making PC Gaming Too Elite?
Thanks to AVault for its editorial discussing whether PC hardware/graphics card manufacturers are fragmenting PC gaming too much with constant hardware upgrades, thereby "making it a sport for only the serious few." The author argues: "With the impending release of Valve's Half-Life 2 and id's Doom 3, we're looking at the first required hardware upgrade in gaming history... the reported minimum requirements for these two heavy hitting titles include fully DirectX9 compatible video cards. This demand excludes all low-end and many medium-level computers out there today." He discusses the "partnership" of "hardware manufacturers turning over reference equipment that won't see the retail market for some time to software developers to use in the creation of their games", and queries the "expensive process of habitual upgrades" by suggesting: "If everybody turns to an Xbox or a PlayStation for entertainment, who's going to need new PC equipment?"
Uhh... I call Shennanigans? Reading the Half-Life faq, you will find:
Q: What are the minimum hardware specifications?
The bare minimum you will need is a Pentium II 800Mhz processor, 128MB RAM and a DX6 class graphics card.
Michael C. Hollinger
Physics haven't changed since Quake? Where've you been? Part of the draw of next-gen games like Doom 3, HL2, and Unreal 2004 is the much improved physics engine. That stuff is pretty CPU-intensive. For that matter, even GPU-accelerated graphics still tax the CPU pretty heavily.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Apparently the poster isn't familiar with Origin's early Ultima and Wing Commander games. It was widely assumed that the $50 games would routinely end up costing between $500-$1000 to play, hardware prices being what they were back then.