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?"

Comments

Requirements and PCs

[Txiasaeia]

Forced upgrades for PC games is not only nothing new, but it's been *REALLY* toned down as compared to 10 or 15 years ago. An upgrade from a 486-SX 25 to a P-1 133MHz cost $2000; an upgrade from a Geforce 2 GTS and an Athlon 1.2GHz to a Radeon 9800 and an Athlon XP 2500+ is what, $600? I'd much rather spend less money than more money, neh?

Re:Requirements and PCs

[JusTyler]

An upgrade from a 486-SX 25 to a P-1 133MHz cost $2000; an upgrade from a Geforce 2 GTS and an Athlon 1.2GHz to a Radeon 9800 and an Athlon XP 2500+ is what, $600? I'd much rather spend less money than more money, neh?

I have to disagree with your insight. The components are cheaper these days, but the benefits from upgrading are nearly entirely game focused, whereas the benefits of upgrading in 1994 covered everything you did with the machine.

Going up to 32 megabytes of RAM from 8 megabytes ten years ago would mean you could play the latest games, but it would have also made your PC feel like a new machine! Upgrading from 512 megabytes of RAM to even two gigabytes of RAM these days wouldn't make Windows feel significantly different at all.

And in the CPU department, too.. you can run Windows XP and have most general apps feel instantaneous on a mid-range 2.0GHz Pentium 4. Why upgrade to a 3.4GHz machine? There's no point except for gaming, and many new games will make use of that extra CPU power (try busy bot matches).

I think is going to become a sore point quite quickly. You just don't need expensive 256MB graphics cards, 3.4GHz processors, and a gigabyte of DDR RAM to do 99% of what you want on a PC now.. it's just the games that are demanding it. So.. people will drift to the cheaper options like buying an XBox, getting XBox Live, and knowing their games will work okay.. and have an el cheapo PC for the Internet and word processing.

Heck, I was a die-hard gamer in the 90's, but all this upgrading is doing my head in, I think I'm going to do the above!

Re:Requirements and PCs

[Anonymous Coward]

gaming is THE activity that is pushing harware development! you think intel need to make new processes for the office drones running word?
you sure as hell don't need any really recent graphics card for that either! if there were no gaming hardware development would fall to a standstill!

as with consoles you have a life cycle of about 3 years. after that point fewer and fewer games are able to be played by you until some gound breaking gmae comes out and you HAVE to upgrade you play it be it on the PC or buying the newest console.

Interesting point.

[polyp2000]

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?"

I think that this is going to be more and more relevant as next-gen consoles come into being.

For me personally its more convenient to buy a ps2 game stick in the machine and play it. I dont have to consider whether or not my PC is up to spec to play it. I also like the way that with a console, all the games are configured for the same controller. Apart from the occaisional game of Vice City , I hardly use my linux box for gaming. The console is also more sociable than the PC which tends to sit in the back room.

I dont mind the seperation of PC and Gaming console and find that the idea that one is for work/education and the other is purely for fun. I kinda like that distinction.

nick...

So?

[maeka]

I haven't, and won't spend money on PC hardware just so that I can play a new game. I still play the original Half Life, and haven't upgraded my video hardware past my TNT2.

The high prices he is complaining about are the price you pay for the biggest and the best. His comparisons to console systems are way off the mark.

People buy consoles for the steady stream of games w/o hardware upgrades, knowing full well that the state of the art will leave them behind.

People buy PC gaming hardware so they can keep up with the state of the art, at their own pace. If I want to plunk down $$ for the latest video card to play the new games, I can. But I can also be like a console owner and stand by and watch my equipment slowly become obsolete.

resentment gone wild and narrowmindeness

[Lepruhkawn]

I guess the author doesn't remember when 3D shooters stopped offering software renderers and you were required to own a 3D hw accelerator to play.

Gamers, as a market group, want progress regardless of whether or not that helps line the industry's pockets. We WANT games that inspire and utilize new hardware.

If any particular software company leaves too many people behind with a game, then they are taking a risk with their product (by possibly making a poor prediction about how many potential customers will want to upgrade their hardware), not engaging in a conpsiracy to manipulate consumers.

Re:What?

[Dirus]

He says that this is the first required hardware upgrade in gaming history (boldfaced lie), then implies that consoles don't have this problem? Excuse me?

Yes this is a lie. I find it rather ironic that Doom 3 is being used as an example. People had to upgrade their hardware (ie purchase a 3d card) to play Quake 3. id has always been ahead of others in the area of requirements, this should be no surprise to PC gamers.

While other upgrades, such as processor and ram upgrades, are not always required, they are sometimes "required" to play a game at a reasonable level of quality. Afterall, all games have "minimum requirements" (as a side note, these are usually too low).

Slightly offtopic, but a good example that comes to mind is Diablo 2. I remember when it came out I had to buy more ram because I'd go down the stairs into a dungeon and it would hit the hard drive. The server wouldn't pause for you so before I could even load the dungeon my guy would die. Sure the ram wasn't required to start the game, but as it was a requirement nonetheless, as there was no way to play the game without it.

There are other boundaries to push

[JusTyler]

What saddens me about PC gaming is that the only boundary which is regularly pushed is the graphics. What happens then is that you need to buy a new $300 graphics card every year to be able to play the latest games nicely. My GF4Ti4200 is pretty much useless now, even Far Cry at 1024x768 is basically un-doable.

Half Life was an amazing game, but it wasn't because of the graphics. It's because it had a good story, it led you through the story well, the graphics weren't awful, and it had good playability. So why didn't we see a lot of games try to be like Half Life? Instead, they all tried to become graphics-fests. If some games with the depth (and graphics) of the original Half Life came out now, but at, say, $20, they'd sell like hot cakes! In a way, I'd say Return to Castle Wolfenstein almost did this. It took the old Quake 3 engine (which was a couple years' old by then), and wrapped a game with improved AI and playability around it. Result.. worked good on old kit, and was a good game.

Let's see boundaries of AI, playability, story, and concept being pushed, rather than just graphics all the time!

Re:There are other boundaries to push

[ConceptJunkie]

The go to the Underdogs site, find the great games from the past and enjoy some real gaming.

I don't even bother with games that are less than about a year old. The market is so ruthless that after that much time, the price is down to $10-$20 and there's a much better chance it will run on my hardware.

Of course, my system is probably pretty lame compared to the hardcore gamer systems, and up until a year ago, my main machine was a dual Celeron 433 machine. Now I run a 1.58 GHz Athlon with last year's nVidia card.

Still, I find no lack of good games to enjoy, despite not being on the cutting edge.

Besides, I went through the whole (games-are-driven-by-graphics-rather-than-gameplay thing
with my Amiga almost 15 years ago. Once you get past that, you start looking for the right kind of games, regardless of high-tech graphics and other cool stuff. You have more fun and spend less money.

Doom 3 is a good example. id hasn't had a new gaming idea since the original Doom in the early 90's (and that, it could be argued was just an evolution of Wolf 3D, although multi-player counts as a lot). They are wizards at pushing the state-of-the-art in technology, and have refined the idea extensively, but at the end of the day, you'll be running around brown labyrinths shooting demons. I'm sure it will be cool, but it really doesn't interest me. After watching the evolution of Quake from the early descriptions by id to a sleeker, fancier, yet ultimately similar Doom, I realized these guys are graphics hackers (not that that's a bad thing), but not really game hackers.

Yes, I know... I've made this comment before and people chime in about lookspring or rocketjump or nosepick or whatever the newest move is being a huge innovation, but in the end, you are still running around brown labyrinths shooting demons.

Re:What?

[Babbster]

Actually, your Diablo 2 example is indicative of a game design/development problem - I don't think it would be out of line to call it a "bug." In an ideal world, sloppy game design shouldn't be driving computer upgrades.

Why not...Optional?

[Prien715]

Let's take Civ3. The AI in that game made using larger maps with slower computers pretty unplayable, but the normal sized maps were very playable. So if you bought a brand new computer today, you'd get extra playability out of this game (which, coincidently will run on a Pentium 133 on smaller maps (Min sys req P3 450)). My point is the game scales.

So what's different with FPS? Well, for starters, the genre's physics and basic premise hasn't really changed since Quake (where they added rooms on top of rooms, jumping, and free look). While graphics are nice, good graphics are certainly not required to make a great game. (Tetris anyone?)

Though not meant as a blast to FPS people, the genre doesn't require huge ammounts of processing power except for the friggin' graphics. As an analogue to the Civ scenario, people with worse GFX cards should still be able to play the game with worse graphics. Unless there's some sort of wiz-bang AI or complex physics, I'd hope processor power wouldn't matter too much either.

People played the original Half-life on P2 300s and they still play it on Athlon64's. All I can say is I hope the new Half-life will try to be as accomedating as the original and provide the same evolutionary gameplay that made it a classic.

Re:Upcoming games? What about the ones out now?

[Ayaress]

Actually, they havn't always been as bad as you've just said. I bought a P200 almost as soon as the MMX chips came out, and it ran just about everything made for three years, with a new ($150) graphics card then to extend that almost another two.

My most recent computer (2.8 ghz Athelon) isn't a year old for another few months yet, and it already looks like it'll need a new video card soon, and I don't even buy the cutting-edge games anymore.

"first required hardware upgrade"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um...huh? What about 3DFX-only games? And didn't the latest EQ patch add a DX9 requirement (thus prepping people's PCs for EQ2)?

If you don't want it....

[IshanCaspian]

...don't buy it. Vote with your dollars. If nobody is willing to upgrade to some next-gen hardware, then it's not going to work. However, if everyone but you is willing to upgrade, this is good news: tha means the prices on the previous generation of cards will plummet, vastly increasing the value of the second-tier hardware for those constrained by budgets.

People buy games that push the envelope because they want the next big thing. If you want to stay back in the Q2 era, go ahead. There's still plenty of great games from that era that you haven't played yet.

Um....

[GaimeGuy]

"If everybody turns to an Xbox or a PlayStation for entertainment, who's going to need new PC equipment?"

What about a GameCube? What is it with people excluding GC from the console lists? GC is outselling X-box, yet I see things like this all the time: "Which console do you have? X-box, or Ps2?"

It gets kind of annoying. :|

Re:This is the way it is supposed to be.

[ChodeMaster]

The way it's supposed to be? Gaming on PC because of the constant flow of technology? Sorry but that sounds very elitist to me.

I choose to game on PC simply because historically PC's have provided different styles of games to what is available on the console market. This may or may not be changing in the current day and age (whether it is changing is a completely separate argument), but the fact is that a number of games becoming available that I myself enjoy playing are only available on PC.
Also, many of the games that I enjoy playing that are available on console and PC are (in my opinion) better interfaced (ie: the keyboard mouse, as opposed to the controller) and more playable on PC.

If you yourself choose to play games on PC because it allows you to feel as if you are using constantly changing up to date technology then good for you, but suggesting that the main reason people play games is so that can utilise the latest technology is, at least in my opinion, outright wrong.

I hope the games developers don't start to think life you, else PC gaming is going to become both less accessible, and less worthwhile. In some ways I think this might be a failing hope, because as this article points out games being released nowadays are forcing people to spend several hundred dollars on a new video card, simply so they can play a game with the latest DirectX 9 features.

With people thinking like this I am honestly worried about the future of PC gaming.

Other Historical upgrade points

[cgenman]

CD Rom drives.
Sound Cards.
VGA cards (like DOS was using it).
Color Monitors.
Joystick ports.

All of the above upgrades were essentially driven by gaming. What use was a sound card before Roberta Williams started supporting them in King's Quest? What did a CD Rom drive do before Myst? Sure, windows would eventually come to rely upon 2D graphics processing, much like the plan is to integrate 3D processing into Longhorn, but the cart in this case did not lead the horse. All of these were driven by gaming, with the operating system and applications expanding to take advantage of these new additions.

If anything, this upgrade generation is the first in the past few years that has been driven by gaming because people started jumping on the Internet and buying machines. People had a more compelling reason to upgrade for a while: I.E. was a dog, and you need really fast hardware to run it satisfactorily. Now, I won't say how Firefox or Opera might fit into this equation more cheaply, but this did mean that people were upgrading their hardware and it had little to do with gaming. We are, of course, back on the gaming upgrade cycle.

It's not a new phenomenon, it just took the back burner for a little while.

Re:Other Historical upgrade points

[Sigma 7]

Sound Cards.

Too true. Not only that, but I've seen applications fail becaue you do not have a sound card active. (Bad programming, anyone?)

The requirements for sound cards in games caused certain sites such as Deaf Gamers to appear - I actually agree as there are sometimes critical conversations that are barely audible in some specific situations.

Joystick ports.

I'm not sure, but I haven't seen too many games that requrire a joystick to be used. In fact, Keyboarding or Keyboard+Mouse seems to be just as effective for a properly designed game.

I'm not stating that joysticks are useless - they are effective for flight sims and anything similar.

What did a CD Rom drive do before Myst?

Help read *huge* shareware collections of games... :)

Seriously, though, CDs help cut down on the amount of disk swapping that was beginning to be required around 1995 or so. It would be entirely insane to distribute Win95 on disks, as it would require swapping through at least 20 disks and therefore increase the points of failure.

Re:Upgrade? Yes, your fucking net pipe...

[CylanR77]

If dialup users are ruining your gameplay experience that badly, either you take your gaming far too seriously, or you're playing games that have absolutely lousy networking code.

Whether or not you want to believe it, there are still some areas in the USA where you cannot get broadband, period [my location being one of them]. Granted, the number of people who live in these areas and play the same games you do are small, but your ultimatum automatically brands every one of these people as losers who ruin your entertainment of their own free will. Sometimes, there really isn't anything people can do about it.

Also, how big of a deal is the small amount of lag caused by a single low-bandwidth player? Do you really need a completely realtime environment to participate in what is really just an entertaining diversion? Or if dialup users really are slowing your games to a crawl, I suggest that you pick up a copy of Tribes 2 or XMP, both of which are excellent at dealing with less than satisfactory network connections.

yeah. I remember upgrading the OS and hardware

[SmallFurryCreature]

Just to play F16 falcon. Years ago. Upgraded DOS and my memory. Made a gigantic difference.

Same with upgrading from an adlib to a soundblaster. Gigantic difference.

Again when I inserted a 3Dfx card.

All my upgrades are for games. My work PC is a linux dual P3 that is so ancient the manuals on top have turned to coal.

Hell Doom3 may in fact not require me to upgrade. I already got the hardware for it. Half-Life 2 is another story. I think this pc will have turned to dust by the time that one is actually released.

Re:What? -- read the websites!

[SuperRob]

Good point. Half Life 2 has the ability to scale for the hardware, and while a 3GH machine with a DX9-class video card would certainly make the game look better, Valve has said that the game will be absolutely playable with the minimum requirements.

It's a smart move, too. Half Life's popularity was in part due to the fantastic "after market mods', but even those would have failed had the game not been playable on just about every hardware configuration.

Graphics Driven Gaming

[zarthrag]

We wouldn't be experiencing this if we weren't so "wowed" by graphics, instead of innovative gameplay. I like the original half-life because of the skeletal animation, and marine AI - not the graphics.

Unfortunately, Doom also hearlded a rush to create the latest and greatest in graphics. Now, with titles like Far-Cry out there. I no longer care to even see, much less play a new game just because it's "pretty".

I've been working on a 3D engine of my own for awhile. As of now, I'm tearing it down and rewriting it as a 2D isometric. No hardware upgrades necessary. There is no way in hell that I'm going to "upgrade" my expensive-ass GeForce FX 5200 w/128MB of memory, processor, or anything else - just so I *CAN* play a $50 game that isn't even bundled.

I say good.

[craXORjack]

"If everybody turns to an Xbox or a PlayStation for entertainment, who's going to need new PC equipment?"

That does away with the last excuse to keep Windows around since some people say 'there aren't enough games on Linux'. Soon there won't be enough games on Windows either. Good riddance.

Hardware upgrades for gaming...

[1eyedhive]

Two years ago (ish) I bough a brand spankin' new athlon XP 1800, 512MB of RAM and a GeForce3 Ti200 video card. It ran every game like a dream, said system still runs the latest and greatest, and the GF3 only shows it's age with the games that really push things around (Far Cry, KoTOR, UT2k4, and the like, easily changed using lower detail levels).
I basically swapped hardware with a friend of mine a year ago when I was building a fileserver and needed a cord to run that, it was more economical to buy new, fast hardware than cheaper, slightly slower stuff. So i swapped his T'bird 1.3 with a Gforce2 (basically next to useless for anything but a HL or Q3 powered game) and got myself an XP2500, gig of RAM and GeForce4.

Said GeForce4 has been in service... 1.5 years now and is starting to show it's age with far cry and the like. The system upgrade was a bonus in my view, as the same performance can be achieved in both systems if the same card is used.

I will argue, however in today's world of software bloat, a gig of RAM is required for any serious gaming (performance is vastly improved, you can run a 2.0 Ghz/GeforceFX game box with 512M and something slower with 1GB will smoke it).

This machine has a gig, runs all games like a champ (mostly load time performance increases).

These days a GFX card is more important than the underlying system, as long as the system has 512MB or more, and 1.5G CPU and a decent video card, you can run almost everything, granted not in 'Holy Shit!' mode (to borrow a term from UT2k3 where if you pump all details to max the announcer goes 'Holy Shit') but they still run.

Everything out today will run on something going back to a GeForce2 or 3. These new cards are nothing more than the 2nd generation GeForce 3's, the uber powered GFX cards that run the latest and greatest. Considering a console is ~$300 + memory cards, controllers and games (~$40, ~$60, ~$70) versus a PC, which can be used for anything for ~$800.

To put it simply, a $1000-$1200 investment in a new box every two years ain't half bad ($50/mo), and ehen it's all over you have a half way decent box to reuse as a box for a non-gamer, file server, HTPC, etc, more or less for free. I've made up a file server, and a desktop linux test box out of old gaming boxes, past their prime for gaming, but they'll run forever as workhorses, so i wouldn't call them obsolite (hell, the linux desktopper can play anything HL or Q3 powered with it's radeon 7000).

Within 2-3 years, the new cards will be standard and the HL2 engine and its breatheren will take the place of the Q3 and HL1 engine as the dominant force behind gaming's latest. With these new engines, come a quantum leap that won't be seen again for another three years, so i'll just sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.

PC vs Console again

[blankmange]

Why would I want to buy/build a PC for gaming if I am going to have to constantly update it? Granted, many geeks love to tinker with their hard/software. But once it is running sweet, why should I have to swap out a video card/get the latest bleeding edge drivers/wait for the multi-MB patch so I can play the latest game on my PC? Then, if you are lucky and the gods are smiling on you, you can play...

My PS2 has dozens of great titles (including the greatest of all time - GT) and I never have to crack the case of my PS2 to get it to run any of them. I opted out of that race a couple of years ago - too expensive/frustrating/time consuming.

I call Shenanigans

[Mr.Dippy]

"If you stay contented with your existing machinery, their profits drop and the CEOs get fired" This guy obviously doesn't know what he is talking about. Once the profits drop, they fire all the engineers, outsource to india, and the CEO gets a $500k year bonus.