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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?"
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?
Rob
we're looking at the first required hardware upgrade in gaming history...
The hell we are, this happens at least once every two years, games are constantly pushing technology, what else would? Who cares about the "little companies"? Millions of people buy(and anticipate) these high-end PC games for a reason.
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
The biggest problem right now is that there are new graphics cards coming out every 6 months with architecture changes every 18-24 months. Games have been behind the development curve for a while. Finally the two big game engines come out with new versions, trying to aim at what should be reasonable at the time.
Unfortunately, the rest of the PC hardware has turned into complete commodity and its unclear whether its worth spending another $500 on the rest of the computer to hold the FX6800 when it comes out (things are relatively quiet in the land of CPU and memory, where spending 3x the money may get you a 20% increase).
If you're a 3D software developer trying to pick which features to use to get decent market penetration (yet still take advantage of the new programmability), you're pretty-well hosed right now with the various flavors of pixel/vertex shader instructions and program lengths available on the various cards.
ATI 9600, NV FX5600 - these are the cards/capabilities I would depend on to be widespread in the installed base by Xmas 2005.
did you RTF or even the article summary?
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"
mod this guy down, hes just your average karma whore...
As a software developer, I actually don't want to have to produce a game with that much eye candy. But I feel compelled to concentrate on that, given that gamers and press go (in part) by screenshots and aesthetics.
Regardless of what I'd like to concentrate on, I think the hardware vendors, the software developers, the press, and the consumer are all in cahoots together. You, me, everyone -- we all want to see prettier games.
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
As graphics go, I generally feel that good games allow most folks to play them, even if they have to turn some settings down. No big deal really.
Now, the one area where folks should definitely be forced to upgrade is their Internet connection. Dial-up users regularly degrade my gaming experience. To the point where I feel that quitting is the best option.
Broadband should be a minimum that is enforced by online games.
Oh, please. This will undoubtably get modded up as insightful, because it seems so noble and zen-like to say "IT ISN'T THE GRAPHICS, IT'S THE GAMEPLAY!" Bullshit. History has proven time and time again that we want gorgeous spooge-inducing graphics, and some gameplay thrown in. I wish people would quit pushing this crap and realize that eye candy is what matters - it drives the software and hardware gaming industries, it sells games, it gets good reviews. You could come up with the best plot EVAR and if it uses last year's technology it won't sell shit.
Guess what he played the game on? Some crappy 8 or 16MB video card with all textures, details, resolution, and everything else all the way down. He had sound through what can only be described as a $2 pair of speakers, but they were enough for him to locate people (which was plain scary). The processor in the box wasn't anything spectacular either. He managed somewhere around 50-60 fps on that thing.
Quake 3 looks terrible at 640x480 with no detail, but it is perfectly playable. Heck, it's even fun multiplayer, because the gameplay is the same, it just isn't so pretty. But it doesn't have to be pretty to be fun. Pac-Man is fun and the graphics on that are terrible. I'm going to guess that Doom 3 will be perfectly playable on minimum specs as well, probably just not as pretty. Also, a $70 GeForce FX 5200 is a DX9 card last I checked. If you want the highest available resolution and textures and want the game for it's glitter then yes, you'll have to shell out cash for it.
That's the way its always been when you want the best right when it's released. I know people who bought a bunch of RAM to play Wolf 3D or Doom or whichever without windowing to a 3" box. You could, however play it in that 3" box. And those RAM upgrades were spendy. Sure, it helped the rest of the system, but when the box was games primarily and other things secondary it hardly matters. Cutting edge has always been expensive.
If not now, when?
BS, games like Civilization 3, NetHack, CounterStrike and Ultima Online are really popular, and definitely not for their dated graphics!
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You're spouting the bullshit brother. Check out Gamecube. They've had hits with several N64 games that have been direct ported to the Cube. Animal Crossing was definitely 'last year's technology' and it sold millions. Fuck, I'm playing Harvest Moon right now.
Simple answer... no.
The pace of technological development and the advance of the minimum specifications has slowed to a fraction of what it was a few years ago. I used to figure on a 2 year cycle between buying a new PC and said PC becoming obsolete and unable to run the latest games. My current PC, a 2.0ghz P4, with 512 megs RDRAM and a GF4 Ti4200 is now 26 months and feels a long way from being obsolte. UT2004 runs like a dream in full-detail and even Farcry runs acceptably (for the most part) in full detail and 1024x768.
The great irony is that it's ID, who arguably do the most to drive specs forwards, who also seem to have done the most to hold them back over the last few years. The lazy, unthinking use of the Quake III engine by game developers, even for realism-based games where, to be frank, the engine just doesn't feel right, has basically held minimum specs pretty much static. The result of this is the current situation, where, by the mid-point of a console cycle, the PC has yet to demonstrate its technical superiority and is, as a result, losing ground to the consoles on pretty much every front.
Warning, grumpy old man sounding stuff ahead!
I felt very depressed when I saw the results of that survey.
I was very disappointed to see what a huge majority had CPU's under 2.0 Ghz. My last *three* CPU's have all be over 2.0 Ghz! A CPU I bought over a year ago [new, for 60 UKP at the time] was over 2.0 Ghz! These are really tight people we are talking about IMO (I know 'causual' gamers don't want to upgrade so often, that's why there are consoles).
I have a P4 3.2 Ghz, Radeon 9800 Pro 256 MB, 2 GB DDR400 and 160 GB SATA RAID0 (dual 80 GB disks with 8 MB cache each). I have this largely for PlanetSide, which yes does use 256 MB texture memory and needs > 1 GB RAM to load the entire game without swapping and fully benifits from SATA + RAID given how many textures it needs to load, and it simply can't get enough CPU power (partly due to the quality - or otherwise- of the engine), but this is also greatly benificial in other games - SWG loved the avalible RAM so it could cache worlds without having to swap and FarCry is far better for the FSAA and high quality texture rendering too.
Some people argue (incredibly, as far as I'm concerned) 'FarCry plays okay on my 2500+ and Geforce 4 with 256 MB RAM' to which I would reply no, it doesn't it looks horrible playing it a 800x600 with low quality texture rending no FSAA and a jerky motion, and that it you should be playing *all* games with 4xFSAA in this day and age, and ideally at resolutions of 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 with resonable anisotropic filtering. It's not as if the difference is barely perceptible, it's HUGE, it's just that some people arn't willing to shell out new money and and try and cut it on 3 or 4 year old kit, which is not good enough and simply never has been for the latest games.
While developing content and graphic rich worlds is increasingly time consuming, if users at least hand decent and reasonably up to date systems (not +2 years out of date) developers would be a lot more free to experiment with relatively easy to impliment but high quality T&L bump mapping and particle effects, but I get the feeling the slow speed of upgrades (largely though the lack of any compelling new games such as Doom 3 or HL 2) is holding up progress in the overall level of detail and eyecandy developers can build in. I thought Unreal 2 did a superb job though, running at 1900x1200, at full detail, without batting an eyelid, so hats of to Epic for a spectacular engine.
Going OT from this particular thread (but staying with the main topic...). I actually avoided the PS2 completely as a console.
I have [had - gave away now, after the diappointing Mario Sunshine and a lack of subsequent unique titles] a GameCube (which I got largely for Rouge Squadron and the aforementioned Mario Sunshine) and still have an XBox, my last console before that was a Dreamcast. I simply thought the PS2 was piss poor when it was released and the much older Dreamcast was arguably superior. It was certainly a lot easier to develop for than the much more complex PS2, which lead to better games and shorter development cyles. Because of how disappointed I was when I saw the very mediocre hardware the PS2 had, I avoided it in disgust.
I think the only reason the PS2 has been so sucessful has been of the back of the orional PlayStation. The XBox is the best designed console ever IMO (Hard Disk, DVD, Ethernet, easy to develop for, and even something as simple as excellent Joypads, just like the Dreamcast, ignoring what some say about them for longer play sessions they are superb, even if 'small children' don't like them), and this is made all the more impressive as it's Microsoft's first console. Being Microsofts attempt to leverage dominance in the home, I had planned to avoid it, but it was just too perfect, it's just too bad it doesn't have the same level of developer support, I haven't bought a game for it in over a year, KOTOR being the only thing that struck me, and I'd rather play that on the PC being the type of game it was (and I was willing to wait a little while).