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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
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?
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
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.
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...
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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.
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.
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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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.
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
...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.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
"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.
I belive DNF requires a time machine to play.
"I forgot my mantra."
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.
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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.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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?
Yeah, just like a monopoly on operating systems... It quite probably IS illegal, but who do you think will do anything about it?
Saying it's the first games that REQUITE a hardware upgrade is rubbish. The first game that required a 3D card was the exact same deal. The first game that required 4 megs of ram etc...
If the developers want to force you to upgrade, fine, I won't buy their titles then. I really couldn't care less about Doom 3 or Half Life 2. (And I say this is as a huge fan of both games earlier versions.) I've long since stopped caring about whether I can run a particular game. I used to care, but now the system specs are getting so retarded that it's just not worth wasting time or money on, especially when current hardware hasn't even been fully utilised. For the longest time the developers of software said about my particular graphics card (GeForce MX420. Essentially a GeForce 2) that it can't have reflective water surfaces. "It just can't be done on a card that low" they said. I've had two developers say that practically verbatim...
And then along comes Unreal Tournament 2K4... And OH LOOK! Fully reflective water textures. It wouldn't be so bad if developers fully explored what they can do with a card and push it to it's limits, but it's become a case of "Bollocks to this, let's just say you need a higher card".
In short, developer laziness is what has led to this, and I've heard that from people in the industry.