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Valve Releases Hardware Survey Results
Chris_Yates writes "A hardware survey containing over one million entries has been made public by Valve, the creators of Half-Life 2. Some interesting facts include: 65.89% now have SP2 compared to 17.04% for SP1, AMD and Intel almost split 50/50 with nVidia edging out ATI 50.72% to 41.03%. The Radeon 9800 and 9600 take the top two spots with 20% combined."
Consoles are popular because most people are idiots, and if you give them choices, they get confused and inevitably fuck it up. This is further confused by marketspeak on new PCs, advertising things like, "WOW! Intel Super 3D GRAPHICS INTEGRATED!" and then people wonder why, if Intel (the only brand name they likely recognize and associate with quality) has this "Super" 3D chip, why does their PC game run like total crap, if at all?
In any event, most developers DO allow for older hardware. HL2 and Doom3 are known to run pretty nicely on even considerably older hardware. But those of us on the cutting edge get a lot of love, because part of what these companies do is advance the state of the art. If these games DID NOT cater to the cutting edge gaming enthusiasts, then who would be left to PC game at all? Everyone would be on the console for cheapness/ease of use, or just because "hey, the PC isn't any better".
Is having a Dual GeForce 6800 SLI setup overkill? Sure. As is the 2GB of ram, the 10k raptor SATA drives, and the overclocked AMD64. But when I go to play, I know that what I'm experiencing is as good as it gets. And given how many hours I spend playing games and how much I enjoy that after a hard day toiling away at code and such (and posting to Slashdot, too!), it's pretty damn enjoyable.
Honestly, who the hell wants to game on an XBox these days?
* 733 Mhz Intel process
* GeForce 3 (mostly)
* 64MB RAM
* 10GB Drive
I have a friend who has been using the same gaming PC for coming up on 3 years in June, and his is *still* better than that. Meanwhile, look at what the PC does that the XBox does not (the list is endless).
On the other hand, I like the fact that the XBox is, fundamentally, PC hardware, as it encourages cross-platform games.
Of course, the real reason I'm not playing on consoles 99% of the time is that the interface remains clunky. The handheld controllers are not comfortable to use, and you can do a lot less. With a PC, I can comfortable control a mouse with 4 buttons and a wheel, plus easily access at least 15+ keyboard buttons and another 15 or more with a smidge of extra effort. The thought of trying to play an FPS game on a console is enough to give me nightmares.