The Xbox vs. PC Gaming

An anonymous reader writes "FiringSquad.com brought back their Face Off format to debate how the Xbox was beneficial or harmful for the PC industry. It's an interesting read with a special 3rd guest, Tim Sweeney from Epic Games, giving a few comments at the end." From the article: "The exact impact on Microsoft on the ATI/NVIDIA rivalry is difficult to know. NVIDIA received $200 million up-front from Microsoft for the Xbox. That was as much as the entire 3dfx company was worth in 1998, when the Voodoo2 was at its peak. Likewise, the original plan was for DirectX 8 to provide an API for the pixel shader in the GeForce 2 GTS. But something happened to the DirectX8 spec where all of a sudden, the minimum level of support was the GeForce 3. That something was Microsoft."

Comments

Re:Harmful it is.

[Gulthek]

Why so?

Did you also complain when the Lord of the Rings trailers didn't mention the books?

Or when commercials home versions of arcade games don't mention that arcades had it first?

XBOX has nothing to do with Direct X

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Direct X has been a PC API all along, I didn't even think XBOX games were based on it, or at least, some offshoot from it different then the PC API. As for Microsoft changing Direct X on nVidia, well, MS could do what it wants, Direct X ISN'T an industry standard, its an MS standard. Neither is OpenGL an industry standard, but OpenGL is a cross platform API which ATI and nVidia could make more robust by optimizing their drivers for it, if they wanted to. Has the XBOX really impacted PC gaming? Well, considering that the most innovative and technically advanced games are released for the PC first, I don't think so. Quake, Half-life are two rendering engines that have been ported over to XBOX games. There is so much porting of PC games to game consoles, I would suggest that the only reason why game consoles exist today is because of PC gaming. Lastely, as long as PC technology evolves and improves every 6 - 8 months while game consoles remain static for 5 - 6 years at a time, I can't say the XBOX has had any impact on PC gaming. The Xbox360 may be revolutionary today, but give it 3 - 6 months and nVidia/ATI will release a video card that outperforms the 360 by a factor of 2, followed by one a year from now by a factor of 4, etc, etc, etc until the Xbox720 or whatever.