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Unreal Creator Proclaims PCs are Not For Gaming
An anonymous reader writes "TG Daily is running an interesting interview with EPIC founder and Unreal creator Tim Sweeney. Sweeney is anyway very clear about his views on the gaming industry, but it is surprising how sharply he criticizes the PC industry for transforming the PC into a useless gaming machine. He's especially unhappy with Intel, which he says has integrated graphics chipsets that 'just don't work'."
There aren't many GOOD pc games coming out lately. So, if the manufacturers drop the ball on hardware ... it doesn't REALLY matter, because the software developers aren't doing much better either.
... they're focusing on consoles because there is more money in consoles!
I don't think that it is a downward spiral, either - software companies aren't focusing on consoles because the PC hardware isn't great
I really believe the last bastion of PC gaming lies in real time strategy games, a genre that essentially requires at least a mouse. I guess many die hards would say the same about first person shooters, but I am comfortable playing with either a mouse or controller, and ever since Halo came out back in 2001, the FPS scene has been migrating to the consoles at a pretty quick rate. The PC will always have Counterstrike, but when it gets pretty popular console games such as Gears of War a year after their console release, you can tell that times have changed.
But yeah, real time strategy games, I don't think we'll ever a decent port of say Starcraft 2 to the consoles, but I suppose if anyone can pull it off, Blizzard can.
I'm not really sure if PC games losing to consoles is entirely a bad thing, I think people are just fed up with trying to keep their system up to date with hardware, nasty CD protection schemes that kill their drives, and console ports that can play just as well and in the comfort of their living room.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
U+F8FF
Of course integrated graphics aren't for gaming. that's what a dedicated video card is for. If you want to use your PC for gaming (Which I do, casually.. with dual geForce 8600GTSs) you have to add on.. it's a simple procedure as everyone here is probably aware. but integrated graphics are VERY useful for office environments where they don't NEED 3d performance. wow.
But, as ever with Epic staff, he seems to labour under the frankly ludicrous idea that the solution is to stop home and business users who don't need an 8800 from buying anything slower.
If he's not able to label his game box clearly enough as needing a £300 graphics card, that's his problem, not Intel's. They make chipsets that are perfectly good enough to accelerate Aero Glass, and there are plenty of consumers that only need that.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Have you even tried to play Unreal III? It takes far more PC than most people have. and that same problem plagued ID on it's last 2 releases for almost 2 years. Hell I know people that STILL dont have a pc capable of running Doom III at any playable speeds. Gaming companies are killing themselves. They are selling games that require a 4ghz dual core, 4 gig ram, and a $500.00 video card. While the world is happy as hell with their 3 year old Pentium 4 3ghz running that $45.00 Geforce 6600 card.
you cant sell a crapload of games that runs on hardware that most people dont have.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I fully agree with the sentiment. In the good old days, you had to be creative to get the most out of the hardware you had, and gameplay was at the centre (or center) of attention. These days it is all about how many frames per second you can push from your graphics card and cpu.
and stop having an anuerism everytime someone tries to add a mouse, I'd pretty much stop using my PC to game with.
I will NEVER use a joystick to play an FPS. Period. It's inferior. Period. A good mouser can beat the best joysticker everytime, given a level playing field (and before you start, it's almost NEVER a level playing field - so don't tell me how good you are on a console. The target areas are programmatically larger. The AI is dumbed down. Etc, etc. These are facts - look it up)
If you even START to suggest adding a mouse option to consoles, the kiddies starting pitching a fit and immediately begin insulting your mother. It's pathetic - the fear of having their asses handed to them in combat is funny. I really enjoy my 360 - but not having a mouse as an OPTION prevents access to a lot of what is cool on it.
Until that time, the PC platform will remain strong. Consoles need a mouse. It's just silly they don't have them. If M$/$ony will EVER gets some balls and support a mouse, I think you'll see the PC side take a huge hit. I'd rather play on my 65" HD.
EK
From the perspective of type of resources "modern" games require, he's right. But large portions of the gaming industry seem to have lost sight of the fact that games do not need to be pretty, only fun. They are games after all.
In the last six months I've logged more hours playing Mahjong on my N810 than I have playing UT3, EVE Online and Half Life 2 mods combined.
So from a wider perspective he's not only wrong, but lost sight of what is important in a game. Not that I don't personally think that UT3 is fun as hell, I actually bought that one. But some perspective on his part would be beneficial to him and his customers.
Question everything
this article and interview are NOT about mouses and joysticks. this article and interview are NOT about PC vs. Console.
This article and interview ARE about how the overwhelming majority of PCs sold in the US do not come remotely close to being able to run current game software. It is almost a plea to Intel to stop making integrated graphics chips, because they suck at running games. If 90% of the PCs sold can't run the software you write and publish, then you aren't going to be a big fan of PC gaming at the moment.
Yes, we know, if you're posting here you can build your own PC, upgrade your graphics card every six months, and use your mouse and keyboard to headshot Osama Bin Laden in his cave from orbit. That doesn't change the fact that you are a part of a minority, and can expect that other game publishers will begin thinking of bailing out on the PC as a platform.
I like Tim, I especially liked his presentation on programming languages in games, but his comments about 64-bit Vista seem rather out of touch.
Yeah? It'd also have cleaned up all the "legacy" software people are using. Like iTunes. Not to mention all the actual legacy software like kids educational software, drivers for old hardware, etc. I also don't know why he thinks this would have cleaned up viruses and spyware. These guys adapt fast and the extra anti-patch systems in 64 Vista aren't all that strong.
Because you, the consumer, demand flashier and better graphics. Not to mention that the level of graphics we're talking about is *impossible* to implement on CPU - the GPU trounces your CPU's performance many times over for matrix math and other calculations.
Scalability is certainly a problem that game developers face - your game should look fairly decent even on a relatively old card, but PC gaming (especially of the 3D graphics variety) has always been an enthusiast thing. If you're not willing to buy a new $200 video card every year or so, you have no hope of keeping up.
I object to your description of game devs as "lazy". The usage of the GPU is a matter of necessity, and it's not easy either. Game developers are not taking the lazy way out by "not writing code" (they are), and relying in GPU functions - what does that mean anyway? Do you think there's a magical "awesome graphics" API on your graphics card that we can call to make things shiny? The kind of work we do on the card (shaders) is sometimes a LOT more complex than what we do on the CPU.
Oh, and DOOM works fine on integrated chipsets because... *drumroll* it doesn't use it! All your 3D work is done on-CPU, and I'm sorry to say that as fast as our CPUs have gotten, they are FAR from fast enough to power all of the pretty graphics you're used to seeing. We are, what, 100 times faster than the CPUs of the DOOM era? But our performance needs for games have progressed leaps and bounds beyond that.
I'm so tired of buying games for my 10 year old, then having to disappoint her when it won't install because it doesn support pixelshader 1.N, and 10^27 polygons per second etcRead the requirements on the box! Every PC game I've ever bought has been *perfectly* clear about its video card requirements up front. After all, PC developers don't want pissed off consumers any more than you like getting disappointed when a game won't run. And seriously, if you're buying things like Lego Star Wars for your child, anything higher than a GeForce 6600 will run it buttery smooth, and that's a $50-100 card these days.
Honestly speaking, IMHO PC devs have been doing a good job with scalability. The only game recently that required a massive upgrade just to play was Crysis, everything else (Portal, TF2, C&C3, etc.) scales VERY well down to some downright low-end hardware.
Show the the console that can play Crysis. For that matter show me a console that plays the newer 'Total War' games. Show the the console that supports various MMO's.
Drink your coffee before you post!
That's sorta true. . . but not so much. . .
By the time you finish upgrading your computer, you've spent enough money that it might have made more sense to by a medium-spec next gen machine, instead of trying to upgrade your last-gen machine to high-spec (for that generation). Because the medium spec machine will likely be more powerful than the high-spec last-gen machine. Or, you have, really, bought a new computer, one part at a time, anyhow, and probably spent $400-$600, at least, to do it.
If 90% of all PC's sold can't play 90% of the games sold, who's fault is this? Is it the hardware manufacturers that sell people PCs at a reasonable price, or the game manufacturers who target hardware only found in 10% of PCs? Even if only 1/9th of all the people buying low-end PCs wanted to buy games, that would still double the target market (and that is assuming that all of the people buying "capable" machines want to buy games).
Games manufacturers could easily start to target the 90% instead if they wanted to increase their market. Even an Intel GMA 950 (which is in an awful lot of PCs and laptops) should be capable of playing 3D games if the graphics are scaled down properly.
Personally I think a lot of games manufacturers are pissing away the chance for a large increase in their sales, by being way too '1337'. They want to show off their game, and they want to make it look super slick, which is fair enough... but don't come complaining if this rules the game out for a large part of the market.
Yes I'm aware of that, however pretty much no game supports it. The support is half-hearted at best and is basically non-support.
And, yeah, it is Sony's (and MS's) fault. Say 'ok you can plug in a mouse' is not 'You must also support a mouse'.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
What you're saying makes a lot of sense, especially given the fact that the computer mouse and keyboard was designed specifically to ergonomically play First Person Shooters and game controllers were designed to type letters and open folders.
Yup...
> criticizes the PC industry for transforming the PC into a useless gaming machine
Humorously ambiguous sentence
I personally think that the PC, particularly under Windows XP, is a terrible gaming platform. I find myself cringing every time people complain about how bad Linux/Mac are for games, as opposed to the great and wonderful Windows. Here's a little list of annoyances I can think of off the top of my head right now:
* The need to install a game on your hard disk. Why can my Gamecube run any game within seconds of plopping the CD in and turning it on? (...and it's not like I can legitimately run the game without the original CD anyway.)
* The horribly slow and ugly process of switching from the Windows desktop to full screen. First the screen flickers. Then the screen turns black. Then the desktop shows up for a second, "magnified" (because the resolution is lower). Then more blackness. Finally, the game shows up. Hard disk grinding throughout this time. Reverse this process when the game is over.
* Occasionally some stupid popup (like an instant message or a warning about my swap space running low) will force the game out of full-screen mode and back to the desktop. This cuts you out of the action for at least 30 seconds, as the disk grinds its way to swap everything back in and the resolution change as described above occurs yet again.
* The occasional background process causes the game to stutter or jump slightly every once in a while.
* I've rarely ever seen a 3D, or even a 2D game on the PC that has consistent smooth moving animation and scrolling at the refresh rate of the monitor with no tearing - things that are a given in almost any console game. That is, it should be that FPS == refresh rate, and refreshes occur while screen is not updating.
* When quitting a game, very often all windows that were previously open are now confined to the upper-left corner within bounds equal to the size of the game's full-screen resolution.
* Sometimes the same goes for all desktop icons. So what if you've spent time arranging them in a particular way? They're all bunched up in a 320x200 corner now, sorry.
* No matter how good your hardware, a game will always give you the impression that something needs upgrading (see the stuttering phenomenon mentioned above).
In my experience the Mac is much better in most of these respects. I've never tried gaming under Linux or Vista, and I do realize some of these points may have been fixed in Vista.
I think you're missing the point here though. It sounds to me like he's more pissed off with the fact that Dell, HP, and the other vendors are slapping the cheapest video card they can into the computers, ripping out the PCI-X slots, then selling the computer for $800 and marketing it as a "Entertainment PC". I admit I agree with you a little, but the Intel chipsets really are pretty terrible. Usually they pull out most of the flashy shaders and such for video games leaving the developers a tiny toolset that they could make an engine reminiscent of the Quake engine.
I really agree with Tim here. This was the perfect opportunity to transition to 64bit. Most compatibility issues with Vista are Vista related, not 64 bit related. This would have given us more access to memory beyond 2GB and accelerated 64bit application development and might have even given me a reason to go with Vista. If you are breaking a lot of drivers and programs anyway, why not got 64bit at the same time and gain some benefit in the process. Heck Apple managed to swap to a whole new CPU architecture with minimal pain. You need to have stones to move forward.
But by giving everyone a choice again and all the OEMs pushing 32bit, there is practically no movement to 64bit and practically no new capabilities exercised, no 64 bit games. etc..
Another thing is MS should have upped the minimum HW requirements for Vista. 64bit processor 1Gig memory and graphics capable of at least running the interface. That is how bad Intel Integrated is. It can't even run Vistas bloated interface (hence lawsuit). No surprise it can't run games.
There should be some kind of game certification as well and the bar needs to be high enough that Intel Integrated fails even the minimum standard.
It needs to be made absolutely clear than standard integrated graphics are incapable of running games.
Blaming Intel and integrated graphics for the decline of PC gaming is a cop out. These game companies have been operating under the principle that a game with better graphics is a better game. Instead of creating new an innovative was to game on a PC, they enhance the graphics of an old game and call it a new game. Don't blame Intel if your game does not work on their GPU platform and you are using the latest, cutting edge, extensions and expecting the latest amounts of video ram. The fact that some of these companies are listing specific graphics cards as system requirements should indicate that there is a problem. At that point you are limiting your audience on your own. If you want a big audience, you should target machines with integrated graphics and then find ways to scale up when there is more power instead of targeting the latest and greatest and then complaining that you can't scale back to make it work. By promoting the idea that better graphics equals better game, they entered into a stupid race and they can only blame themselves.
The problem is that most designers don't know how to make a new game, and instead of stepping down, they throw themselves into the eye candy columbine.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
The problem is the people who buy a business class machine, like one of the Dell machines intended solely for office work, e-mail/surfing and expect it to be a gaming machine.
There is nowhere that this is more apparent than The Sims franchise where people who are not gamers suddenly want to play a game and find they can't or that the performance sucks.
The problem lies with the fact that PCs are not consoles and people have choice. If every PC was sold as something capable of handling games, the price would be much higher. You wouldn't be able to get those $300 desktops for grandma to check her email on.
Don't blame the industry for giving consumers a choice. Blame the consumers for not educating themselves and making a proper choice. Better yet, educate consumers. Run an ad campaign, set up a website as a resource for explaining the difference between an e-mail machine and a gaming machine.
I agree that a joystick is inferior, but so is a mouse.
Try a trackball, it'll kick your ass at games.
I love all these people posting that the mouse is the ultimate game control device who act as if they've studied and critiqued every device imaginable for the role. You ask, "ever tried a trackball?" and the answer is no, even though trackballs are cheap, available, and work better for games. Just admit you like the mouse out of habit.
(If you HAVE used a trackball and rejected it, I apologize, but the vast majority of gamers have not.)
Comment of the year
That's amazing. Now how about you give the prices of: case, power supply, CD/DVD drive, keyboard, laser mouse, monitor, speakers, and value of your time spent on building it. :-P
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
But still crap overall. The major problem is that they use system RAM. Graphics is very RAM bandwidth intensive and the system RAM just can't provide that. Part of the problem is that you are fighting for access to it with the CPU, but the other part is that it is just slow by graphics standards. I mean consider that the brand spanking new high end RAM for a motherboard is DDR3-1333. That's 1333MHz in RAM speak (meaning 1333 million transfers per clock). Most people don't have that, even with high end systems since it is brand new. Most are DDR2-667 or DDR-800 which are, of course 667MHz and 800MHz. Ok, now compare that to a high end graphics card. These days they have RAM in the 1800-2000MHz range. What's more, they have a very large memory controller (or rather a lot of parallel 64-bit controller), between 256-bit and 384-bit on today's high end.
The upshot of it is a high end motherboard might have a theoretical max 10GB/sec of memory bandwidth, a high end graphics card can have as much as 10 times that (the 8800 Ultra has a theoretical max of 103GB/sec).
Now if you talk more realistic systems like where you'd actually be using integrated graphics, it isn't even that high. You have a system with DDR2-533 and, well, that's 4.2GB/sec peak and remember that's shared with the CPU. Even the cheap 8400 has more than that (6.4GB/sec peak) and, of course, that is all dedicated for it, no sharing.
So while the Intel chips themselves aren't all that bad (they aren't great either, don't get me wrong), they are just going to be permanently crippled with regards to games so long as they are sharing slower system memory. Doing graphics operations on lots of pixels just demands lots of memory bandwidth. Doesn't go over so well when the bandwidth is low, and you have to fight with the CPU for access to it.
So yeah, the guy's right, Intel's graphics adaptors are terrible.
Terrible at polygon shading, maybe, but that doesn't matter for 95% of what the PCs that have them are used for.
Yeah, PCs are "useless gaming machines" for the games the "Unreal" creators keep trying to make.
But they are perfectly fine for WoW, Counterstrike, Warcraft 3, Starcraft, The Sims, Bejewelled, Freecell and many other games that millions around the world are playing _NOW_.
I've been playing Guild Wars on my years old Athlon XP system, and what bothers me more is network latency than system "grunt" - high ping makes playing hard.
If the latest UT didn't sell well or doesn't work on computers that 90% of the _target_ market own, I think it's more Tim Sweeney's fault than Intel's fault.
If they weren't targeting the mass market then no problem right? If they were, then maybe they should start giving out free 8800GT video cards with their game. But that costs $$$? Uhuh, so why should customers subsidize your game when it's not really better than UT2k4?
Many people aren't downgrading to Vista from XP for similar reasons.
I know that more than one colleague upgraded their vid cards to play games like Crysis and Bioshock. And after a few days, one said he was spending more time playing Warcraft 3 "DOTA" and the other was playing the GTA series. They both agreed the Crysis and Bioshock were nice to play, but I suppose they don't have as much "staying power".
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If the console say, came with a mouse and some sort of layout controller (ala a nostromo for instance) then there would be more defacto support. I am not saying force the devs ( and whatever on content control - the devs are currently 'forced' to a standard controller) to be forced - if a mouse/keyboard was a standard part of the consoles it would take care of itself.
And yah, sometimes I don't know why I bother to post here *smile*.
EK