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NVIDIA Quad SLI Disappoints
Vigile writes "While the death of PC gaming might be exaggerated, it's hard not to see the issues gamers have with the platform. A genre that used to dominate innovation in the field now requires a $1200 piece of graphics technology just to participate, and that's just plain bad for the consumer. NVIDIA's SLI technology was supposed to get a boost today by going from two GPUs to four GPUs with the introduction of Quad SLI but both PC Perspective and HardOCP seem to think that NVIDIA drastically missed the mark by pushing an incredibly expensive upgrade that really does nothing for real-world game play and performance. If PC gamers are left with these options to save them from consoles, do they even have a chance?"
Consoles have always been cheaper than PCs, that has never been in dispute, but over $1000 for a bit of bragging rights.
I read up in the reviews now them talking about 2560*1600 display sizes and full options and shit:
I am still happy running around at 800*600 with medium graphics (and I used to keep up with the curve until I wasted money on nvidia 5900).
liqbase
You hardly need to spend $1200 to save your rig from the years-old consoles. Quad SLI is nvidia's top offering, not entry level PC gaming. A $200 card (and a $300 core 2 duo) can easily trounce anything the xbox 360 or ps3 can do.
There's something very fishy about the graphics card market. Using a substantially faster video card in a PC doesn't provide nearly the performance of a slower spec'd console. The console isn't burdened by nearly as much overhead, but that should not affect the GPU noticably. The only factor that I can see in play is that games can be better optimized when the developers know exactly what hardware will be used (as is the case with consoles), but surely having twice the power should be enough to negate that.
Whale
This is a very narrow view of gaming. There is more to success than graphics. Themes, genres, plot, interface and repeat playing all affect how popular a game can be. While most of these points are available on any platform the PC still has an edge on interface. Keyboards, mice and flightsticks all offer a more advance UI than thumb levers.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
What on earth has Quad-SLI got to do with 'saving us from consoles' ?
You don't even need a single top-end card to provide an alternative to a console, let alone *four* top-end cards.
As someone still quite enjoying PC gaming, I've got to take issue with "now requires a $1200 piece of graphics technology just to participate". You can play modern games on some very inexpensive hardware just fine. Yes, you *can* spend $1200 on graphics alone, easily, but the vast majority of us, I think, realize the futility of it.
Tech like quad-SLI is there for people with more money than sense, or at least more money than they know what to do with- and at that point, fine, if they want to spend that money and basically support the graphics companies' development costs, let them. The rest of us can continue as we have, working with normally-priced hardware that does everything we need it to. No, we can't play the latest games at 200 FPS on a 30" monitor with everything turned on- but then again, most of us don't even *have* 30" monitors, so... who cares?
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
1200 dollar card to participate? IS the poster really that stupid?
I have a 150 dollar card I bout 2 years ago and it runs everything pretty damn well.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Anyone who has kept track of the discrete graphics scene for the past 5 years has known for a long time that quad sli is less than admirable for what you pay for it. Its only for the etreme of the extreme and by no means is a 1200$ graphics setup REQUIRED to participate in pc gaming as the article would have you believe: "A genre that used to dominate innovation in the field now requires a $1200 piece of graphics technology just to participate." With a 300$ graphics card you can run almost any game today on high or medium high graphics, which is, needless to say, much better than the console equivalent graphics on the same games....
No matter how much cheaper and prettier consoles get, they still won't be fully fledged computers that you can do with as you will.
With only consoles as viable games platforms, the modding scene will essentially die. Seeing as this is the primary source of independent games these days, then expect the standard of games to plummet as publishers have no real incentive to produce quality.
Furthermore, console makers have this tendency to lock you into their proprietary games networks, and unlike the PC it is not possible to get around this.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Someone released hardware that has yet to be taken advantage of! It must be the death of PC gaming forever! No successful industry has ever released a single product that flopped because it was before its time! clearly the failure of a single Nvidia product to deliver massive speed boosts to games that weren't made with it in mind, spells the doom of not only PC games, but the PC itself.
It would kick just about everything's ass in performance and visual quality, because people could develop games to that spec. But its on a PC, and no developer in their right mind would ever write something optimized for 4 graphics cards unless they're writing a tech demo. Nvidia and ATI are trying to push multiple cards on people to get more performance (a decision which obviously helps their bottom line), but I'm sure in a year or so their single-card solutions will end up being better and far far cheaper than having to throw down $1200 for 2 "double-cards".
PCs just have so much damn extra power that is underutilized or wastefully used compared to consoles. Between Windows, any background apps, any programs you're running that grab up as much ram and processor attention as they can, and games, the PC is not really an ideal gaming platform, and consoles will usually beat them on performance and looks at least until near the end of their life-cycle. PCs have the advantage of mod-ability, custom content creation, and greater control (try playing an FPS on a controller after a few days on a mouse/keyboard).
I'm not sure I'd say P.C. gaming is "dead" but I have my doubts about long term viability. As P.C. become even more connected to the outside world and more and more of your collateral exists in digital form on your P.C. The need for security and reliability increase even more. To circumvent the security in order to get good performance for games means that hackers can circumvent the security for their purposes as well.
A console who's sole purpose for existing is to play games doesn't need to (a) be a general purpose computing system and (b) contain anything particularly sensitive. It can dispense with operating system security. There is no way a P.C. can ignore the very real threat of intrusion, data theft, and risk of hijacking.
So, if a video card for your computer costs as much as a whole gaming system, what's the benefit of the video card? More over, if you have to jeopardize the security and integrity of your system to play games, is it worth it?
I can't say, I'm not a gamer and besides a little solitaire, I don't play games on my computer. So, in the abstract, I can't see the advantage of playing games on a computer when good/cheap consoles exist.
I suppose things must be framed as epic battles in order to make them dramatic and interesting. Otherwise, we would just be reading an article about Nvidia not having a clue. I mean, that is obvious, isn't it? Graphics hardware is absolutely out of control. The Wii is proof positive of the start of a change in the industry, meanwhile Nvidia is stuck in the past cycle.
Yes, ridiculously overpowered graphics cards are absurd. This has been true for years: just look at game reviews. With all the settings at maximum, the top tier cards run 60+ fps. That is way more than anyone can ever appreciate, and yet review sites have been living in a make-believe land, along with the card makers, that 10 points more somehow matters.
None of this means PC gaming is dead, by any stretch of the imagination. This is a dead horse, and to try to turn the mistakes Nvidia is making into some kind of broad statement about PC gaming takes quite a leap of logic and sense. You know, consoles have graphics cards too...
Good grief. For a minute there I thought the entire PC gaming industry was going to crash down infront of me.
Quad sli is a crude (ie, consuming excess physical space and $$$$) representation of the future of graphics cards. It is an enthusiast concept for those who absolutely have to have it. It isn't the future. Fact of the matter is, you can immediately reject based on sheer use of space. Were we huffing and puffing at the future of the cpu industry when the concept of dual cpus came out? I don't think so.
I record my sleeptalking
You don't need to spend 1200 dollars to be competitive.
9600 GTs went on sale for 130 bucks recently and they can play crysis at a modest detail level.
A decent gaming machine isn't expensive nowadays:
$100 processor
$100 mobo
$50 case
$150-200 videocard
$70 RAM
$50 PS
Bam you got yourself a gaming rig.
~600 bucks and that's not including the corners you can cut with upgrading.
I have to call B.S. on the article summary. The problem with PC's and gaming aren't because of these ridiculous high end graphics cards. Those are for the morons (like me) who like spend 3x the money to get a 20% boost increase. It has always been like this. I can't think of any games that require cards like these. If there are, the creators of that game are pretty dumb if they want it to sell. The real problem is the crappy Intel graphics cards that are put into many of the mainstream store-bought computers. The people who buy those computers will get screwed in terms of what games they can play. I think it's silly to say that the high-end graphics card is problem. That's like saying "Microsoft just released a new, more powerful, XBox-Super-Elite 360 for twice the cost, but it only adds 10% more detail to all your games. The original 360 is doomed!" No, stupid, you just keeping playing your games on your regular 360 and don't buy something you don't need.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
$1200-1300 was the price tag of SLI 8800GTXs right after they were released. With the 9800gx2 you get almost that much performance with a single slot at half the price. Hell, you can buy SLI 8800GTS 512s (the current price/performance champ) for like $500 and get better performance than a 9800gx2. Quit whinging about how the absolute bleeding edge is unaffordable, asshole.
...that an Xbox 360 pro (HDMI, hard disk, wireless controller) only costs $350 USD and already includes everything you need to play games. Your $200 card, $300 CPU will also need a case, mobo, RAM, keyboard, mouse, and now you're at $800 or so to "trounce" whatever the consoles can provide.
I think a lot of people just don't have the time to set up and maintain a rig anymore or they just don't want to go through the hassle, and contrary to the way things were in the N64/PS1-2 days consoles really don't seem that far behind PCs anymore but the prices are still way cheaper.
I for one welcome our new console playing overlords.
The peak of PC (& mac) gaming was the early 90s. Games like tetris, civilization, sim city, lemmings, kings quest, red baron, played fine on standard issue office computers, and the platform was targeted at adults rather than the under 25 crowd. At what point in the 80s did Apple IIs stop getting ports? Since grownups outside a dedicated fanbase generally do not care about the next iteration of graphics and twitch style play, this meant that games had to use either innovative gameplay, storyline, or compelling simulation to compete.
It was also wonderful that games had small enough budgets and man hours of development that games could be signed by individual creators. Virtually nothing made by committee is as interesting as the enthusiastic work of a dedicated artist.
All the "are video games art?" questions amuse me. Because the answer is: they used to be, now they're straight Hollywood, with opening weekends and everything, and if that qualifies as art or not really depends on individual taste. But they aren't terribly compelling art as storytelling mediums (Chrono Trigger is the only non-adventure story game I've ever played that might make a decent non-licensed-property paperback) and they don't match film for visual spectacle. Interactivity is the fundamental nature of the art. Tetris is ten times the work of art that Final Fantasy is.
While I'm complaining: what's with the totally jockish attitude toward games. I have so little interest in proving my skill against testosterone drive 15 year olds, I can't even begin to describe it. Competitive online content, which is seeing the most energy and creativity on both PCs AND consoles, is a turn-off to most people.
Rhythm games are interesting because much like adventure games, they have a basic interaction model that is dirt simple, but they appeal based on the surrounding context. If you'd told me at the time that Parappa the Rappa was one of the most important games ever made, possibly more so than Street Fighter II, I'd have thought you were nuts.
There's a lot of innovation on the PC these days though. It's all in Flash. If you haven't played Desktop Tower Defense, you're way missing out (say goodbye to your productive time and sleep schedule though, 100 level challenge is basically impossible but you just keep wanting to try). I'd relearn actionscript (haven't played with it since Flash 4) to make some games if I wasn't very well aware that any good game takes hundreds of hours to write and under the hood if you aren't using complicated physics or AI it isn't very interesting programming. I'd rather invent a language or fork Minix or something.
On the other hand, MMORPGs are very interesting. Though I worry that WoW defined the success model too well and experimentation is going to fall off (given the huge investment it takes to launch an MMORPG this isn't so much a worry as a certainty).
Back to the main topic: it's no accident at all that WoW runs playably well on 8 year old graphics cards. Games that require specced out systems have a bright neon sign that says "hobbyists only." If you want a game that crosses over, make it run on whatever piece of crap integrated graphics they put in $500 laptops these days. Hell make it run on OLPC. Graphics can scale down much farther than the currently do, and most people don't mind. Most games could be reduced to Halflife 1 level graphics and still convey the important ingame objects and map features. One thing that I'm constantly bewildered by is that designers use all these polygons not to populate worlds with more interactive objects, but to dress up the same low moving object count we've had since Quake 1. Halo would play perfectly well with 500 polygon characters.
Or maybe I'm just bitter because 1991 era action puzzle games were the last genre I was any good at. I beat Oh No More Lemmings! as a 10 year old, a fact that I'm still damn proud of.
But don't worry, PC gaming isn't anywhere near as dead as arcade games.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
The fact that anybody needs four video cards is disappointing in itself.
Beaten by ATI Radeon: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/geforce9800-gx2.html
"If you have a 30-inch monitor that supports 2560x1600 resolution, then your choice is clear: ATI 4-way CrossFireX
outperforms the similar solution from Nvidia or runs at comparable speed offering acceptable gaming performance
in such titles as Battlefield 2142, BioShock, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and ompany
of Heroes: Opposing Fronts.
Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 Quad SLI platform, however, leads in Call of Duty 4, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of
Chernobyl and Tomb Raider: Legend. In other games, both quad-GPU configurations either work incorrectly or
cannot provide acceptable performance in 2560x1600 resolution.
So, the total score would be 5:3 in favor of AMD/ATI that offer better compatibility, scalability and fewer technical
issues for the users."
___
So, beaten by Quad Radeon in some games.
However, anyone willing to bet on the Linux 3D performance on Radeon? I'm not...
If I want to look at high-res, high-FPS content, I'll just go outside in the real world, thank you very much. In addition that $1200 you didn't spend on a GPU could probably make for some quite nice "real life" experiences as well..
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Standard NTSC television is 720 x 480, with a psuedo frame rate of 60 fps.
It's a little more complicated than that - basically, half the lines on the screen are drawn 60 times per second, so you get 30 actual frames per second, but with the visual impression that it occurs much faster. A gaming console rendering 30 fps could see minor action improvements if it rendered at 60, but nowadays, the difference is hardly noticeable.
With the persistence of vision about 1/20th of a second, there isn't much gained in the difference between 30 and 60 frames per second; the resolution of the frame and accuracy of rendering (realistic fire and smoke, anyone?) probably has a greater impact on the perception of reality.
I think, though, that consoles have the advantage that for the size of the display, televisions are still much cheaper than monitors. Having a sub-millimeter dot pitch doesn't matter much when the action is too fast to notice anyway.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Yes, technically NTSC has 525 scan lines... but not all are visible on the screen. Hence, 720 x 480 is a good approximation.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Consoles offer dismal graphics performance compared to even mid-level PC GFX cards. How can the author or any of these posters make such uninformed statements? How about you do some real research and look at the actual hardware inside the console game and compare the GPU performance apples to apples?
Console games push CRAP resolution, that is why they can do that and operate smoothly with less hardware. PC's have other overhead but this mainly increases cost rather than reduces performance. PC's do a lot more than just games though!
It's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison when consoles can do very little compared to a PC as far as applications are concerned. If you want to compare consoles to PC videocards, stick to the fill rates and raw rendering performance of the GPU.
I have never played a console and said "wow, I will dump my PC now!!!"
1) The GFX blow. PS3, Xbox360, none compare to even my nVidia based laptop.
2) The controllers blow. Playing FPS games on a console is like playing with parkinsons disease. FORGET IT!!! Talk about repetitive stress injuries. I will save my thumbs for later thank you....
EEEgads... PC Gaming is fine thank you. Sure, you can go nuts and spend more on your graphics cards than many folks spend on a whole decent gaming PC. However, I have never seen the point in folks saying "OOOH I Get 4 gazillion frames per second" when the damn monitors are refreshing at what? 60 hz for most LCDs - maybe up to oh? 120 for some really top end stuff? So, I don't see the point except that it's another form of ruler.
I love my PC games - I played Portal on a friend's Xbox and quite enjoyed it, but when I got it for my PC, I was actually able to get the medals on the speed runs - mouse and keyboard offer MUCH more precise and speedy control than the thumb sticks. For RPGs like Neverwinter and MMORPGs like WoW, I just could never see anyone making a usable control layout without a full keyboard. Consoles are great. I like that I can turn on my Wii, have a couple friends over and we have a great time. I like that I can go buy a game for the XBox and not worry that it might be too much for my system to handle, prompting a RAM or video card upgrade (the way Neverwinter Nights 2 did).
I guess it all depends. Except for that one occasion when I first got BioShock on the PC and decided to hook it up to a big LCD TV late at night and play with the full surround sound working overtime to really try to enjoy the full-on creepy factor, I usually separate my gaming: console games where I just want it to work, to be fun, to play in the living room - preferably with friends, and PC games when I want to spend some serious time fragging away or raiding.
Sure, having some totally kick-ass quad video card setup that would let me max out all the video settings at resolutions higher than 1920x1200 would be great - just as soon as I get some monitors that can display that - right now, 1920x1200 is the best I have and my current Nvidia only lags the tiniest bit on some of the newest most advanced games IF I crank absolutely everything up to max. It's not worth the money (to me) to take that next step. Even if I did, I could probably get away with either a single 9800 series or even just a normal pair of SLI type cards.
Let the early adopters pay the huge prices so they can have bragging rights and work out all the inevitable bugs while the rest of us enjoy our relatively stable, not-so-bank-busting gaming experiences. It's going to take a while before the games require all this processing power, and by then, there will be some new, even more outrageous cutting edge stuff that will only work with a handful of the latest games, and the cycle will repeat.
Digit's Law: Early adopters almost always get screwed, so never buy the bleeding edge: get the thing that was bleeding edge yesterday... learning from the mistakes of others is far more pleasant than learning from your own.
The Digital Sorceress
$100 mobo
$50 case
$150-200 videocard
$70 RAM
$50 PS You meant:
Perhaps requiring each player to buy his own PC is acceptable for Crysis, if only because Crysis happens to be rated M. But for any game not rated M, there will be a lot of players who are not yet old enough to work and therefore have to use someone else's PC. If someone else is also playing, then we don't have enough PCs to go around.
..and it runs anything I throw at it. I spent $800 on an Acer 5920G last December and even Crysis is playable at medium settings. Top end graphics cards have always cost $700+ when first hitting the market. Not exactly sure why just because Nvidia releases a $1200 video card suddenly you need one for all PC video games.
This is just sensationalism. Nothing new to see here.
am I missing something here ?
I wish I could mod this comment even higher, because frankly, this story reads like it was submitted by Sony or something. This generation of consoles was basically behind the technology curve either right as they were released, or they were within a year. Already a $200 gfx card can outperform, and this is years before we see the next gen of consoles.
The summary assumes that it's the graphics cards that cause the disappointment with current PC games.
I couldn't disagree more. What's causing this gamer to be fed up isn't graphics quality, it's game quality. From the plethora of patches, bugs, crashes and incompatabilities that plague PC games, to the sheer fact that most games are just badly done reshashes of successful predecessors.
I'd gladly take NWN2 with less fancy graphics if in return it wouldn't be a constantly crashing piece of apeshit, for example. I put down most MMORPGs after an hour or so not because the graphics weren't good enough, but because the gameplay is highly repetitive and I've seen it all before.
On the other hand, GTA didn't have the best graphics of its days, but it was addictive because it had great gameplay with good-enough graphics.
PC gaming could be great, especially where consoles lack. Morrowind, for example, was a better game than Oblivion for one simple reason: The compromises that Bethesda had to make on Oblivion so that it would work on a console.
And for the final nail in the coffin of the summaries argument, consider the Wii. Is it the winner of the 3rd generation console wars because it has the best graphics, or because it's more innovative and provides more fun than the two other "look, ma', bigger and more expensive than before" competitors? Heck, the PS3 is losing to the PS2 in sales figures, and I'm sure we don't have to discuss which of them has the better graphics card.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If you want to play games, buy a games consol. Don't give the fat lazy software houses more resource to do the same thing, or the apps will continue to get fatter and slower.
Open source doesn't suffer as bad from this laziness because trimming the fat is always one of the number one things coders (not sales reps and managers) care about.
I really won't be surprised if we end up with pc (as in crap for games), consols (specifically for games) and workstations (great for games, but really for media work). We are pretty much there now, your crazy (or rich) if you splash out for a workstation to play games.
I've got a bee in my bonnet to day for modern big fat slow apps doing the same thing, only slower, then I was doing on my Acorn 15 years ago with 4Mhz and 1MB! It was all BBC BASIC with some ARM asm, on such slow spec, how could it be faster! HOW! I blame pc gamers and fat lazy software houses! GRRR!!!
$10,000 says you can't run Crysis in a nice setting on a 1920x1200 or above settings.
Yes you can run at a pretty crappy resolution with low textures on a $150 board, but then why bother?
After I upgraded from a 21" CRT to 24" LCD and put in some very nice equipment the "Uhh look at that effect" factor went skywards. Yes you can have fun at $150, but having the latest and greatest actually does quite a lot for the gaming experience.
If I could use a keyboard and mouse on a console across most games control config, I would be all over a console without hesitation.
with text on a 30+" HDTV screen becoming more clear and useable - it's not much of a surprise. The reason PC has always held strong was it's ability to communicate effectively and efficiently, and a lot of that strength came from clarity of the screen which TV simply could not support.
...it would spell the end of competitive PC gaming as you know it
A console with all the advantages of a PC with non of the draw backs are wins for everyone:
Standard Mouse Keyboard Controller and Joystick peripheral support
Less piracy for developers
Less costs to consumers
Same experience as the PC
Lower costs of research and development for graphic card companies (product life cycle pushed to every 2-3 years, opposed to every 6 months: contracts with the console manufacturer, not the consumers)
Better audio support via home theatres
HD media discs
Patches funneling through the live service the instant you log on
More players.. period.
Often enough I've been an adovocate of : well I can't play War3 and SC on controller, or controllers are crap for real fps.
But what excuse would I have next when the mouse/keyboard combo comes into play?
I can't play SC2 on a screen that is 40" ??
I refuse to play Q3 on my big screen tv because my hdtv won't go up to 189 fps so I can make this freaky up jump on this particular q3dm9?
And even if that was your excuse, there would be no stopping you from connecting your next gen console to your monitor......
PC gaming for me is generally RTS or turn based strategy games. I can run them on anything newer then 7-8 years old. Anything else I play on my 360 on my 50" HDTV. A $1200 video card isn't going to ever change that, or a $300 video card for that matter.
While AFR provides higher frame rates, it increases latency which is a big problem for twitch games. With Quad SLI, full AFR requires that you are 5 frames behind. Why five? Because you want all your GPUs rendering all the time (ideally) which means they are rendering the next four frames and the CPU should be building the command list for the fifth frame to be rendered so there will be no stall to start rendering when the most recent GPU becomes free. I'll assume that there is no frame synchronization because that can add yet another frame of latency. Now granted that if you run at 100 FPS, five frames of latency is still only 1/20th of a second.
SFR does get the same frame frates the geometry work much be done once per GPU working on the frame so overall work per frame is a bit higher. However, it does decrease the number of "frames in flight" being rendered and so it has lower latency. This makes for a more responsive game and also can reduce "VR lag".
Another difference is that with AFR rendering, you can't do frame-feedback effects and you have to be careful with render-target as a texture operations. It really depends what you want to do and whether you need faster frame rates or reduced latency. Most of the time AFR and higher framerates are a good thing though -- especially for GFX card manufactures or bragging rights gamers who want the highest FPS possible in their game benchmarks.
Two 8800 GT OC's should be enough for anyone....
If I went around claiming I was an emperor...they'd put me away!
It's not an uber gaming rig, but it'll play most games fairly decently, and it's only $200 to $300 more expensive than an Xbox 360 or PS3 + accessories. You could drop the 8800GT card down to a 8600GT and save another $110 off the total price, bringing it down to $642.
By comparison, an Xbox 360 Halo 3 Edition is $415 with shipping, or a PS3 40GB is $413 with shipping.
It's an apples-to-oranges comparison, but $1200 is not the entry point for PC gaming, and you'd have to go back to the mid to late 1990s to find the last time that it was.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
I fully agree. I read the introduction and conclusions of the two linked articles and found that the summary exaggerates the conclusions. There's no doubt that the price/performance ratio of Quad SLI makes it unappealing for the vast majority of people who play games, and I think the two articles do state that. However, NVIDIA did not "drastically miss the mark" (to paraphrase the wording of the summary). They just released a technology which most people won't want to use. It seems to me that this keeps happening now and then. Some GPU company decides to significantly push the envelope but the end result does not have mass appeal. So what? I don't see this as harming the PC gaming market, except perhaps in really roundabout ways. Someone could argue that NVIDIA might have better spent their R&D somewhere else but then again that needs to be demonstrated.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Stop right there! Its not the games themselves that are the source of the problem. It's thousands of different combinations of crappy hardware (yes I'm looking at you, Intel integrated graphics), crappy drivers, and random crap people have installed on their computer (virus scanners, etc).
Trying to make a modern game work reliably across all the different PCs out there is extremely hard (actually, more like impossible). Some of them have graphics drivers that are 3 years old, so they still have all the bugs that were fixed 2+ years ago. Others have just plain broken drivers that return success results even when DirectX API functions fail, or return failure in situations where it should literally be impossible.
Modern PC games usually contain *workarounds for specific known-bad video drivers* and as many as 5 custom rendering paths for *specific cards*. Developers work hard trying to make the PC look like one sane platform with compatible, working hardware. But the truth is that it isn't... every PC is slightly different, and so its a regular occurrence that a commercial PC game is released and it turns out to crash or have graphics glitches or not function correctly, on some percentage of the target market's PCs.
There is no solution to this other than to move towards a more console-like model for PC hardware and drivers (which Microsoft is trying to do with Games for Windows, but I doubt they will really succeed with that).
P.S. Your argument about Oblivion being consoleized overlooks the fact that Morrowind was available on the original Xbox. I agree that Oblivion was dumbed down for console though--especially in the limited dialogue. That was really a shame.
Latest and greatest has a way of topping out these days. This quad-SLI rig is probably only a measly 5-10% 'speed' boost to something thats half the cost. Not only that, but that 'speed' bost is usually beyond the notisable range (i.e. getting 120+fps as opposed to 100+).
You just need to do a simple cost-benefit analysis. Paying $600 more for a theoretical 10% performance boost that you wont notice is not a lot of benefit for the added cost.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This "PC gaming is dying" meme is bullshit. If you count international sales, online sales and subscriptions, online games in flash and Java, PC gaming is much bigger than consoles, AND GROWING. Bloggers and developers who keep repeating that PC gaming is dying are talking out of their asses. See here for more:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17744
A (really good) friend of mine is an avid gamer. He reads a monthly gamer magazine and rents pc games from the local video rental. He usually buys cards at 100 or 150. Since he is also a professional musician I introduced him to quiet computing. I got him a decent power supply and a good cpu fan. So then he had to deal with his gaming vs. a quiet graphics card and gaming partly lost out, since he got a rather slow card in order for not to have a fan.
Now he is looking into buying the "SAPPHIRE Radeon HD3870 Ultimate" which is a passiv card. I don't really know how it is supposed to do so while drawing 106 watts of power, but they are selling.
Now with that he would have a rig that is probabely less noisy than an XBOX 360. Care to check for a performance comparison? I wouldn't need to. That card is top notch. And the price for that is about 170 over here. He needs the pc anyways (who doesn't nowdays). You only need to look at the price for the graphics card vs. the price for the XBOX/PS3.
Much more bang for the buck IMHO.
Analog NTSC has no pixel structure, so there is no specific number of pixels on a line. A broadcast channel has 6 MHz bandwidth, so there is a physical limit to the number of 'lines of resolution' before it blurs together.
The broadcast standard is 720 pixels wide, as this can represent the full 6 MHz range. It includes 8 pixels of the blanking area on each side, which, when eliminated, leaves 704 pixels. 640 is commonly used by PCs/consoles because it results in square pixels, and gives sufficient detail with slightly less storage/processing overhead.
As for the frame rate, it is 30 frames per second (not 24 as a previous post indicated), which are made of two interlaced fields (240 visible lines each.) Most games don't draw complete frames at 30fps, though -- they draw independent 640x240 fields at 60 fields per second, as it gives smoother motion.
So compare 640x240 60fps to what a gaming PC has to pump out, and clearly it's a much smaller task for the GPU. Hi-Def TV shifts the balance, though, as full 1920x1080 60fps is more than most desktop PC monitors support.
FIXME: Add a sig here
I'm glad that all the fanboys have left the platform for the consoles. There's more games available for the PC than ever before and many absolutely free. Its just so easy to create PC games (as opposed to getting another platform's SDK) and now with the Interwebs its become so easy to distribute them and develop communities around them. They aren't blockbusters, they are more like indy films. Better yet, they're indy films where YOU can actually have fun participating to make them better.
I think the state of PC games is back in the hands of the game hobbyists, maybe more like the early days of PC gaming, rather than the big companies. To me thats a good thing.
100 fps? Are you friggin kidding me? Right now gamers are trying to break the 30 fps mark with all eye candy enabled. High end GFX boards sure as hell have a use these days and will continue as soon as game developers and MS get their act together and learn to program for multiple GPU/CPU's.
A $200 video card and a $50 stick of ram makes the computer you already own a very solid gaming platform; just because you can spend $1200 bucks doesn't mean you have to.
I'll be playing games on my PC as long as I have a PC capable of running Captain Comic.
.com executables.
Of course, I bought my first VGA graphics card and monitor specifically so that I could run Captain Comic at home. AFAIR it was also the last time I bought computer hardware to run a game.
I also enjoy a good game (or 10) of daleks also. It's fortunate that Windows XP still runs
Do not get a shuttle, the power supplies that are available for it do not have the required amps to run a decent video card. I had this exact issue.
You missed out Windows Vista, and try those prices without the promo codes. And there's no way you can get a DVD burner for £12, unless it's off the back of a lorry.
PC games and console games cost roughly the same amount. The difference in cost, for most people, is the console and video card. A base video card costs about $100, but an equivalent console will cost $300-$600 these days.
Additionally, many people already have a computer capable of running most games. Most computer vendors typically upgrade video cards and cpu/memory proportionally between levels (mid-range cpu comes with mid-range video card), and a mid-range computer is needed to run productivity software at a bearable speed.
People only buy consoles when they decide that the benefit is greater than the cost, which either means that console games are more fun, or that they will save money in the long run.
How do you think a PS3 would fare at Crysis on 1900x1200?
Software is so far behind hardware at the moment, it isn't even funny. I mean, have you played WoW lately?
Besides, I hate to bust people's bubble who play FPS games on their fancy gaming rigs, but the highest framerate your puny consumer LCDs can get is 60fps. Anything more is dropped due to the 60hz refresh rate.
i mean, WHICH $1200 piece of GRAPHICS hardware to PLAY a game ?
whats that guy was smoking ? gasoline ?
i amaze at some people, who set their resolution to 1800x1800 or whatever then try to run games in full detail and try to achieve 100 fps or whatnot.
human eye cant discern the difference after a certain resolution and after a certain framerate. in many games it will be impossible to discern the difference after 1280 resolution and 50 fps.
no such bullshit like '$1200 piece of hardware - death of pc gaming' exist.
i just bought a radeon 3870 with 512 ram for $300, and im flying high. literally. crysis and such.
that article is a TOTAL piece of crap. TOTAL.
Read radical news here
I recently bought a new computer for $499.99 (a Gateway GT5428, not the best computer in the world, but it works). It came with a shitty Intel integrated graphics card that couldn't run ANY game that uses DirectX 9+ without crashing!
:)
That's the problem here, almost all home PCs are not even built for gaming! Integrated graphics suck for gaming, most can't even run simple games. But I checked online, and almost all namebrand computers in the $300-$800 range use these broken graphics "cards"! Wtf?
So then I bought a new PSU for $89.99 and a nVidia 8600GT graphics card (the 8800 was too much money unfortunately) for $149.99-$169.99. Now I can play games like Call of Duty 4 and Unreal Tournament on MAX settings, and everything runs smoothly
Promo codes were $10 off the CPU and $10 off the RAM. So that's a $20 difference, or (at most) 3% more than the lower total price. And if you want to clip UPC codes and send in the mail-in rebates, that's another $60 off the price if you go to the effort.
DVD burners just aren't that expensive in the States. Newegg has a whole bunch of DVD burners (even dual-layer capable and with LightScribe support) for under $40, with some good Samsung and Sony/NEC drives for under $25, including shipping. I haven't spent more than $35 on a new internal CD/DVD burner for 7 or 8 years.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
Nvidia's QuadroFX series are the ones that are good for 3D modeling, etc.
The current crop of "quad" SLI and Crossfire are only for gaming ($1100 for 2 dual gpu cards). Remember that the size of PC screens and resolutions have been going up at a brisk pace and many gamers have 24" or 30" monitors. That's 1920x1200 to 2560x1600 pixels. Even the most cutting edge solution gets less than 30 FPS from Crysis on even 1600x1200 and the minimum framerate dips below 12 FPS. (And that's without AA or AF enabled). Unlike on CRTs, lowering the resolution makes the monitor display a blurrier/crappier image on LCD screens.
For the non-hardcore, anything below 30FPS minimum is simply bad (jerky, choppy, ruins the experience) and ideally, you don't want it to dip below 60 FPS to have perfectly smooth motion. Most find a minimum between 30 and 60 FPS to be good.
Bottom line: Top of the line GPUs are about 5 years behind monitor resolutions.
Keyboard + mouse
(or this + this)
Is that the place run by that douchebag guy that lies and bans/deletes people who disagree?
This particular model (Shuttle XPC SN27P2) has a 400W PSU, and I've googled around and read through some discussion boards where people claim, at least, that they have run the SN27P2 with an 8800GT. I'd like to find some more specs on the actual power output per rail from the PSU before buying this all together, though.
NVIDIA has a neat graphics and PSU comparison Flash webpage where you can drag sliders to specify your PSU wattage, and it'll recommend video cards accordingly. At least according to them, a 400W PSU should be sufficient to power 8800GT class cards.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
We aren't just seeing the death of PC gaming, but the death of the desktop PC. Laptop sales definitely overtook desktops on total value a while back - not sure if it's true on number of units shipped just yet. There just aren't all that many new desktop PCs being sold compared to a while back. People are deciding laptops are good enough and have so many advantages.
One area that they aren't good enough though is gaming. Hence more and more people who would like to game on a PC are having to consider buying a whole new PC to play games. I don't believe you need a $1200 graphics card to play new PC games, but I suspect you need at least a $1200 PC.
Step two buy a PC Done years ago. Step three look at the back of the TV and then the PC Done. TV inputs: RF and composite. PC output: VGA. Step four buy the appropriate cable (HDMI, DVI, VGA, or SVGA)
What is the appropriate cable from a PC with only a VGA output to a TV with only RF and composite inputs? Or should someone have have considered this at the "buy a TV" or "buy a PC" stage, and if I have already done that, I'm out $600 for a new TV?
But to give your procedure a full shot, I'll try it on my other PC, which (step three) does have an S-video output.
Step four buy the appropriate cable (HDMI, DVI, VGA, or SVGA) S-video to composite adapter: check. Stereo miniplug to dual RCA: check. Triple 4 m RCA cable: check. Now I have a Windows desktop on the TV. Step five hook cable to TV & PC, right click and then adjust screen resolution to native res of TV The control panel doesn't list 480i, but 480p is close enough. I even understand what "overscan" and "deflicker" are, and when I should and should not turn them on. But: Step six give console fanboy boy a tired look.Console fanboy gives me a look back: "So you got Windows, PowerPoint, and YouTube on your TV. Good job. Now where are the games?" Too many major-label video game publishers dismiss HTPC gaming, claiming that same-screen multiplayer is for consoles only. During the PS2 era, multiplayer titles such as Soul Calibur and Shrek Smash n' Crash Racing would get ported to everything but the PC.
The problem here appears to have a catch-22 in it. Major video game publishers won't port games to the PC because of the TV connection mismatch, and PC makers won't promote PCs with TV output because of the lack of game software.
That doesn't help if the game only reads one joystick at a time. The problem is that so many major-label video games with action on the same screen, such as Soul Calibur and Shrek Super Party, are ported to all three consoles and not Windows. This lack of titles takes away the incentive to set up a home theater PC for gaming, and the lack of suitable HTPCs discourages major video game publishers from making PC ports.
How do I broke Catch-22?
I really don't understand what these developers are thinking when they develop PC games that wont run well on current hardware. I can't help but get the impression that some developers specifically make their games demanding so that they end up in tech benchmarks ultimately providing them with a good deal of free advertising. But then what good is it when the majority of gamers wont even be able to enjoy these games as they've been advertised.
What's happened with me for over a decade now is that shortly after getting a new PC I'll buy a handful of games. Eventually I start hitting performance issues and find myself not buying anything. It gets to a point where I no longer even bother following what's out there because what is the point if my PC wont even be able to handle it.
This has been an issue since at least the 386 era. The difference is, however, that back then once I had a PC that was up to par it would be sufficiently powerful for quite a few years. That performance window has shrunken dramatically in recent years. My last PC, now over 4 years old, barely went a year before being inadequate for gaming. What I find amusing is how it's still handles everything else so well, including some graphics intensive work.
Obviously, I expect that a 10 year old machine wont be able to handle current games. But it's absurd that a PC nowadays is rendered obsolete far quicker than a console. And on top of that the longer a console has been around the better games for the console generally are because developers have figured out how to best utilize the system. PCs follow the opposite path; the older they are the less I can do.
And what, to me, discredits the competence of developers is a game like Street Fighter 4. That game is running on Core 2 Duo's, Pentium 4s and Celeron Ds equipped with Intel Q965 chipset which apparently is no good for graphics. It may not be the most graphically demanding game out there, but it certainly looks good. The same game produced by a PC developer would certainly wouldn't run nearly that well on that hardware.
I find it insulting when I'm told I can turn down graphical settings. I paid $50 to play the game depicted on the box and in screenshots online. Why should I have endure a compromised gaming experience because the developer felt it unnecessary to optimize performance. Maybe I should be charged based on what I can get out of the game.
Since when did Crysis become the official representative of PC games? Crysis shows what can be done with the currently available, albeit still expensive technology. YOU CHOOSE the cost of playing Crysis. It plays fine on my $80 overclocked 7900 GS at medium at standard desktop resolutions and still looks better than any console game I have seen. And my cheap card manages just about every other game on high, say UT3 and COD4 at 1680x1050, my native resolution. There will always be a PC game that pushes the envelope. That doesn't mean that I am REQUIRED to upgrade.
Believe it or not, I choose PC gaming because it is cheaper - for me. I need a semi-decent computer anyway (that is not the case for an average PC user) and slapping in a mid-range card is the cheaper route than buying a full console that I can't use for other things.
As the owner of a 2-way SLI system I can claim that everything about SLI disappoints. As far as my experience is concerned, it only makes a difference at higher frame rates (i.e.: if the game is running at 40fps you can expect it to jump to 60-70fps). That's the case of Oblivion, which fluctuates between 50fps and 250fps on my system (it used to do only 30-140fps with one card). Crysis, however, which was the game that made me upgrade, doesn't benefit the slightest bit from SLI because the areas where I was having 15fps and needed a performance boost the most keep running at 15fps with two cards.
The first two are right, but the last one is wrong. This in fact brings up the point that the "PC gaming is dying" crowd is making- the low end never catches up. This is due to integrated graphics. Sure the CPU power and RAM size might increase for the low end over the years, but the graphics ability has remained at a low level for some time.
Integrated graphics of a low end computer today (say the GMA 950) is actually worse that the graphics card in the original Xbox, never mind the 360. Integrated graphics don't make a jump from generation to generation. The most modern Intel integrated graphics (x3000) is only mildly better than the GMA 950 which is only mildly better than the GMA 915 which is mildly better than GMA8xx. And by mildly I mean "gaming benchmarks won't really run on any of them so we don't know." Heck, the GMA 950 might be the most popular GPU by volume in the world- the new baseline. And that baseline can barely play WOW (a Directx 7 game) let alone anything more modern.
Now I know that the reply might be "throw in a $60 graphics card and you are set," which is true. Problem is that starting last year when the majority of computer sold were laptops, now the bulk of the market is STUCK with integrated graphics.
THAT is what is killing PC Gaming- the fact that the low end (and the mid end in the case of laptops- you usually have to spend over 1k to get one with dedicated graphics) NEVER competes with consoles in their lifetime. Intel has failed Moore's law on graphics. Because most people don't care- GMA 950 does Vista's effects and that is all non gamers need. And actually if it wasn't for ole Aero Glass, the GMA950 wouldn't even be as strong as it is- Intel designed it to be JUST enough to run Vista premium.
So we have a situation were the low end has CPU/RAM/HARDISK power that is 50% of what the mid end has, but has 5% of the graphics power (if by midend you mean "has a low end dedicated graphics card" as I do). Hence Intel is killing PC gaming...
Open Source Sushi
But this exact point is why the Xbox exists- MS realized that the second part of the equation is no longer needed at some point. I sold computers for a few years to regular consumers and let me tell you- 90% buy them just to get on the internet. Web browsing. Thats it. I already know of one friend that basically doesn't use a PC anymore- the Wii's web browser allows him to do anything he wants to do. And even though that sounds icky to me (480p web browsing sucks), I honestly COULD get by for a while with my PS3 running Linux running Firefox on a 720p or higher TV. But I am picky (I need tabs). I bet the built in PS3 or Xbox360 web browser (I'm assuming it has one as both the PS3 and Wii do) would suffice for most. The web reads fine on them.
So within a console generation people will discover that their kids' gaming machines do everything they want from their computer (check their bank statements online and their ebay auctions) and they will stop doing the "buy the $400 PC" part. Then consoles win in a big way...
Open Source Sushi
The big problem with NVidia's latest "generation" of graphics hardware is that it's not a big enough leap from the previous batch, and their SLI tech is every bit as clumsy as the original 3Dfx kludge. Rendering alternating frames doesn't seem like it can make much of an improvement, for a rather simple reason: in Quad-SLI, you're essentially giving each card 4 times longer to render its frame, which also means you're quadrupling latency. Each card still needs its own texture and frame buffers, and it has to do all the work each time. It's like running four separate rigs at 15 fps. Well let me tell you a secret: games and game engines typically don't cope too well with that kind of lag.
It's different from say, a non-interactive render from 3D Studio or whatever the kids are doing these days, where four simultaneous frames equates to almost exactly four times the net performance, but the key ingredient here is non-interactive... since each frame is predetermined, you could theoretically have one GPU for every frame of your movie and render the whole shebang within milliseconds - perfect parallelism. This is not the case with interactive games.
The other problem is that SLI tries to blindly throw more power at the problem, without actually considering how people are using SLI. We don't want to run out games at 250fps, for the most part we want higher resolutions and more texture detail.
To get SLI working as expected and actually coax people into dropping $1200 on these overpriced SLI rigs, NVidia needs to go back to the drawing board and come up with split-scene rendering algorithms that work, or some kind of hybrid parallelism to make four GPUs appear and behave as a single ultra-wide GPU (e.g. pooling stream processors and memory). It takes more than just dumb brawn to drive 2560x1600 at acceptable rates.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The ps3 has 512MB RAM, but it is split such that 256MB is for video, 256MB is general purpose.
"Yeah, this is among the most ridiculous things I've heard on here. "
You don't read below five do you?
"Quad SLi is for the consumer just like a super computer is for the consumer. "
Or people who do CUDA, or experimental operating systems (*wink*wink*).
"NVidia puts this sort of thing out to maintain its reputation as top dog in the graphics arena and to offer specialized niche users (read people that spend their entire day doing 3d modeling of some sort) an extra boost."
Weren't slashdotters the one's clammoring for real time Toy Story on their PC?
"This obviously isn't intended for average consumers when the motherboard you have to buy to support Quad SLi costs about half as much Joe Schmoe even wants to spend on his eMachine (not to mention the power supply and the cards themselves.)"
I wonder if "average"* Joe is still running an Apple I?
*"Average" Joe? Is that anything like "groupthink" slashdotter?
And look at other sites that are more objective, like Tom's Hadware. ATI's 4 GPU solution uses twice the power at 20-85% worse performance depending on the game in question.
The Quad SLI drivers were released today. These sites managed to receieve the drivers, get everything set up, and then test several different games under several different resolutions, AND edit the and post the article.
Spare me. They couldn't have tested very thouroughly.
There's a reason Tom's Hardware doesn't have their results up. They test 6+ games ontop of 3DMark and at 3+ resolutions. Always have, always will.
One company gets kudos from me on this front. Epic had the brains that other companies don't and released Unreal Tournament 3 on the PS3 with full keyboard + mouse support as the hardware supports it. Sadly, the Xbox 360 does not offer this functionality due to Microsoft's ever so brilliant strategy to woo PC gamers. I sincerely hope they come to their senses come their next hardware revision.
Another thing is you could stick four Tesla C870 cards on this motherboard to get an extra 512 processors. Not fantastic processors as such individually but that makes quite a lot of them. Forget trouncing a console - you get to trounce a cluster.
When will stupid people realize the Quad has nothing whatsoever to do with games. Period! You're an idiot if you think a Quad will be awesome for your gaming rig, not because it's insanely more expensive, but you'll also get worse performance than if you got a real gamer's card (which is what the GeForce series is for.. duh.) The Quad is made for accuracy; for high-end professional 3d work which needs to render a scene as accurate as possible (as opposed to as fast as possible which is what gaming cards strive for).
Honestly, people... But I also blame Nvidia. Their marketing department could probably do a much better job educating people about their products.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
I hope by "upgrading" you mean stealing your $200 Hard Drive, $50 gaming mouse, $60 speakers, $20-$100 keyboard, and if you are lucky, your $200 flat panel monitor, that is unless your video card has HD out and can hook up to your TV. Suddenly you just increased your cost of your "Cheap Gaming PC" by 2x.
Also, both NVIDIA and ATI/AMD developed the graphics technology that went into today's consoles. It's not like console technology will somehow overtake what's available for PCs; it's the same technology, only the product cycle for PCs is a lot shorter.
Consoles simply cannot defeat the PC as a gaming platform on the basis of somehow having better hardware. Sure, Wii games are fun. Gameplay is always important, blah blah. That's no reason to assume consoles are, have, or will be crushing PCs anytime soon. As long as compilers are available, small timers will be making games for PCs. And successful small timers occasionally become bigger timers. But what about profit? We all played WoW on our PCs.
Here is why you shouldn't care too much about the results listed in the article. The GF9800 GX2 isn't just for 3D graphics. The reason why NVIDIA rushed the GF9800 GX2 to market now is to support the brave new world of high-performance computing they are envisioning. NVIDIA recently announced that a CUDA implementation of PhysX would be released; you'll probably want two GPUs for that. Additionally, CUDA 2.0 is due real soon now, and this will certainly have enhanced support for multi-GPU application development. To buy one of these just for gaming right now is, well, not economical. To buy a system capable of this degree of performance in this form factor (*eight* GPUs fit on one Extended ATX Intel Skulltrail) intended for research, scientific, or industrial computing is, well, a steal. Hats off to gamers for making this kind of technology affordable.
And now, the sensationalist closing: could this be the year of the Slashdot article summary that concludes without baseless rhetorical questions?
In australia it was a grand, until the dollar went up and it looked like utter price gouging, so now its a better $700, but still way too much, it should be $500au if sony wants to kill MS's shit box that should be $350au.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I really don't see it. PC gaming is far from dead in my opinion. As others have already mentioned, costs of consoles is continually increasing. Cost of PC's on the other hand is continually dropping. That being said, more and more people now have PC access. Thanks to the internet, it is extremely easy to distribute a PC game. I'm currently developing a free PC game called Battle City. It's available online and anybody can stop by to try it out. Since more and more people are getting online, I have endless opportunities to find new users and players. They don't need to buy a console in order to play the game and they don't need to buy a PC to play it, they already have the PC! On topic of the graphics cards, there are tons of quality games available that do not need such an expensive card to be played.
Battle City
PC gaming is dying because nVidia released a card that isn't quite as spectacular as hoped? ATI is releasing excellent top-of-the-line cards at the moment, and for people who mislaid their brain, Crossfire is a perfectly viable alternative to SLI. But nobody with a functioning brain would even consider putting such a ridiculous amount of graphical power in a system. One $150 card gives you way more graphical power than any console has, and more than enough for all current PC games. If you really do need 1920x1440 with 4x AA, a mere PS3 isn't going to cut it for you anyway.
But the real reason why PC games aren't going to die any time soon: the mouse. Only the Wii has an interface that might come close to the versatility of the mouse, but it lacks the speed and precision. With the other consoles you're stuck using thumbsticks. That might be perfectly fine for some games, but not nearly all. Strategy gamers, for example, really can't do without a PC.
The original Xbox was from the PS2 era, and like Windows and Xbox 360, Xbox used APIs very similar to Windows DirectX. So why weren't the majority of party games for Xbox ported to HTPCs?