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?"

Comments

Office computers

[colmore]

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.