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AMD Wants to Standardize PC Gaming
Vigile writes "Even though PC gaming has a very devout fan-base, it is impossible to not see the many benefits that console gaming offers: faster loads, better compatibility and more games that fully utilize the hardware to name a few. AMD just launched a new initiative called AMD GAME! that attempts to bring some of these benefits to PC games as well. AMD will be certifying hardware for two different levels of PC gaming standards, testing compatibility with a host of current and future PC titles as well as offering up AMD GAME! ready components or pre-built systems from partners."
I think this will be very cool for average joe who don't understand difference between 8400GS and 8800GT graphic cards. If game cover says its AMD GAME READY, joe can buy that game and play in his PC.
This is a good idea, but I'm sure it will show to be very difficult. The neat thing about consoles is they are all the same, roughly, where PCs can be made up of pretty much any component you can find. On top of that, you have all sorts of software that can be present that have just as much as, or in some cases more than, hardware.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
This will get abused/misused just like the "Vista Capable" mark. Find a way to technically be compliant but in reality be quite sub-par to what the consumer expectations are.
Because AMD is the Champion of Standards. In fact they should come up with a set of instructions like SSE... we can specialize them for Graphics... call it 3DNow!
The chances of this going the way 'Games For Windows' did is quite likely. Be interesting to see how it plays out however.
- SoulMan "Drink Life As It Comes." ~ Gavin Rossdale, BUSH
By building your corporate name into the name of the "standard," you won't be getting Intel on board. 3DNow redux.
Microsoft wasn't even that dumb when they pushed OOXML through ISO.
No standards to see here, please move along.
So what, we wait for INTEL GAME! and POWERPC GAME! too? Geez....
This kind of crap has been going on for a long, long time. Anybody else remember the MPC standards?
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
as long as I get to write them!"
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Dumb everything down so that everyone with the infrastructure to make crap can enter the marketplace regardless of the quality and merits of their product. Those that make the cheapest shit that just barely conforms to the standard will capture the market.
Hey, it worked great for the PC market; didn't it?!?
PCs used to be a rather diverse collection of hardware. I'll bet most of the older techie's can remember the horrible variations on IBM's original PC. Even IBM made horrible variations.
My point is that standardization is possible, even probable. So, I think that, yes, there can be some effort to enable the technology for gaming; memory management, graphics buss technology, cell processor technology, etc.
It seems like the processor divergence works against this. The various 'Intel' compatible processors all have a requirement of specialized Northbridge/Southbridge type glue silicon and that works against standardization.
Best regards.
I'm looking forward for Yahoo! to answer by joining this idea to get Gaming! ready! for the Internet! with Yahoo! Game!
Heavens, people, whoever thought it'd be a great idea to trademark punctuation needs to be slapped!(tm)
It's a nice ideal, but AMD has no authority or power to make this happen. The difference between PCs and Consoles is who is in control. With a console the manufacturer can dictate standardization, but with a PC the user gets to decide what goes where. AMD will need to ask all the gaming-hardware manufacturers to join together voluntarily to make the user's choices fit into a standard. They can't just restrict the user to standardized options, the user will pick as they please.
I think the best chance for standardized PC gaming is for someone to pitch a desktop-console. Essentially they'd just be selling a standardized box of subsidized PC hardware. Market it well enough to developers and to consumers and hopefully enough people will hop on board to make it a defacto standard by popularity. What would make this difference is pre-packaging an affordable gaming box instead of having casual consumers pick out hardware on their own. Hardcore gamers will of course prefer to do this themselves, but casual consumers would rather that things "just work".
ODF standardizing document formats. While it succeeded, the 800 lb gorilla in that market quickly came in and created their own standard. I await Intel / Nvidia's response. This might be off, I apologize if it is.
Wasn't Windows Vista supposed to have something like this where they'd take all your components and assign you a number based off of their estimated performance? Then games would be marked with a number - "You need at least an X computer to play this game. Y is recommended". I don't run Vista so I don't know.
My name is Wootzor von Leetenhaxor
So what AMD are trying to say is that they are getting into the game console business except that their system will run Windows and have upgradeable hardware.
It's either that or PC makers/buyers wise up and tell Intel graphics to shove off and buy whatever is in the $50-100 range from Nvidia or ATI or one of their integrated solutions they've been talking about.
Looking at Valve's hardware survey that's about where the majority of PC gamers reside. Give it another year or two and Crysis level graphics will run nicely at that price point. Maybe then the PC gaming renaissance can commence.
Although AMD seems to be in a bit of a bind on all marketing fronts, I don't see how this will positively affect their business. They'll have to pitch it pretty hard to get vendors to sign on, and most "gamers" are pretty familiar with the hardware offerings. The types who don't research what they're buying, but instead grab something off the shelf without asking pointed questions about the power supply and specific slots, probably are looking for a home computer more than a game playing device. There's a lot of information out there to anyone who wants to see even rudimentary benchmarks.
If they *are* able to sell their services, though, more power to them. I'm kinda disappointed with their latest offerings, but I must say that the new Intel Q6600 is keeping pace with my 5600 in everything that was CPU-bound or single-core'd.
While some intense games require specific types of hardware from what I've seen most require the computer to be dedicated to playing the game. Why not take advantage of the virtualization extensions AMD and Intel have built into their CPU's and virtualize a gaming environment.
Another Vista Capable, another Nvidia ,the way its meant to be played advertisement.
Seriously that is all this is, ADVERTISING.
Sounds like the MPC level labels they tried using back around the time (1992) when I bought King's Quest VI. I think I may have gotten the upgrade from the floppy disk stack to the "new" version on CD-ROM for free.
The easiest thing to do would be to create an independent capability standard for cpu, sound, video, etc. like a simple DirectX release number. But, trying to keep pace with the actual power in our computers will get silly with all of the elements combined. What would we be at now, MPC Level 103?
...are doomed to repeat it.
:)) Still it is possible to obtain new hardware
Can you say "MSX"?
+ What is a MSX computer?
The whole MSX story started in 1983 when the computer companies
wanted to make a worldwide home computer standard.
The idea was that you could run programs made for one machine
on a variation on models from different companies (Just like the
PC standard today).
Companies involved with this was among others, Sony, Philips,
Spectravideo, Sanyo, Yamaha, Mitshubishi, Panasonic, Dragon,
Daewoo and a lot of other companies.
The MSX was based around the Z80 3.5Mhz 8Bit CPU, a well
know and well supported CPU for its time. It also came with
a 3 channel PSG which had no problems matching the poor quality
PC sound or other machines made in the early 80's. There was also
the possibility to add extra sounds via SCC cartridges made by
Konami, MSX Music (FM-Pac) from Panasonic and also a soundcard
originally made by Philips. As it also supported 16 colors the
machine was well suited for games and education programs.
Later models had more colors and more RAM.
The MSX did very well in Japan, South America (there are 400.000
MSX machines only in Brazil!) and quite well also in Europe.
It did not however become a huge success worldwide, but it did
reasonably well, in fact it was made and sold in Japan till
well into the 90's... and the user base still have lots of active
fans (including myself), though not the same as it was 10 years
ago for natural reasons... (the developent goes on and so does the
computer freaks
for the MSX even today thanks to various MSX clubs. These clubs
make the Moonsound soundcard based on OPL-4 and is said to be
very good. There is also the GFX9000 graphics board that add even
better graphics to the MSX in addition comes things like SCSI
interfaces, adapters etc......
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Sounds like AMDs aiming to make 4 different "console" type setups... to make this really work they need to focus on a singular setup rather than what they're doing... unfortunately I just don't think their heart is really in it enough. We've been working on the Open Game Console project for over 2 years now to figure out these sorts of issues and I just don't see AMDs current game plan working.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
One of the biggest advantages of a games console is a specification and implementation once released. A PC (whatever the OS) is a moving target and because of the complexities of configurations and different hardware proves to be harder to get right, especially when you are pushing the edge. Taking this into account and the existence of virtual machine technologies, such as Virtual PC, I wonder how successful a Virtual Games Machine environment would be. The idea is that you provide a virtual machine environment that runs transparently to the user on whatever OS they happen to have (MS-Windows, Linux, MacOS X) and provides the right hooks to run on the underlying hardware. This is probably wishful thinking, but maybe it is the only way PC gaming has a way to survive beyond the speciality games that are suited for a PC - think World of Warcraft and other strategy games.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
1) AMD Game is pretty low-spec.
2) PC gaming, unfortunately, is a constantly moving bar. There are a few games out today that will run just fine on AMD Game. Tomorrow? Probably not, Crysis 3 will come out and require a 16-core 5.5mhz processor and 8264234gb of RAM, and if you bought into AMD Game thinking it'll last any longer than any other system you can buy/build, guess what?
3) Enthusiasts will ignore Game, seeing points 1-2 clearly. This leavs Joe Sixpack to market to, and Joe Sixpack will be angry by this time next year once he sees Elder Scroll 7 won't even attempt to launch on his POS.
radeonhd?
Dammit, I _do_not_want_ a separate computer to play games on!
I _have_ a computer. It is primarily for playing games. I don't want another computer for playing games, and a separate computer for email, web browsing, watching movies, etc. etc.
And while more and more of this functionality is showing up on gaming consoles, now I'M RIGHT BACK TO HAVING A COMPUTER AGAIN.
I just do not understand the console appeal. My last console was an Atari 2600.
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It seems like this sort of thing has been tried numerous times already and I don't see anything here that will make this any sort of success... Did the Viiv thing work for anybody? Tell me this, does having another case sticker help anybody? When I go into the local stores the computers are already plastered with so many Intel inside, vista ready, media ready, blah blah blah stickers that I doubt the average person even knows what they mean. So what's going to make anybody look for an AMD Game! sticker... In addition, how does it even benefit the gamer past 6 months or a year? Sure the pc will run games at 30fps today but then what? You just run into the same problem because you have no versioning... If it was AMD Game! 1.0 the user could then know it a 1.0 game could play on it but not a 2.0 game. But this isn't manageable in the industry because you got to get software makers to work with you. The other problem is that you have one manufacturer trying to change the industry and it just won't work. The only people who could possibly do this by themselves would be Microsoft. I was hoping that the Games for Windows thing would take off but its too closely tied to Vista and the Xbox team. To get anything like this to work, it will have to be done by a task force made up of several companies or somebody like Microsoft will need to do it but in a way that's a bit more protected from Microsoft itself. If MS didn't care about DX 10 being vista only and trying to get people to pay $$ for Live services this could really go somewhere. The only other company I can see being successful is Valve with Steam. Its just a fantastic system and all that needs to be added is pc performance scoring to tell the average joe what they are able to play or what they need to upgrade in order to play a game. It already has the content protection nailed down. Wild tangent is trying this but they really have to prove themselves on this one... Wild tangent itself wasn't relevant to any mainstream gamers that I know of.
If this were combined with the "Preloaded linux in rom for browsing" thing. Call it a "Console Mode" for PCs, where you can just boot up from the DVD and the game starts running instantly.
It could still load the DVDs to disk.
And the whole thing could be set up to run as a VM inside another OS if available--making games platform independent.
And there would be world peace...
(Might as well throw that in with the other pipe dreams)
Nvidia and Intel will never sign on to anything called "AMD GAME." This is doomed from the start because of the name.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
1) Multiple loading times and "please wait" - PC games do NOT do this
2) Saves money - why spend $300+ on a separate system that I can just play on my gaming computer anyway? Save the money for a new computer.
3) Better graphics - PC gaming had better graphics (PS3 is an exception probably) so why by a console system for poorer performance?
I'm not just talking about gaming, either. If someone creates a "standard" for something, somebody else will come along and find some reason to break the standard. Remember when they tried to standardize C? Yeah, that worked out well didn't it? Besides, so-called "standards" are just as likely to stifle innovation as they are to eliminate compatibility problems -- and I'm sure that isn't lost on AMD, who'd stand to profit greatly if everyone just nodded their heads emptily and said "'K! We'll do it all your way!"
You know how some laptops have an alternate, simple OS built in that can fire up in seconds to play movies, listen to music, and so forth? I think that would be a slick way to establish the pc back as a gaming console. It could be a stripped down, heavily tainted linux OS, or a severely trimmed XP; the point is you would put in a disk and hit the 'game' button on the case, and bam!
First thing is first, if you really want to bring an even remotely viable standard to the industry, it can't have your brand on it. Not even if your processors didn't suck. So, AMDGame!, AMDGame Ultra, ect.: meet trashbin.
Second, if you base your standard on qualitative metrics today like regular, extreme, venti, extra loco, etc. they're all going to be in the sucks, super-sucks, sucks more dick than an intern at a political convention, range of categories in little over a year. That means you have to keep coming up with new, confusing, and retarded new names every product cycle or, alternatively, redefine the existing names each cycle so that last years Ultra is this years suck. How is this going to reduce confusion?
My suggestion is to slap a number on your standards. e.g. PC Gaming Score: 710 for this years Ultra, and 920 for next years. Every last mouth breather out there knows that higher numbers are usually better and will assume so, even when they aren't.
Now, it's important to note that these numbers aren't quite like a benchmark. Having one really fast component shouldn't quality a system for a number high enough to play a game when it has other components that will make that game unplayable. These numbers can't be mindless metrics that come out of a benchmark. It has to take all components into consideration, especially the bottlenecks. The goal is to provide a single number that a user can look at and say: Okay, the required number on gameX is lower, so I can play it. No worries.
It's that simple. No worrying about whether uber-awesome is greater than mega-extreme, or whether it's last years mega-extreme or this year's mega-extreme. It's, "is the number on the box of this game less than the number on my machine".
Seriously, it's about time companies like AMD realized that the same slice from a bigger pie still equals greater profits. If they want to increase the PC gaming market they really need to put their brand promotion on the back burner.
Basically, it's a branding initiative with zero weight behind it. AMD is in the unfortunate position of not having leading products in either graphics or processor, and yet they are trying to emphasize themselves as a leader for gaming enthusiasts. Of all the markets to try to hoodwink, this is a poor choice to focus. There has been a long standing history of PC gaming nuts keeping a close eye on technology and commenting. The ones that aren't so obsessive about it have either moved to consoles or don't bother buying hardware and just game with what they got, with the titles they are comfortable with. They already know that even as of B3 stepping Phenoms, the processor isn't up to compete with Core2. They know that nVidia still has the edge, from either driver optimization or the hardware itself, it's hard to tell.
So what you are left with is a branding initiative targeting a market that is admittedly potentially high margin, but in this scope to savvy to fall for such a move. If they truly want that market, they need to push their product from a technical, not marketing standpoint. With the offering they have now, their only viable option is to emphasis value for the money, regrettably relegating themselves again to the budget market. AMD has been there before and didn't die and emerged with an overwhelming product before, and they have just got to accept it and regroup.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The way this works out is that they want to be able to Label systems as Game or Game Ultimate if they meet or exceed certain specifications. Kinda like the way Microsoft labeled systems as "vista ready". This really isn't a standardization, they are looking to be able to set customers expectations via a labeling system, so that the customer will have a good idea what they are getting before they get it out of the box.
On that note: Don't all pc games already have this? I think it's called the minimum system requirements? Besides, doesn't nvidia already do something similar to this?
I mean I see little nvidia stickers all over the gamestore?
This was done in the 90s. It was called MPC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC
The wide choice of hardware in the x86 market is counter to easy and performant gaming...
You end up needing multiple levels of software abstraction between game and hardware to cater for hardware that is fundamentally incompatible with each other.
Compare that to consoles, where the hardware is always the same, so you can program it directly without lots of extra overhead..
For a good example, try building a pc with as close a configuration to an xbox as you can, and try running some of the games side by side on it and a real xbox... Something like halo will run like garbage on a similarly specced pc once you have the overhead of windows, while the xbox will run it quite well, and it still has layers of abstraction on the xbox, not hitting the hardware directly.
What AMD should do, is get together with other vendors and create a standard "gaming spec" every couple of years... Where the CPU will always be a certain level or faster, memory a certain amount, and videocard a certain performance and with a guaranteed hardware level interface. Then the games can boot directly from DVD, without the overhead of an OS.
You can also never guarantee compatibility when you rely on third party software to be running, which seems to be one of the goals... You will always get users who have a powerful enough system, but some crap running in the background that drags the performance down far enough to make the game unplayable.
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What about something like 2008 Basic and 2008 Performance that held steady for a year and then were reset the year after, it would allow game boxes to say complient with 2009 Performance 2010 Basic and all newer systems. That isn't too far from consoles which are on a slightly longer than annual cycle.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Good idea, crappy ass execution. Biggest issue with is the entire thing is the X PC configuration is labeled as Ultra and Y PC configuration is label basic. How long will these configurations be the adequate for PC gaming? In 2 years, the "ULTRA" system may be pretty crappy compared to what is for sale. You have to keep coming up with new names to identify that this is different from that. Essentially, PC hardware changes all the time. How is one to know how todays "basic" compares to yesterday's "ULTRA?" It makes the entire mechanism useless over time. If you are going to do it, you need to say some system is the baseline system with a score of 100. Over time, you rate the PC based on that. So in 2 years, a "standard" pc may end up rating a 200. You say a game requires a rating of Z score to play. It is of course not foolproof as there are many factors that go into a PC's performance but it's a lot better the "basic" and "ULTRA"
Remember MPC1, MPC2 etc? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC) ... capable display resolution, colors, audio, cdrom with xSpeed etc.
Considering how fast GPU's and other hardware are shipping/changing there's going to have to be separate versions and it's going to be changing every few months which is why I think the MPC standards went by the wayside anyway. Good Luck to AMD, but I'm putting this one up in the Fail column from the start.
Where do I start!? This faster loads and games that take more advantage of the hardware talk is ridiculous. My computer loads games FAR faster than my piece of crap XBox 360 (looks at rock band). How are there more games that fully utilize the hardware on consoles? Is that because there's less to use? Have they heard of Crysis? You can only just now run that maxed at a decent framerate and that game has been out ages. Those things are not console advantages. Being able to buy one system, never upgrade it and "know" that games will work - those are advantages. (know is in quotes because console games seem to be getting buggier and buggier.)
As for the standard - I don't see it being any more useful than Microsoft's performance index in Vista which was supposed to make playing "Games for Windows" so easy! I don't know about anyone else but I've never seen a game box (not even a Vista-only-DX10-wonderland type game) with a performance index recommendation on there. Maybe after "Vista Capable" game makers realized that pinning their hopes on a Vista performance index was a *bad* idea.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
...are doomed to repeat it. Can you say "MSX"? Konami fans can. Konami put out several games for the MSX. Even if this "MlayStation" failed in the United States, the Xbox and Xbox 360 have failed just as hard in Japan.I think this is a really good concept for the PC gamer. This would allow the removal of minimum system requirements being long and drawn out, you need AMD GAME! or higher. I'm very interested in how this will play out with the community overall. The average gamer now has a rally point to know what is needed to play the games and the developers now have a baseline to what they need to achieve for compatibility. On the whole, I think it's a good initiative on AMD's part.
This is alot like wildtangents "Orb". Maybe the two should team up as the "Orb" already has deals with all the major OEM's to come preinstalled.
I basically said the same thing lower down. You can't come up with fancy names for how good the performance is, because it's all relative. "Ultra" is going to be "not-so-ultra" is 2 years. You'll have a 2010 "basic" system thrashing a 2008 "ultra" system. The naming system will completely break down. You either have to date everything with the name to get anything out of it (which is insanely complex...I have a May 08 Ultra system...is that better than a May '10 basic???), or use a pure numeric benchmark-type score. Otherwise it is MORE confusing. It'll never work.
This PR stunt will die in 1-2 years as the stickers and reports I have seen make no mention of appending a date (a year would be enough). Get ready for class actions in 1-2 years when old stocks of AMD game certified machines are on sale and do NOT play the latest games well.
A well thought out system would put the year on the sticker and have a site dedicated to the specs required historically for the year in question.
Standardisation is a great thing!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Just buy a PS3 and dual boot GameOS with Ubuntu. ..but wait until 8.04.1, we're still working out some pretty major bugs.
Congratulations, you just (re)invented the Windows Experience Index:
Read my blog.
I would much rather see a OS dedicated to gaming that could be easily configured to dual boot. That way bloat ware and misc PC clutter would not sit in the background wasting precious memory and potentially interrupting gaming sessions. Normal users could think of it as booting their PC up into Console Mode.
It's not like Windows doesn't make users reboot on a whim anyway.
The AMD/ATI 780G chipset has gotten great reviews otherwise, so why isn't it in the initial list - even if it still needed to be paired with an external graphics card?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I like the idea behind this, but I think I would rather see a third party develop standards rather than a company so closely tied to ATI. To me, it sounds like an attempt to control the market more than an attempt to enhance PC gaming. Also, different games need different requirements, and games need a combination of good hardware (memory, processor, video card, etc) in order to perform adequately. I am skeptical of whether any rating system would be completely accurate.
I've been saying this since at least '95, "Why can't games be bootable?" With the proliferation of CD/DVD burners, It shouldn't be so difficult to create a Windows or Linux installer that customizes the game for your particular system and create a bootable CD/DVD. By eliminating the Windows executable and all other programs, games should run XX%(pull stat from whatever orifice you wish) better. Considering that back in the day, you would exit out of Windows 3.1 to play DOS games even though you could run them in Windows. They were alway faster in DOS. Wasn't until Windows 95 and that God awful game Microsoft came up with that was truly Win95 compatible that game makers accepted the performance hit just so they could sell how easy it is to run the game.
Grranimals. That's what the average Joe needs: "Hmm. Crysis has a picture of a hippo on it...this video card also has a hippo. Best Buy, meet Visa."
So the justification for consoles is LAN parties?!?!
In all my years of gaming on my PC, I've been to exactly 1 LAN party. For the other decade or so of gaming I've done on my PCs, I've played solitary, or head-to-head over the Internet.
I did try a console once at a friend's house - it was his son's console. We played some 1st-person shooter. It drove me _nuts_ having two separate games going on on the same TV. Give me my own display, thank you.
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I meant dumbed down to the point that backward crap technology is part of the standard. Joe Sixpack can run a billion dollar very complex machine with a push of a button if the UI is designed right. Just look at military hardware.
And wouldn't these standards have to be constantly changing to adapt to the hardware market?
No. Standards are lobbied like any group decision process and you are going to have the inept slackards who will chime in with "the standards don't work with our stuff". So you shitty APIs, bloated software and just really shitty design. I've seen this attempted with many things that IBM and others have tried years ago and you ended up with bloated shit that doesn't exist anymore. Remember: Taligent? SOM?
The article does make a good point that if it is implemented it should be done by a third party, and not someone tied to the hardware and software.
Oh, God no!
I say everyone fights for market share, the poor technology or unmarketable (e.g. Betamax) dies out for whatever reason, and let God sort'em out.
Because that would be a pain in the ass. Instead of pausing my game and pressing alt-enter to switch from fullscreen to a window, I'd have to reboot, just to do something else with the computer.
Or boot it inside a virtual machine.
Maybe that's because customers thought ease was worth more than a few milliseconds. There's no way I'd still be playing Kohan or SMAC every once in a while, if I had to reboot to do it.
Also, it seems like eliminating the OS is exactly the wrong approach from an engineering perspective. The OS is there to provide drivers, and a way to upgrade stuff without altering the game software itself. Get a new video card, recompile the game with a different video driver? Ugh. And what if it's a network game? What if it has sound? What if you want to store saved games on disk?
I think you might be happier with a console game system. (And I think I might be less happy with one, which probably explains why I haven't had one since the 1980s. ;-)
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Take this a step further... Why can't apps be bootable? Why not just ship a bootable DVD with your app, that fires up an OS and runs your application only?
My immediate response is "because I don't want to wait for my system to reboot every time I want to run a different app/game".
On the other hand, this would eliminate gaming performance issues caused by malware, too many other processes running, etc. It could also give the game developer complete (software) control over the OS, or simply eliminate the chance that Joe Sixpack is going to be able to look up a walkthrough, run cracks/hacks/cheats, etc.
Kinda a mixed basket of potentials, here, but I think that the basic response to this is simply "Why don't we all run linux from LiveCDs?"
Hardware divirsity and a little thought about potential issues kills this idea, but thank you for reminding me of the "good ole' days", when I would reboot with a floppy so I could play my DOS-mode games without all the extra drivers and stuff eating up my base memory. Ah, the good old days. Now get off my lawn.
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Some kind of standard is a step in the right direction, but a standard where AMD is the judge, jury, and executioner is not it. There has to be a group-logic behind this; where major hardware developers get together with game developers and decide on a series of graphical, audio and performance standards, then have an independent third party that will enforce and certify it.
Sadly, this will never happen. This would mean that you would need to get Intel, AMD/ATI, nVidia, Creative Labs, Microsoft, EA, Take-Two, etc etc and so on ad naseum to actually universally agree on something; the chances of that happening roughly equate to a snowball's chance in hell.
Even if they somehow, through the intervention of (insert holy diety here) managed to actually agree on a standard, that just means they have to do it again next year.
If PC gaming ever hopes to recover mainstream popularity, not only would they have to come up with a universal standard, but with the cost of PC upgrade hardware, that standard has to last more than a year. A casual gamer has no desire whatsoever to shell out $500 every year to bring their PC up to gaming standards.Let me explain my situations, which appear to differ greatly from yours:
A: The ROM Hacker. I have a little cousin who visits my house every other weekend and likes to "hack" (make user-generated content for) video games. He has Fighter Maker 2 and RPG Maker 2 for PS2, which have some room for customization. But he uses the PC a lot because games for GameCube, PS2, or Wii don't offer nearly the opportunity for UGC that PC games and emulated games for classic consoles offer.
B: The Family Party. Every December, my extended family has its annual reunion party. Some nuclear families living in other states drive hundreds of miles to attend. My job is to provide entertainment for about six to ten kids between 6 and 17 years old. One TV is connected to a GameCube and runs Super Smash Bros. Melee.[1] The other TV is connected to a PC and runs what game designed for a home theater PC?
I did try a console once at a friend's house - it was his son's console. We played some 1st-personThere's your problem. Games that are not first-person need not split the screen. For example, in the Super Smash Bros. and Bomberman series, the action is confined to a plane, and the arena is small enough that all four players' characters can fit onto one screen.
[1] This year it'll probably be Brawl.
So long as the ratings are monotonic, that would be great. I think the biggest issue might be whether 2008 Basic > 2009 Premium?
You might then have to specify that it as something like:
2006+ Class A
- OR -
2008+ Class B
In other words, to classify it by the minimum year for each class. But that might get messy if there were too many classes, you need to trademark everything (to keep people from lying about what class they are), and a standards body to actually set the specifications...
That is a far better idea, I'd say.
Incidentally, Microsoft seems to be headed this way with its "Games for Windows" initiative as well, only with the stink of its product identity slathered all over it, naturally.
Still, it's a laudable effort to bolster up the flagging hardcore PC gaming industry in the face of diminishing costs of development on consoles.
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
...because, invariably, a PC which was good two years ago when I bought it just never seems to be good enough for the games coming out two years later.
Game companies trying to use the high end equipment to "fully develop" their games kept leaving me with abysmal frame rates. I got tired of my wallet smoking from trying to keep up.
Of course, I understand the idea. Can you imagine game development languor if the latest NVidia or ATI was forced to sit on the store shelf because a company is dedicated to the creation of games which will have excellent framerates on boxes carrying cards, memory, and CPU horsepower from four to five year old machines?
It just seems like the only people who can afford "hard core" PC gaming are the ones who are willing to build their own boxes from a la carte parts (already an expensive proposition) hoping that upgrades they'll have to perform are minimal and they get a few years of top-level experience through a generation or two of games before having to do a major overhaul.
I mean, I like the idea of this kind of uber-performance insanity getting reined in a bit, but I just don't see how this could reasonably accomplished. And "speccing" systems doesn't help either. With so many hardware options and combinations thereof, can you really make any real statements about compatibility and performance without caveating the shit out of it?
At least with a console I know that that console is going to be at least 5 years relevant. I know that every game produced for it has been tested against identical or near identical hardware to the hardware that's in my console so I don't have to worry about compatibility issues or a degraded experience. I know that the controllers will not require setup to use properly. In other words, if a game strikes my fancy, I can buy it only with the knowledge that the console it is made for is the same console that I purchased and know its going to work (at least if the disk isn't scratched beyond repair).
Unless this "standardization scheme" can approach this level of confidence, it strikes me as an empty effort.
My suggestion is to slap a number on your standards. e.g. PC Gaming Score: 710 for this years Ultra, and 920 for next years. Every last mouth breather out there knows that higher numbers are usually better and will assume so, even when they aren't.
Now, it's important to note that these numbers aren't quite like a benchmark. Having one really fast component shouldn't quality a system for a number high enough to play a game when it has other components that will make that game unplayable. These numbers can't be mindless metrics that come out of a benchmark. It has to take all components into consideration, especially the bottlenecks. The goal is to provide a single number that a user can look at and say: Okay, the required number on gameX is lower, so I can play it. No worries.
AMD wanted to do exactly that, and talked a lot about it back in the day when they first started using the modelhertz ratings on their processors. They wanted to have a full-system performance number in several areas (i.e. business, content, games) that would let customers choose rigs based on what they wanted. But there were ultimately 2 huge problems and a 3rd relatively minor problem:
1) OEMs didn't like it. OEMs prefer to be able to market based on the processor, the amount of RAM, and a couple other basic specs. They don't want the effect of things like the cheaper, high-CAS latency RAM and the craptacular chipset they used to become blatantly obvious via low scores and thus explain why their offering is $100 cheaper than a competitor's with superficially equal specs. They would have been okay only using it on high-end gaming rigs, but that mostly defeats the purpose.
2) Intel. Intel was never going to buy in to an AMD-concocted perf rating scheme, especially not in a period where AMD held a performance advantage, but realistically not even when Intel was ahead. And when your number rating scheme misses 80-90% of the market, it's pretty useless. About all it would do is point out above-mentioned performance deficiencies in some AMD-based products, while leaving the Best Buy clerk perfectly free to answer the question of "well how does this Intel-based PC [with equal number of cut corners] perform?" with "Great!"
3) Picking benchmarks. You have to change them over time, because a game perf score based on Quake 3 (the FPS benchmark du jour back when this was all being proposed) would be a ludicrous way to rate a modern PC, but then you have problems with the relative scores of old PCs changing. And the politics. You may be aware of the politicking that goes on at SPEC, now imagine if SPEC CPU numbers were the primary metric used in consumer-level marketing. When you're only rating your own parts, you can make whatever changes you want. Which is why ultimately AMD's modelhertz ratings and now their supposed system-wide scores are only going to apply to systems with AMD and only AMD parts in them.
Since then, AMD has pretty much completely shut up about the issue. Now what they're talking about is superficially the same idea, but as you noticed from the branding, it is not going to be very helpful for a wide number of customers. I don't expect this to be a hit with the OEMs either, maybe restricted solely to their high-end gaming lines if anything.
Oh, and seriously, AMD needs to learn to stop putting sentence punctuation into proper nouns. It makes no sense.
The enemies of Democracy are
ONLY a 5.5mhz processor?
The problem is, more often then not the OS is MS's OS. That raises a few questions, A) Will this game be supported in the next version of Windows (after Vista I think this is a question all of them need to answer) B) Will this game work even without MS's next generation of "security" (such as UAC). I don't think any of them can be truly answered without being MS and that is the real problem with PC gaming. With consoles it can be rather guaranteed that software made for the Wii will still work on a Wii made 7 years down the line, with PC gaming the disk you bought 4 years ago may not work on MS's new OS, and that is where Linux or other OSS OSes come in. With say Ubuntu you can get a free base that you know what everything is, as for driver updates it would just be as simple as including them on a CD to be flashed onto a USB drive and then the OS would read the drivers and update it. I don't see how a company can spend tons of money on a game that may not work right 2, 3, or 5 years down the road.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Creating a bootable version of a game should be optional and would benefit hardcore gamers that want to get the most FPS they could. As far a hardware diversity, the installer would be grabbing drivers direct from windows or online updates and dynamic data will still be written on the HD. Hell, skip the bootable CD and just create a bootable game partition on the machine.
No offense to you, but the gist of your post seems to be the norm when it comes to solving systemic PC problems. Everyone (or a good portion) bitch and complain about bloated Windows and pose only one solution, if they even get that far, Linux, and expect someone else (usually MS, et al) to come up with solutions. It's this lazy-ass mentality that stifles real ingenuity in the PC world and why I don't bother with PC games. I still don't see why anyone would sink $1000+ into a gaming rig and then load Windows on it. Would be like spending $100,000+ on an exotic car and tossing in an 80HP engine and a set of on-sale $70 BF Goodrich tires on it.
Gamers go out of their way to develop cooling systems so they can overclock their processors, but they don't want to change the way the game is delivered.
"Taking it a step further" has no bearing on my idea unless you want to talk mission critical apps and kiosk terminals and such.
- The scale of the numbering system will likely have to be "reset" every few years to keep up with Moore's Law and its effects on coding. It's easy to say that you need a 3 or 5 to run a game, but what about an 837? If you make the numbering system exponential to begin with, you have customers wondering why cost goes up exponentially just to upgrade from a 3 to a 4.
- There's no "one true rating." There's Vista, there's AMD, and there's bound to be a few others, all of which are designed to be anything but vendor-independent. Instead of looking at the back of the box for requirements for CPU, RAM, HDD, etc, you have to look up the Vista Number, the AMD Number, etc.
Now, granted, there are corollaries in the world of console gaming (new consoles needed from time to time, more than one console), but at least there the target market is the comfortably broad category of "television owners." The market for these games are the hardcore PC gamers, a rather small (if disproportionately loud) subset of PC owners overall. And I stress "hardcore" because you're not going to need such a convoluted rating system to find out if your computer can handle the latest from PopCap, whose products certainly aren't going to sell new operating systems, CPUs or GPUs (the manufacturers of which are the ones trying to introduce these metrics in the hopes of selling more of their products). With such a small potential customer base to begin with, there's little or no potential for competing standards to coexist without all of them dying out for lack of adopters.To be defined by AMD. Certifications by AMD. Hardware requirements by AMD. Video requirements and capabilities by AMD.
Anyone see a problem with this becoming a fully accepted cross platform standard?
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
> It's this lazy-ass mentality that stifles real ingenuity
Bootable games are more like real retardation
(Hardcore games have plenty of windows customizing guides at their disposal. And they still don't customize environments per-game. no demand for this period.)
Building on that, it could be 2008 Performance WXYZ. 2008 being the year the parts were released; because a E8400 could be performance now but be mediocre by the end of the year. Or 2008.Month. So 2008.11
W: Processor rating, 1 is crap, 9 is "Extreme"/"Black Edition" overclocked to hell and back
X: Video card rating, same as above. HD3650 would get a 6 (best at 1024x768), 8400GS would get a 2, 9600GT a 7, 8800GT an 8 (but only for 2007), 8800Ultra/9800GTX a 9.
Y: Hard drive performance; faster hard drives, such as ones with 32MB of cache, rate higher up.
Z: Amount of RAM. Higher gives a higher number; 16GB would be a 9, 8GB around a 8, 4GB a 7, etc.
As you can see the numbers go in "important-least important" order, so that the customer just needs the first few numbers to make an informed decision. Extra details can be added later, like whether the machine can do $year's games at 1080p or whatever.
It is flawed, however, if only because some parts can't really work in here. As you can see the 8800GT was released in 2007, but will probably remain competitive until mid/late 2009... So how would you class it? What about the other 9800 cards? I don't think nVidia would be happy telling consumers its new cards and old cards perform the same...
Oh, and both basic and premium would follow the same rankings; except "budget" parts would be in "basic", and high-performance parts would be in "premium". So the strongest thing you'll see in Budget is probably a X2 5000+ BE with an HD3850, or a Core 2 E4500/E6750 with a 9600GT. Of course, the Premium series would effectively have those as a minimum requirement.
Windows Experience Index only tells you about your expected Windows experience. It wasn't designed for games and doesn't produce useful scores for such.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
DirectX made it easier for your game to run, and provided unprecedented backwards compatibility for games. For all Microsoft's and Windows' many flailings, DirectX is not one of them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Right I think a lot of people misunderstand this -- this is more like Intel's "Centrino" branding than the end-all of gaming branding. The point of "Centrino" was to allow consumers to differentiate good Pentium-M laptops from cheapass desktop chip-based laptops. And it was hugely successful.
The point of AMD GAME is so that consumers can differentiate systems with 'business graphics' (integrated) versus PCs that can game. Since AMD/ATI sells the whole package this should make it easier for them to upsell.
With all the video cards on the market, PC gaming badly needs better performance branding. But that's going to have to come from an industry consortiom. This ain't it, nor does it pretend to be.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
What REALLY annoys me about this is the naming convention of it all. What's going to be after Ultra? Mega? Super? Zamm? Biffo?!?
Calling the second iteration of a gaming platform as Ultra is a bit short-sighted. Like someone who calls a program "myProgram Final", then "Final 2", then "Final 3", "Final Last", "Final Last 2"...... ad nauseum....
AMD was cooperating with Intel and Nvidia to make a standard without the AMD and ! in the name.
I've been gaming since the heady days of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 & spent years playing games using a keyboard, mouse & simplistic 4-way joystick - I find console controllers to be okay for games like Zelda or Monkey Ball on my Gamecube but really struggled with the Metroid & Medal Of Honour games on it.
Personally, I just want things left as they are. Let the console gamers enjoy their games & leave me on my PC enjoying Half-Life 2 & Galactic Civilizations 2.
It ain't broke, AMD, so please DON'T try to fix it!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I'm not sure this is a good idea at all, but I think the worst possible people to drive it would be the HW guys, and I'll get the disclosure out right now - I work for Intel*.
Gaming drives a lot of innovation and stress on the marketplace right now. Hot new games and ideas drive greater need for CPU and GPU innovation. If one HW company sets any standards (Intel, AMD/ATI, Nvidia, etc) we're going to see that come to a screeching halt as innovation gives way to "buy us because we're the most compliant."
I was going to suggest that some SW/HW API would be the best way to try something like this, but now I even think that would fail. The bothersome truth of it all is that the incompatibility and churn is part of an ongoing survival of the fittest that will sort itself out. AMD had better products than Intel for a long while, and while I think Intel is in the driver's seat now, only an idiot would count AMD/ATI out.
We all benefit from this ongoing struggle, so let it play out.
*The views here represent my own as a cog deep in the Intel machine, and do not necessarily reflect the Assuredly Important & Wise people I work for.
I think people should at least be able to figure out the clock speed and amount of ram their graphics cards have. Same with their CPU and system ram. It would be impossible to have different 'grades' or 'specs' of computers that rely on a single calculation. If someone has 4G ram on their Pentium 3 1.0GHz, how will that be distinguished from a modern-day quad core with 256MB of ram? These two machines may score equally well with this scale ATI's speaking of, but neither of them would play what a Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM could; which would also score similarly. People need to know what kind of hardware their computer has. If you build your own computers, you're fine. If you buy from Dell or something, figure it out once, write it down on the back of a business card, and stick it in your wallet. That's what I do for print cartridges, and I've not bought the wrong one yet.
Perhaps a better idea for all involved would be... No, wait, I think I'll patent it first...
Pardon my ignorance, but you may know the answer to this; are there any virtualization systems out there that offer near-native performance specifically in reference to the video hardware? I'm sorry if this is noob, but I know next to nothing about virtualization. My ignorance-crippled googling is telling me mostly no, with enough uncertainty to make me ask.
Just a finnicky point here - people will think that WXYZ is one number, not four separate numbers. So they'll look at an 9000, which will be quite cheap because of all the 0's, and compare it to the 8899, which will be more expensive, and say "well the 9000 is obviously better and cheaper - I'm getting that!". OTOH, if it was separated by periods or commas, people would have no idea what's going on ("how can there be 3 decimal points in a number?") - I'd be surprised if anyone here didn't run into a confused newbie saying "what do all these dots in the version number mean?" for an application.
Well ... there's also the whole issue of writing drivers optimized for benchmarks exclusively. Both nVidia and ATI have a history of doing this kind of shit.
Maybe AMD can take advantage of Asus' new strategy of putting Linux on every motherboard. That could become a standardized OS across millions of motherboards a month. It could then be updated with a standard set of "gaming" drivers, and give a lot of control to the game developers over the hardware. It would help remove the overhead of a bloated OS like Vista, and contribute a lot towards Linux based gaming.
Vista, the Operating System I have yet to use for more than 2 minutes, must be absolutely terrible. Everyone, and I'm talking everyone, that I know who is either a system admin, maintenance lacky, developer, musician, and have recently bought a new computer with it preinstalled is pissed. I even argue with them, defending Microsoft quite passionately, and they still keep coming up with reasons to keep their hate on Vista.
This is the industry's opportunity to kick Windows in the teeth and burn this motherfucking monopoly down.
Ah, well, I guess I overlooked that one...
I knew it was scaringly familiar to nVidia/ATI's numbering schemes...
Of course, who the heck would pair a "9" processor with a whole bunch of crap? And you'd hope that the vendor would have some goodness and put up a chart explaining what each number meant... They make a killing on HTPC-like "media" computers don't they? This would be to their benefit.
Hopefully this solves the problem of having to program games to deal with the various combinations of computers that are out there. EA has been driven crazy by this lately, and notice...no Madden for PC this year. Say what you will, but I'm talking about one of the most popular annual games. Hardcore fans preferred the PC version because of the ability to customize rosters and such. For the last few years, many new features have been directed only to the consoles, and omitted from the PC game. This year, EA has still seen fit to axe the PC version, because they can no longer control the user experience (e.g. many buyers will think the game, and therefore EA, is crap)
"I've been saying this since at least '95, "Why can't games be bootable?"
Console games, are esentially bootable, to switch games you switch discs and hit reset...
Why would Pc games do the same thing? it's easier for a PC to make the game a program that installs and uses whatever drivers the OS has, there is no point to make PCs load programs like consoles do, because consoles already provide that functionality for less cost.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Well ... there's also the whole issue of writing drivers optimized for benchmarks exclusively. Both nVidia and ATI have a history of doing this kind of shit.
Oh yeah, and it'd only get worse if there was a true industry standard set of benchmarks rather than an ad-hoc and de-facto standard used on enthusiast sites. You see it all the time in SPEC submissions, where they will use all kinds of crazy compiler tricks to optimize only for one benchmark in spec. The Intel compiler used to be considered useless outside of spec submissions since it made crazy-fast code, but couldn't compile everything. Other companies used all other kinds of dirty tricks too, completely changing algorithms in ways no general purpose compiler could ever do validly, but because they knew exactly what program they were compiling they could.
In the end, just like SPEC is useful despite all the problems, I think the industry really needs a standard for measuring system performance. It's just a road with so many political and business pot holes that I doubt anyone, especially relatively small and vulnerable AMD, wants to go down it.
The enemies of Democracy are
INTEL PLAY!
But really, why AMD even thought of this I can only assume it is a Marketing stunt aimed at getting the "game machine" companies like Dell's Alienware line, Falcon PC, and the like interested in continueing or stepping up their AMD relationships.
Ave Molech Setting
thats the only way to 'standardize' pc gaming is by making your own gameconsole and make sure it COMES with a keyboard and mouse and that you subsidize the hardware to be cost competitive with other game consoles.
That's really the only option is to beat console makers at their own game, but you'd be in for a 'war of attrition' like the Xbox had where it was losing money hand over fist for a while.
All other attempts are half-baked hardware guys sole reason for existence is some market has a need for them to make it, games, scientific apps and servers are pretty much the only thing that needs that kind of performance until the next killer app hits. No, what's needed is a mass market killer app that requires mucho increasing horsepower that people are willing to pay for.
There's a lot of confusion here regarding AMD's intent. This isn't about AMD certifying Intel/NVIDIA hardware. This is about combining AMD processors with ATI graphics and labeling the systems with the consumer-friendly "AMD GAME!" stamp. It's similar to Intel's Centrino stamp on laptops. The idea is to make a standard mark that non-geek consumers can look for instead of getting bogged down in specs.
Cynicism, like dogmatism, can be an excuse for intellectual laziness. - Susan Shirk
PC gaming is full of cheaters. You can't play a single FPS online without there being a cheater, wall hacking or using an aimbot. If they just would release a keyboard and mouse for PS3 or Xbox360 I would never look back.
Look, I'm not new here and I know you guys hate reading, but AMD is trying to standardize what they call the Mainstream segment of gaming. They purposefully exclude the high-end, which means all your Crysis arguments are null and void.
I personally think AMD's idea makes a lot of sense. It's also somewhat redundant, as it is mostly borne from the confusing product lines for PC components, like how a GeForce 8500 can be slower than a 6800GT, or how an Intel E4600 can be faster than an E6300. It's hard for a non-technical person to reasonable gauge their own PC's performance levels.
It's tricky for a guy like me, as I fit in that upper crust of hardware freaks. If a game doesn't run smoothly on my PC, I fire off hate mail to the developers, but I often get clients who just bought the latest game and found out their PC doesn't have the horsepower. Most times it's fixed with a $100 graphics card and name-brand power supply, but this one time I got a dude who wanted to play Age of Empires 3 on his 800mhz P3... well it actually ran, but peaked at 3-4 fps on the title screen. Well the key point is he wasn't the only one, and my reputation for gaming gear brought many of his ilk through my doors.
If there were a standard like AMDGame, where X game requires Y-level-of-performance to play, then people could ask me "What do I need to meet Y-level ?" and I could sell them exactly what they need. In such a scenario, the most important aspect of the standard is adherence! If the box says a level-4 PC can handle it, and it turns out the level-4 sucks, someone's balls must be sacrificed! What killed MPC wasn't the standard itself, it was the blatant abuse by game houses, who either overshot or undershot the spec by too wide a margin, turning the MPC logo into little more than a misleading marketing gimmick. The world does NOT need a repeat of those mistakes.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Microsoft was on track with Direct X for just this reason. It was the long drag between windows releases that added the silly "extras" to the spec that made game specs confusing.
If there was a separate spec it might work out better. What you have to be careful of are operations like Intel that slink in and want to get DX10 rated with the bare minimum spec implemented mostly in software.. ouch. Unlike other posts, there should be no levels of the year-to-year spec. Go forward, don't allow going back.. There's no reason to break "old" software for no reason. Make the divisions atomic, like other posters said, so you can choose your level of bloat by loading old libraries for old games, but not require old libraries to run new software.... in fact ban them and limit programmers to only their target model year. I'd even backport older years into the spec for old 2D and 3D games already out there to get people used to seeing the numbers. This would work well in the OSS world because companies could focus on new hardware and new specs and let the community pull the old version forward to the new hardware rather than spend time tying up resources.
I'd differ. The spec should be the minimum to play at good quality and it's the game maker's butt to target the platform, not expect you to buy more hardware. Take low-average hardware right now... 1.8-2.0 dual core, 2GB ram, DX10/OpenGL 3 with the proper addons in a low end card and draw the line. Then expect game makers to hold to it for a "good" experience. No playing with more ram or cpu or gpu... it needs to just work at a quality level. Sure if you have something faster, maybe allow higher resolutions or more polygons, etc. but the game must be PLAYABLE at the bottom of the spec. In reality, game makers do it now, but they all pick different numbers and it's a moving target trying to one-up for slightly faster hardware. The current games have wiped the common PC gamer with only a "$1000" laptop or PC out the door... that would be why nobody gives a damn about PC games anymore except die-hards.
your company name is something that the other company will be like... Oh EM GEE! Lets standardize gaming but use our competitors name!!
the solution is to "glue" the standards down and make all the libraries atomic to the version. If you want Game2002 it will take x libraries. Make them open source and let the community pull them forward for new versions of the hardware. The community is great at emulation and this would be a chinch for them. New games will run with new libraries and mixing will be prohibited.
The real problem is that game makers cheat because of things like copy protection. Relying on OS hacks and bugs to make their precious game "secure" and when those are fixed, the code doesn't actually work correctly. The only way around that would be to pre-announce that any DRM scheme would be void in 3 years and we Open Source the tools so games can be run on new hardware... after all, how many games do people care about after 3 years that don't get constant updates? (which could charge money and add features to the new DRM model) That would help with abandon ware as well.
how about a virtual machine environment! Linux has pretty good ones now. Then you could run the game under KVM or Xen or VMware with all your other stuff running or from just the bare minimum. Sure it's a little extra overhead, but the compatibility would be great as nobody would write games to hardware, only to the virtual machine.
Granted it would put a damper on the next Crysis, but only 1 of 100 titles are like that, the rest are like the Sims and just want to run anywhere they can.
good point, the main factor of PC games that makes them interesting is persistence. That a game world data can stay grow and ebb and change as you play it. It's got gigabytes of space and no time limit when you hit the reset button. The real push on PCs should be for persistent games... ones that stay available all the time and you just check in to see how they're doing.
Buy yourself an Xbox 360. Or a Wii. Buy a couple of games for it.
Notice how you just put them in the drive, pick up the controller, they load and they play? No fucking around with graphics drivers. No upgrading your mobo and processor every 2 years, and buying more RAM. It costs less for an Xbox360 than it does to buy a decent video card for that PC you keep upgrading. Seriously.
The promise of consoles is that It Just Works(tm). Guess what? They actually deliver. The games are more stable too, and the reason for that is we have exactly one type of hardware to test it against instead of thousands of different combinations of dozens of different pieces of hardware. So we can actually optimize it enough to get decent performance out of har
Oh, and console controllers are much nicer too. Xbox360 has the nicest controllers of any console I've ever used (except the sucky d-pads). Wireless, of course. PS3 has controllers just like the PS2 ones, but also wireless. And the Wii... well, I'm sure you've heard about the Wiimote. Wireless.
What does PC have? A keyboard and mouse? Give me a break.
If you want to play games, you should buy a REAL games machine. One engineered specifically for playing games. A console.
except that tells you nothing about if FEATURES exist. In fact it's down right deceiving in the case of things like Intel integrated graphics.
In Visa's case there should have only been #1 and #2. #1= run all of Vista's features, out of the box right now. #2= run them a little faster. That's it.
Specs should meet and achieve or go home. Vista is such a joke precisely because Microsoft caved to Intel and OEMS and allowed "toy" computers from 3 years ago to be sold as "latest and greatest".
Consoles are faster loading than PC games? I don't think so. Even the best DVD/BD drive cannot match a low-end modern HD for transfer AND latency.
The most recent example, GTA4, is driving me up the wall. I've been on long hours at work since just after it was released, which doesn't give me much time to play. Every time I fire it up, I'm watching those static pictures for a minute and a half out of a thirty to sixty minute play session.
Were they talking about cartridge games or something?? Or comparing the one-time PC install cost vs. the every-time-it-starts console cost??
...there are actually very few PC games released that must have the latest and greatest hardware. A three year old PC will play most PC games. Whereas if you buy an XBox, you can only pay XBox games. So you actually MORE limited with a console, not LESS. Unless you buy each console, but then there goes your supposed cost advantage.
I'm filing this one with Intel's VIIV and VPro.
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
They is crap - I like AMD, but what it looks like is that it will be crap.
If they are going to make a "gaming standard", it has to be differentiated according to the year at least, as things move too fast.
Furthermore, how will you rate something with the latest quad core cpu but with 512 mb ram and an intergrated graphics card?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=557666&op=reply&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=
Reply
They will have to use a rating something like Year / CPU / Graphics / RAM (maybe?)
So it can be 2008 / B / A / A and you can easily have games saying they need a minimum of 2008 / B/B/B to run.
Of course it will not be as catchy as "AMD GAME!" or some crap which does not give any information at all in a fast changing market.
With ASUS's new bios, the game could boot and install while you play.
What's OpenGL running now, 200 megs or so? No problem for a DVD or some flash...
PuppyLinux + OpenGL + route to HD (for real install) = the win.
If you take microsoft out of the equation it isn't "a pain in the ass."
Dual core CPUs aren't that good for gaming, but they'd be useful for decompressing for installation/play concurrently.
While the OS is there to provide drivers it also provides a lot of overhead and functionality that games don't require, games don't use paint, gedit etc. They run a (usually) 3D environment and self contained logic.
Get grpahics, sound, mouse + keyboard working and you're good to go, you don't need networking (right away, if it installs in the background it doesn't slow down insta boot).
Consoles have taken many of the great things and adapted them (poorly?), though PCs are harder to get standardized it shouldn't be impossible to get insta boot working and it would be useful for say, bringing a game to a friend's house or putting it in his mythTV box.
let's see who gets what they want first?
"benefits that console gaming offers: faster loads" Huh? Ok, I might have to install games first, but I'm damn sure they spend a lot less time loading than consoles do...
So...your system sounds almost exactly like the Windows Experience index in Vista. You get a score in 5 different categories, and I believe the overall score is the lowest one of those. Now I don't know how much that's caught on, but it's possible it's been ignored simply because of Vista's lackluster success.
That's it. I'm opening a restaurant called RESTAURANT!. I will be selling FOOD! on the menu because food isn't quite good enough. Oh! No! Wait! I'll call it the RESTAURANT GOOD!; because, one cap'd-n-bang'd word isn't quite good enough. btw. how are those linux drivers for dual ati graphics cards going? yeeeeeaaaaah thought so. there like TOTALLY GAME!
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Now get off my astroturf and go back to your own lawn you old fart. :P
I hate to say it, but kind of like Vista's performance index. It takes into consideration all the hardware in your computer that affects the performance of Vista, and gives you a single, solitary number. It tells you which component is slowing your computer down, and you can re-run it every time you get a new driver/bit-o'-hardware and see the difference. Now we just need one for games.
I think we're working at cross purposes, here, when we don't need to. I wasn't attacking the idea, so much as critiquing it. If you'll read more than the first few sentences of my post, you'll see that in addition to pointing out some flaws, I mentioned some ideas that would make this arguably a Good Thing(tm).
For instance, the increased performance due to not having umpty-bazillion other processes running in the background while you're just wanting the highest FPS and lowest latency you can get so you and 30 or so of your closest friends can frag each other.
An upside for the developers might be making sure we don't cheat at their game, by simply not giving us a web-browser (or other dev tools) on the standard disk. Of course, the pirates/hackers/crackers will figure a way around this, too, but it'll be one more hoop for Joe Sixpack to jump through before he can seriously break the game, or share it with his friends.
Now, to attack the big problems in earnest:
The major downside, as I see it, is having to elevate the game programmer to the level of OS developer. I will again point out the huge diversity in hardware, and ask how much knowledge it requires just to get a system to do more than POST when you're writing your own operating system. Snitching the Windows(tm) drivers might work for your hardware interface (assuming the base-level coding is there to support adding a Windows(tm) driver to the stack), but when you talk about snagging non-free code (such as the Windows(tm) operating system itself), you get into all kinds of licensing/legal issues... not to mention that not everyone runs Windows(tm) on their gaming rig, or even has a legally-licensed copy of Redmond's wallet-snatching piece of^W^W^W^W a Microsoft OS just laying around.
I don't personally want to reboot my pc to play a game or launch an app, but I can definitely see the benefits of doing so. I can also see that it would drastically increase development time, unless someone makes a F/OSS operating system specifically for this purpose... in which case, our incredible developer diversity is not a boon. We would need to standardize on something, or each game-producing company is going to be reinventing the wheel... which costs them money, thereby decreasing their incentive to produce - not to mention potentially adding years to the development cycle.
Speaking from my viewpoint as a Linux user (read "not a Linux developer"), the biggest challenge for Linux in the gaming market that I see is that Microsoft(tm) Windows(tm) already has a system designed to make developing games "just work" on a wide variety of hardware. They call it "DirectX(tm)", and the game developers seem to like it an awful lot (check my work, here - go to Wal-Mart, or your favorite software shop, and scan the list of titles that "support" DirectX - and then see how many you can find for OpenGL. Before you get up in arms about my choice of distributor, ask Joe Sixpack where he buys his games). Don't take this as a personal affront; see it as more of a challenge or call-to-arms. A good, workable solution might be for a bunch of Linux developers to come up with something akin to DirectX(tm), but without tying it to a specific (non-free) OS - or rather, come up with an OS that is absurdly easy to develop games for (ala Windows(tm) with DirectX(tm)), and release it to the public so everyone benefits.
As for your comment,
Creating a bootable version of a game should be optional and would benefit hardcore gamers that want to get the most FPS they could.
I think it already is optional. I don't personally know how to do it (nor do I have the time to look it up at the moment), but I'm fairly sure that you can make a LiveCD of your favorite distro, with whatever software you want on it. You might find that the performance isn't quite what you were expecting, running from CD/DVD, but "them's the breaks". Perhaps you should just make a partition with a clean OS install on
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XBox360... $300 PS3...$600 Wii...$200
Grand total $1100. Good for 5+ years. Everything else is largely game purchases.
Gaming rig good for Doom3 or Quake4: $2000+ Good for however long until the next vid card comes out, then its $$$ for upgrades.
Seems to me, there is an enormous cost advantage to buying consoles. That coupled with the fact that every game looks the same on every Wii, XBox360, or PS3 and those games are tuned to the machine specs rather than the machine trying to match game specs, makes them ideal vehicles for gaming.
It's not a question that you don't have to have the latest and greatest hardware, but your gameplay will be affected. Yes I can play Doom3 on my 3 year old PC, but with horrible chop. I turn down the resolution. Ok a little better. But that's not what I bought. I paid for "OMG!!!" and I got "OMG!!!"'s blocky third cousin.
You see, it is the few that DO require the latest and greatest that I see as the problem. If I buy an above average rig in 20XX, I should be able to "turn up all the knobs" on a game made in 20XX and get a pretty seamless experience. This is usually no problem. The problem is that invariably a "must have" comes out in 20XX+1 and nVidia has come out with the HyperRaptorXZX 4 bajillion gigaphlanson Video Card with Real-Time Tachyon Transfer Surface Mapping Core... capable of rendering full images even before the program knows it requires them (!!!). And good old iD comes along and creates a new rendering engine which writhes like a salted slug if you use anything with less horsepower than that. Well, that $2000 to $3000 I paid now requires that I purchase nVidia part number HRXZX4BG-RTTTSMC for the whopping amount that they ALWAYS ask for on first release of a new card...
Now the new card is nothing without the 160 exabytes of RAM that the game will use to show me the actual submolecular quantum fluctuations resulting in the preternatural realism of the flying casings and fangor beast blood spew.
I've had consoles since the Atari 2600 and, with the exception of my Commodore 64, the consoles have always been the reasonable choice for gaming. Consoles are never marketed with completely ridiculous price points, never require much in the way of purchase other than games beyond the initial cash outlay, and have a long shelf life. When PCs can accomplish this, then it might be cause for reevaluation.
>Really? You can't comprehend the appeal of sitting in a nice room on a comfortable couch with other human beings?
In my decades of computer gaming I have only once played computer games with other people in the same room. When I play computer games against other people I do it over the Internet.
When I have friends over we don't play on the computer. Nor do we watch TV. We interact with _each_other_.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
... and a pony.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Rebooting just to play a game is unacceptable to me.