Slashdot Mirror
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."
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".
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!
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.
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. ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Wrong.
Things that are filmed have natural motion blur built in. The frame of film (or CCD or whatever for digital cameras) is exposed for some duration of time. During this time, you get a slight motion blur on the frame. Games and such have frames that are calculated for one instant (quantum) in time, and have no such blurring (without the use of additional filters).
(I wont' even get into frame blanking, projection, viewing environment, etc.)
And if you're simply watching a movie, you don't have to do anything or react in any meaningful way. Games are much different in this regard.
Your eye can "run at" extremely high "frame rates". The human visual system is based heavily on contrast and pattern recognition. You're able to see things of extremely short duration - such as a light bulb burning out, or a strike of lightning, or the motion of the second hand on your watch. The perceived speed of your vision is very content-dependent. It is also dependent on how alert/excited you are.
You can easily see tearing in most games at refresh rates of 60Hz and lower. If you watch something like a seizure-inducing rgb flashing video, you can easily see the tearing even at 120 Hz (assuming you don't actually get a seizure).
Try this out on a good CRT at varying refresh rates http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/rgb .
Basically, you're wrong and that's an old myth that's been outed many many times. There is no set speed of your eyes. Of course upper bounds exist, and 120 Hz over 90 Hz is kind of pointless for games since reaction times for you WASDing all over that keyboard become the bottle neck.
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.