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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 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.
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.
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?!?
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
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.
...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.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
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.
So they are all the same, except everything is different?
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.
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"
Microsoft essentially did EXACTLY that in the original Xbox. They took commodity PC parts and designed a gaming machine out of them. It was a bit large, ugly, and has it's issues, but it worked reasonably well as a console (speaking as someone who owned all 4 systems from that generation and has no bias towards any one in particular).
Honestly, with the advent of HDTV displays the horrible graphics resolution of console games has finally been fixed. The new consoles also come standard with networking/internet capability. Aside from input methods, there's not much difference between a console and a computer now. Even that is being improved. Xbox 360 has those little mini keypads that fit under the controller now. While I can't stand those things, I have to admit that to a generation that has grown up using cell phones to communicate using SMS messages, they're probably not bad at all.
I'd bet that the next generation of game system will include an RF keyboard with them, at least as an option. And honestly, this convergence isn't a bad thing. It's not as if PC games are dying and loosing out to a console like the SNES. It's just that the best attributes of both systems are being combined to form a better gaming paradigm.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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.
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.
because the multiplayer mode requires more gaming PCs (one per player) than you own (one per household).
What does this look like to you, the ghetto? Me and my roommate have 3 computers between the 2 of us (two quad-cores and a dual-core), and we're starving college students!
...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
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.
I still think any standard will fail because game publishers will always lie about the requirements so as not to scare off buyers with slower machines.
So the box will look like:
Minimum System Requirements: 2008+ Class B
Recommended System Requirements: 2010+ Class B
But a sensible machine will be rated something like 2011+ Class A
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.'"
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.
"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
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.
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??