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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."
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.
I think you have that exactly backwards. The software won't be "AMD GAME!" branded, the hardware will be. It's basically a certification program similar to Microsoft's "Windows XP/Vista Certified" stickers on computers and components. AMD will test various components (certain video cards, etc.) to make sure they work as intended with the "latest games" (not sure which games they'll test).
So, if you buy hardware components that are "AMD GAME! Ready", you can be reasonably confident that you can play the most popular games on them. Personally, I think it's a pretty good idea, as if the label takes off, AMD can charge hardware manufacturers a premium to get the certification. And, of course, AMD's own offerings will be AMD GAME! certified before anyone else's.
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".
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.
One, AMD might shoot itself in the foot by targeting gamers especially (or not; I think gamers actually like to run AMD's top offerings on desktops so it might sense to concentrate on that market, but it's kind of sad).
Two, I think neither Intel nor Nvidia will ever want to get any of their hardware certified with their biggest competitor's logo. So if it's by component, it's dead in the water. If it's by system, it might have a little potential, but unless it gets the big shots (Sony, Dell, etc.) on board, it will be limited to the much smaller market of small run custom builders - and those are exactly the ones whose customers already know which systems run games well.
...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.
I disagree. I didn't even finish reading the summary before I realized this wasn't going to work. TFA just confirmed my suspicion.
A few problems:
1. AMD will only certify AMD/ATI hardware. Which kind of makes this useless if you're an Intel/NVidia user.
2. Game Systems gain their stability due to LOOOOONG (4-5 years) release cycles. In PC terms, 4-5 years is an eternity.
3. AMD is going to butt heads with the PC Gaming Alliance they just helped form.
4. Given that PC Hardware is a moving target, how will AMD certify future machines? Will AMD GAME and GAME ULTRA also be moving targets? If so, will that not confuse Joe Gameplayer when AMD GAME system from 2008 fails to smoothly run AMD GAME software from 2010?
5. Epic and Id are the primary drivers behind the PC game market. Their engines are the keystone that holds the whole thing together. Thus it is their engines that make the market. Maybe I missed it, but I don't see AMD having their cooperation on setting future standards.
A much better system would be a versioned hardware spec that is maintained across the industry. e.g. PC-Spec 1 would certify GeFore 8400/Radeon HD 2400 and PC-Spec 2 would certify GeForce 8800/Radeon HD 2900. A new revision of the spec would be created for each sliding window. Each spec would consist of a certain performance plateau combined with a given feature set. (e.g. Support for GL Programmable Shaders.) The latest 3D engines from companies like Id and Epic would target the latest, upcoming spec. (A spec which those companies would have helped define when they were in early development.)
From a consumer perspective, this makes my life easier. Because instead of looking if RAM, Graphics Card, and CPU match, I can simply look for the spec number. If my computer supports a higher spec number than what's on the box (e.g. I have a PC-Spec 5 computer and this game requires PC-Spec 4) then I know I can play the game.
It's not quite as simple as consoles, but such is the way the PC world works.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
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)
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.
Bingo. But MPC was too slow, so they added MPC 2. Then 3. I think that's when they gave up. As another commenter pointed out this is how the RSX got started in Japan.
Computers move too fast. The only thing this is good for is smaller games (think PopCap) and with those it's a pretty safe bet you can play them if your computer was purchased in the last 4 years.
If you want this to work for FarCry or some such, you're dead.
Then there is the "playable" problem. Is 60 FPS at 1024 playable? I'd say yes. I'll accept 30 FPS at 1280. Many people here (and on other forums) will say "It must be at least 90 at 1600" to be playable. 3D graphics just made defining anything like this much much harder. MPC included CPU, colors, CD-ROM speed, and sound card. Now you have to deal with can the GPU render X number of Ys at Z resolution with Q pixel shaders at over L FPS.
Can't be done unless you can get some huge share of the market with ONE computer. The iMac (first gen, colorful) worked for something like that on the Mac side, but then again you can often just list the Mac models on the box because there are so few these days.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I don't think a random number generator is going to help us here...
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.
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
90FPS means that the framerate can dip 30FPS before it's possible to notice. Agreed, it's kind of silly to demand 90FPS when you're really just demanding a consistent 60FPS with no dips, regardless of how you get it.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Epic and Id are the primary drivers behind the PC game market. Their engines are the keystone that holds the whole thing together. Thus it is their engines that make the market.
Epic and id may drive the FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER genre, but in the PC game market there's Blizzard and then "everyone else" a long way back.
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.
Your eyes are continuous input, and they don't "run at" any particular speed. We're easily able to detect stimulus thresholds of thousandths of a second, but only for rapid changes. Things sitting still don't generate the same kind of sensory events. It's not altogether different from video compression, really.
Motion blur was invented for movies so they wouldn't all look like Charlie Chaplin routines. Even so, cinematographers avoid fast pans unless they're deliberately aiming for a disorienting effect.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
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.