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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.
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.
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.
I don't think a random number generator is going to help us here...
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.