Is the Gaming PC Dead?

An anonymous reader writes "Rahul Sood, HP's CTO of gaming, argues that the days of a market that wants PCs running three $500 GPUs is history; he argues that it's really a tough or impossible sell. '... let's face it, high-end hardware has delivered diminishing returns in terms of value. This is why you don't see ridiculous offerings like Quad SLI and 2-kilowatt power supplies coming from our company.' But don't the ideas of customization and market pricing for components tend to undercut that? Is the gaming PC dead?"

Comments

Re:I don't know about dead, but it should be.

[Syrente]

All the while struggling to manage 20 frames per second or else looking like a child drew it. That is gaming uptopia! Consoles are the future!

Hardware is getting better

[Datamonstar]

You can run a lot of decent, newer games on mid-range hardware these days. No, you probably can't crank out Crysis, but I play Rising Force Online full screen with moderate settings on an integrated ATI chipset when I'm at my dad's house.I can play all the source games at full framerate, max settings with no problems at all on my 1650 Pro on a Nvidia mobo chipset with a single core Athlon 2.2GHZ and 2GB RAM. I played the new James Bond game that just came out with everything turned up all the way on the same platform, anti-aliasing an all. You can play WoW on pretty much anything. In fact, I'm thinking of buying a Voodoo 5 5500 just to play it on an ancient legacy system. It's a hobby of mine, don't ask.

My point is that you don't need to go out and buy an expensive high-end system targeted specifically for gaming in order to play games, casually or seriously. Casual gamers can get by on their everyday systems, and serious gamers usually have specific titles in mind, so once they've acquired the hardware necessary to play those games they don't need to upgrade unless there is some other game they want to play, or if a significant upgrade is made available. Since Vista's requirements are so high, most people with that OS have a decent platform for playing some 3D games anyway. If you're casual, you probably don't need much else. The only people, in my experience, who I see purchase gaming machines from a mass manufacturer are those who's PCs are so full of start-up apps and malware that their blazing fast machines are burdened to the point of crawling when it comes time to play games. That's not typical of most real gamers.