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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?"
Has he looked at what the company he works for has been selling for well over a year now?
It seems every year is starting to be the "The year of PC gaming death."
And, we all know that every year is the year of linux on the desktop and that the year of Duke Nukem is coming.
Thus, clearly, next year will be the year of playing Duke Nukem on a dead linux desktop*.
*: According to the latest casting of bones, the prophecy can also be interpreted as: "Penguins will nuke ducks dead from the top of their desks". But I don't think that will happen next year.
LCD screens? I have 2 choices. I run my games at 1680*1050 looking great, or any other resolution looking like...total crap.
Now picture 2 of those screens hooked to the same poor machine ;-)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Black Shark is not a... wait, I don't even know Black Shark. But a REAL flight sim was Tornado. Man that game rocked, in all its VGA glory and 75 separate key commands. And the music was awesome. :)
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
The desktop computer as a gaming rig will never die until I can write game code for consoles or cell phones without a desktop computer being somewhere in the pipeline, as it is ground zero for any game development effort.
Its easier to get set up and develop games on the PC than it is any other platform. As such, it has a much larger independent development community and has more choices when picking games.
Don't even get me started on the cost of indy development on consoles either. Its gotten better in recent years, but you usually still have to buy a platform development kit, which usually isn't cheap.
The problem is the OS. Windows isn't built for more than one core CPU. It only can put one application to one core and that's it. And sharing the cores isn't really that fast. Therefor isn't the multi-core CPU-s very useful for such big applications like today's games. But buying a multi-core GPU is more useful because the threading model should be built-in in the cards or drivers. Of course 32-bit XP can't handle more than 3G ram.
Windows does not put one application on one core (unless you tell it to). Windows, like other modern OSes assigns threads to cores. If the game is written for a single CPU (or 1 core cpu), Windows cannot magically make the game scale out to multicore/multicpu.
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Supreme commander.
Get the Sorian AI, and Core Maximiser if you have a dual core machine. You won't regret it.