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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?"
Game titles shouldn't drive hardware requirements. Outside of Portal, something I can play on my xbox 360, and I don't have to upgrade every 6 months to continue to play new titles, I haven't seen anything new from game makers other than new requirements for my machine to somehow be better to play the same dumb first person shooter remakes. Oh, need I mention that now days you even need a pretty kick'n system to play what amounts to MUDS? Yes, please die. While you're at it, make mouse and keyboard style FPS navigation a standard and supported option on consoles -- the claw is not acceptable. That would be gaming Utopia: A supported console that worked for a few years and continued to play the latest titles while also offering a control system that leveraged something other than my fine motor control abilities of the digits that spend 8 hours a day inaccurately whopping the damned space bar.
Less demand for high-end machines full of superpowered parts miiiight have something to do with people concerned about spending too much now, maybe.
Of course, midrange parts becoming 'good enough' is a good factor for me, too. I don't feel the need to run things at stupidly high framerates on the largest resolution screens available.
I walk into a coffee shop with people using WiFi and chugging coffee. More than half of the people at these coffee shops are using Macs.
I hang out with my geek friends, most of them have switched to Ubuntu, but a couple of us are Debian hold outs. Many of us have completely given up Windows.
Everyone seems to be pissed off at Windows and Microsoft issues.
Game developers make everything for Windows. I used to be a gamer, when I switched to Linux I played games on Linux. Now the companies that used to make Linux Games (Hello Unreal 3!) have decided not to do it anymore because they're kissing Microsofts ass.
People aren't moving away from gaming rigs, game companies don't cater to gamers who are on the cutting edge - i.e. ditching Microsoft!
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... I cannot justify buying three $500 video cards just to play a game.
Was this ever a requirement just to play a game? Granted, I haven't been around THAT long, but if my current rig and its pair of $200 video cards in SLI mode can run Age of Conan at 70 FPS on maxed out settings, I fail to see why anyone would be shelling out $1500 on graphics hardware alone.
An often-missed point in this discussion is, even with bleeding edge $500 video cards available, there isn't a game out there that requires more than one of these behemoth cards to run at max settings. None that I've encountered, anyway, and this was true even four years ago when I built my current rig's predecessor.
As for the gaming PC being dead, mine seems to be alive and well despite being a year old now. I generally build a new rig every three years or so, and it seems to cost roughly $1500 for the entire machine each time. I tend to jump on new games fairly quickly, and I have yet to see my computer choke on one. I never really understood the whole "six-month upgrade cycle" thing for hardware, but maybe my luck with hardware is just that good.
Either way, the article sounds like more sensationalist over-stirring of the pot to me. Move along, nothing to see here.
I think the difference this time is that higher resolutions have a much higher production cost associated with them. And there is only so much money you can make by targeting high end PC users, most of the money is in the mid range which are on a par with the consoles.
Given the kind of PCs that are sold on the high street, for most people a console will look like an upgrade in terms of gaming. Of course you'd have to drag them away from WoW first.
Sice one year ago, I almost don't play "hardcore games" in my PC, simply because I replaced my main desktop with a integrated graphics laptop (now I have two laptops, the main one, docked with a bigger screen and normal keyboard and mouse).
The point is that I have no intention at all to return to "desktop PC", nor "dedicated graphics", because the integrated graphics (Intel, but ATI/AMD is also OK, if not better) are just enough -cheap, and with longer battery time-. If the PC game runs OK, good, if not, I have a Playstation 3 for more fun (that also run Linux).
Now the companies that used to make Linux Games (Hello Unreal 3!) have decided not to do it anymore because they're kissing Microsofts ass.
Or the economics of investing a lot of money to supply a product to a niche market which is rendered even more niche by rampant piracy (the one damned thing which *is* OS-neutral on the PC) are just far too marginal for it to be worth the money.
Cock-up before conspiracy.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
was there ever a PC game that *required* more than one gfx card?
Crysis. And then they wonder why the game doesn't sell.
Hardcore gamers still flock to the PC...World of Warcraft, Diablo II (and soon III), Starcraft (Starcraft II!!!!!)...Blizzard is enough PC gaming for a large number of PC gamers and that's just the hardcore crowd. Once you factor in TRUE casual gamers it's the consoles that should be looking up to the PC.
If you openly interpret the definition of PC gaming then PC gaming is clearly the dominant platform. Flash games, web games, online checkers, online chess, online board games (Monopoly is extremely popular), online card games, online gambling games (though I think gambling is a horrid activity), emulation (those SNES games will never die), GGPO, MAME, etc. and then add in AA/AAA titles you have a massive community...
And way more people own PCs or MACs compared to the three main consoles right now (PS3, 360, Wii). In order to casually game on a PC you usually have the hardware already in your house, people buy a PC (or MAC etc.) for word processing, internet use, or personal use outside of gaming but casual gaming becomes a side usage of their PC.
My mother uses her PC for work and personal communication but she has started playing puzzle games for fun and actually spent over $100 on puzzle games in the last year. Is she included as a PC gamer?
Sure she's not killing hookers and cops in GTA or saving the world from mutant-zombies in Fallout 3 but puzzle-gaming is a legitimate genre so should she be counted as a gamer? Would she ever spend any money on gaming console? No. Would she purchase a 'gaming PC' as these manufacturers dupe people into buying? No. But does she game on her old Gateway 1.5GHZ/512RAM...hell yeah she does. She's a gamer....a puzzle gamer. Go mom...
Now for Christmas mom I need an Alienware 9.7gHz 1000lbs of RAM and 9.1 speaker setup and three ice-cooled (TM) graphics cards.
Do they wonder? I thought they said it's because of "the pirates".
So, in the middle of a huge recession, will people:
a) Keep playing their consoles which are good for another five years or so, or
b) Get the credit card out to upgrade their PCs with the latest bells and whistles so they can play shitty console ports and endless FPS sequels.
Well, for one thing I can update Linux from one release to the next in an hour or so. I used a version update disk to take Vista from Home Basic to Home Premium so I could join a clients notebook to the domain. I initally left it on his desk and checked back every 15 mintues. Finally I dropped it to once an hour. Took about 5 hours.
Another thing I can do with Linux (and to a lesser degree Mac) is chose all updates, applications and OS, hit "do it" without having to track down individual application updates and patches.
With other OS's I don't get the feeling I'm having to fight the OS to do everything I want. I can have as many people as I want mapped to my personal drive if I have a shared out section without hitting a "maximum connections" error - without paying extra. It may seem like a contradiction of terms, but it's actually getting to the point that GNU/Linux with KDE or GNOME is easier to use than Windows, of any version.
I will agree with you on 2K, Windows 2000 was a decent easy to use straight forward OS. XP was almost as good interface wise, but wasn't as good as 2000 in some ways, Vista is just slow and clunky. I know it's supposedly stable, but it's just slow to do technical things, like add and remove programs. As a tech I like to be able to get in, do it, and get out. Vista is an all day commitment.
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Games for both consoles, and the ps3 especially have not been taking full advantage of the hardware...
They use a lot of pre written code libraries rather than hitting the hardware directly, thus negating the performance advantages of a console, and i don't think many games make full use of the cell chip in the ps3...
When the hardware starts to age and coders are more familiar with it, you will get much tighter code being written, hitting the hardware directly and cutting out the middle layer of drivers and general purpose code libraries... On a PC you always have the overhead of an OS running, and the fact that things like graphics calls go through several layers before they hit the hardware.
What we do need badly tho, is for console games to support mouse and keyboard... All the current generation and most of the previous generation consoles support USB devices, there's no reason console games couldn't support the connection of usb keyboards and mice for those who want to play with them.
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For my job i have to scan networks, fast scanning tools like synscan are not available for windows and run very slowly inside of a linux/bsd vm... I would be stuck with slower less efficient tools.
I have to do wifi sniffing, last i checked none of the wifi drivers for windows supported rfmon mode for sniffing...
I run a number of servers with no video support, windows at least needs a video card to install and if the os fails to boot for whatever reason you have to troubleshoot it from the local console, this is totally unacceptable for me since the servers are located far away. I could use graphical based lights out management cards, but they cost more and are much slower than the serial console based ones.
I need to install and remove a lot of tools, package management on linux makes that easy, cleanly removing something from windows can be difficult...
The interface is a lot more customizable, i can choose the window manager that suits my needs best, and i have multiple workspaces to arrange my applications on... windows can do this with third party hacks but none of them work very well since virtually no apps are designed to make use of them and will often open dialogs on the wrong workspaces (osx apps do this too, since spaces was only introduced with 10.5).. i find the default windows interface incredibly clunky and inflexible so it doesn't suit me at all.
Cut+paste in X11 is much easier than windows, and this makes a huge difference to my productivity - select with mouse, middle button pastes to wherever the pointer is.
Chroot - i can easily have multiple user lands installed, without the overhead of a vm and multiple copies of the kernel, which is incredibly useful for development.
security - vista achieves its out of the box level of security by having all the stupid msrpc services listening on the network and then filtering them (they're obviously not needed or filtering would break stuff, so why have them listening in the first place?) whereas linux simply wont have anything listening.
performance - linux outperforms windows on the same hardware for a similar level of functionality, and vista makes the gap bigger... linux has a lot more scope for performance tuning if you're so inclined.
While there are decent command line tools for windows, they aren't default and thus lots of apps are not designed to work with them, and you lose a lot of the flexibility offered by pipes and fifos... when something is default it can be relied upon by app developers, if its not default then app devs may never have even heard of it... how many windows apps let you write something to a pipe and process it by several other tools before streaming the output over an ssh connection to another box?
For a real world example, i have a small atom based box with tv cards connected to the tv (its small and quiet), when it records tv it then pipes the video over ssh to a noisy quad core box that sits out of earshot which strips out commercials and transcodes the video before piping it back...
But by far my biggest gripe with windows is that it has it's own nonstandard way of doing or storing things... Linux is incredibly simple... everything is a file, configuration is stored in textfiles which are usually well commented and that you can edit with an editor of your choice or parse using standard commandline tools (or use gui config tools if thats what you like), and all your data files will be stored in standard documented formats that can be opened by multiple programs. Windows on the other hand is insanely complex, and likes to store data in binary blobs the format of which is known only to microsoft and no other programs can use.
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there's no reason console games couldn't support the connection of usb keyboards and mice for those who want to play with them.
I think that Microsoft isn't quite ready for the general public to realize that that $399 'gaming' machine is perfectly powerful enough to run an office suite. With a 1080p HDTV, it's even got more resolution than monitors of 5-10 years ago. 80/160GB? Again, look back a few years, we did fine with less storage than that*.
There's not actually that much difference between an XBox 360 or a PS3 and a PC/Mac.
*I am, of course, talking about the average user. Think grandma and the secretary's desktop, not the machines in the server farms, or on our enthusiastic desktop.
I don't read AC A human right
Killer Instinct is not a flight sim. Try Tekken 4.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Hard-core simmers will always need the super-high-end machines. Flight Sim 10 *kills* virtually any system out there today; as does Black Shark. Older sims like LOMAC (5 years old) and Falcon (10 years old) are just now entering a zone where they can be played at full settings and full AA/AF.
Flight Sim 9 (5 years old) still crushes all but the high-end machines. Flight Sim 10 and Black Shark will kill systems for years to come.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.