Is the PC dying as a gaming platform???

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haha, i know. When he finally moves into the city where i live i'll be getting him into crysis and all that. A giant dlp projector screen should suck him into pc gaming for the rest of his life.. he has a nintendo wii, which i give him props for going with a console with an innovative interface at least. it is kinda novel.
an idea that might help flip the intimidation is to have a "game os" bundled with an OS... so all you do is turn it on and decide to play games or run the os, and it would greatly simplify the process for people who are into the plug and play type interface that is offered with consoles. I personally prefer to have more control over my games and options and all that. I also think that once people start seeing how crappy consoles look compared to a good video card poped in a pc looks on a high definition screen that they may choose to play more pc games... I know that at lower resolutions consoles look pretty slick, but just don't compare at high resolutions. the switch to all digital tv in 09 may help with this as well... it's a transitional period right now.. and people who don't pay attention to the bleeding edge will go with whats easiest and in the now, rather than looking forward like most of us here on tg do. the growing popularity of htpc's are helping out the transition greatly, and may eventually be a saving grace of pc gaming, due to the fuctionality (watch/record tv, internet, movies, games, all in one box is very attractive to a large audience) htpc= what web tv wishes it could have been years back.

ps: you can thank sega and the dreamcast for being the first "real" next gen console... online gameplay was non-existent until the DC hit the market, xbox simply emulated the dreamcast and improved on some of it's features (dvd instead of cd, ethernet instaead of dial up, better graphics) but at a higher cost as well, and later down the road. basically the DC was before it's time, i honestly believe that if Sega was still in the market and put out a console in line with the xbox, MS prolly would have not had as big of a market share/not made it at all. but that's my speculation. 😛
 
PC Gaming is not dead! (At least not in my country)

In Romania if you go to a game store there is a huge section (50m) with Computer games and in a small corner, about 10 times smaller, there are games for all consoles.

The Professional Gamers League and WGC and other competitions use computers and computer games. They DON'T use consoles.

The mouse and keyboard is much better than the gamepad. I tried both because I have a gamepad, and the mouse is FAST and PRECISE. With a gamepad it can be either fast or precise but not both. The gamepad is good for racing games. I had a PS1 and played NFS3, 4 and 5.

Some people like consoles because you can use a HDTV and sit on the couch. I can do that with the PC too. I bought a 10m USB cable and hub, a 10m HDMI cable and a 10m audio cable and it's the same as a console because you can plug anything in the USB hub. All the cables cost about 50$ total (they're so cheap here 😀 ). Now I have 1080p FULL HD.

Companies like nVidia and ATI (AMD) won't die. They're actually doing well!!!

I built PCs for my friend for 500$ with 8600GT (OC) and AMD X2 with 2GB ram and a 250GB HDD and can run CRYSIS!!! For a console you also need to buy a HDTV. A good res (1600 X 1200) PC monitor is 400 $.

Every one says the graphics are too advanced for the hardware. The game can run at low verry well and at low have graphics like a console. But they give you the choice to go to high setting if you have the hardware. Nobody is forcing you to set the graphics to high.

Games like Counter-Strike aren't dead. Everybody I know play them!!! Even at school! 😀

I can try PC games free and then buy if it's a good game. I downloaded games (used them like a better demo) and then bought. For consoles if you buy a CR@P game that's it!

Multyplayer on the PC is way better. It exist for far longer than on the consoles.

PC game salles aren't lower on the PC.
Everyone says that salles for PC vs consolles (PS2, PS3, XBOX, XBOX 360, WII) are lower for the PC!
They are comparing wrong, PC is a platform too, then why not compare like this:
Xbox 360 vs others (PS3, PS2, PC, WII)
or PS3 vs others Xbox 360, wii, PC)

It should be Xbox 360 VS. PS3 VS. PC VS. Wii. Everyone for himself

PC GAMING IS NOT DEAD!!! :bounce:

 


Call yourself an enthusiast? making a list without the amiga?????? blah. school boy error! 😉
 
I can't resist jumping into this conversation. PC gaming isn't going to die unless either PCs die or Gaming dies. I hardly think either of those will happen soon. Gaming is a growing industry and if anything will further grow on PCs, even if it grows faster on consoles. As far as the hardware a day will come, and probably sooner rather then later, when the most average PC will be capable of high end gaming. Think about this, a few years ago the idea of editing and encoding video for home users was limited to only those with top of the line hardware and even then it was a stretch. Now even the cheapest PCs and laptops come with Dual core CPUs and plenty of RAM and hard drive space(yes hard drive space was an issue for those of us doing video editing just a few years ago). I think the current downturn in the PC gaming market can be mostly attributed to the gaming market outgrowing itself and PCs being the platform to take the hit since unlike the others it's not a unified platform. Once things catch up a bit they'll go right back to developing more PC titles because there's money to be made there.
 
I don't think PC games will die. Most of the games that I've played have only come out for the PC. Such as:

Far Cry - (Far Cry: Instincts was a console game and it heard it sucked).

Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines

S.TA.L.K.E.R.

Civilization 4

X3: Reunion - (Xbox 360 version was planned, but it was going to be such a cut down version that it was gonna be laughable. Glad that it never saw the light of day.)

Crysis


Those are just a few.
 
I remember seeing a informal "study" about forums and blogs a while back. Interesting information. Seems the number one question/subject discussed is "why does my machine only see 3.X of my 4 gigs of memory", closely followed by the "pc-console" debate. Bet the latter has been going on since the original Play Station came out.
 


never used it lol, never even saw one until today (looking it up), reminds me of the sega cd, and how could anyone use that controller lol?

I assume this is the amiga?

Amigacd32.jpg
 
PC gaming is dying or has been undergoing a transformation for several years.

I love flight sims, military sims. I can remember great games like Task Force 1942, Falcon 3.0, M1A1 Abrams, Aces of the Pacific, etc....

Those days are dead.

It used to be that Intel/AMD and the video hardware companies were challenged by flight sims. Not first person shooters.

Maybe it's cyclical. Maybe some upstart company will rehash Task Force 1942 or some other sim of yore and update the graphics and gameplay.

One can only hope.
 
pc gaming is having trouble because when many companies make pc games, they make a lot of mistakes

they always assume that we all have the latest $500 video card when in reality only like 0.00001% have the latest hardware (so they just knocked out over 99% of their market)

then you get companies that feel the need to drm the hell out of their games making it too much of a hassle to run

also 8 cores is starting to become mainstream
so most likely when the first gaming motherboard that supports 2 quad core cpu's comes out,

you can bet that a week later, a company will make a game that requires you to have 8GB memory and 8 cores to run

i understand making games look better but they also have to think about game play (crysis looked better than cod 4 but cod4 had better game play and won out)

another problem is that game makers don't make their games efficient

if you run crysis on the lowest settings, it looks 10 times worst than FEAR, but fear runs at least 5-6 times faster

most hard to run games are only optimized to run at full settings, lower settings are are not well thought out so you can lower it and make it look worst than most older games (which ran 100% smooth) and yet it may still lag

what game makers need to do is target the mid range for their games that way more people will be able to max the game out (they will still look batter than many console games and best of all everyone will be able to play them, and high end pcs will stay high end for for a much longer time)

also with consoles you don't have to upgrade every year to be able to game

software developers in generally have become lazy when it comes to making things efficient
vista is slow compared to windows xp,

outlook 2007 is harder to run than doom 3 and all it does is check mail

office 2007 uses more memory than battlefield 1942


second life (a cool pc game, but it is harder to run than crysis and the graphics look like they were from the 90's)

why is second life so hard to run

at 1024x768, you can get 50FPS in crysis maxed out
at 1024x768 in second life, you only get 30-40FPS

and tell me which looks better to you

pic1au7.jpg
(second life)
pic2tp7.jpg
or crysis

believe it or not, crysis runs at least 50% faster than second life and has much less lag (personal experience)



 
cool... pork and beans are for breakfast! ANYWAY... the number one forum post about a pc not recognizing ram... haha... people are stupid. 😛 I've known about the memory limit since i was in 4th or 5th grade. 😛 I also do agree with the fact that software is superbloated 99% of the time. I run ubuntu linux, and that is super lightweight and fast compared to any windows distro, but it still has the same problem in a lot of places... people need to start changing this... but they won't because they'll just say "oh, faster hardware will fix the problem" untill we hit a wall on how fast our procs are going to get at their current size, and eventually a "fast" computer will once again be the size of the living room sofa because it has 20 procs in it, 80 sticks of memory, 40 video cards, and a commercial air move to keep it all cool. just like the very first ones were... i just can't wait till they figure out how to use animal brains for computing, and human brains will be illegal of course, but everyone will want a human brain cuz it'd be the fastest!
 
think about it, how many people pay ~2,000 for a gaming machine?
almost no one, but people are willing to spend 300 for a console and have much more fun with friends
 
we have already hit that wall.

8 cores are starting to ease their way in

soon we will be at 16 cores



we are basically hitting a technology wall and multi core and SLI are starting to become more mainstream

the problem with multicore and SLI is that there not as efficient as 1 super powerful core

on paper, SLI should give you a 100% performance boost

if you got 30 fps with 1 card, then you should get 60fps with second card in sli

but in reality, if you got 30fps with 1 card, when you go sli you end up with 35-40FPS in sli


when you move from a single core to a dual core, if 1 core rendered a mental ray image in 2 minutes, on paper, the dual core should do it in 1 minute but in reality, it does it in 1 minute 20-30 seconds

sli and crossfire has the worst performance out of any multicore setup on earth

it has the most bandiwdth overhead and performance hits of any multicore setup

with dual core you at least get around a 80-90% boost

with sli, you get a 20-30% boost

which means you paid twice the price for a 30% boost



look at the super computers, having over 10000 cores and requiring their own building and power plant to power the power hungry cores and cooling system


multicore is a short term solution to technology limits.


i a long time ago, computers were much slower, and you will see some pcs with 8 500MHz processors more processors (single cores now are able to beat the 8x 500MHz processors )

if you look at the benchmarks, the 8 core pcs are not 100% faster than the 4 core pcs the boost is more like 30-40% faster

here is a everest benchmark i ran this list shows the results of many other multi core benchmarks

evvve9.jpg


as you can see

the 2x 500MHz got a score of 755 and the 8x 550MHz got a score of 2239

on paper that 8x 550 should have gotten a score of over 3120 but it didnt

multi core is not efficient it is just a bandage for limits in technology
 
the problem with multi cpu computers is that they use the same memory... you essentially need 2x the bandwidth on all fronts to take advantage of 2x the processing power... and crossfire and sli is just retarded to begin with because it's true you don't get that much more perfofrmance for 2x the price... you might as well just buy one hardcore card. unless you have an upgrade plan that involves selling each card individually to 2 separate people and then buying 2 more... or something like that... nobody in their right mind with the facts straight that would buy 2 cards. so i agree.... to an extent....

and a gaming pc doesn't cost that much, you basically have a pc.... say you built it and paid 500-600 dollars for parts, case and everything... the video card to turn it into a gaming machine is significantly less than any given high graphical processing console. so basically you're just paying to turn a PC into a gameing machine... if you look at it that way.. it's much more cost effective because you need a pc anyway... and a nice video card is not as expensive as a console... unless you buy an uber card... So i don't really agree with you on that front....

not to mention you didn't even address my thought about using BRAINS for computing! 😛
 
the human brain is much slower than than current processors.

how many times can you answer the question what is 1+1

a computer can do it millions of times per second, while a human might do it 15 times per second. (also the brain is never able to make the same exact output twice. even though you can say the same thing twice, if the brainwaves are monitored, you will see that the output is different each time machines see the difference but for us, we don't notice it as the brain knows what it is doing and has very good ecc )


console gaming has a lot of ripoffs why do we have to play $8 a month for xbox live? most multiplayer games for pc have no charge for multiplayer

we already pay for a internet connection, we don't need to pay microsoft $8 a month just so they can keep out scores (something with 90% of the pc games that are multiplayer do for free )

console games are also more expensive and offer less content since the games are preinstalled from the cd, and not installed directly to a hard drive, levels have to be designed in a way that allows for quick level loading and for thins to be easier on the video hardware.

if you look closely at many console games you will see that only main focus objects have high res textures and and detail and mesh detail
everything else is generally badly down sampled and are later rendered properly when you go close to them or when they become a main focus

pc gaming is generally less optimized for performance as the makers always have the mind set that the new cpu and videocard coming out next month is twice as fast (but fail to see that 90% of us wont buy it because we don't want a negative balance in our accounts)

no matter how much secondary bandwidth is available, multicore will always have a performance overhead which will reduce performance and will never give you a full 100% increase in speed

but compared to dual core cpus, SLI is horribly inefficient

not to mention that it cost an average of $500 a year to run a gaming pc that uses SLI and drawing on every bit of power that 800 watt psu can offer (the average gaming pc uses just as much power as a microwave and it is on at least 18 hours a day )

1 500 MHz processors use more power than 1 1GHz processor

2 , 3 GHz processors use more power than 1 overclocked to 4GHz

but due to technology limits and lack of effort from the companies, instead of better processors, we wind up with power hungry multi core systems

also
 
Power hungry multi-core systems? Are you kidding me?
If anything CPUs and video cards consume LESS power than they used to a year or two ago.
Take the Core 2 Duos for example, and compare them with SINGLE core P4s; which consume more power? That's right, the P4s do.
(http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/12/28/intel_cpu_power_consumption/index.html)

Parallel processing is probably the best thing that ever happened to CPUs, IMO. Does it really matter how many CPU cores there are under a heatspreader as long as a CPU performs MUCH better, uses up less energy AND outputs less heat?
Keep in mind I'm talking about multi-core.
Multi-CPU is a different story, and that is what I would call inefficient.

Even dual card systems don't consume much power; 2 SLI'd 8800GTs do not exceed 185W in power consumption and two 3870s do not go over 190W (I'm talking about the power consumption of the cards alone). Add, say, 250W to that for everything else, and you get no more than 440W. A lot lower than your 800W estimation, and we're talking at load.
I doubt anyone plays 18 hours a day on a PC, so power consumption is cut by half (more or less) on idle.
However, I will agree that SLI/CF is a waste of money.

The way I see it, we're going in the right direction.
Next stop: multi-core GPUs and 32nm octo-core CPUs. :bounce:

 
instead of 2 gpus why cant they just do dual core gpus like they do with the core 2

ps a few years ago, my gaming pc did fine with a 400 watt psu, now we need 750-800 watts

power requirements go up each year because instead of companies working on how can i make this GPU better

there working on " how many videocards can i fit in this space"

usually when they make a new processor in a series, for example the socket 939 opterons, power requirements didn't change much when a faster model was released but when motherboards that support 2 physical processors then power requirements doubled

and the other problem with multicore is getting software to make use of it. certain programs will make use of 2 cores but not 4 and most quad cores have 4 slower cored instead of 2 faster ones (the 4 will offer a major performance boost but only if a program is multithreaded enough

many professional programs like maya only support up to 8 cores after that they wont use any more unless your running like 50 computers as render slaves then you can have 50 computers each having 8 cores and it will use all of them)

if we move to 16 cores per computer, it will be useless to pretty much all professional software

and based on how things are going, more companies are pushing more cored for everything instead of a single one that can do the same work or more

pc gaming will always be higher end and more advance than console games but no one if going to buy the games if you need a $5000 gaming pc to run it with some lag


gaming companies need to better optimize their games, the newer the games get, the more crap their graphics look when you lower the settings (crysis on low looks worst than many games that are years older than it and yet crysis duns 10 times slower than those games (and the problem is that this slowdown is happening in the videocard as crysis doesnt even use full cpu usage, it like many new games use inefficient rendering all leading up to the most inefficient being second life (second life looks like it came out 10 years ago, but it is harder to run than crysis )
 


THAT is the failed Amiga CD 32. It was Amiga's attempt to break into the young console market and it failed utterly.

No, when someone talks about the Amiga fondly, they are not referring to that thing. They are referring to the computer lines. The amiga 500, 1200, 2000, 3000 and such. They were ahead of their time and had graphics that beat anything else on a consumer level when they came out. Years after the company went out of business, these machines were still used for high end graphics manipulation. Babylon 5 for instance made good use of Amigas for their CG.

Poor Amiga though. They have a troubled and sordid history. Do a search for the history of Amiga and I'm sure you will come up with something. Should be an interesting read if you like to follow the computer industry.
 


This is an oversimplification and also wrong. You are comparing a rock to an aardvark I'm afraid. A computer is a binary counting and arithmetic machine and nothing more. Now it is very VERY good at it, but it is not even comparable to a brain.

If you must call the brain a processor then it would more accurately be called an intuitive processor. The reason you get different results when you monitor brain activity when performing the same task repeatedly is because you are improving how you do it each time. For instance you ask a brain what the answer to 12 times 10 is. The first time it might actually calculate it if you have never done that operation before. Another time you may have noticed the trend that multiplying things by 10 results in the first number with an extra 0 at the end so it does a simpler operation to find the result. Another time you will simply remember that the answer to that was 120 and not do any calculations at all.

Computers don't do this. They reinvent the wheel every time a wheel is needed. There are a few technologies that try to optimize the process but it is just not as good at it.

Another thing to look at. How much work would a computer need to do to calculate where a ball will be once it is thrown? Now consider that it does not have accurate range finders and radar guns but only two crude optical sensors, though high resolution. It might not even have enough data to form a starting point for calculations depending on how it was programmed. Your brain on the other hand short cuts all that. It guesses and it does so with sufficient accuracy to catch the ball more often than not. Intuitive processing is powerful for vague situations where all the numbers and mathematical details are just not available.

Finally, when was the last time a computer invented something that changed the world? Computers are tools, used to help invent things, but they are incapable of creativity and creation. Once again that requires an intuitive processor such as a brain.

Brains > computers.
period.

Sorry, seriously tangental, but this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
 
the brain is fast at what it does but not fast at what computers do.

the data the brain collects from the eyes is much higher than a processor can handle

but if you try to get a brain do something like find pi to a million places or solve a calculus equation that takes up a page (a the pc does it almost instantly while the brain just gives up 1/100 of the way through

also brains make mistakes, it is hard to overclock a brain because no one can figure out how to access the brains bios and overclock it

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.



 
Like I said, A rock and an Aardvark. You might as well be saying that google is a significantly better web search site than Xbox Live. They serve extremely different roles and have no chance of encroaching on the other's territory. Point is moot.
 
it's a stupid question "1+1" because the brain doesn't have to answer it a million times... it answers it one-seven times and remembers for eternity... arg... i have a very frustrating audience. anyway. yes, brain is infiantly faster... try using 10% of your computers capacity to read a web page while at the same time having pictures of the web page layed out in front of you... not only will your brain recognize everything on the page and everything in the room, and the sound, and regulate everything in your body on 10%, it'll do it in a fraction of a second if you havn't fried half of it/keep it excersized by using it often. the information that passes into your brain is only as slow as you teach yourself to interpret it. 😛

and as long as we are comparing a "rock and and aardvark" shouldn't we be comparing a rock and a sloth? just kinda wondering, 😛

and the brain did not give up at finding pi to a million places... it simply invented a way to make it easier. DUH!

furthermore... my brain WOULD have a bios... but i dumped it and put in my own code... it works much better this way. 😛

and lastly, WAY TO STEAL A QUOTE! I sure needed that plagiarism to remind me of who's boss! i'll send you a nickel if you can name who coined that term. 😛
 


I'm not sure I follow what quote you are talking about....


To get back to the OP though... No, the PC is not dying as a gaming platform. This happens in cycles. In 5 years people will be taking for granted how well PCs are doing and shortly after that the new console generation will start and people will be doomsaying PCs again. If you are truly concerned however, buy a few PC games that you have been considering picking up. Vote with your wallet as the saying goes.
 


Oh stemmin u are young lol 😉

Like the other guy said, the 'proper' amiga was the 500, 500+ and 600, and it was an absolute LEGEND!

Seriously the amiga era deserves at least 5 minutes looking up on wikipedia. Hugely influential and popular machine. Its time is well and truly over since about 12 years or so. But in its time...

And yes I still don't think the pc is a dying gaming platform.
 

They are going to start producing multi-core GPU solutions.
The current popularity of multi-GPUs is just a temporary phase.


No, we DON'T!
It seems you didn't even bother to read my post.
I don't know what kind of computer you're running, but there is NOTHING besides SLI 8800 Ultras that would require anything close to 700W, and that's depending on how many other components you have in a PC.
No offense, but saying 750-800W is a requirement is just ridiculous.


Again, it seems you completely disregarded what I wrote.
I said multi-CPU solutions were indeed inefficient (as in the two physical processors you're talking about now).
What I was talking about in the beginning of my last post was dual and multi-core processors.


While you are right in that most software does not have the ability to use all cores, I will say that this is the fault of the software rather than the hardware.
Software will eventually adapt to hardware requirements, as it always has.


The reason they're doing that is that it is MORE EFFICIENT (and faster) to have two cores or more working simultaneously rather than one taking care of all the load. Having more cores means the load can be split equally over all the cores, which equals more efficiency.
There is also a limit to everything, and single core processors have reached theirs.


There is NO game that requires a $5000 PC to run.
I would assume that you mean Crysis, though.
In the US, an $800 PC will run Crysis pretty decently on high settings at 1680*1050.
No offense, but saying that you need a $5000 PC to run games leads me to believe you have the mindset of console fanboys.


That I cannot but AGREE with.
Game companies need to start working on better optimization for games. I can only imagine what a good gaming PC (no, not a $5000 one 😛) can do when a game like Crysis is better optimized.
Still I cannot say it is not optimized at all, since I did manage to run it on medium-high on my X1900XT with about 22-27 FPS. That was much more than I expected, to be honest.

 
by power requirements increasing, you will notice that during the days when the 5200 was considered s high end card you could get away with a 250watt psu and run everything fine, try doing that with a modern pc with 8800

while power efficiency doesnt bother me too much as unlike card, with a gaming pc, we have need for all of the speed and more.

over the years, cars have become more and more efficient but all of that added efficiency is lost because the makers just use it to add more horse power and show their cars moving super fast on their tv ads while in reality we are only able to use 30% of that speed and power before we get a ticket (with the efficiency of cars now, if they were to make the engine 90 horsepower instead of 300, the car would probably do 100 miles to a gallon or more and still be able to exceed the speed limits on the highway

(a 1000 horsepower car gets around 5-6 miles to a gallon)

PS the last pc I built had 2 8800 GT's in SLI

the powersupply was a 750 watt by corsair

when idle everest showed 12.17 V on the 12V rail
then when i launched the fog in a box demo by nvidia and prime 95

the 12V readings will hover between 11.95 and 12.02V

and the powersupply has very good reviews (this has 100% no effect on stability but it is annoying to see that 11.95V)

the pc was using the onboard sound and 1 500GB sata drive and 2 dvd burners and 1 floppy drive

 
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