I’ve been saying this for a while now. The PC gaming market has huge potential based on it’s unparalleled install base. But confusing consumers and providing substandard hardware configurations only frustrates possible PC gamers.
Having a simple way to tell if your new PC from best buy can play games or not will go a long way towards that holy grail of PC gaming where everyone is capable of playing the majority of games. Coupled with scalable game engines I think we can start to reverse the current trend of Console first, PC second that’s emerging.
Now, will intel finally give up on their terrible integrated GPU chips and follow suit?
Not many people got or ever got gaming PC’s. Rather, they got computers which could also do fun stuff. The mass market has always been with mid-range or low-range PC’s.
Given that they’re trying to convince world + dog that their new Larrabee GPU, with its secret hoodoo raytracing powers, will overwhelm those mere super-specialized rasterization-based devices, I doubt it. (Of course, in the wake of a number of game developers calling them on it, they seem to be saying, “Oh, it will do raster stuff, too.”)
Well I did just skim the article but I don’t think this will help any. The Gamer Ultra of today is the Game Minimum of tomorrow and the people who don’t know/care about the difference between a Geforce 8800 GT and a Geforce 9600GTX other then one has a higher number will still be in the dark…hell I consider myself a gamer and sometimes the numbering system can confuse me. Unfortunately I don’t have a solution either. I do think they need to stop having engineers name chips and have a clear linear numbering system so you know at a glance what hardware meets what requirements.
If they had some communication with the game producers they could have a situation where the game packaging will say something like “Tested on AMD Game Ultra 2008.” Including the year then gives you an idea of how your Game Ultra system stacks up. If it’s a 2007 system you may be in trouble, 2008 and later, you’re good to go.
Wouldn’t that in the end be even worse?
Minimum requirements Ultra 2006 or Minimum 2007
Recommended Ultra 2009, Minimum 2009 or Ultra 2008
etc etc. only sometimes you have a generic video card from Gateway in your ultra that’s not quite up to snuff even though it barely met the Ultra 2006 requirement or you’re sitting there with a custom box and have to look up what is ultra in 2007.
I agree with most of this, all of it depending on what you mean by fun stuff. I’m not sure if you were agreeing with me, disagreeing, or just commenting. Either way, I still don’t see how the $1000-$2000 computers metioned in the article are going to take a bite out of the $100-$500 console market.
In my own experience people who get gaming machines don’t shop at big box stores, they build them. This is a ploy by AMD, nothing more than that, since Intel has taken over the gaming processor spot that AMD once held and sadly let slip away.
Most new builds my gaming friends build now are E8400/Q6600/Nvidia 8800s or better I rarely if ever in other forums, or amongst my large group of playmates see anyone talking about buying a Phenom or a ATI Radeon 3000 series. And while this may increase the casual numbers of people buying an AMD once they become “gamers” they will start swapping the AMD parts out for Intel/Nvidia. If AMD wants to make a comeback in the gaming market they need to stop trying to be first and try being the best*.
*In fairness Phenom does okay in benchmarks for multitasking programs, but gaming it lags way behind Intels quad core and all quad core still barely BM better/same than the E8400/8500’s in gaming as dual core is about all most games can utilize at the moment.
What they need is a standard DirectX control panel for controls and video settings. That way you don’t have to individually set up every game for your preferences (FPS, driving, etc.) And I don’t have to tell every game to invert my mouselook, that I like to use right-click for jump, etc.
Same with video settings, let resolution and stuff stay the same between games, maybe have a level of detail slider to tweak things if the game runs too slowly on your system.
Audio could get the same treatment, I don’t want to tell every game that I have 5.1 sound.
Some of this could be done with better implementation of an auto settings tool when the game is first launched.
But some of your suggestions don’t sound like a good idea. One thing I LIKE about PC games is the ability to tweak them to my heart’s content.
On an XBOX 360 Mass Effect or GTA IV will stutter/drop frames/play smoothly whenever the Devs decide it will.
On a PC I get to choose how smooth my playing experience will be, and I get to choose what settings I want to lower/raise because for some people realistic shadows are the cat’s pajamas, while for other’s it’s realistic water, and others still would do away with both if the game runs at 50+ frames no matter what.
This is what I’m most afraid of when it comes to console gaming. That PC developers will continue to create half assed ports to the PC and that console trends will start to become standard operating procedure on the PC. The casual gamer and the PC, I don’t think, can co-habitate in the same virtual space, at least not within certain genre of games.
Casual games on the PC can, of course, and should really, be as casual and dumbed down as can be.
I think this is the current trend, but it will not be so for very long. PC’s will continue to dominate as the biggest install base and as hardware continues to improve and as more people buy PC’s and more people play games on those PC’s hardware and system devs will be configuring more gaming capable rigs.
The console biz is treacherous and expensive. Will microsoft/sony continue to sink billions of dollars into consoles? Are they even making their money back at this point? Didn’t a recent Park Associates study show that the average console gamer spends MORE time playing PC games than console games?
I’m not really concerned in a “Oh no PC gaming is going to die!” way, because, well, it won’t. It’s probably eventually goign to suck up the console gamers when the time is right and when a home PC is truly integrated into the home wheen it will be used to house all the family’s digital entertainment, gaming included.
What I’ms most concerned about is the console first current trend and it possible effect on the future of PC gaming. That, and the currently slow process of getting hardware vendors to start helping out the gaming industry on the PC instead of making things more difficult.
I think the settings like 1680x1050 resolution, 4x AA on, Antiscopic texture filtering, EAX 2.0 enabled, etc. should be standardized, but you should be able to override the standard settings in any particular game. Yes, PC gamers still need to be able to tweak.
Especially considering that a game would look like ass with those settings on a lot of rigs with LCDs with different native modes. Resolution would be a hard thing to standardize.
I don’t mean the game should ship set to a particular resolution, I mean that the user should be able to specify their own universal preferences/defaults in a DirectX control panel or something, and games should load those defaults in when they’re first installed.
You know, I don’t disagree with you, especially regarding the install base, but the install base has been there. Consoles rose during this amazing install base. I don’t think comupter gaming is dead, but it has to evolve or else it will suffer greatly.
I don’t know about you, but I do my gaming on a pretty old machine and I have to specify different settings for virtually every game I play, or a 2005+ game will be uber-choppy and and 2003 game will be needlessly blocky.
For example, I can play, say, StarCraft with all the settings turned all the way up, but KOTOR II I can only play at medium settings.
PCs capable of playing the latest games do not have the highest install base and I’d say the last time they did was sometime in the late 90s. While the price of a gaming PC and a console have gotten closer, they are still far enough apart that I doubt the PC will regain an install base lead any time soon.
And why would people jump to PCs if the hardware improves, console gamers are swayed by games and PC game makers have no interest in moving beyond their current “safe” genres. And some of those genres are being done just as well on the consoles.
I’m pretty opposed to the idea that one box will rule the home entertainment sphere on principle, but I also doubt it will ever happen in practice. It will require too much software knowledge that the average user does not have or a new generation of electronics that does it automatically. And either way won’t be cheap.
And besides, the consoles are making strides towards the one entertainment box and they’d get there well before the PC would.