Was the death of PC games really nigh? Revisiting an old thread.

The Game Room
21

Exactly. It never fails: when the comparison arises people pit the ENTIRETY of console hardware AND software retail sales vs only the US PC software retail sales.

A bit lopsided no?

Gaming PC hardware is not taken into account, retail sales worldwide (and they are still very big in Europe and Asia) are not taken into account and the two big gorillas in the room (MMO’s and similar subscription/dlc based services and full game download services like Steam) are likewise ignored.

My hunch is that if those were taken into account, as they should be, and then compared to any single console platform, PC’s number would look hella good. Hell, without the cost of hardware on the console side the PC market is probably doing better than some of the current gen console platforms.

Surveys are also still pointing out that most people are spending more time playing PC games than console games. Though I would imagine most of them are playing solitaire, and maybe the Sims.

And we still have our big budget exclusives. I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to Diablo III, Starcraft II and Satr Wars the old Republic (the only MMO that might actually get me to play MMO’s). And of course I also enjoyed (and am enjoying) playing Spore and Sims 3. We also still get our large share of exclusive indie games, simply because the PC is the easiest and cheapest platform to develop for. And that won’t change.

22

Wasn’t there a Simpsons game that was released for every console but not PC a few years ago?

23

It’s been said before, and is worth saying again:

As long as people have computers, they will want games to play on them.

As to comparing bits, frame rates, graphics 3D accelerators, gigaflops and all that crap, how many people in the original thread predicted the much-accelerated graphics monsters Xbox 360 and PS3 would get thier ass handed to them by a little white box with inferior graphics that lets you play golf by actually swinging the controller, which DOESN’T have twenty-six buttons on it? None, that’s how many.

At the heart of a game is not a graphics; it’s the GAME.

24

The cell processor still outperforms anything from intel for the workload it was designed for.

The problem with the hype is that there isn’t 1 single computing model, some problems are well suited for a GPU, others for a traditional CPU and others for the cell which lies between the GPU and the CPU.

25

You must be using some highly specialized criteria for “workload it was designed for” because there’s no way a cell processor has anywhere near as much computational power as a current I7, especially if you factor in easy overclocks.

26

Last I saw the i7 was around 70 gflops (I think that was 2008, maybe it’s moved up a little).

Cell =218gflops

27

This is exactly why, when Wizards of the Coast releases new Dungeons & Dragons material, they don’t allow online sources like Amazon to sell their copies until a couple weeks after the initial release. Gaming shops (i.e. stores that cater to tabletop RPGs, wargamers, collectible card game players, etc) are about as niche as it gets, and are usually very small businesses that don’t stock a wide selection of “other” goods to boost their sales figures. They’re usually run by dedicated gamers, for dedicated gamers. So WotC makes Amazon et al hold their copies for a couple weeks, which means those gamers who absolutely must have the books as soon as they’re released have to purchase them from their local gaming shop. That keeps the small local gaming shops in business, which in turn gives more exposure to the games, which creates more demand for the products.

28

By the same token, it is impossible to get single comprehensive sourcebooks for anything now, perhaps because piracty is such a massive problem. What once might have been released in one book is now released across five.

29

Claimed PR numbers for GFLOPs aren’t that meaningful. You can cook up different test conditiosn to give you different numbers. Tests can be taken with a limited specialized dataset in strictly the FPU registers maximizing SIMD/extensions with no memory interaction vs actual real world performance on real data. Graphics chips can get GFLOPs up past 2000 in specialized roles - does that mean they’re 30 times more powerful than the fastest i7?

You seem to be saying that a PS3 CPU from 2005, in a system that cost as low as $300 or $400, including an expensive blu-ray drive and other hardware, had a CPU that’s 3 times as capable as intel’s best 4 years later? And somehow that processing power can’t even beat out the xbox 360 in graphical performance in most games?

It’s not a meaningful comparison without more data.

30

Real benchmarks by researchers at universities have shown the cell performs very well for the workload it was designed for, which tends to match scientific computing. Vector operations, high memory bandwidth, etc.

Here is one example:
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:mnuCQ4n4nusJ:cell-blade.ncsa.uiuc.edu/papers_presentations/lattice08.ppt+benchmark+cell+processor+intel±fuel&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Here’s info on someone replacing their supercomputer time with networked ps3’s:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/articles/new-supercomputer-is-a-rack-of-playstations/2008/02/26/1203788327976.html

For some problems yes, for other problems it’s the reverse. That’s why in my original post I made sure to point out that different computing models are good for different things. It’s not a one size fits all.

For the workloads it was designed for, yes, I believe it still outperforms the i7 based on the two theoretical numbers of 200 vs 70, and knowing that scientists have been generally successful at getting the cell to perform to it’s peak.

Also, remember that the price of the ps3 does not represent it’s cost to build. So, while intel sells their processors at a profit, Sony is taking a loss on each ps3.

I didn’t make any statements about how it may or may not translate into graphical performance as compared to the 360. I was just merely pointing out that the cell processor was and is a powerful processor, for the workload it was designed for. In other words, the blanket statement that consoles are not more powerful than the pc at time of introduction is too broad of a statement.

31

Thing is a PC is the sum of it’s parts. The cell processor can indeed outperform the x86 based processor when performing certain types of operations. But the same is true of the i7. In other types of operations it outperforms the cell.

Not only that, but on the PC, it is the GPU that takes over the roll of performing the types of parallel operations that the cell processor does best. And modern GPUs do it better.

So indeed a modern PC (GPU + CPU) smokes a PS3 any way you slice it (assuming the software is taking advantage of hardware in an optimal way on both platforms of course).

32

The things I see working against PC gaming right now are:

  1. Retail shelf space given away to more profitable Xbox, PS3, Wii, DS games.
  2. Development and marketing dollars spent on more profitable console only or multiplatform titles.
  3. Desktop PC sales declining and giving way to increased laptop sales means fewer PCs capable of running state-of-the-art titles. Not to mention an increase in Mac sales.

But on the other hand, I see promise for PC games development because of:

  1. Digital distribution channels like Steam have been doing very well over the past couple of years.
  2. The above makes it viable for smaller, independent developers and publishers to sell more games.
  3. PC multiplayer communities tend to be stronger than their console counterparts due partially to the moddability of PC versions.
  4. Improvements in hardware technology help drive innovation that sometimes starts on the PC and moves to consoles.
  5. MMOs don’t seem to be slowing down at all.
  6. Let’s not forget ad-supported browser-based gaming.

Gaming as a whole has grown by a very large amount recently and with more online sales of boxed games and digital distribution, it is not easy to get a good idea of exactly how much money is being spent on PC games. When we do get sales data, it is usually only retail store sales and while Walmart and Best Buy probably sell more PC games than anyone, I would suspect that overall PC sales figures are being vastly underreported.

While developers bemoan piracy and poor PC sales compared to the console versions, if you look at it from the perspective that there has been an explosion of titles in recent years to the extent that all the available money to buy games has to go to a more diverse number of publishers, it’s really no surprise that any one game doesn’t sell as well as the developer and publisher would like.

Gone are the days when you would have two to three blockbuster titles a year. Now we have big games releasing all throughout the year and a huge pile of them released for the holiday buying season.

If any developers want to leave the PC gaming space, there are plenty more ready to take their place. There’s still money in PC games and the smart developers will be the ones to leverage multiplatform strategies or go the other direction with smaller teams with modest budgets but great creativity.

33

I suspect that this thread will do better in the Game Room.

34

If you do some shopping, you can find 1 year subscriptions to Live for less than $30. I think PS3’s free service may be improving enough to make MS close that price gap a bit.

35

SenorBeef, none of the comparisons you’re making are even remotely close to meaningful. The 360 has a comparable video processor to a Radeon 2600? Yes, if you’re thinking in binary, 1:1 terms–if you’re comparing the needs of a dedicated gaming box to those of a multitasking, desktop-based, user environment. Why would you do such a thing, though, unless you were being intellectually dishonest?

They do make gaming-only shells for Windows which strip away all the pretty graphics, wallpaper & cursor & animation rendering, and many of the other shell functions in favor of an environment where as few non-game programs are running as possible. Even these have at least four times as many background services running; basic things that Windows requires to even function as a computer, which are not streamlined for a single hardware setup. Check out the Services section of your Control Panel sometime and gawk at the list of networking, accessibility, security, backup, drivers, data access, etc. that Windows has running, every nanosecond it’s on.

This is why a desktop OS boots in ~30-90 seconds, and a console boots in about 10. It needs less processing power, GPU, and RAM because it is doing less as a machine, being designed to run games, run games online, and nothing else.
That said, I don’t know what forum this started in, but these sorts of fanboy-driven discussions are things I was hoping to be done with outside of maybe the internet cesspool that is GameFAQs. Or, saving that, the Pit.

No one who weighs in on “The Death of [GAMING_PLATFORM]” is going to be level-headed about it, myself included. Heck, I do more PC gaming than not these days because I can multitask. But unfounded claims and Controller vs. K+M debates are kind of below us as a board, I would hope.

36

Heh, I guess you have’t seen some of our “teh Wii Graphx suuuxxxxx” topics, huh? :wink:

37

You rang?

38

Biggest problem I’m having with consoles is trying to play FPS games on them. I’ve always been damn good at FPS games, but using a console control with a resistance-giving joystick to precision aim still feels clunky as hell to me. Through a lot of practice I’ve managed to become at least halfway decent in Halo 3, but it’s still very frustrating to me at times not being able to aim for shit.

I haven’t even bothered to try an RTS on a console, but I imagine (and hear) it is even worse in terms of clunky controls. They should really let you use a mouse and keyboard for consoles…

39

True.

It’s not that black and white. The cell is a middle ground between the high parallelism of the gpu and (up until recently) limited parallelism of the cpu. The problem with the gpu is that it assumes you have many data elements that need the same operation performed generally at the same time. The cell fits problems that have fewer data elements requiring the same operation at the same time.

I’m not going to disagree, we were really talking about at intro, then comparing cell to current cpu for some workloads.

40

How many cycles is the GPU dedicating to rendering the wallpaper while a game is going. Seriously - this is your argument? The PC needs to display wallpaper, so it needs a beefier graphics card to get the same performance!

Windows takes longer to boot because it loads more and the slowest part of any computer system by far is loading data from the drive into ram.

You’re talking about graphics cards here. The GPU isn’t running your network driver, or loading your startup programs, or doing much multitasking.

So yes, the xbox has a little bit less background stuff to worry about. But when running a game, how much of a PC’s resources are dedicated to running the background processes? Looking at my system right now, since I rebooted a few hours ago, my CPU has dedicated 50 seconds to windows processes. If you throw in non-essential background stuff like firewalls and antivirus programs, the number is 2 minutes, 10 seconds. The computer has been on for 3 hours 40 minutes. So 2 minutes, 10 seconds out of 220 minutes. Less than 1%. And that’s for the CPU - the GPU isn’t running my firewall or windows services.

So even though my PC has probably about 3 or 4 times the raw power of an xbox 360, but because it has to spend less than 1% of its time running background processes there’s parity?

What if I had a computer from 10 years from now, which has 50 or 100 times the processing power of an xbox 360, but also has background processes to run? Is it unfair to say that it’s more powerful than the xbox too?

And you say I’m being intellectually dishonest.

You can argue in favor of consoles, but among the arguments you can choose “they’re just as powerful as gaming PCs made years later with much better technology!” is not one of them.

I mean - just look at the practical results. If I play for example COD4 on my PC, it’s 1680x1050 with 16x anisotropic filtering, 4x or 8x fsaa (I forget what the max is), frame rates of 60-90, better shadows, better post processing effects, etc. - on the xbox it renders at what, something like 1000x700? (even though the xbox can plug into a 1080p TV, most games run at a much lower resolution). With no anisotropic filtering, FSAA, bad shadows, lower frame rates, lower draw distance, etc.

But they’re comparable because my PC is running a firewall in the background, right?