PC Gaming Going Down the Tubes?

[ultima_trev]

I've always been one to tout about the superiority of the PC compared to consoles, but it's gotten to a point where I am beginning to question my loyalty.

1) The price of high end CPUs and GPUs are sky rocketing. This has always been the case though, so I guess one would have to deal with it... but unfortunately, even the highest end hardware won't help you with the next dilemma...

2) Even the highest end hardware won't run DX10 games for shit unless you sacrifice assloads of image quality. Even with a Core 2 Extreme QX9650 + 3-way SLI GeForce 8800 Ultra configuration, you'll be hard pressed to get playable framerates in Crysis with the eye candy turned up.

3) Crysis aside, just about every good PC game is available on consoles. Unreal Tournament 3, Call of Duty 4, The Orange Box, Quake Wars. Sure, they won't look and feel as good as their PC counterparts, but considering we're comparing 400$ consoles to 1500$+ gaming rigs, the improvement just doesn't' seem to be worth it.

[Sean]

I've always been one to tout about the superiority of the PC compared to consoles, but it's gotten to a point where I am beginning to question my loyalty.

1) The price of high end CPUs and GPUs are sky rocketing. This has always been the case though, so I guess one would have to deal with it... but unfortunately, even the highest end hardware won't help you with the next dilemma...

2) Even the highest end hardware won't run DX10 games for shit unless you sacrifice assloads of image quality. Even with a Core 2 Extreme QX9650 + 3-way SLI GeForce 8800 Ultra configuration, you'll be hard pressed to get playable framerates in Crysis with the eye candy turned up.

3) Crysis aside, just about every good PC game is available on consoles. Unreal Tournament 3, Call of Duty 4, The Orange Box, Quake Wars. Sure, they won't look and feel as good as their PC counterparts, but considering we're comparing 400$ consoles to 1500$+ gaming rigs, the improvement just doesn't' seem to be worth it.

1. "High end" CPUs? Mine's an AMD Athlon x2 6000+ 3.0 dual core and I spent <$200 for it. That's skyrocketing? When I bought it I think the 3.2 dual core was the highest AMD on the market. Granted Intel has quad-cores now, (which are fairly new) but last time I checked when dual core launched it, too, was ridiculously expensive. Such is the price one pays for wanting the ABSOLUTE BEST technology.

2. This is only in reference to Crysis. You're going to nag that you can't run one of the most resource intensive games on full settings, you should know full well that there's no video game console in the world that can run it either, then.

Also, unless SLI has changed recently (I haven't ran it since it first came out with 6600GTs) then the resource gain isn't 3x with 3 cards, or 2x with 2 cards. It's 1.5x with 2 and 2x with 3. nVidia may have made it better, I'm honestly unsure.\

DX10 is also fairly new "technology" it'll take awhile before hardware that can FULLY utilize it becomes more readily available and affordable.

3. While most games are cross-platform from PC to Console, my monitor has a better resolution than my television. Sure, I can spend $1500 for a high-def television, but then this defeats the purpose of saying a $1500 gaming PC is overpriced in comparison to getting the same resolution off of a $2000 console system with the cost of a good television included.

Albiet you can do other things with a television, but I find myself doing other things than gaming on my gaming rig. Don't you?

Also, to me, nothing beats the TOTAL control of mouse-and-keyboard setup. No console controller will EVER come close. Online gaming is much more effecient when done via a PC than a video game system (in my opinion) because the processors aren't handling the load, PCs have a dedicated LAN "processor" if you will.

PCs always have been and always will be superior, and the biggest plus is you don't have to wait 4-5 years for an "upgrade" in the technology like you do with consoles (Which require you to COMPLETELY scrap the old one) every year or less I can upgrade any component to my PC to the highest standards if I so chose, and I always have a "non-techy" friend I can pawn my old components off to in one way or another.

[ultima_trev]

I agree about the controls. Mouse + keyboard gives you a level of speed and precision unachievable via the shitty analog joysticks (though maybe a Wiimote could potentially be as good).

And the PC being multi purpose is another selling point, though I find with games (at least for me) getting more and more bland (in correlation with the graphics progressing too fast), I might jump ship to Mac OS or Ubuntu... and stay there, never to return to Windows (unless the increment of such post-Vista doesn't suck as badly).

[Walter Sobchak]

I look at the shrinking shelf space at GameStop and it becomes quite clear that PC Gaming has been hit hard in terms of popularity. Now that consoles can go online, the fixture PC gaming had on that niche is gone. It will stick around, but it is not nearly as popular as it used to be.

[Sir Kenneth]

http://www.pcgamingalliance.org/en/n...cga_launch.pdf

I find this to be quite interesting. Apparently Microsoft, Intel, AMD, and Nvidia have joined forces to promote and improve PC gaming. I have no idea what this is going to amount to, but if more software and hardware producers were to join this, it has the potential to make things a hell of a lot easier.

[ultima_trev]

I've read about that. Dell, Acer, Epic, and Activision are also a part of the PC Gaming Alliance as well, so it's definitely a no joke coalition, though what good it can do against the steadily building momentum of console gaming has yet to be seen.

What I wish for is for PC Gaming to completely thrash the console market, and the nerds and fanbois whom you'd assume would die for their console would suicide. THAT WOULD BE THE MOST AWESOMEST THING EVAR!!

[Merlin]

The problem with PC gaming is the same that its been for years. Its not the games themselves, its that you have to constantly spend excessive amounts of money every time a new game comes out to upgrade your PC so it can play the damned thing. Back when PC gaming was new, all you had to do was tweak some settings (albeit it was a bitch, but free) and play. Now every time a major game comes out, it pretty much requires you to dump your current system and get the latest and greatest to be able to play it the way its supposed to be.

Consoles aren't the most advanced thing in the market, but they don't require you to dish out extra money for the next 3-5 years or so. Sure the games are a bit more expensive, but shit... you don't have to buy a $250 video card every time you buy a game. Its just stupid.

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The following is for those who run Vista: If you want to play games on Vista, you're going to have to do a little tweaking to get it to work. Out-of-the-box, its memory management system will absolutely kill frame rates for even the best PCs because it is constantly allocating unused RAM in the background, anticipating what you might use it for... and stupidly not realizing that you need the damn processor for the game! While its not really processor-intensive, its enough to screw your frame-rate up with nice random pauses, etc. For more info, check out Why Does Vista Use All My Memory?

How do you fix it? The simple solution is to disable SuperFetch. Now I wouldn't recommend leaving it off indefinitely. That would actually be rather stupid. But, during gameplay if you disable it, you should alleviate this annoying issue. Its just like the game books tell you: Disable everything running in the background for optimal performance. It should now include SuperFetch. How to disable SuperFetch

[ultima_trev]

It would figure MS would deoptimize Vista for gaming with crap like superfetch, yet at the same time, try to promote gaming with "Games for Windows," which is quite possibly the biggest joke ever concieved.

Also, ATI just released Crossfire X (in the Catalyst 8.3), which allows for up to 4 Radeon HD3870 GPUs to work in conjunction. However, just like 3-way SLI, the gains are useless when it comes to the game that matters most: Crysis.

I wonder what's to blame for this travesty of justice, Crytek and their shitty programming, nVidia/ATI with their crappy drivers, a lack of innovation on the GPU front (since the newer GeForce 9xxx/Radeon HD3xxx are just rehashes of GeForce 8xxxx/HD2xxx), or a bit of all.

BTW, does anyone else think its unfair that all the PC game developers are under nVidia's payroll (thus making games work better on their cards than ATI's)? Especially considering when ATI's HD2xxx/3xxx products are, at least on paper, architecturally superior.

[Refieth]

For me, PC gaming just doesn't cut it anymore. PC games nowadays are mainly just cr4ppy movie/TV tie-ins that graphically look like a PS1 with 142 dead pixels. =/