are you [h]nuts?
nvidia and ati disagree with you.
That’s true, but I think that, for better or for worse, that effect is largely ancillary to anything that people here have any interest in. I find it unlikely that any developments in game design would emerge from that market to influence the hardcore games that people here play, nor would it likely have any effect on the hardware likely to be developed. However, I don’t think there’s any reason for hardcore gamers to fear the casual invasion either: the economics that currently influence the developers and hardware producers should be just as valid regardless of how large the casual market becomes.
I’m not sure what I think about iPhone/mini-computer gaming and developments though. It’s an interesting topic, I’ll have to think about that.
No matter how powerful low-end PCs become, one of the twin bugaboos of PC gaming - minimum system requirements - will always remain, because there are plenty of potential customers who won’t upgrade their PCs just to play games, regardless of how cheap said upgrades become.
[The other bugaboo, of course, is piracy, for both its real and perceived impacts.]
(A) A lot more people pirate PC games than console games.
(B) A lot more people buy the console versions of cross-platform games than the PC version.
As we all know, correlation does not imply causation, but it’s hardly surprising that publishers & developers have come to the conclusion that they’re linked.
Except lightguns serve only one purpose / genre and were never that popular to begin with. The Wii is ridiculously popular and motion controls can be adapted to most genres. Which doesn’t mean motion controls might not end up being a fad, of course, just that your analogy is flawed. Personally I’m hoping motion controls grow up rather than fade away.
Fairly appropriate, when referencing Eep3.
compare PC gaming prior to glide/directx and PC gaming now. That’s a pretty big leap.
but I do agree that it won’t have as significant an effect ten years down the line as it did in the years between 1996-2006.
you never know. If graphics hardware manufacturers take a page from console manufacturers’ books and sell high performance hardware at an initial loss it might happen.
But how much does their opinions matter? Take FO3 for example. I think my graphics card is 3-4 generations old now (not really keeping track), yet it runs FO3 with all possible eyecandy at 60fps without problems. Same thing with Demigod, the latest pretty PC-only game we have (…I think).
I’ve thought about picking up some new gfx cards several times over the last couple of years. Usually, I have to. But barring Crysis I’ve yet to find a game where it would make any difference. If things continue this way, there won’t be any reason to buy new graphics cards until the next console is launched.
The only reason console manufacturers do this is because they can earn enough money from game sales over time to cover that initial loss. What do Nvidia and ATI have that would offset their losses?
It’s a good thing that graphics card have a longer life span than the house fly nowadays. Point is, graphics cards aren’t the only area where the PC reings as king of shiny new tech.
Consider the gyration mouse, the precursor to the wiimote. Or LG’s HD DVD/Bluray combo drive. Or Blackmagic design’s hdmi capture card. Or the upcoming ioDrive.
There is no way that anyone can claim that the PC hardware market is stagnant or is not full of innovative products.
get a bigger monitor, then see how your card holds up.
Demigod isn’t really in that category, I recommend Empire:Total War.
Unfortunately that’s because multiplatform titles are not designed as cutting edge PC games. Still, when you compare them to their console counterparts, the PC is consistently leagues ahead.
Try these games on your PC and compare them to the console versions:
GTA 4, Mirror’s Edge, Lost Planet, Devil May Cry 4, GRiD, Mass Effect, UT3, GoW, Tomb Raider Underworld, Bioshock, Oblivion
Wouldn’t nvidia or ati actually profit over time if every home/office pc had their chip in it rather than an intel one? They would be selling at much higher volumes than what they could achieve with the hardcore gaming audience.
“Sure, we’re losing money on every sale, but we’ll make it up in volume!”
If you’re only talking about the hardcore market, then there’s no guarantee that selling well in the hardcore market will affect other types of sales. Intel’s takeover of the integrated market was completely independent of the ATI/Nvidia battle on the hardcore end.
no I’m not talking about selling to the hardcore market. I’m talking about mass produced integrated chips on par with an 8800gt in terms of performance. It’s easier to manufacture cheaply now, maybe not as cheap as intel’s offerings. On the other hand if it’s sold in great volumes the initial loss would be dampened by profits and further improvements in production.
Yeah, you don’t need our help.
…not that you’ll ever see this.
Maybe Bill will quote me to help a brother out.
(Though I bet Bill’s on ignore, too.)
But why sell at that initial loss, though? It’s not like the consoles where that one time loss on the hardware leads to a (hopefully) steady stream of money for several years. With the video card, they would sell them for a loss now… and wait several years before the parts can be produced cheap enough to sell to a much larger, price sensitive part of the market. The problem with this is that there doesn’t need to be an initial loss to earn the profits several years down the road.
AMD/Nvidia/Intel don’t make money from market share percentage. Having larger market share means nothing if you lose it in the next quarter. Selling at a loss is simply lost revenue for them.
I assumed it wouldn’t be much of a loss if 45nm process was used, and several optimisations to the design were implemented.
The payoff would be a lot of users being exposed to the advantages of good graphics hardware. Awareness, it’s what realtek and audiomax did for sound hardware.
That’s a leap of logic to assume that people “exposed” to decent gpus would want to spend $200 to upgrade. Look at all the people bitching to high hell about how their non-bleeding edge systems can’t run the bleeding edge games.
Not to completely derail the conversation, but I couldn’t help but drag this from the dead.
People are already aware of decent graphics; they can see them in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. This hasn’t led to any reported upswing that I’m aware of in adoption of high end, or even medium end, graphics in PCs. To the contrary, more and more people are choosing laptops and netbooks that possibly wouldn’t outperform a TNT2 card.
that’s not what I was thinking actually. More along the lines of ati/nvidia producing integrated chips that are similiar to slightly older mid range cards every 2-3 years. Most people just buy new systems when their older ones are ‘too slow’, it would fit nicely with their buying habits.
EDIT: I guess my point is about making the PC more attractive to game developers. More gamer pc’s = bigger pc gaming audience = more pc games. There will eventually be a trickle effect, where young gamers will come to understand about gfx cards and such but it obviously won’t be major. Still a small gain is better than no gain at all.
a lot of them don’t even know it. I remember seeing someone complaining about Bionic Commando Rearmed not running on his/her ‘decent’ system which was a P4 with 1.5 gb ram and a 9600 graphics card. Turns out it was a radeon 9600, circa 1896. That card can’t run any modern game, well unless the game has SM2.0 support.
So why the initial loss, then?
a lot of them don’t even know it. I remember seeing someone complaining about Bionic Commando Rearmed not running on his/her ‘decent’ system which was a P4 with 1.5 gb ram and a 9600 graphics card. Turns out it was a radeon 9600, circa 1896.
1896, eh? Steam powered graphics cards aren’t known for their modern game performance, true. ;-) Radeon 9600s actually came out in 2003/2004. Mine came with a free voucher for Half Life 2, I think.