Found this on Digg. Makes so much sense.

truth!

Funny, but the PC is a dead platform for a game like this. It's best for open ended stuff.

Personally, I don't care for PC Force Unleashed anymore. At first, it worried me because I thought it would be like Jedi Academy with PHYSICS. Looking back now, it would have been better than the hack-n-slash of the final product. Atleast the camera and the lightsaber worked in JA.

I've played the demo and thought it was awesomecool. Is it worth buying?

Please elaborate as to why PC gaming is dead. I'm really curious why people say this. Maybe troubled and sometimes frustrating, but I don't see it dead unless informed otherwise. Is it because there isn't "face" to associate and generate hype with the PC industry as opposed to, let's say, Regie with Nintendo?

You simply are never up to date with your hardware. Thats what causes me to do the majority of my gaming on a console. The console comes at the price of a good, up-to-date video card and lasts 2-3 years, while a computer grows out dated within 6 months.

My 2 years old computer was a bomb when I bought it, dishing out ~1500-2000$ (CAN) on it, and within a few months I was already having to run games at medium settings or suffer crap framerates. Heck, when Oblivion came out my PC could not run it with good framerates on High settings, with the top of the line video card from the time. On the Xbox 360, the game looked as beautiful and ran wonderfully right away.

There are definatly bonuses to playing on the PC, one of them being user-made content. Oblivion became the beautiful game it is today on PC in large part due to the amazing work of some individuals.

Still, there's a big difference with dishing out 400$ for a console and be able to run games made for it for 2-3 years, then dishing out 1500$ for a new PC and having to constantly upgrade over the same course of time if you want to continue to run the games as beautiful and smooth as possible.

$1,500-$2000? What were you spending your money on?

My incredible amount of PC frustration comes from the long times of tinkering with settings and files to run one game the best and certain titles not working with the endless sea of different hardware. And anyone who tries to PC game for the first time would probably be utterly befuddled as to what components who be the best decision.

But I mean, $1,500+ seems awfully excessive. And $400-$600 graphic cards? Unless you want the best graphics and performance ever, I don't see how you can't just get/build a decent that runs the games fairly decently that would stay fine for awhile.

600$ for a video card was the normal price during the X1900XTX era. Thankfully ATI and NVIDIA have both revised to lower prices since.

Mind you that was a brand new computer, switching from AGP to PC-Express, which required a new EVERYTHING. It remains that you do go outdated fast, and find yourself having to play games on lower settings. On top of that you are right, tinkering with settings and files for hours upon hours is terribly annoying.

While people like you and me who have at least a decent idea of what they are doing, when you start seeing a decrease in performance, you know that you might be suffering from malware or that your hdd could use a good defrag. However, the majority of population don't know that stuff and PC gaming becomes a terrible choice.

When people say that PC gaming is dying, its not because PC gaming isn't fun. In my opinion, its a world more fun to play with a keyboard and mouse and get to mod and experience tons of user-made content.

However, to game developpers and (in my opinion) to gamers, in this day and age (where money isn't that easy to come by) it is much more profitable and much less of a headache to snatch up a console.

That's the thing, I don't see the alarming figures that developers aren't turning profits on PC gaming. Many major exclusives from consoles also have a PC counterpart. Maybe the PC can't snatch many pure exclusives and doesn't have sheer amount of shovelware consoles get, but I am not seeing the numbers that indicate that the PC gaming industry is "dead". I understand that people might be turned off by the confusing PC world, but people can be also turned off by, let's say, the Xbox 360 due to its "hardcore" status or whatever. Not really trying to start a PC vs Console argument.

Sure it might be believable that titles are not overwhelmingly profitable to make as a PC exclusive (although Orange Box proved otherwise in PC sales) on one hand... but on the other hand, games like WoW and similar MMORPGs do show you can turn real profit from users.

edit:word use

I agree, I had a 4440+ x2, 7800GTX SLI rig I built about 3 years ago. I had nothing but problems keeping the SLI working with new games. And after about a year it was already outdated. And I spend around $4k on it...

I do agree with you. I don't see PC gaming as dead in any way. I was merely using someone else's term used previously in this thread.

I do believe that, for the moment, the future is in gaming consoles. Perhaps some day when computer technology slows down, or when prices are significantly decreased (unlikely), it will be different.

However, I completely agree with you there, Echo.

Meh, I will always prefer Pc over anything.

Thanks to Gordon E. Moore that won't be the case any time soon.

Moore Law has a built expectation of obsolesce, which we are quickly approaching. We can delay that obsolesce with things like High K gates, but eventually we just won't be able to get much smaller, and we'll have to wait for some kind of paradigm shift for things to move forward. Moore's Law does not govern the eventuality of a paradigm shift or how fast technology will advance once this occurs.

Besides technology would have advanced at that rate whether he came up with the axiom or not, so you can't really thank him.


It's not hard to keep a decent gaming PC. If you want to be able to play with everything maxed all the time, yeah you'll have to pay the bucks, but it's not as if consoles magically upgrade themselves either. If you buy a 360, games will look a bit better over time, but you're still going to be working with the same hardware. With PC's, you simply have the option of upgrading. You can still get games looking better than a console with out spending too much. You may not be able to max everything all the time, but you'll still gain graphics performance faster than a console. You just have to upgrade intelligently instead of blowing everything you have on hardware that has a terrible price performance ratio.

For instance, don't buy a 600$ video card that has only 10% better performance than a 300$ card, and then complain when a new generation comes out and the new 300$ card blows your old high end one out of the water. Also, don't buy high end CPUs. Buy low end ones and overclock. CPUs these days have a lot of head room and if you can't be arsed to do even a mild OC, you're just being lazy. Then there are other things, like don't spend a bunch of money on a SLI rig right before a new generation of hardware comes out ect. but those are all things that just require a little patience. As long as you don't over spend on less important components like the CPU and RAM, and you upgrade your video card intelligently, you can get by with quite a lot on a relatively low budget.

I'm actually thinking about selling my xbox 360. Just got a brand new laptop, so why not?

IIRC, Oblivion can still bring a lot of PCs to their knees. It's a very poor example.

No, it isn't bad example, you actually just emphasized my point.

Well, Oblivion was a bugfest.

Until you download the UOP

It's a poor example in that it's a poorly optimized game, using poorly optimized/buggy games in a discussion about the obsolescence of PC hardware is bad since your hardware probably could run it at X settings if not for ****ty programming and/or design decisions.

Yeah, of course there is a maximum limit of how small semiconductor devices can get and I seem to remember Intel suggesting that limit will be reached in about 2020. But then we're into the exciting world of quantum computing, (which will probably be a physical reality by) and I can tell you more about that in a years' time when I've finished my masters project on quantum computing! It's not unreasonable to presume that quantum computing will follow an expontential trend as well, so Moore's law will not necessarily reach a limit (well, technically it will as Moore's law only concerns semiconductors, but it'll be the same trend with a different name. Maybe Mort's law!)



Interestingly, you can! Of course Moore's original paper was purely predictive, but now many industries use Moore's law as a target or a goal (making it a self-fulfilling prophecy). What's utterly amazing is that Moore published this in 1965 (integrated circuits were only invented in 1958), so I think I can indeed thank him.

Tag: neckbeard

Looking pretty RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALPH'S CLUB CARD there, Lucas.

Quantum computing is interesting, but it's not necessarily "the next big thing". There are some things that they are likely to be really, really, really good at like cryptography, but not might not necessarily be useful for all we'd need them to be. We don't even know enough right now to say whether they'll actually even replace semiconductors; in fact it is likely that they won't. There are still a number of engineering hurdels to overcome before we can say what exactly they will be good for, and it will be still longer before it makes it's way into industrial applications and even longer before we start seeing them in consumer applications if they prove to be useful for such purposes. And this is coming from all the CECS majors/professors I've talked to about it, so I'm not pulling this out of my *** or anything.

Also I think it is a bit unreasonable to presume anything about the possible rate of advancement of quantum computing. It could be much faster than what we have now or much slower. It's just a wild guess without actual data, and we have very little.



It's not like industries would develop chips any slower if he hadn't made that prediction. Companies develop new parts to stay competitive, not see how well they can adhere to a law. Moore's Law is just kind of a benchmark, though that is, of course, not to say that he didn't made a very insightful prediction.

Except that it worked perfectly fine on Xbox 360. You're essentially trying to excuse the PC because supposedly the game is poorly coded. My point is that on a console the devs only have to optimize the game for a single set of hardware, not an infinite amount of combinations of various cpus, motherboard, video cards, etc. so on and so forth, thus games are more likely (and in the case of Oblivion; it was) to run better and be better optimized for a console.

So in that light, Oblivion is a perfect example. You simply choose to dismiss it.

Until they allow you to use a mouse and keyboard with consoles, screw 'em. I can't stand using the little joysticks for FPSes, which are what I usually play.

It sounds like some of you are making the argument that consoles can outperform PCs. That's not true is it? Isn't the console hardware just as outdated as any PC bought at the same time?

Whoa, Obi_Kwiet said something right!

They probably don't want to sell TFU on PC because I think it would bomb on PC. Because us hardcore fans that would rather play JO or JA.. aren't going to buy it

I hear ya. I can't aim worth a damn on consoles, and can't be bothered to practice. To be honest, I don't really game enough anymore to make it worth investing in a new console. I think the PC market will always be able to rely on those extra casual gamers. People who are going to have a computer anyway, and figure they might as well have a little fun with it. I can live with running some of the later games on lower settings.

It's fun, but not worth $60 in my opinion. However, Toys R Us is offering a $20gift card upon purchase of the game this week so you might want to seize the opportunity.

Actual quantum encryption is nothing special, you just guarantee that your channel is secure and then you send your message normally, we can do it using current technology. Cracking encyption using quantum algorithms isn't necessarily that viable either. Whilst it is true that there is a quantum algorithm for finding prime factors in P there is one major problem. The problem is that you can't find the prime factors of numbers bigger than what your quantum computer can handle, plus we can realistically assume we'll always have standard computers of greater memory capacity than quantum computers. This means it'll probably always be possible to encrypt something using a larger encryption key than the current best-of-breed quantum computer can crack.

Lmao.

Actually they just didn't feel like making the code work for such a wide range of system specs. It would ruin the game to play it on it's minimal settings.

That said, it's the stupidest excuse I've ever heard. HAVE YOU SEEN THE DS VERSION? OR THE PSP OR THE PS2 VERSIONS?

They amaze me sometimes..

I think that PCs these days are way way way better hardware wise than consoles, it's just that the consoles are dedicated to gaming only, and thus there are no programs and such running in the background, just that game, thus making it perform better than a PC. I think.

It's not really that they're too lazy to make the code work for a wide range of system specs... it's a business decision

Doing so would cost a massive amount of dev, QA hours and even then the PC has the highest pirate rate and will sell by far the least number of copies for the game. I can't say for sure but it's probably more difficult than a ps2/ds port (those only need to be ported/tested on one piece of hardware each)

How is it anything but logical that they don't make a PC version? I mean it sucks balls, but it's pretty damn clear why they don't...

Not only that, but as a system is around longer, developers find new ways to push the hardware. Compare PS2 launch titles to say, Shadow of the Colossus or Final Fantasy 12. But with PC hardware, there's no need to find clever ways to push the hardware since there's always newer, more powerful cards and chips coming out.

Another Prime example is Resident Evil 4 on the Gamecube. That game looked awesome on it and it had the crappiest hardware.

Metroid Prime 3 on the Wii comes to mind too. For a moment, if I doze off a bit while playing, I can easily pretend I'm not playing a Wii game.

In terms of pure hardware power, the Gamecube is just about on the same level as the X-Box last generation. However, the PS2 version did look pretty good for being a PS2 game.