every pc gamer should know
http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2008/20080227.jpg
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/54254
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/29884/UT3-and-Stranglehold-hit-1m-sales
http://www.aeropause.com/2007/12/unreal-tournament-iii-for-the-pc-sinks-while-crysis-aims-high/
http://pc.ign.com/articles/858/858259p1.html?RSSwhen2008-03-10_152600&RSSid=858259
March 10, 2008 - Tim Sweeny, CEO of Epic Games, the studio behind Gears of War and Unreal, recently declared his concerns with PC gaming when he spoke toTG Daily. The biggest offender to the industry, he believes, are hardware vendors who cater to the masses instead of the potential gamer.
"It is very important not to leave the masses behind. This is unfortunate, because PCs are more popular than ever. Everyone has a PC. Even those who did not have a PC in the past are now able to afford one and they use it for Facebook, MySpace, pirating music, or whatever. Yesterday's PCs were for people that were working and later playing games. Even if those games were lower-end ones, there will always be a market for casual games and online games like World of WarCraft. World of WarCraft has DirectX 7-****graphics and can run on any computer. But at the end of the day, consoles have definitely left PC games behind," said Sweeny.
He asserts that there is a disconnect between the technical needs of current generation games when compared to current generation hardware. He cites integrated graphics as one of the biggest offenders to PC gaming. "Retail stores like Best Buy are selling PC games and PCs with integrated graphics at the same time and they are not talking about the difference. Those machines are good for e-mail, web browsing, watching video. But as far as games go, those machines are just not adequate. It is no surprise that retail PC sales suffer from that. Online is different, because people who go and buy games online already have PCs that can play games. The biggest problem in this space right now is that you cannot go and design a game for a high end PC and downscale it to mainstream PCs. The performance difference between high-end and low-end PC is something like 100x," said Sweeny.
That begs the question; why not just make games more scalable to fit the needs of most computers? According to Sweeny, it's not that simple. "If we go back 10 years ago, the difference between the high end and the lowest end may have been a factor of 10. We could have scaled games between those two. For example, with the first version of Unreal, a resolution of 320x200 was good for software rendering and we were able to scale that up to 1024x768, if you had the GPU power. There is no way we can scale down a game down by a factor of 100, we would just have to design two completely different games. One for low-end and one for high-end."
Sweeny had very harsh words to say about the state of the platform, "PCs are good for anything; just not games... every PC should have a decent graphics card. A PC should be an out-of-the-box workable gaming platform." He went on to explicate his opinion on the matter whilst pointing a finger at Intel, one of the pioneers of integrated graphics. "PC gaming is in a weird position right now. Now, 60% of PCs on the market don't have a workable graphics processor at all. All the Intel integrated graphics are still incapable of running any modern games. So you really have to buy a PC knowing that you're going to play games in order to avoid being stuck with integrated graphics. This is unfortunate, and this is one of main reasons behind the decline of the PC as a gaming platform. That really has endangered high-end PC game sales. In the past, if you bought a game, it would at least work. It might not have been a great experience, but it would always work... Intel's integrated graphics just don't work. I don't think they will ever work."
However not all was doom and gloom with CEO of Epic Games, as Sweeny had these optimistic words to say, "If you look into the past, CPU makers are learning more and more how to take advantage of GPU-like architectures. Internally, they accept larger data and they have wider vector units: CPUs went from a single-threaded product to multiple cores. And who knows, we might find the way to get the software rendering back into fashion. Then, every PC, even the lowest performing ones,will have excellent CPUs. If we could get software rendering going again, that might be just the solution we all need."
With recent and pressing news of the PC Gaming Alliance, a consortium of companies gathered to "provide guidelines to simplify hardware specifications", underway; it will be interesting to see if Epic Games and Intel, both in PCGA, can come together to work out their differences.
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