PC gaming's main advantage: Backwards compatibility.

You can't run anything on ARM. The only people who are interested in ARM are people running web servers.

The future can't be predicted, but x86 is likely going to stay for the next few decades. It won't go away overnight.

The_Capitalist

Agreed. Microsoft is supporting XP SP3 until 2014, and after that there's still Vista and Windows 7. I could possibly see game developers dropping DX 9.0 within a year after Microsoft quits supporting XP. By that time most people will have upgraded their OS, as it is dangerous to continue using an OS that isn't being patched.

Mostly but not all. I know several games from 2000 that have trouble being played 'cuz it will run too fast and the game become unplable. Or some games will have graphics issue when your card is too "new", or your OS being XP or newer edition of windows wouldn't run certain games, etc.

[QUOTE="ghostofzabis"]

Mostly but not all. I know several games from 2000 that have trouble being played 'cuz it will run too fast and the game become unplable. Or some games will have graphics issue when your card is too "new", or your OS being XP or newer edition of windows wouldn't run certain games, etc.

agpickle

lolwut?

[QUOTE="agpickle"]

[QUOTE="ghostofzabis"]

Mostly but not all. I know several games from 2000 that have trouble being played 'cuz it will run too fast and the game become unplable. Or some games will have graphics issue when your card is too "new", or your OS being XP or newer edition of windows wouldn't run certain games, etc.

DerekLoffin

lolwut?

Huh, I've never heard of that before. I take back my lolwut then.

[QUOTE="DerekLoffin"][QUOTE="agpickle"]

lolwut?

agpickle

Huh, I've never heard of that before. I take back my lolwut then.

[QUOTE="DerekLoffin"][QUOTE="agpickle"]

lolwut?

agpickle

Huh, I've never heard of that before. I take back my lolwut then.

1) with consoles we do this thing where we actually hold onto our old consoles. its not like when each gen comes along, our old consoles disintegrate.

2) running dos games can be a pain, especially if youre like me and you want to record your games. I dont have any of these problems with my old console games

arbitor365

You can easily run and record any DOS game with DOSBox.

Fat PS3's can play PS2 and PSOne games, like mine. Soo..... yeah.

My entire PS2 and N64 game collection is just for show now, both systems are boxed up and in my cupboard and have been for years. Just yesterday I was playing my CD copy of Daggerfall and Terminator Future Shock on my PC. It makes the games seem more timeless without having them bound to pieces of hardware that have timers attached, I'm hoping that doesn't change with digital distribution.

[QUOTE="savagetwinkie"]

[QUOTE="The_Capitalist"]

With die shrinks on x86, ARM's power savings advantages are likely to be negated, especially as we move towards 22nm and beyond. What does ARM offer on a technical level that makes it superior to x86? What is the point in recompiling software if a decent chip solution exists already? Do you work for ARM? Or are you just trolling?

Like I have said, until the future reveals itself, there is very little reason to see any hardware vendor pushing ARM onto the desktop. There's no point. Besides Linux, there is very little desktop software that runs on ARM natively - and if there are very few people who will be using an ARM desktop, what is point in recompiling software for them?

Again, either you are trolling, or you are simply delusional.

ronvalencia

linkin a 50 nm processor, 40% of power consumption is current leakage, which grows as processors get smaller, so the 32 nm processor power consumption is likely primarly leakage current, and reducing the size will mostly only effect size and heat

ARM doesnt' actually manufacture any of their CPU's, they designed them to be modular, and with so many companies jumping aboard the arm bandwagon, ubuntu is working with arm to release a full desktop, windows 8 is coming out to support arm, it already dominates the mobile market, it will soon dominate the latptop/tablets, desktops will evetunally be arm machines, you'll loose the ability to play any old games unless you get a x86 emulator

edit: just found the version on intel's website, but this still doesnt' matter its not like you can't make ARM chips with the same material and still have better power per watt because of architecture.

[QUOTE="savagetwinkie"]

[QUOTE="The_Capitalist"]

With die shrinks on x86, ARM's power savings advantages are likely to be negated, especially as we move towards 22nm and beyond. What does ARM offer on a technical level that makes it superior to x86? What is the point in recompiling software if a decent chip solution exists already? Do you work for ARM? Or are you just trolling?

Like I have said, until the future reveals itself, there is very little reason to see any hardware vendor pushing ARM onto the desktop. There's no point. Besides Linux, there is very little desktop software that runs on ARM natively - and if there are very few people who will be using an ARM desktop, what is point in recompiling software for them?

Again, either you are trolling, or you are simply delusional.

ronvalencia

linkin a 50 nm processor, 40% of power consumption is current leakage, which grows as processors get smaller, so the 32 nm processor power consumption is likely primarly leakage current, and reducing the size will mostly only effect size and heat

ARM doesnt' actually manufacture any of their CPU's, they designed them to be modular, and with so many companies jumping aboard the arm bandwagon, ubuntu is working with arm to release a full desktop, windows 8 is coming out to support arm, it already dominates the mobile market, it will soon dominate the latptop/tablets, desktops will evetunally be arm machines, you'll loose the ability to play any old games unless you get a x86 emulator

With so many companies, why Intel is still number 1 semi-conductor entity? Anyway, western CPU ISAs (e.g. X86(USA), ARM(UK)) has issues with China's national MIPS ISA support.

ARM on the desktop and unix type OS is not new i.e. Acorn Archimedes and RISC PC. Atm, ARM is dominates phone and mobile phones, while X86 dominates netbooks, laptops, desktops, servers and HPC. Two clone armies are headed for a clash.

[QUOTE="savagetwinkie"]

[QUOTE="Firebird-5"]

why are we talking about ARM? I thought windows 8 on ARM was a move for the tablet and handheld market - not a move for ARM to take over the desktop market. first MS would have to convince all their corporate clients (which are going to be edging out normal desktop users soon, at least in spending [Reuters]) that a complete rewrite of all their key infrastructure is worth it.

and it's not.

you won't have to rewrite anything, its all windows api stuff so its just a recompile,

Windows NT 4.0 MIPS/PowerPC/Alpha says Hi. DEC Alpha EV6 even uses the same slot infrastructure (Slot B) as AMD K7 Athlon MP.

and why does this matter? I already do cross dev stuff with arm and x86 and so far nothing has come a cross as more then a simple configuration change, savagetwinkie

cant get 3d movie maker to work on my win 7 pc. I also could not get shadow of distany to work .

dontshackzmii

lol shadow of destiny works even on vista your graphics card maybe doesnt work

I haven't run into a game I haven't been able to run on my computer.

I can use dos box or virtual pc to run any other games which don't work under windows 7.

[QUOTE="savagetwinkie"]and why does this matter? I already do cross dev stuff with arm and x86 and so far nothing has come a cross as more then a simple configuration change, AdrianWerner

[QUOTE="AdrianWerner"]

[QUOTE="savagetwinkie"]and why does this matter? I already do cross dev stuff with arm and x86 and so far nothing has come a cross as more then a simple configuration change, savagetwinkie

lol shadow of destiny works even on vista your graphics card maybe doesnt work

HFkami

Funny thing I just played Shadow of Destiny on my Windows 7 ultimate laptop a few weeks ago an it worked.

And that laptop was weak and cheap when I got it around 6 years ago.

Back when widescreen laptops were new and 1280x800 was used as native resolution.

Of course the game is decade old so even old laptops run it fine.

.

i played and finished it too some weeks ago awesome game

1) with consoles we do this thing where we actually hold onto our old consoles. its not like when each gen comes along, our old consoles disintegrate.

2) running dos games can be a pain, especially if youre like me and you want to record your games. I dont have any of these problems with my old console games

arbitor365

The same could be done with the PC. People could hold onto their old computers just to hook them to their monitors or HDTVs occassionally and play old games. But that wouldn't be backwards compatibility would it.

The fact remains that the PC still has by far the best potential to play thousands of old games than any console does.

this isn't going to fix leakage current, that actually comes from the gate level silicon parts, the dynamic power loss is from the actual switch since the connection is made from off to on and on to off

edit: just found the version on intel's website, but this still doesnt' matter its not like you can't make ARM chips with the same material and still have better power per watt because of architecture.

savagetwinkie

Who siad about fixing the problem? High-K insulation material is use to mitigate the leakage.

Current ARM hardware implementations wasn't designed like the other RISC DEC Alpha EV6 i.e. aggressive OOOE.

In this era, pure CPU vs CPU is just yesteryear's battles. It's all CGPU vs CGPU in the application profile solution.

AMD Ontario, 400 million transisiors, 74mm^2 = 5.4 million transisiors per mm^2. About 76 precent of the die size allocated towards to the stream processors. For X86 ISAlegacy FUD issues

AMD Ontario's X86 legacy decoder is tiny i.e ~1 to 2 precent of the die size.

---

NVIDIA Tegra 2 (Dual Core Cortex A9 with Geforce 6/7 type GPU), 260 million transisiors, 49mm^2 = 5.3 million transisiors per mm^2.

AMD Radeon HD 5800, 6.287 million transisiors per mm^2

AMD Radeon HD 6800, 6.67 million transisiors per mm^2

NVIDIA Geforce GTX460, 5.31 million transisiors per mm^2

AMD easily beats NVIDIA in transisiors per mm^2. AMD can design 36mm^2 die size APU with 40 stream prcoessor i.e. recycle Radeon HD 3400M design instead of Radeon HD 5400M. AMD can easily design APU that targets 3DMarks 2003 with under 200 points. PS Radeon HD 3200M 3DMarks 2003scores around 2610 to 3739 points. AMD needs to design Radeon HD mobilewith4stream processors with cut-down OpenGL ES2.0 support.

Both AMD and NVIDIA uses the same TSMC 40 nm process.

"Performance per watt" alone has own limits since it doesn't deliver the overall performance i.e. laptop PowerVR is a joke.

I've never said these things don't exist, but there is a massive push going forth in the mobile department, especially being aimed at laptops and tablets, and there is tons of money in mobile gaming, if arm gets into the laptops and desktops there will be some major support backing it up, so regardless of who is #1 now which we all know its not arm, the future could quite easily go to arm

savagetwinkie

There's a lot IFs.. ARM is not a stranger in laptop or desktop PC space.

[QUOTE="ronvalencia"]

[QUOTE="savagetwinkie"]

you won't have to rewrite anything, its all windows api stuff so its just a recompile,

savagetwinkie

Windows NT 4.0 MIPS/PowerPC/Alpha says Hi. DEC Alpha EV6 even uses the same slot infrastructure (Slot B) as AMD K7 Athlon MP.

That's from devs's POV not from general user's POV. Win32 source code can recompiled for either MIPS/PowerPC/Alpha.

Backwards compatibility is an advantage of PC gaming that I truly adore for I have access to pretty much any game I'll ever wish to play without having to pay a ridiculous price for it. As time passes by, I'll also be able to max out many of these games which I would likely not have been able to max out in the past. Future generations will have immediate, easy access to games that they would have otherwise not been able to play as well. Truly remarkable, and it's directly tied in with digital distribution to boot.

[QUOTE="savagetwinkie"][QUOTE="ronvalencia"]

Windows NT 4.0 MIPS/PowerPC/Alpha says Hi. DEC Alpha EV6 even uses the same slot infrastructure (Slot B) as AMD K7 Athlon MP.

That's from devs's POV not from general user's POV. Win32 source code can recompiled for either MIPS/PowerPC/Alpha.

[QUOTE="savagetwinkie"]

I've never said these things don't exist, but there is a massive push going forth in the mobile department, especially being aimed at laptops and tablets, and there is tons of money in mobile gaming, if arm gets into the laptops and desktops there will be some major support backing it up, so regardless of who is #1 now which we all know its not arm, the future could quite easily go to arm

ronvalencia

There's a lot IFs.. ARM is not a stranger in laptop or desktop PC space.

I know, but ARM actually has a strong position right now for mobile applictaions, with windows 8 coming out supporint it, nvidia's tegra using it over a x86 solution, nvidia is also making a high performance ARM for desktops, ubuntu is working with arm, x86 is just going to be legacy eventually

[QUOTE="savagetwinkie"]

this isn't going to fix leakage current, that actually comes from the gate level silicon parts, the dynamic power loss is from the actual switch since the connection is made from off to on and on to off

edit: just found the version on intel's website, but this still doesnt' matter its not like you can't make ARM chips with the same material and still have better power per watt because of architecture.

ronvalencia

Who siad about fixing the problem? High-K insulation material is use to mitigate the leakage.

Current ARM hardware implementations wasn't designed like the other RISC DEC Alpha EV6 i.e. aggressive OOOE.

In this era, pure CPU vs CPU is just yesteryear's battles. It's all CGPU vs CGPU in the application profile solution.

AMD Ontario, 400 million transisiors, 74mm^2 = 5.4 million transisiors per mm^2. About 76 precent of the die size allocated towards to the stream processors. For X86 ISAlegacy FUD issues

AMD Ontario's X86 legacy decoder is tiny i.e ~1 to 2 precent of the die size.

---

NVIDIA Tegra 2 (Dual Core Cortex A9 with Geforce 6/7 type GPU), 260 million transisiors, 49mm^2 = 5.3 million transisiors per mm^2.

AMD Radeon HD 5800, 6.287 million transisiors per mm^2

AMD Radeon HD 6800, 6.67 million transisiors per mm^2

NVIDIA Geforce GTX460, 5.31 million transisiors per mm^2

AMD easily beats NVIDIA in transisiors per mm^2. AMD can design 36mm^2 die size APU with 40 stream prcoessor i.e. recycle Radeon HD 3400M design instead of Radeon HD 5400M. AMD can easily design APU that targets 3DMarks 2003 with under 200 points. PS Radeon HD 3200M 3DMarks 2003scores around 2610 to 3739 points. AMD needs to design Radeon HD mobilewith4stream processors with cut-down OpenGL ES2.0 support.

Both AMD and NVIDIA uses the same TSMC 40 nm process.

"Performance per watt" alone has own limits since it doesn't deliver the overall performance i.e. laptop PowerVR is a joke.

I don't see how this matters with x86 vs ARM, ARM can benefit from high-k material and better silicon placement while being a better architecture then a x86,

wrong about that x86 theory, the move to ARM has already started....also PC games used to be the same thing, but they are diving into DD a lot faster then consoles but consoles are making their way over nicely,savagetwinkie

I own all the consoles back to the NES. It's really the same principle. Don't see the huge advantage.

[QUOTE="Seiki_sands"]

No, No, No, a thousand times no to the exaggerated misinformation that it's always easy that's running throughout this thread.

Lucianu

There is nothing easy about anything, in general, if you are not experienced enough, man. It is easy, once you know what you're doing. 10 - 15 damn minutes to make a damn game work ain't what i would call hard.

I had massive problems modding Morrowind at first, because i was a idiot regarding that. Now that i have enough experience, i laugh at how i was back then, because its extremely easy and takes far less time than it took before.

You make an inaccurate assumption in saying it is easy, when in fact most people are not even slightly interested in the pursuit of this so-called knowledge you speak of. I believe it is accurate that most people dislike unnecessary effort when it comes to playing games. They are, after all, a means of entertainment.

In a similar fashion, I could say to someone that they should read War and Peace, simply because I've done it. I would say it is an excellent literary work and only takes a few hundred hours of your life if you read slowly, as I do. I make the assumption that they would find the pursuit worthy, when in actuality the value of the pursuit is determined by the one who undertakes the endeavor. I could similarly say the same for maintaining above a 3.9 GPA, or doing 25 pull ups, or shooting a man-sized silhouette from 500 yards with an M16A4. All these things may seem illogical for someone to pursue, but for me, they are vital to my livelihood.

You may find the effort to play older games to be worthwhile, but, just as many will find my efforts to be futile in their own situations, many will not find it worth the effort.

Speaking of keeping a good GPA, I really should be working on my assignments. Ha...

You make an inaccurate assumption in saying it is easy, when in fact most people are not even slightly interested in the pursuit of this so-called knowledge you speak of. I believe it is accurate that most people dislike unnecessary effort when it comes to playing games. They are, after all, a means of entertainment.

In a similar fashion, I could say to someone that they should read War and Peace, simply because I've done it. I would say it is an excellent literary work and only takes a few hundred hours of your life if you read slowly, as I do. I make the assumption that they would find the pursuit worthy, when in actuality the value of the pursuit is determined by the one who undertakes the endeavor. I could similarly say the same for maintaining above a 3.9 GPA, or doing 25 pull ups, or shooting a man-sized silhouette from 500 yards with an M16A4. All these things may seem illogical for someone to pursue, but for me, they are vital to my livelihood.

You may find the effort to play older games to be worthwhile, but, just as many will find my efforts to be futile in their own situations, many will not find it worth the effort.

Speaking of keeping a good GPA, I really should be working on my assignments. Ha...

thesmiter

I was mearly saying that with more experience gathered from tweaking these old games, the less frustrating and time consuming it'll be next time you have a itch to play them, simply because its always hard the first time (doing anything out of the ordinary that you are not used to, will be hard the first time, and that's a general rule of life), but then will be far more easier. There is nothing, nothing hard, once you know what you're doing, and if you want to play these old games, then people should know that perfection does not exist and a little bit of effort is required, but once you get passed that little bit, it's all smooth sailing from there like you were born doing it.

Obviously if one is not interested in doing this, there's no point to my post whatsoever.

[QUOTE="ronvalencia"]

[QUOTE="savagetwinkie"] and why does this matter? I already do cross dev stuff with arm and x86 and so far nothing has come a cross as more then a simple configuration change, savagetwinkie

That's from devs's POV not from general user's POV. Win32 source code can recompiled for either MIPS/PowerPC/Alpha.

ARM is just like any another Windows NT target platform.

[QUOTE="ronvalencia"]

[QUOTE="savagetwinkie"]

I've never said these things don't exist, but there is a massive push going forth in the mobile department, especially being aimed at laptops and tablets, and there is tons of money in mobile gaming, if arm gets into the laptops and desktops there will be some major support backing it up, so regardless of who is #1 now which we all know its not arm, the future could quite easily go to arm

savagetwinkie

There's a lot IFs.. ARM is not a stranger in laptop or desktop PC space.

I know, but ARM actually has a strong position right now for mobile applictaions, with windows 8 coming out supporint it, nvidia's tegra using it over a x86 solution, nvidia is also making a high performance ARM for desktops, ubuntu is working with arm, x86 is just going to be legacy eventually

So? There's nothing new with Windows supporting non-X86 solution e.g. MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha.

Also, Windows CE already supports ARM.

Again, there's nothing new with ARM on desktop PC e.g. RISC PC. NVIDIA haven't proven themselves in designing thier own fat OOOE processor i.e. they mostly cut-and-paste ARM's Cortex A9 designs.

AMD has both ex-DEC Alpha EV6 (via NexGen)and ex-SGI (via ArtX) engineers.Intel has Alpha EV7 engineers and been guilty of copying DEC's AlphaCPU designs.

Note that Samsung has fabricated DEC Alpha's CPU designs in the past yet Samsung haven't created the highest performance CPU in both clock speed and IPC.

PS2's cheap. I don't know why people sold the darn thing. I had a 60GB until I got the YLOD and I never really used the BC. Since I wasn't old enough for the M games until last gen really winded down, I missed MGS and GoW. I also missed Shadow of the Collosus. Because I'm smarter than you, I kept my PS2, I played these games, and I lol'd when I nearly missed literally the 5 best games on the PS2!

Oh come on. PC bc is weak at best as well most programs requring you to change settings to get them to work or running an emulation program to get them to work. Some programs won't work at all till an unofficial patch is released *the first decade half of the games wouldn't work outside of XP and atleast 1 wouldn't work in XP it self, it took a fan made patch to get them to work*WilliamRLBaker

Wouldn't the ability to create workarounds and have community patches that initialize backwards compatability of old software make PC's BC fairly strong? It seems that at least having the option, or the means to make something play from, say, 15 odd years ago is pretty damn good.

[QUOTE="ronvalencia"]

Who siad about fixing the problem? High-K insulation material is use to mitigate the leakage.

Current ARM hardware implementations wasn't designed like the other RISC DEC Alpha EV6 i.e. aggressive OOOE.

In this era, pure CPU vs CPU is just yesteryear's battles. It's all CGPU vs CGPU in the application profile solution.

AMD Ontario, 400 million transisiors, 74mm^2 = 5.4 million transisiors per mm^2. About 76 precent of the die size allocated towards to the stream processors. For X86 ISAlegacy FUD issues

AMD Ontario's X86 legacy decoder is tiny i.e ~1 to 2 precent of the die size.

---

NVIDIA Tegra 2 (Dual Core Cortex A9 with Geforce 6/7 type GPU), 260 million transisiors, 49mm^2 = 5.3 million transisiors per mm^2.

AMD Radeon HD 5800, 6.287 million transisiors per mm^2

AMD Radeon HD 6800, 6.67 million transisiors per mm^2

NVIDIA Geforce GTX460, 5.31 million transisiors per mm^2

AMD easily beats NVIDIA in transisiors per mm^2. AMD can design 36mm^2 die size APU with 40 stream prcoessor i.e. recycle Radeon HD 3400M design instead of Radeon HD 5400M. AMD can easily design APU that targets 3DMarks 2003 with under 200 points. PS Radeon HD 3200M 3DMarks 2003scores around 2610 to 3739 points. AMD needs to design Radeon HD mobilewith4stream processors with cut-down OpenGL ES2.0 support.

Both AMD and NVIDIA uses the same TSMC 40 nm process.

"Performance per watt" alone has own limits since it doesn't deliver the overall performance i.e. laptop PowerVR is a joke.

savagetwinkie

I don't see how this matters with x86 vs ARM, ARM can benefit from high-k material and better silicon placement while being a better architecture then a x86,

"Better silicon placement" is dependant on the engineers' skills i.e. refer to my AMD vs NVIDIA transisiors per mm^2.

Note that AMD K5 was based on unreleased 29K series RISC core.

Oh come on. PC bc is weak at best as well most programs requring you to change settings to get them to work or running an emulation program to get them to work. Some programs won't work at all till an unofficial patch is released *the first decade half of the games wouldn't work outside of XP and atleast 1 wouldn't work in XP it self, it took a fan made patch to get them to work* WilliamRLBaker

Middleware could break compatibility; but the PC hardware itself can still run MS DOS 3.3.

PS; PowerPC's compatibility is a joke i.e. mess-up supervisor mode ISA e.g. PowerPC 440 vs PowerPC 970.