Good or Bad a Goodthing ?
 

Hi All :sunny:

First of all let me make it clear this isn't a thread to praise or bash SH-4.

Or to have all list their rig's spec's.

This thread is about how this game forced some to upgrade
or reminded others who had been putting off upgradeing
because of finanical or because their rig wasn't challenged
by any games available at the time that they enjoy playing.

Also want to hear from those who already had hiend rigs and their feelings about where pc gameing is headed and the future rigs it will take to play them.


Please stay on topic and thank you all for your input in advance.

Firewall :D

I have a 3.0/ 1 gig ram/6800gt which i upgraded to for sh3. I was happy to do it, because it let me play many PC games over the last few years which I wouldn't have been able to otherwise.

Favorite PC Game
SH3
RTW:SPQR
ILS Sturmovik

I don't understand why everyone says the PC market is dead. As an old salesman, I just can't understand, with so many more PC's than consoles, why folks say this.

Developers need to focus on making their games scalable, so both high-end and low-end machines can play them.

Games for Windows seems to offer the possibility of bringing back the pc market in a big way, due to games that you can play XBOX360 vs PC.

When I play a great game like First Eagles from a small developer like Thirdwire, it really gives me hope.

You bring up a very good point about Devs. Makeing games scaleable opens it up to a wider audience thus ...more sales.


YoU made other good points I didn't address. I' give others a chance to jump in.

I don't want to hog all the good input.:D

Funny, I just posted an answer in the DX10-card thread by Konovalov, and the answer I gave also exactly matches this thread. That's why I simply paste and copy it:

According to this Blog Ranter PC gaming is dieing

http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/...ng-online.html

Never tried the downloading method is there truth in what he says, damn it if it is!

AS for me i love to upgrade when i can i dont care if i have to spend 3 grand on up-grades to me its money well spent. If future gaming require me to upgrade my system 3 times in 5 yrs i will be happy to. I suppose its like any other hobbiest who loves tinkering with cars or trains or boats or whatever hes into, nothing is going to get in the way!.

I have quite a few computers (both Mac and PC, the Macs of necessity for work).

Because I'm into flight sims (which historically have always pushed the requirements of PCs), I always tend to keep at least one PC at the high end of performance scale, so I can almost guarantee that I don't need to look at the minimum or maximum hardware required specs on the box of a piece of software.

However, I don't like the way games and sims are going because of this trend for more eye candy simply because the computer can display it. Both the recent titles, ARMA and SH4 are incapable of running on one of my laptops simply because it doesn't support Pixel Shader 2.0, which is a preposterous notion when you consider that the same laptop is capable of running FSX with all the autogen scenery cranked up, something which would bring a good many high-end PCs to their knees. In my opinion many devs and software companies are shooting themselves in the foot sales-wise when they make requirements like that mandatory, and incapable of being switched off to allow lower end machines to run the software, as I'm sure there are many who would like to buy the odd title which catches their eye, but are not about to upgrade their computer just to play one game.

Computer progress has currently run into a developmental brick wall owing to manufacturing limitations, which is why we are seeing multi-core processors, these being nothing more than an attempt to side-step the problem. However, for many applications, the multi-core capabilities will be a dead end simply because using a multi-core processor requires the data you process to split and be calculated on several cores in isolation from one another. Effectively this is like running half your application on one PC, and half on another one. For sims (and indeed a lot of other applications) this is a no-no. Put simply, since you cannot have say, the artillery from a ship which is firing at your submarine calculated on one core, while the position of your sub is calculated on another core, as the artillery data needs the positional data in order to know whether it's hitting you, which it can't because it doesn't have that positional data. This is the essence of the problem with multi-core stuff.

Oddly enough, since this problem exists, it may well lead to an end in the trend for more eye candy, and a resurgence of better AI, as these kind of routines could be where the desire for more impressive sims and games will be forced to place developmental work if we are at a graphics limitation point. I certainly hope so, as it is quite clear that eye candy aside, SH4 is not much of an improvement on SH3, althoug I concede that it has appeal for many Americans who were sick of donning a cap with a Swastika on it.

Currently, it's apparent that (eye candy whores that we all generally are) eye candy for the screenshots and box art pictures are where the marketing has placed its store. And it's also apparent that with this being a desireable selling point, if not a good long-term idea, too many development hours are being spent on this part of games and sims, and not enough on the actual advancement of AI and good old fashioned addictive gameplay structure.

Reports of the death of PC games and sims continue to be greatly exaggerated however, as evidenced by Apple's desire to tap into this market, and as more tools become available to make constructing this software ever simpler, it is opening the way for companies to tap into this market. Five or six years ago, the flight sim market was a veritable graveyard of abandoned titles as bigger developers sought to jump on the FPS and online MMORPG cash cows. But these days we are seeing more sims arrive, and that's definitely where the PC shines in comparison to the console.

It just needs computer software developers to wake up and smell the coffee.

:D Chock

Thx Skybird I just posted on same thread. You make a very good point.

Thx Kiwi You also make a good point.

Thx Chock So if I understand right that is why some of us cautious about spending money on upgrades or complete rebuild until the dust settles. And I recall reading somewhere MS said PC games would be on the rise in the near future. DX10 ???

Well, I find it difficult to believe that one of the largest corporations in the world is simply going to roll over and die when it comes to defending the market it dominates, after all, the proportion of gamers who buy their operating systems cannot be an insignificant number. So yup, I'd go with PC games being pretty safe for a while:rotfl:

When it comes to their X-Box, there clearly is a lot of competition for MS, so make of that what you will, but one arena clearly feeds off the other.

:D Chock

Excellent points made Chock :up:

One big difference I've seen between consoles and PC games is , you can rent console games.

I don't think I have to tell anybody what would happen if they did that with PC games.

:rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:

Chairman Gates in watching! :D

Vista has Games for Windows, which will theoretically allow PC's to play with XBOX360.

The game Shadowrun has that functionality now.

The problem is that mouse and keyboard in more precise than a gamepad, and console games often have "sticky reticules" to make up for the imprecission of the gamepad.

Only one specific sim has ever forced me to upgrade, and has been the root cause of most of my upgrades since it's release - Falcon 4.

I went for dual core a year ago to supprt F4AF even!

On the GFX front, I buy a better cards than my friends, just to tick them off, with the added side benefit that it has better frame rates in games. :p

-S