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Evolution of PC Gaming

scojer

scojer

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This video is great to watch if you want to see the evolution of video cards and how far we've came.
 
Great video! However I think he left out a very important graphics processor... the ATi R300 line, starting with the Radeon 9700 Pro. It was a massive game changer when it came out, and left nVidia scratching their heads for quite some time.
 
the vodoo rush and vodoo banshee were also game changing chips conspicuously missing....
 
The Mac said:
the vodoo rush and vodoo banshee were also game changing chips conspicuously missing....
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Huh? The Rush was a POS with driver issues and less performance than the real deal. The Riva 128, Rendition v2200, and Rage Pro had more of an impact on the market at the time.

The Banshee was a castrated Voodoo 2 with a fantastic 2D engine...released after the Riva TNT and the G200. The G200 had enough 3D features and similar 2D performance, plus established stable drivers, so it made no inroads in any business machines. And the higher performance of the TNT2 (along with rapid price cuts) made it the high-end gaming OEM chip of choice.

Basically, if the Banshee had been released in 1997 INSTEAD of the Rush, it would have been a world-changer :D
 
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But, it wasn't released in 1997. I do wish we had more competition than AMD/Nvidia. It is amazing how there was a handful of makers, and now, down to just the big two.
 
scojer said:
But, it wasn't released in 1997. I do wish we had more competition than AMD/Nvidia. It is amazing how there was a handful of makers, and now, down to just the big two.
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But if you take a look at the market for PC it is declining which company would dump billions of dollars into this segment and have to play catch up for several years without any profit to look forward to.
 
I think the video gets a 7.5/10.

A lot of it I understand because I've been watching the industry for awhile, but I doubt any normal person would be able to digest it. On the other hand, they left out a lot of details that people like me are familiar with. So they kinda missed both types of audiences.
 
DX9 being used for over a decade not sure if that held us back or helped us evolve.
 
Oh yeah, I just remembered another reason the1998 was so deadly for the Banshee: they had to handle the i740 release. Now the Banshee was faster, but not that much faster.

Intel over-estimated sales, and made too many chips. The i740 flooded the market, dropping the prices of entry-level cards. I remember i740 cards going for 40 bucks by years end!
 
Pieter3dnow said:
But if you take a look at the market for PC it is declining which company would dump billions of dollars into this segment and have to play catch up for several years without any profit to look forward to.
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PC gaming is on the rise, in a huge way. Buying a box at the local Best Buy is on a decline, but actual component sales are on the rise.
 
This is the normal flux of pc sales and they tend be cyclical, when new consoles are created pc sales tend to drop. We have seen this every new generation of consoles. Of course the PC market is saturated, so even when new products like tablets are introduced the PC market will get hit but its only temporary. This even happened when affordable notebooks were introduced to the market, we also saw it with netbooks, the desktop sales did take a hit but rebounded.

Desktops are going no where.

Just have to ask yourself, would you drop buying a pc just because of a new product? I wouldn't. Of course these new products are nice but they can't do everything a desktop can do.

Edit also pc's tend to have longer life cycles, because of upgrade ability, in a saturated market, and a market that isn't pushing CPU performance as much as it did in the past sales will slow a bit but again its temporary, once we start getting software that we will need to push core components more, sales will increase again.

after the first 2 years a console is released, sales tend to drop a bit on a per year basis (pc market tends to increase at the same time though), are we going to say the console market is dying?

Comments like "pc market is dying" are stupid comments by short sighted people.

Now Tim Cook isn't stupid but he has an agenda, a big one, low power Apple devices makes a shit load of margins for Apple, much more then their Mac Pro tower and even their notebooks.
 
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In the end there is no real need to upgrade for the PC either maybe the videocard every year or 2. The cpu has been trivial in most cases.
I don't care for what Apple is doing Apple has it's own universe with their own special people they need to market for.

The problem lies that people used to use desktop because that platform allowed them to do basic stuff now people have phones and tablets which can do the same basic stuff where you would need a PC for 10 years ago.

Even if the gaming for the PC is rising it is still not viable for a company that does not have a plan for several decades to drop in cash because they simply will not be able to compete on the gpu for a good while. This is why you don't see any other X86 processors then AMD or Intel there is nothing to be gained in that market without a stupid amount of cash.

Btw this does not mean that if a company would have better design for the gpu it could not compete but it would have to be competitive from the start rather then trying to catch up.
 
This is saturated, mature market, if someone wants to come in they need much more cash at hand to do it and the return on that will take longer because they have less margins, that is the reason why they won't do it, not that they can't make a profit because there is nothing to be made or it will take too long due to declining markets. The pressure of competition is too great to make acceptable profits in the short term.

Tell me this do you like typing up a presentation on your phone? How about tablet? good luck with that...... Don't get me wrong it can be done, but it will take longer.

Even excel spreadsheets, its nice that a tablet can do them but really, its nice to have the screen real estate to do them faster isn't it?

if we are talking about GPU's, forget being competitive off the bat, even Intel couldn't do that with all their resources, how would you expect a new comer to come in and compete with nV and AMD? That is wishful thinking again its a saturated, mature market.
 
The key is a good wireless video connection. If your phone can connect to a monitor or HDTV and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and automatically switch into desktop mode, the justification for owning a low-power desktop or laptop just went out the window. I believe this is what MS is aiming for with its integrated W10 OS. There will still be gaming and workstation PC's, of course, but the personal PC or laptop for web browsing and e-mail will go the way of the dodo.
 
Leaving out the Geforce 3 and ATI 9700 Pro was inexcusable.

First card with pixel shaders and first card that could really slang AA/AF with ease....
 
arthur_tuxedo said:
The key is a good wireless video connection. If your phone can connect to a monitor or HDTV and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and automatically switch into desktop mode, the justification for owning a low-power desktop or laptop just went out the window. I believe this is what MS is aiming for with its integrated W10 OS. There will still be gaming and workstation PC's, of course, but the personal PC or laptop for web browsing and e-mail will go the way of the dodo.
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Yes I think so too, and this should have been the goal from Microsoft with Windows 8.1, but of course they screwed it all up lol. Also will still need good connections for peripherals, like a keyboard and pointing device, or some other device that will help productivity and speed. Touch devices just don't have that yet.
 
horrorshow said:
Leaving out the Geforce 3 and ATI 9700 Pro was inexcusable.

First card with pixel shaders and first card that could really slang AA/AF with ease....
Click to expand...
The GF3 was important for the technologies it debuted that showed up in later cards, but in raw power it wasn't much of an upgrade from the GF2 GTS / Ultra. It didn't pull away from its predecessor until later when games were really taking advantage of shaders and by that time the GF4 series was already out. I ran a GF3 Ti200 for several years, so I'm not bashing the card but it wasn't earth-shattering at the time.

I definitely agree about the 9700 Pro, though. I can't think of another card (aside from the original 3dfx Voodoo) that so thoroughly kicked its competition directly in the babymakers for multiple generations. They definitely should have showcased it instead of the HD 5870.
 
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