Nvidia and ATI should be worried?

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jonneymendoza

Supreme [H]ardness
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Sep 11, 2004
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Why? because pc gaming is becoming a niche market and if none of these two companies do something about it, hardly anyone will see a point in buying their next GPU's because no game takes advantage of it.

Look at the current crop of pc games mostly console ports. a 9800gtx is still good enough to play those at near max settings and how old is that card?

im fed up of developers pissing about with pc users and im fed up some of you lot who practically ruined what crysis was trying to do for us pc gamers and that is to PUSH the graphical technology for pc's like how others have done before them. instead people complained that their 2 year old pc's cant run it and pirate the shit out of it. now NO devs have the balls to fully test our rigs with cutting edge graphics and technology.

i have a 260gtx and it hardly breaks a sweat. i should of just bought a 9800gtx. that would have been good enough for TODAYS games for fucksakes.

rant over.
 
If PC gaming started going stagnant wouldn't they just go into mainstream/integrated solutions and high end design solutions? Not to mention they'd still be able to make money off consoles if they could get one of their GPUs in the design.

If something terrible like that does happen theres always casual PC games right? Right!? *sobs*
 
Piracy has to be killing the pc gaming industry, if I were a dev or publisher and I saw the tens of thousands of downloads on torrent sites I would be pulling my hair out. It's getting so easy and I don't see any stop to it so companies are just pulling out. Just sucks thinking about all the games not coming out.
 
Shane_c82 said:
Piracy has to be killing the pc gaming industry, if I were a dev or publisher and I saw the tens of thousands of downloads on torrent sites I would be pulling my hair out. It's getting so easy and I don't see any stop to it so companies are just pulling out. Just sucks thinking about all the games not coming out.
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You can't count pirates as a loss though... they wouldn't have bought the game regardless...

If I want a game it's usually going to be online so I'll buy a legitimate copy... if there's some game I heard a little bit about I might torrent it, play it for an hour and realize it wasn't worth it and delete it.

I should have done that with Farcry2 but instead pre-ordered it thinking it would be as good as the original or better, waste of $50 bucks... got maybe 1 hour of play time before I closed it and uninstalled, but because it's linked to my Steam I can't get rid of it (Which is a downside to steam) Making shitty games is killing the industry if anything...

And there is a way to stop it, move to services like Steam... you can't use a pirated copy of TF2 and play on VAC servers, you can pirate TF2 and play on hacked servers, but who the fuck wants to do that? You can't pirate WoW... etc.

Wasn't CoD 4 one of the most pirated games, yet sold amazing... shit it's still retailing for $30-40 for a PC copy which usually drop to $5-10 after a year

But no, Nvidia and ATI aren't going to be worried, they both have a place in the console market.. shit ATI did both the Wii and Xbox360 part of graphics and I think Nvidia worked on the PS3. So they're both fine in that aspect... there's always integrated GPU's now with Nvidia and ION along with ATI and their chipsets. Disgrete graphics are also required for like the FireGL cards / 3d modeling and rendering.

And people will always buy the latest and greatest, games still don't run perfect on a GTX 260 Core216 @ 2560 x 1600, and I'm waiting for the next generation to upgrade...
 
<insert 13 page rant here about how this has all been said before>

Cliffs)
1) PC gaming isn't dead.
2) Someone till has to make GPUs for consoles
3) Nvidia has been branching out of just gaming GPUs for the last several years, see CUDA, ION, even the old Quadro
4) DX11 comes out, some powerful hardware comes out and they start to take advantage of DX11 lighting goodness and PC gaming will make a revival.
5) MMOs will be the savior, just look at how many people upgrade thier cards so they can play WoW faster, except now it's new games like Aion.
 
The key for PC game profitability is to give it an online mode that people want to use and then they will need a legit key to play it. Like the Sims 3 broke 14 million sales in 1 week? Looks like a healthy enough industry to me. If the game is WORTH IT, people will buy it. There hasn't been a blockbuster game out in a while to cause people to want to buy it. Crysis was a curiosity, and an interesting exercise in demanding graphics, but most people decided it wasn't good enough to upgrade for. Oblivion DID cause people to upgrade for it. Etc. If the games aren't out there, people won't buy. Period.
 
vengence said:
<insert 13 page rant here about how this has all been said before>

Cliffs)
1) PC gaming isn't dead.
2) Someone till has to make GPUs for consoles
3) Nvidia has been branching out of just gaming GPUs for the last several years, see CUDA, ION, even the old Quadro
4) DX11 comes out, some powerful hardware comes out and they start to take advantage of DX11 lighting goodness and PC gaming will make a revival.
5) MMOs will be the savior, just look at how many people upgrade thier cards so they can play WoW faster, except now it's new games like Aion.
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i disagree about dx11. no1 is taking full advantage of dx10 now. why? because consoles are still running at dx9. o and newsflash. most pc games are console ports. put 2 and 2 together and you get dx9!!! :rolleyes:
 
I personally think that DX10 caused a lot of problems in slowing down game development. It certainly did not hit hard like MS intended, in fact, I'd call it rather a flop. It simply did not deliver what it promised. Also, with the slow adoption and perception of Vista (the only way to get DX10 btw) has caused developers not to worry too much about exploiting DX10 features in current gen video cards. They are happy and content with DX9, which unfortunately has the side effect of not really tapping the potential of the current hardware.

I think, now with Win7, and its much better perception, and possibly greater adoption, DX10/DX11 will take off now. Thank goodness MS is making DX11 available for Vista. It is my opinion (we will see how that works out, heh) that Win7/DX11 will kick start developers again into taking advantage of the hardware available. Of course, with game development cycles, don't expect to see that happen for a couple of years still. But, I think this is the start of PC gaming taking more of a stand up front, rather than lagging behind being pulled along by console ports.
 
I remember as a kid a decade ago dreaming about 1600x1200 and 21" monitors; my next dream, now as an adult, is having hardware that would allow things like real-time ray tracing of pixels.

It's the hardware industry's fault we aren't rushing towards that (the ability is there in the form of the stream procs) so stop blaming the game and DirectX developers... believe me if they could develop an engine that could actually produce a Pixar quality movie on the fly they would be all over it!

Am I the only one who realizes this? :rolleyes:
 
Nvidia's 3d vision seems a sensible way to sell cards. It uses all that spare grunt to add a new dimension to the graphics of all these console ports without requiring the devs to do a lot of work.
 
sbuckler said:
Nvidia's 3d vision seems a sensible way to sell cards. It uses all that spare grunt to add a new dimension to the graphics of all these console ports without requiring the devs to do a lot of work.
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blabla.. and it requires vista fail os and a monitor capable of doing 120hz or so.. doubt many have that.
 
It's nice to finally start seeing lower and lower priced video cards providing faster, better experiences. The companies have been taking advantage of people willing to pay out the nose for a top-shelf card for far too long.
 
I don't think too many people who have a core i7 cpu that costs $300 would use a $100 video card. I guess its asmart upgrade if you were to turn an office PC into a gaming one. And yes the 4770 is a great card for gaming. I doubt I would get the same results on my 3 yeard old Pentium D-based system. Most games are GPU dependant some are CPU bound. The best bet is to ahve a good balance. Is there a need for high end GPU's? Yes if you want to max out your settings and play at high resolutions with all of the bells and whitles. not ot mention the fact that in 6 months there will probably be a game that will bring your system down to its knees and you'll want to play that game. Spending $50 more for a better card with twice the memory may be your meal ticket to playing that game. You don't buy a video card just to play today's games. you buy it to play the games of today and the games of the next 2-3 years. then you upgrade or buy a whole new system if upgrade costs outweigh the benefits.
 
adonn78 said:
I don't think too many people who have a core i7 cpu that costs $300 would use a $100 video card. I guess its asmart upgrade if you were to turn an office PC into a gaming one. And yes the 4770 is a great card for gaming. I doubt I would get the same results on my 3 yeard old Pentium D-based system. Most games are GPU dependant some are CPU bound. The best bet is to ahve a good balance. Is there a need for high end GPU's? Yes if you want to max out your settings and play at high resolutions with all of the bells and whitles. not ot mention the fact that in 6 months there will probably be a game that will bring your system down to its knees and you'll want to play that game. Spending $50 more for a better card with twice the memory may be your meal ticket to playing that game. You don't buy a video card just to play today's games. you buy it to play the games of today and the games of the next 2-3 years. then you upgrade or buy a whole new system if upgrade costs outweigh the benefits.
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what game in 6months time will make us want to buy a new GPU? that is the point of this thread. to explain to you and others that their most likely wont EVER be a game that will tax out current GPU'S because of devs pushing console ports down our throats.

come on please name me just ONE game that will at least surpass crysis in terms of graphical power. Btw, the new crysis 2 will be a console port as its coming to the consoles as well :rolleyes:
 
Cerulean said:
Go play Armed Assault 2 on maximum video quality settings and maximum resolution.
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i am playing Arma 2. Yes it does strain my system a bit but what else? thats 1 game out of how many thats been out on the pc's for the past year?

Its going to take more than one game to persuade people to buy a new GPU and thats the point.
 
Me for one, is glad that vid technology is out pacing game technology. Seems like a first, for as long as I've been pc gaming, about 12 years now, it was always a new game comes out, need to get a new vid card to play it. I have a 9550, 8800GT sli on an nv 750 board and vista x64 @ 1680x1050 and I have no problems running games at all. Bioshock, dx10, full eye candy, Cod 4, max settings, same for farcry 2, STALKER Chernobyl, Oblivion. Kinda gets monotonous having to buy a new vid card every 6 months just to play a game. Hopefully the trend continues, and it becomes more about the game that the vid card powering it :p
 
DX11 comes out, some powerful hardware comes out and they start to take advantage of DX11 lighting goodness and PC gaming will make a revival.
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I just don't see it. There was sure no revival with DX10. The profit margin has to dominate and fewer people are playing games on PC. Consoles are here to stay (BTW, I'm not a console guy) because that's where the money is and game makers have a much easier time making games for it being everyone with the console has the same exact thing (making the technical aspect much easier). The people who will be rushing out to get the DX11 cards are the ones who just have the money to burn and have to keep up with the Jones'. Personally I don't have much money to burn anymore so I will have to be making much better decisions on how I spend my money. I don' t see myself making any changes to PC anytime soon. There is just no benefit on my doing so right now (and I'm guessing for at least the next couple of years). I've already bought Windows 7 so that expense is already past.
 
Here's the question about " system straining games ".

Are they ALL that way, or are some of them just piss poorly wrote? Because it runs with horrible FPS but looks pretty, is that straining, or is it poor coding?

Some titles fall into that crap category. No, I can't code better than them, I'm not standing on the mountain.

And ummm, so great, we have declining prices in a declining economy, and the stuff that would normally race to the market is not. Look at how many developers have idled titles and or shut doors in the past 12 months.

The recession proof gaming industry is not recession proof. The only recession proof activity is working as a pall bearer, no matter what happens financially, people still die, everything else has an attachment to money and the lack of it in the economy.

I wouldn't worry, a lot of people (I'd say the vast vast majority) will be in for the Windows 7 upgrade cycle from XP -> Win 7 and from Vista -> Win7. Thats going to make DX11 adoption much higher, and its going to keep to one platform to build to, giving further advantages as is had on consoles.

If you go with a 3 year upgrade cycle, Pentium 4 machines will be replaced with i5/i7 hardware and newer GPU's within 6-12 months. I wouldn't panic if I was AMD/Nvidia, I'd work on making a polished, solid, and stable product that takes full advantage of Windows 7, and the market will be there when it matters.
 
jonneymendoza said:
i disagree about dx11. no1 is taking full advantage of dx10 now. why? because consoles are still running at dx9. o and newsflash. most pc games are console ports. put 2 and 2 together and you get dx9!!! :rolleyes:
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Vista is part of the reason DX10 had such a poor reception. DX10.1 vs DX10 and Nvidia debacle didn't help either. Furthermore add in 600$ graphic cards (8800GTX+Ultra) around the time of DX10s launhc made people more interested in getting a 400$ console than upgrade thier computer.

On piracy, priacy does hurt gaming sales. I have no doubt about that, there are lots of people who would have bought a game that don't because they can just as easily pirate it. However, that number is MUCH MUCH MUCH smaller than the numbers put forth by the special interest groups. I suspect it is along the same lines of used game sells hurting console sales.

There is a pendulem and it swings. DX10 came out a year (Q1 07) after the Xbox 360 did. Furthermore the 8800 GTX costing 600$ didn't come out till Q3 07. The Xbox graphics were just as good and cheaper. Now you can get more graphics than your xbox for less than an xbox the pendulem will start to swing back to computers. DX11 will release after the hardware is there to run it, and with some luck from Nvidia and ATI, that hardware will come in around 400$ for the high end single GPU part. The Xbox360's graphics are quickly becoming dated and there's no replacement in sight. That's a far cry from what happened at the launch of DX10.
 
jonneymendoza said:
im fed up of developers pissing about with pc users and im fed up some of you lot who practically ruined what crysis was trying to do for us pc gamers and that is to PUSH the graphical technology for pc's like how others have done before them.
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...and this is the real problem with PC games.
A game is a game, not a technical showcase. It's all fine and dandy to make it all look pretty, but if there's no substance or replay value it's not worth it. The chip makers aren't on the hot seat they sell their chips regardless, it's not like a high end Matrox can hang even with the a midmarket nvidia/ati card. The people that should be worried are mediocre and crappy devs. They really on pretty things to sell what amounts to a crappy game.
 
I'm glad hardware has surpassed software. There's nothing more disssapointing than having to play a new game on settings so low that it looks worse than last generation games on high. There's always going to be exceptions, but it's nice for a change to play the new crop of games without overhauling my system. Currently I'm getting my game on with a $40 HD4670. It does the job quite nicely even at 1680x1050 in most games I play. Hardly enthusiast level stuff, but many including myself can't afford to keep up like we have been. Maybe game developers realize this too. They keep thier requirements lower to continue to sell games. Would Crysis have sold more if it ran better? Might have.
 
Out of all the people I know, I know less who are playing First-person shooter style games but the amount of RTS players seems to have stayed about the same and I know a ton of people who never played any computer games before who now play an MMO.

As for me, just about every computer upgrade I've done in the last 4-5 years has been to make WoW run faster.
 
ya they should be worried, nobody is building demanding pc only games that are worth playing anymore. no need to get better hardware when all the new games are going to be ports from a 2+ year old system.
 
Not worried here. There will always be games that push our systems and make you think you should have gone SLI. Thats why I'm planning on doing SLI in my next system build.
 
The main problem with PC gaming right now is its lack of diversity. Many of the titles are nothing more than bad console ports. It used to be that you had racing games, flight simulators, combat flight sims, space-combat games, RTS, turn based strategy games, side scrollers, RPG and FPS games. Now most of what's sold are MMORPG, FPS, or 3rd person action games. The latter of which are usually console ports. The occasional RTS comes out now and again but that's really it. Currently we have one recent fighting game (Street Fighter IV which is excellent) and of course we get Need 4 Speed games but those aren't generally all that good really.

Again I don't see PC gaming really dying despite all the doom and gloom tales and even this dryspell in game releases. Unless your blind you should be able to see that consoles are becoming more PC like all the time. HTPC's are becoming more popular and things are going the way of the digital download. This will happen on the console side eventually as well. Eventually these devices sare going to merge.
 
jonneymendoza said:
Why? because pc gaming is becoming a niche market and if none of these two companies do something about it, hardly anyone will see a point in buying their next GPU's because no game takes advantage of it.

Look at the current crop of pc games mostly console ports. a 9800gtx is still good enough to play those at near max settings and how old is that card?

im fed up of developers pissing about with pc users and im fed up some of you lot who practically ruined what crysis was trying to do for us pc gamers and that is to PUSH the graphical technology for pc's like how others have done before them. instead people complained that their 2 year old pc's cant run it and pirate the shit out of it. now NO devs have the balls to fully test our rigs with cutting edge graphics and technology.

i have a 260gtx and it hardly breaks a sweat. i should of just bought a 9800gtx. that would have been good enough for TODAYS games for fucksakes.

rant over.
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Wow, I think you totally missed the point of what gaming is supposed to be. FUN! Sure, Crysis pushed video cards to their limits, but it was a lousy game. I have a 8600 GT in my rig. No where near the horsepower to play Modern Warfare at high/max settings. But I played the shit out of that game for a year. For once, in a very long time, I got my moneys worth out of a game. I don't give a shit if a game has cutting edge graphics or not, it just needs to be fun to play. And I am sure as fuck not spending $300+ for a video card. Not when I got an xbox 360 connected to a 52" plasma. The 4770 will be my next card.
 
You're all acting like consoles are going to stay at the level they're at now forever...

If PC's are truly no-longer the driving force behind game advancement, then consoles are going to step up and fill that place. When the next generation of console hardware rolls around and those games start being ported, you'll all be scrambling for new PC hardware again ;)

Look at it this way; you'll only have to upgrade your graphics card as often as joe-average upgrades his entire console.
 
Someone from DICE(battlefield franchise) came into the EA forum and spoke on why the player count is low on their current battlefield games. why is the player count low? because the consoles simply dont have the bandwidth and power to run more than 24 players lag free on the frostbite engine.

This goes to show that developers are begining to feel the strain of making games on console now while maintaining that quality of their engine and gameplay.

Forza 3, another console game that cannot push more than 8 cars on the screen at once. Again, if you make a pc game with only 8 cars onscreen, most pc gamers will laugh at you.

If their hitting the limits on consoles, why cant they focus on the pc version and give us pc users a proper game that takes advantage of our hardware??

edit: like this neew need for speed game. i hope the player count is more than 16 because alot of gaming pc's can handle that amount. if not then thats one reason to upgrade your GPU innit lads
 
BretG57 said:
ya they should be worried, nobody is building demanding pc only games that are worth playing anymore. no need to get better hardware when all the new games are going to be ports from a 2+ year old system.
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starcraft 2, diablo 3
 
I've been more disappointed with PC gaming over the years more than anything else. A lot of games feel unfinished. A lot of games I don't have any interest in. I liked, for example, the Need for Speed series. And EA went and effed it all up completely. I like to play a lot of games in co-op. There was a period when co-op was hard to come by. Seems it's making a bit of a comeback now. And, I wish the game labels would support their games longer. A lot of times, you see a big push for a game only to see it disappear into a dark corner of their web site after a month.

I can deal with patches, and with having to wind around internet accounts to set up private LAN games (though it's a pain in the ass), but the "DRM" is most annoying. I never did buy (or pirate) or load Half Life 2 cause I can't support Steam. I wanted to play it, but I thought a mandatory internet connection to play a game was just going too far.

I am going to likely buy Diablo 3 and the next Wolfenstein.

Should they be worried? Maybe. PC gaming now is a far cry from what it used to be. I may buy a console in the next year. PC gaming used to be good.
 
I gotta disagree on this idea that pc gaming is going down the tubes. from what I hear pc games sales are doing just fine. I mean steam for one seems to be raking in the cashola. Theyve been adding new content almost everyday since the new year. I do agree that pc gaming is getting a bit less demanding. a 9500GT can "technically" play any game out. what would be interesting to see in the next year is 120mhz LCD's taking off. I want my stereoscopic 3D back. NOW THAT will beat the shit out of the higherend cards coming out. when stereoscopic capable LCDs get a big more reasonable like $200 for a 24" I would blow money on better cards, but thinking about it I'm pretty sure my 2 GTS250 could still handle it
 
The article is rediculous. The video cards out now at the high-end are 286 slow like in 1993 not even enough to run crysis you would need to sli quad that can run more efficient than dual fixed. I got 4890 1gb and I get 7-15 fps at daralan in wow at 1920x1080 x8aa even at x4aa. Crysis is still slow. SF4 barely make 32-35fps at 8xaa at 1920x1080p. Even high end shadows on all ati cards runs at a crawl just play the last remenant.

If you are comparing to people who are running on 4ghz intel at 640x480p resolution on low-end video card then I'm not sure you can call that gamming high-end.
 
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