4 ms·

Ultra-enthusiast hardware is strangling PC gaming

6 points by elorant 4y ago

PaulHoule 4y ago
No. Chipmakers can make chips that are much more powerful than what they sell to consumers. For instance the top AMD CPU for consumers has 16 cores, but they sell server (e.g. "workstation") chips with up to 96 cores. If they were really interested in marketing hardware to a handful of whales they could do the engineering to make liquid cooled machines (machines like the above are air cooled and produce fan noise that people find objectionable even behind a locked door) that cost $15,000+ and are much more powerful but basically compatible than a "gaming PC". The real crisis in gaming is the games. Nintendo is healthy, to the extent where it's hard to see what a sequel to the Switch will look like. Sure you can play Control natively on the Steam Deck and can only stream it on the Switch, but that's not a function of gameplay, that's a function of graphics. For Microsoft the situation is dire. I let my Xbox Live Gold subscription lapse which caused me to lose 20 or so games. I thought I really wanted to play 3 of those and maybe I'd get inspired to get a few more games. I found Gamestop had hardly any used game inventory because I guess people don't buy discs. Go look at lists of "the top 25 XBOX ONE games" and you find most of them are big series or were games (Skyrim, Diablo) that were out for the Xbox 360. It's so bad that Microsoft wants to take over the whole market for games with GAME PASS which will certainly fail in the long term because by separating the purchase of games from the quality of games can at best reproduce the "success" of cable television with a long term drop in quality coupled with long term price increases. What we should be doing is breaking Activision and Microsoft up, not merging them. What we've seen is that giantism in the game industry can turn a highly successful game into a failure, see https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/6/23588083/meta-shutting-down-echo-vr-john-carmack https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/6/23588083/meta-shutting-dow...
- brucethemoose2 4y ago
  A 96C gaming CPU doesn't make any sense. Stuff like the 7900X3D is realistically the most expensive thing you could cook up. On the GPU side, HBM GPUs like the server chips dont really make sense either due to supply constraints. And monitor prices are indeed completely bonkers, with some displays costing more than equivalent TVs 4x their size. I think the article is spot on. It almost feels like Nvidia and AMD are colluding (though I know they probably aren't).
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    Hasn't the definition of a computer monitor been "4x the cost of an equivalent TV" since the beginning of the HD age? What makes sense or doesn't make sense for gaming is a function of the software as much as anything else. I think the biggest disappointment of Stadia was that so many companies got onto the cloud gaming bandwagon out of some combination of self-servingness and me-tooism. Of all companies, Google was in the best place to develop games that could generate graphics that could be streamed to 20+ players who simultaneously inhabit a complex and closely coupled world... Google has machines in Google cloud that are completely capable of that, but instead of moving the standard of gaming forward (where gamers will be saying "you can have my cloud games when you take them out of my cold dead hands") they just streamed more boring episodes of Assassin's Creed.
    - brucethemoose2 4y ago
      No, about a decade ago a 1440p/120hz monitor would blow the best TVs out of the water, for less than $400. Even low latency modes were a rare thing on TVs. And even before that era, some 1080p 120hz and 2560x1600 60hz monitors were quite good for the money. Yeah, Stadia was sad and never lived up to its potential. But this is a frequent issue with Google, so it's not really surprising.
- rektide 4y ago
  The games situation is interesting but not something PC gaming seems to be facing. Personally I think the current $2000+ flagships is way way closer to catering to "handful of whales" than you attribute. The middle tier offerings cost unbelievable amounts too. Old cards are often mot that much worse; Nvidias biggest new schtick is that they have DLSS upscaling, which they allege cant work on older hardware, but there are already some hacks doing just that.

6 points by elorant 4y ago

No. Chipmakers can make chips that are much more powerful than what they sell to consumers. For instance the top AMD CPU for consumers has 16 cores, but they sell server (e.g. "workstation") chips with up to 96 cores. If they were really interested in marketing hardware to a handful of whales they could do the engineering to make liquid cooled machines (machines like the above are air cooled and produce fan noise that people find objectionable even behind a locked door) that cost $15,000+ and are much more powerful but basically compatible than a "gaming PC". The real crisis in gaming is the games. Nintendo is healthy, to the extent where it's hard to see what a sequel to the Switch will look like. Sure you can play Control natively on the Steam Deck and can only stream it on the Switch, but that's not a function of gameplay, that's a function of graphics. For Microsoft the situation is dire. I let my Xbox Live Gold subscription lapse which caused me to lose 20 or so games. I thought I really wanted to play 3 of those and maybe I'd get inspired to get a few more games. I found Gamestop had hardly any used game inventory because I guess people don't buy discs. Go look at lists of "the top 25 XBOX ONE games" and you find most of them are big series or were games (Skyrim, Diablo) that were out for the Xbox 360. It's so bad that Microsoft wants to take over the whole market for games with GAME PASS which will certainly fail in the long term because by separating the purchase of games from the quality of games can at best reproduce the "success" of cable television with a long term drop in quality coupled with long term price increases. What we should be doing is breaking Activision and Microsoft up, not merging them. What we've seen is that giantism in the game industry can turn a highly successful game into a failure, see https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/6/23588083/meta-shutting-down-echo-vr-john-carmack https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/6/23588083/meta-shutting-dow...

brucethemoose2 4y ago
A 96C gaming CPU doesn't make any sense. Stuff like the 7900X3D is realistically the most expensive thing you could cook up. On the GPU side, HBM GPUs like the server chips dont really make sense either due to supply constraints. And monitor prices are indeed completely bonkers, with some displays costing more than equivalent TVs 4x their size. I think the article is spot on. It almost feels like Nvidia and AMD are colluding (though I know they probably aren't).
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Hasn't the definition of a computer monitor been "4x the cost of an equivalent TV" since the beginning of the HD age? What makes sense or doesn't make sense for gaming is a function of the software as much as anything else. I think the biggest disappointment of Stadia was that so many companies got onto the cloud gaming bandwagon out of some combination of self-servingness and me-tooism. Of all companies, Google was in the best place to develop games that could generate graphics that could be streamed to 20+ players who simultaneously inhabit a complex and closely coupled world... Google has machines in Google cloud that are completely capable of that, but instead of moving the standard of gaming forward (where gamers will be saying "you can have my cloud games when you take them out of my cold dead hands") they just streamed more boring episodes of Assassin's Creed.
  - brucethemoose2 4y ago
    No, about a decade ago a 1440p/120hz monitor would blow the best TVs out of the water, for less than $400. Even low latency modes were a rare thing on TVs. And even before that era, some 1080p 120hz and 2560x1600 60hz monitors were quite good for the money. Yeah, Stadia was sad and never lived up to its potential. But this is a frequent issue with Google, so it's not really surprising.
rektide 4y ago
The games situation is interesting but not something PC gaming seems to be facing. Personally I think the current $2000+ flagships is way way closer to catering to "handful of whales" than you attribute. The middle tier offerings cost unbelievable amounts too. Old cards are often mot that much worse; Nvidias biggest new schtick is that they have DLSS upscaling, which they allege cant work on older hardware, but there are already some hacks doing just that.