Where is the desktop gaming market going?

[White Haven]

That has little to do with there not being valid ways to push gaming hardware and much to do with the fact that games are developed with horrendously shitty console specs in mind these days. Eeeeverything has to be crossplatform.

[Zaune]

You say that like spending a hundred quid on a new graphics card every couple of years to be able to play new releases at all was a good thing.

[White Haven]

I say that without a value judgement at all, in that I was correcting actual counterfactual bullshit. Gaming graphics haven't plateaued because they can't get better, they've plateaued because consoles have shitty, shitty hardware, and games are made to run on consoles. Whether that's good or bad isn't what I'm addressing; it's a fact.

[Zaune]

Fair enough. I was talking more about CPUs than graphics cards anyway. Although I don't think consoles and their static hardware specs are the only factor that's discouraging developers from pushing the graphics envelope. The physics-simulation envelope's another matter, but that tends to be a bit of a niche endeavour.

[White Haven]

The entire reason the '30fps is really better than 60, guys!' party line gets spouted by console devs is that they really, really want to look spectacularly good despite not having the hardware to manage it. Developers (and customers pushing them) clearly still value cutting-edge graphical fidelity despite the fact that the current 'next-gen' consoles don't have the horsepower to handle it. Customers want it. Developers want to provide it so badly that they compromise FPS and resolution and even letterboxing (hello, Order: 1866) to get close to it. Console hardware is the stumbling block, largely because Sony and Microsoft are unwilling to continue the old 'take a loss on the consoles, make it up on the games' console business model, and instead are trying to make a profit on both sides in this generation.

[TheFeniX]

What about the sales figures for PC components? Because it seems to me that we're coming up against the upper limit to Moore's Law in a way that nobody really expected; developments in hardware have overtaken our ability to fully utilise them. CPU specs are a non-issue outside of very specialised applications; most processors made in the last five years are 'good enough' for even the Triple-A end of the gaming market, and for business and general-purpose home users you can get away with even less powerful kit.

People who build PCs haven't been relevant since Dell hit the scene. I'd be surprised if they comprise more than 10% of the PC gaming market.

The upshot of which is that hardware life-cycles are going to get much longer; it's actually conceivable that even a really dedicated FPS fan with money to burn will find themselves only replacing a whole PC every decade or so. Or even longer if the backlash against the trend for pushing visual spectacle at the expense of innovative gameplay gets strong enough to meaningfully hurt sales.

Lifecycles would already be there if PC gamers are willing to forgo 60FPS and ultra-high settings. My GTX260 would have played Skyrim just fine, but 2K textures, higher-poly models, and loads of other graphical mods pushed it out of necessitated an upgrade. Even then, the game only devours VRAM, not much else, which isn't surprising considering it was designed to run on a console parted out in 2005, even if it did have hardware ahead of it's time and sold at a loss.

The problem we're facing now is that the PS4 and Xbone are $400-$600 PC retail and designed to sell at a profit. Stagnation is the name of the game.

You say that like spending a hundred quid on a new graphics card every couple of years to be able to play new releases at all was a good thing.

This really hasn't been a thing for a long time. A whole load of games are heavily CPU intensive more than anything. If you're willing to cut down some graphics settings (especially AA and dynamic anything) and deal with sub-60FPS, any moderately new Nvidia or ATI can last you pretty much forever. Especially in this market. The thing is, there's still enough crazies SLIing Titans for no fucking reason to keep manufacturers pushing them out every year.

[Jub]

People who build PCs haven't been relevant since Dell hit the scene. I'd be surprised if they comprise more than 10% of the PC gaming market.

I built mine because for the specifications I wanted it was cheaper than buying preasembled, but both my roomie and most of my other friends are runnin either older laptops or both a prebuilt PC when they needed an upgrade. So I'd be inclined to agree with you on the percentage of people that still scratch build PCs. What is more common is upgrading a part or two and adding more ram to a desktop after the fact and most of my friends are confident enough to do that or to call me for help when they want an upgrade without buying a new PC.

Lifecycles would already be there if PC gamers are willing to forgo 60FPS and ultra-high settings.

Yeah, but why would we want to settle for less? I'm fine upgrading my PC every 3-5 years and building a new one every 10+ if it means I get shiner toys, more physics, and better games. I understand that not everybody can afford that, but I have to ask if the fact that some people might be left behind is reason to stop making games that need more hardware?

The problem we're facing now is that the PS4 and Xbone are $400-$600 PC retail and designed to sell at a profit. Stagnation is the name of the game.

Yup, and is sucks.

Of course some companies are going to make the consoles look bad with PC only releases. I mean look at Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous and tell me they're look as good and run as well on a console. I can only hope that getting crushed by even low end PCs in 2 years will be enough to make this a short console cycle.

This really hasn't been a thing for a long time. A whole load of games are heavily CPU intensive more than anything. If you're willing to cut down some graphics settings (especially AA and dynamic anything) and deal with sub-60FPS, any moderately new Nvidia or ATI can last you pretty much forever. Especially in this market. The thing is, there's still enough crazies SLIing Titans for no fucking reason to keep manufacturers pushing them out every year.

People that SLI Titans drive the industry to make higher and higher end stuff and that drives down the prices of the next best things so everybody can get them. I fully support the nutjobs who buy $2k+ PCs because it means my upgrades will be cheaper and/or more powerful in a few years when I want/need them.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I suspect that VR might bring an end to the current trend of CPU and GPU hardware being years ahead of software. 1080P might be good enough for most with a monitor or TV, but put a screen an inch in front of the viewer's face and slash the effective resolution in half for stereo 3D and even 4K isn't nearly enough. This calculator estimates that with the size and viewing distance of the Oculus Rift DK2 (5 inch screen, 1 inch viewing distance, 3D) we can still perceive benefits from increased res all the way up to 32K. With full immersion and graphics and resolution being cranked up, idiosyncratic AI behavior and unrealistic physics models are going to seem more and more intolerable, so we'll demand more CPU power too. I wouldn't be surprised if the high-end PC landscape starts looking like the late 90's again soon, where a cutting edge machine in one year was a joke a few years later.

[Lagmonster]

People that SLI Titans drive the industry to make higher and higher end stuff and that drives down the prices of the next best things so everybody can get them. I fully support the nutjobs who buy $2k+ PCs because it means my upgrades will be cheaper and/or more powerful in a few years when I want/need them.

I'm not an IT kinda guy, but this sounds suspiciously like saying that the couple hundred motorists who buy Ferraris keep the price of Honda Civics low.

[Mr Bean]

People that SLI Titans drive the industry to make higher and higher end stuff and that drives down the prices of the next best things so everybody can get them. I fully support the nutjobs who buy $2k+ PCs because it means my upgrades will be cheaper and/or more powerful in a few years when I want/need them.

I'm not an IT kinda guy, but this sounds suspiciously like saying that the couple hundred motorists who buy Ferraris keep the price of Honda Civics low.

If Honda Civis used year old Ferrari engines then the comparison would make sense. The current GPU production cycle is to take the same basic setup and price/performance them by number of shaders, amount of ram on board and other such features. Imagine if Honda sold 10 cylinder engines, 6 cylinder engines and 4 cylinder that were 99% identical except for the number of cylinders.

That's what Titan purchasing drives, engineers are allowed to experiment to see how far they can push the silicon and the results are sold with a 50% markup while the card about 90% as good is sold with a 15% markup.

[TheFeniX]

I suspect that VR might bring an end to the current trend of CPU and GPU hardware being years ahead of software.

I don't think VR can push the market enough to bet on like that, but I hope your right. Consoles are making it so cross-plats aren't going anywhere. The AAA guys are too scared to put themselves out there and leave their console counter-parts in the dust. The majority of gaming will be tied to whatever we have for consoles now (not much) and/or whatever MS and Sony decide to release in another 6+ years. So native VR support on PC ports is probably not likely.

The PC games I played routinely beat up 1-2 cores (out of 8 ), eat up 20-40% of my GPU if they manage to be optimized at all, but devour any VRAM I give them. Like, for Skyrim, loading 2k textures and high-poly models only increased my VRAM foot-print. I don't see 4k textures on an occulus doing anything to crater even my current PC. What is there extra to process? Most games I've played seen to have most of their stumbles getting stuff in and out of RAM/VRAM and/or are just poorly optimized. Don't get me started at how few 64-bit games there are out there.

Consoles have held back game development while PC hardware has continued to progress. The problem is consoles are going to continue to hold back game development due to low resources. People just got spoiled at getting cutting edge tech sold at a loss.

I wouldn't be surprised if the high-end PC landscape starts looking like the late 90's again soon, where a cutting edge machine in one year was a joke a few years later.

Those computers became a joke because one upgrade usually meant replacing your entire PC and said upgrades were much less affected by diminishing returns. Picking up an extra 100Mhz on the CPU when you only had 400Mhz to start with means a lot more than 300Mhz on a 2.6Ghz quad-core, of which even current games will barely touch anything but the first core (or second if you're lucky). Meanwhile, said 100Mhz upgrade usually meant your form factor has changed. So, your mainboard needed an upgrade.... oh yea, the RAM changed too. AGP might have been backwards compatible, but using a 4x card on a 2x slot was a big waste compared to the difference in speed for a lot of PCI-E upgrades over the years.

But even then, many PC developers are just fucking lazy. With SWTOR, you'd have been much better off with a cheap GPU, but some kind of 6Ghz dual-core with an SSD because that's all the game would use when it wasn't busy dumping everything out of RAM and reloading it from the HDD constantly.

Pre-2000, enough PC developers were doing all they could to give the best looking graphics and passable AI without exploding what little hardware was actually available. The games pushing that limit would have crated anything on a console, just like they would now. But those games existed in their own universe, separate from consoles. You either had to push the envelope, or people wouldn't buy your cutting edge game, even though there was plenty of more "casual" games out there that needed little hardware to run. With consoles opening up an entirely new market, those developers could run of and create for standard hardware that wasn't going to change. Why would they go back?

But whereas PC gaming is still a large dent in the sales department, the types of sales aren't what people think they are. Only a select few developers are going to bother optimizing their games for what PC is offering and the others will run to the console market instead. VR is going to be pretty cool, but it's not going to be the force in gaming people think it is. The fact is: it's still just a graphics shift and the biggest problem today is the overemphasis on graphics at the expense of everything else.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I guess it will depend on how quickly VR catches on. I haven't tried it yet, but I've heard that it's a whole new level of gaming, not at all comparable to a simple improvement in graphics.

You're right about the driving forces behind the quick obsolescence of that time period, but before graphics accelerators it was pretty much like today. My Pentium 60 from 1993 was able to run everything at high settings for years, but once the 3dfx Voodoo showed up it was a whole new ball game. That could happen again if there is a sudden and massive increase in the level of hardware needed to push the cutting edge. If consoles can't keep up, then this will be a short hardware cycle.

[Jub]

People that SLI Titans drive the industry to make higher and higher end stuff and that drives down the prices of the next best things so everybody can get them. I fully support the nutjobs who buy $2k+ PCs because it means my upgrades will be cheaper and/or more powerful in a few years when I want/need them.

I'm not an IT kinda guy, but this sounds suspiciously like saying that the couple hundred motorists who buy Ferraris keep the price of Honda Civics low.

Mr. Bean pretty much covered it with his reply, but even sticking with the car example racing teams and high end street legal cars do eventually lead to upgrades to the base model cars. Even five years ago joe average didn't have a car with backup camera and self park capabilities and now that's just an extra option to tick off the list. Sure it takes longer to filter down for a car, but the high end stuff does get cheaper the more we understand it and that means it comes down to where joe average can afford to have it at home.