There’s been plenty of predicition lately that the age of supermegapixelshaderooed blockbuster games on PC might be drawing to a close, in favour of lower-spec, lower-profile inventiveness from the indie, MMO, browser-based and casual scenes. What there hasn’t been is much hard data that reflects this possible sea change. The news that current 3D card king NVIDIA recorded an eyewatering $30 million loss last year (that’s after a $797.6m profit in the preceding year) could have something to do with it.
Of course, it could also have something to do with the general worldwide moneypocalypse, or of eejits shouting about the death of the PC potentially having something of a point. Nah. I suspect it’s to do with the lack of a game that really demanded a system upgrade last year. 2007 was the year of Crysis, and despite that game’s debatable merits, it was a waving flag for a new graphical generation – a spur to buy a better graphics card even if you weren’t interested in that game specifically. 2008 lacked such a game – the PC’s biggest titles were either less graphically ambitious or reworks of console titles. Poor optimisation may have meant that half the time the latter did need a powerhouse 3D card anyway, but that’s not a card-shifter in the way LOOK AT THESE AWESOME GRAPHICS is.
I wonder if NVIDIA’s investment in Physx, and (presumably) expensively rolling out physics-via-GPU support as a result, is an experiment that really didn’t help. It’s not something that’s proven its usefulness to Johnny Average Gamer – until there’s an NVIDIA physics killer app, it’s not likely to sell many cards. In other words, it could repeat the failures of Physx back when it was Ageia’s struggling baby.
Here’s NVIDIAn emperor Jen Hsun Huang’s thoughts on the bad news:
The environment is clearly difficult and uncertain. Our first priority is to set an operating expense level that balances cash conservation while allowing us to continue to invest in initiatives that are of great importance to the market and in which we believe we have industry leadership. We have initiatives in all areas to reduce operating expenses.
Which sounds worryingly like it could mean job losses, always upper management’s sucker punch response to money problems. Let’s hope not. Whatever they do, can the big N pull it back, or are 3D card upgrades only going to go more out of fashion as integrated chips grow ever more capable and the bulk of new PC games less demanding? ANSWER.
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I haven’t really understood this thread, so i’d just like to say that The Thing is awesome.
@Arathain:
I don’t see how, considering that both Sony and Microsoft have lost billions of dollars on their console hardware, that they have yet to recover.
The PC and consoles have opposite problems. On the PC, the money is made on the hardware and not so much on the software. At least when it comes to games, anyway. But both ATI and nVidia make enough profit on their cards, to continue funding the R&D required to keep advancing their technology.
On consoles, the manfacturers lose shedloads of cash by subsidizing the cost of the hardware, in the hope that they’ll eventually recover it through software sales. But I don’t believe that either Sony or Microsoft have earned back what they lost. Then, considering that each wants to up the ante by bringing out another console in a few years time . . . they’ll never make their money back.
It’s the PC that’s paying for all the benefits that the consoles later receive. That’s why it’s so irritating that game publishers treat us like second-class citizens now. Without us, the consoles would not be where they are today.
If the PC hardware market went bust tomorrow, the future of console development would be in serious peril. Where would the hardware manucfacturers earn the money to fund their R&D?
Certainly not from console owners, who expect their hardware to be as dirt-cheap as possible. Heck, people are still complaining that the PS3 costs too much.
Oh, it actually has a name? Who knew? Well, other than you guys of course. I agree that economics are at the heart of the problem though, since it does impact every person no matter where you are on the food chain.
Arathain is spot on: there aren’t enough high-end PC gamers to support today’s game budgets. Which studios piss and moan the most about PC gamers? The “graphic whore” outfits like Epic, id, and Crytek. If you spend $20+ million making a game (most of that going to art and sound assets), then you’ll want to focus on the largest market.
The good news is that I think more people than ever are playing PC games and will continue buying mid-range graphics cards for years to come.
Gap Gen, point of information: the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (1939) computer was developed to solve complex physics equations. The German Zuse Z3 (1941) was applied for aerodynamic analysis, the Harvard Mark I did calculations for the Navy’s bureau of ships and the ENIAC 1’s primary role was developing artillery firing tables.Sure, Colossus did crypto, but that’s after the ABC and Zuse, and the ENIAC makes the claim to be the first general-purpose computer.In all seriousness, cryptography was a very important computing function, but physics presented a whole range of problems to solve.
as for the High-end stuff, guys: there’s three very good reasons why nVidia and ATI embrace the arms race. First, if you’ve got demonstrably the fastest thing out there, your audience is not price-sensitive. You can easily slap on a couple hundred bucks or quid to the asking price. So the margins on those things are huge. If you’re down in the trenches with a hated competitor (like nVidia and ATI in the mid-range), the margins are much slimmer. So what if it’s only 1% of the market share? If your margin is 100 times that of your midrange product, it makes sense to ship.
Second, high-end drives midrange. The dudes who spend the big bucks are often the ones who spend the most time working on their rigs. In the PC world, they’re also the ones who give free customer service to their circle of acquaintances. If they’re running a high-end nVidia, and their cousin wants to buy a $100 card, which brand will that guy recommend, especially considering Cousin High End will be the guy answering the phone when there’s a driver incompatibility or an optimization issue?
Third, high end gets press. The folks who publish on-line and print hardware reviews, and the ones who read them, care about flash. They like something with some slink. Being the best deal in the midrange ain’t gonna win many headlines.
nVidia is not the big N. nVidia is the little n. Nintendo is the big N.
But being best deal in midrange sold s**t loads of 8800gt’s didn’t it?
The big N was when Nintendo used to make games. Now they just make toys :P
I would love to see combat games where the smoke of explosions, rockets, motors, etc.. are persistent. Most game engines remove the smoke as fast as posible to make the player happy, and to save fillrate/polygons. But this remove the “fog of war” precisely from the war. It seems people can live with a war game where is raining strong, but not one where a tank is burning more than 7 seconds. Another interesting change could be to have some level of deformation on the terrain, so a tank tracks mark on the terrain, or explosions create scorchs, etc.. Thats more “eyecandy” stuff most today games avoid.
There are lots of interesting “eyecandy” effects most today games skip, that I will love to see implemented.
One of the latest more interesting tecnical features are (IMHO) Call of Duty 3 sound engine and FEAR rendering engine. But is me.
Talking about sound,… more effects applied to sounds could be a interesting thing. Like how a tank is supose to sound, if the tank is crossing a forest, and you are outside of that forest in a street. And how a tank sound, if the tank is crossing trough a wood house, and you are on the 2th level of that house.
More games sould be played on very extreme escenarys, like.. a infantry combat game that is played on a area just before a nuclear explosion, whiting the explosion and just after the explosion. Some small tactical nukes are designed to clear a area for the infantry to take it over (in the style of artillery).
Dinger: I was unaware of those machines. However, I’m not sure it’s necessarily true that since CPUs were designed for physics calculations (and at least one of your examples can’t really be said to have a CPU) it’s not true that they are the best hardware for any given physics problem.
The GPU is still a powerful physics solver in every level, from HPC-level research to gaming. A paper by Mark Harris (here) showed a six times speed-up by using a GPU over a CPU implementation of a 2D fluid solver.
Granted, there may come a time when massively-multicore CPUs make graphics cards redundant for a while, but that time isn’t now.
I’m glad I provided you with an excuse to post.
@Tei That’s what I’m hoping Modern Warfare 2 will be. It’s going to be a day 1 buy for me no matter what though.
On Blu-Ray: I’ve only witnessed these in store, but I would say that the improved quality doesn’t particular warrant the expenditure of the player and the disc (and HDTV if you haven’t already got one.) It isn’t exactly the dramatic leap from video to DVD, something which actually made me start buying films, and the quality of a well done DVD is still phenomenal. Look at Casino Royale for a great example of this.
On the topic at hand: I expect, as others have said, that the economic situation is probably the biggest dent in nVidia’s takings. The threat from ATi will no doubt have had a big impact as well (I bought a 4500 myself early this year and have encouraged a mate to go the same route.)
Also believe that we have reached a sort plateau on computing power used for games and that my system should be able to stand tall for a good while yet. The vast majority of systems being sold today are dual cores, so my quad core should be happily reaping the benefits of increased developing for multicore processes whilst also being faster than the standard. Microsoft is still catering for 32-bit systems, and looks to be continuing in this vein with Windows 7, so few games are going to be looking for much more than 3GB of RAM. Graphics cards is the one area where it may continue to develop, but looking at these numbers, combined with the ever increasing multiplatform development, it looks unlikely that well coded games are going to be designed for high-end hardware.
10 Minutes ago I installed my shiny new GTX280, right now I am installing Crysis.Damn I am one hardcore PC gamer : ).
Graphics card development may slow down for a while, especially with economy, but I definitely don’t see it stopping. Yes the consoles are acting as a brake, and PC only developers are becoming far and few between. The forces that have been pushing graphics forward are not gone though. I think a big secret with graphics is that Crysis would not have cost that much less to make if the visuals weren’t cutting edge but merely average. But EA and Crytek have reaped the dividends of free publicity. And besides it’s not hard to spruce up the graphics of the latest console hit to take advantage of the latest video card.
As soon as Intel’s on core gpu/loadsa core is ready non of this will matter.
Intel has never, EVER done gaming graphics well. Maybe that will change in the future, maybe not.
Why do PC games with a 400$ top-of-the-line card run slower than their console ports on 4 year old hardware?
Why?
GOD DAMN IT, WHYYY?????!!!???
Could we potentially be running up against the limits of Moore’s law?
Probably not quite yet, there’s still a lot to be done with parallel processing. Still, the consoles are acting as more of a bottleneck now than in the past, and the law of diminishing returns has begun rearing its ugly head in the graphics department in the past few years. Some think we might not see a new console generation for another five or six years, which would throttle things down even further. All these factors suggest to me that the age of the six-month upgrade cycle could well be at an end, which doesn’t put the hardware manufacturers in a great position. But it does mean that our rigs will probably start lasting a lot longer, and graphics are pretty sweet already, so I think for the typical PC gamer this is a good thing.
@lumpi: Hum??.. my videocard is much less than $200 and make all consoles look like toys. Anyways I suppose your question is retorical. For a fixed hardware is easier to write code to is also easier to write poor code. Poor ports mean these limitations are still on the software, but not more on the hardware, so most console games are not designed to use all the potential of the PC. But, why would you want to play a console game? If you really want to do that, use his native hardware.
“Intel has never, EVER done gaming graphics well. Maybe that will change in the future, maybe not.”
Remember when ATI were the third-rate also rans who cornered the crappy integrated graphics market? That wasn’t all that long ago. Wasn’t all that long ago Intel were playing second fiddle to AMD in their main market either.
“Hum??.. my videocard is much less than $200 and make all consoles look like toys.”
Sorry, I just don’t buy this argument. It only works if you’re talking in terms of pure graphical grunt, things like maxing resolution, AA, AF and all that, which is only a small part of it.
A lot of modern console games have production values that put most of the pc market to shame. Even with the second-string stuff – what are the chances of the PC getting a modern turn-based strategy game that looked even half as good as, say, Valkyria Chronicles without cross-platform development? Never mind the poster boys like MGS, Killzone and all the others. Relative quality of the games aside, there’s almost nobody left who’d be crazy enough to lead mega-budget titles like these on PC. Not when there’s a ready market of fixed-spec consoles happy to buy them up at a premium.
Yes, I’d agree that the PC has the hardware potential to blow the consoles out of the water, but the games aren’t there, the money isn’t there, and seemingly nobody outside of the niche hardcore crowd gives enough of a toss to try.
Controversial one, this – but if you’re looking for brash, mega-budget graphical showcases, you’re on the wrong system. And I’m glad, frankly. With the surge in Indie gaming and some fantastic foreign imports (Hello Russia!) I’m enjoying PC gaming now more than ever.
Probably because there weren’t even any significant leaps in graphics cards this year, most people were probably absolutely fine with their 8800 GTs and anyone who did need a new card probably went with AMD this year.
> Basic computers come with utterly shit graphics cards, so it’s possible that the low end is holding up the market.
That’s not even the half of it. Basic computers *used to* come with utterly shit graphics cards, but at least they had a graphics card slot to be upgraded. The default form factor was a minitower full of air with a crap graphics card, or perhaps a half-decent graphics card for users who’d been upsold by the shop on the idea that it ‘was better’ even if they weren’t really thinking about games.
But today’s average computer is not even one of those crap store-sourced minitowers. It’s a laptop with useless integrated graphics that can’t be upgraded, and that’s if we’re lucky. Otherwise it’s a netbook. Sales of desktop PCs of the sort that can be made into gaming PCs are plummeting.
PCs are more widespread than ever, but potential gamers are dwindling — at least from the viewpoint of the big 3D-heavy major releases. (Obviously Casual is a completely different story.)
Today, just having a normal midrange graphics card puts you in the ‘hardcore’. SLI/Crossfire is so far out of the mainstream it’s utterly irrelevant. And anyway, who really wants those enormous, noisy-fanned, heat-spewing monsters? Why is the graphics card continuing to grow, as everything else about the PC shrinks?
Unless integrated graphics improve to the point where major-release games will run on them, and until Intel and AMD start mixing up their CPUs and GPUs as promised, we’re going to have a balkanised marketplace for PC games. And that will mean more big titles going to console.
It would be great if a workable standard for external graphics could be created. Every other upgrade is now external; all the things people used to put in PCI cards are now USB devices, it’s only graphics cards that remain. An external graphics unit one could plug into an otherwise-hopeless laptop would open up a new generation of gaming potential. Technically quite tricky though, and AMD’s XGP appears to be going nowhere fast.
Good, now with any luck the prices will keep dropping and we’ll find an 8800 class card standard in every PC, so every PC will be on par or better than a console and PC gaming will become the dominant platform.
Eh, I can hope =<.
Pet peeve time!
Why do people keep using the word quality? Wouldn’t quantity (in terms of pixels and such) or fidelity be much more accurate?
In photography, for example, a black and white photograph or a grainy photograph could be better in terms of quality, even if they don’t have the fidelity, of a modern day colour photograph.
PC only developers are becoming far and few between.
Heh, PC gamers supported Epic, DICE, Westwood, Maxis, Bioware, Ensemble, etc. for years, back when they made awesome PC games. Now they’re either nonexistent or part of mega-corps that’re interested in console games and shitty ports. These studios’ old titles are infinitely better than what they make today, which is why I think game quality is regressing, at least for the genres I like.
I agree with cheeba: the PC is no longer the “graphics whore” platform for a number of reasons, the chief one being that graphics are extremely expensive to make and, with a few exceptions, PC game sales have always been comparatively low. Still, look at how many people still play CS 1.6, WoW, Diablo II, StarCraft, and other ugly games :p
Redrain85’s post is also damn insightful. I wonder how long the console system as we know it will survive, given the risks and huge expenses incurred by the manufacturers. Nintendo deserves much respect for making a self-sustaining videogame business; Sony and Microsoft have profitable arms that can subsidize the losses of their respective console divisions.
I will simply say that the ‘graphic card prices are too high for what they do’ idea is dead on.
That said, I managed to get an nvidia 9800 GX2 for about 250 bucks — at the time, it was 600 Canadian.
I do not regret my purchase, as my 1200~ dollar computer fucking annihilates any game I throw at it* (except for bizarre issues with high quality shadows, which is apparently a known bug.)
Let’s just say I wept a little in happiness when I was playing the FEAR 2 demo, got all the way through without lag, and realised I had a 6 tabbed Google Chrome browser open (all with videos/etc), Firefox (for something Chrome had trouble with), 10 MSN windows, Quake Live, and still had WoW running.
I was… pleased.
Given the economy, the fact a 2-year old 8800GTX is all you need to run a decent frame rate, and stats surveys like Valve’s don’t show a rush for uber-fast GPU cards (1.7% of users in the Valve Hardware survey have more than one GPU in their PC’s)…why would anyone think there’s a huge market right now?
Given the economic situation and the prices of these cards, I still don’t see the benefit performance wise (and to the bank wallet), of having more than a single graphics card on my rig that’ll go ‘old’ in 6 months time.
Nvidia releases too many cards and sku’s over a year. Mid-range and top-end cards are too pricey to have them in multiples. SLI’ing them and making them really work has their own troubles as well – costs to benefits are just too small IMO. And all it can do is primarilly just for games anyway.
FuzzDad, there’s a difference between multi-GPU setups and powerful GPU’s, I could be running 2 6600GT’s and I’d be part of that 1.7% which, according to you, is an “uber-fast GPU”.
Yea…but the point is there’s no real market outside guys/gals with lots of disposable income AND are hardcore modders, overclockers, and Futuremark whores. Is that group of enthusiasts enough to sustain both ATI and nVidia in their current headlong pursuit to bash each others skulls in with the latest and greatest card nobody can afford?
Just because I resemble that remark (modder/overclocker/score keeper) doesn’t mean I’m in the majority and the majority rules w/their spending habits. No spending…no marketshare.
I thought Crysis did more harm than good. It was the annual reminder that you need to upgrade your system, but it took it way too far. Has consumer technology even caught up to its level of demand yet? It seems that maybe there was a little hesitation, and everyone trying to take a new perspective on pushing the technology. They even had to scale back Crysis to accommodate.
So really, two steps forward, two steps back. Or maybe three steps forward in 2007, but no room for improvement in 2008 (i.e. should have obeyed Moore’s law like the CPU manufacturers). We’ll probably see the trend continue in 2009 or 2010 and this hiccup will be forgotten.
Crysis may well have been demanding, but didn’t warhead prove that it was also badly optimised? I’ve never been entirely convinced that Crysis was barely playable on high-end systems at max settings due to the limitations of current hardware and not because of dubious coding.
“I still don’t see the benefit performance wise (and to the bank wallet), of having more than a single graphics card on my rig that’ll go ‘old’ in 6 months time.”
My GF has had the same computer for 2 years now, that cost 600 back then (including a decent LCD 19″ monitor”) played crysis mostly maxed, and hasn’t had a single problem running new games. So.. I think the days of computers doubling in capacity every 6 months is over.
And, frankly, those times brought about great advances, so they were worth-while.
The high-end graphics game market for the PC is circling the drain. People are fed up with having to upgrade their computer every 6 months just to keep up with games that will do nothing better than the last except render prettier leaves. Developers are fed up with shoveling millions into a project for a platform that will have the lowest sales and highest piracy rate. The only graphics pushing software the PC will get from here on out is console ports that are usually unoptimized and buggy (GTA4) because of the absolute mess of hardware configurations they would need to code for.
And for the poster who said consoles thrive off innovations on the PC, Uh what? Even if you are only talking graphically, consoles graphical direction has been ahead of the pc for ages. Games like Jet set radio, okami, and windwaker hit years before anything similar on the PC. Another poster mentioned Valkyria Chronicles which is another example of consoles trumping PCs when it comes to innovation graphically.
As for indie devs, more and more will move to the downloadable platforms of the consoles. Its a much more safe enviroment for them to get their small games out on without as much fear of massive piracy (90% piracy world of goo) plus get some free advertisment and exposure from the big three. There are tons of innovative games hitting PSN/XBLA these days, just look at the newly released flower for PSN and braid for XBLA for examples.
@catska
Uh, no. Wrong. Don’t confuse artistic style with graphic capability. Those games were artistically beautiful, but a PC could have just as easily produced those graphics with a modest graphics card.
Both the Playstation 1 and 2 may have had a brief periods where they were ahead of PCs at the time, in terms of rendering capabilities. But in both cases, it didn’t last long. Since then, consoles have leeched off the innovations on the PC, and were only on par at their time of release.
Both the 360 and PS3 are using GPUs derived from PC video cards. At their time of release they were not significantly ahead of their PC brethren, if at all. The 360 Xenon GPU is derived from the ATI X18XX/X19XX architecture, and the PS3 GPU is derived from the nVidia GeForce 7XXX architecture.
The next wave of consoles is set to repeat the same trend. The Xbox 720 (or whatever they’re going to call it) will have another ATI GPU derived from their current video cards, and the PS4 is rumored to be getting Intel’s Larrabee . . . which will show up on the PC, first.
Funny, then, that a developer like Valve always seems to make games for the PC that run really, really well and don’t cause people a lot of headaches.
I wonder why that is? Surely Valve has to deal with just as many different PC configurations, as any other developer? So why do their games always run so well?
If Valve can do it, why can’t the other game devs do it? Oh, right . . . they have to give a damn, first.
That’s where the problem really lies. Not because PCs are too difficult to code for. Quick, lazy ports with absolutely no effort being put in. Valve actually gives a damn, and polishes their games to an iridescent shine on the PC.
As for the rest of your comments, they’re great hyperbole.
Software is what matters, hardware advancing is inevitable. You really think next-gen consoles wouldn’t get much improved graphics if high-end video cards stopped coming out for the PC? Theres really only one direction to go.
All the Ultra Extreme QuadFX 500$ cards in the world won’t matter at all if no software comes out to take advantage of it. Look at when Gears of War came out for the 360 and was the absolute best looking game out (on anything) for a year or so until it showed up on PCs. This wasn’t that long ago. If the big developers are making their games for consoles (which they are), they arent going to be pushing the boundaries of high-end PC tech.
And as far as Valve goes, they are making games on an engine thats 5 years old. Of course they run well on older hardware, that was the entire point of the source engine. If you are using them as an example of graphics-pushing then I don’t know what to tell you. Also check the steam techsupport forums if you think valve games don’t cause any headaches.
@catska:
No. But the pace would certainly slow down, and the consoles wouldn’t enjoy the free lunch they’ve been getting up until now. The time between console releases would probably grow even longer, or the improvement between generations would diminish.
Anyway, you seem to miss the point: the latest consoles (except for Nintendo) have lost money. Lots of it. Neither Sony, nor Microsoft, have made their money back yet.
How can they keep sustaining new console releases, if they never recover their expenses? Right now they have to cheat, by taking money from their other divisions in order to keep the consoles going. For Microsoft, they take the money from their Windows and Office profits.
They can’t keep it up forever. It needs to become self-sustaining. But I don’t see how that’s going to happen, if the PC side of innovation – and people willing to pay the full costs – goes away.
Why do you think a graphics card costs $200 or more? Somebody’s got to pay for the R&D, and console owners sure ain’t that group of people. Unless you want to pay the true, full cost for your next console? Which will end up costing almost as much as PC?
I don’t think a lot of people would agree with you, on that one. Off the top of my head, I would say that Oblivion and the first Far Cry game were in the same ballpark.
And how old is the Unreal egnine? Unreal 3 is based on the previous version, which dates back just as long. Just because Valve’s Source debuted in 2004, doesn’t mean it hasn’t been dramatically rewritten under the hood in the meantime, like Unreal has.
If you are using them as an example of graphics-pushing then I don’t know what to tell you.
You said “console ports that are usually unoptimized and buggy (GTA4) because of the absolute mess of hardware configurations they would need to code for”.
My point was that whether or not a developer pushes the visual boundaries with graphics, is irrelevant. It all has to do with how much care they put into their work, and how much testing they do.
the first far cry game was in the same ball park graphically as gears of war?
I think you need to go back and look at far cry 1 , it came out 2 years prior to Gears of War and it looked great at the time but theres no comparison.
Were you thinking of the sequel or something?
GFWL advertisements that force you to close them to even view content? hasta la vista rps.