Impressions: Is PC Gaming Dying?
I bought Crysis a couple of months back. And now its sitting snug in my cupboard along with my other games. The only difference is that I have PLAYED all my other games. Crysis, on the other hand, turned out to be too high and mighty to be played on my computer… at least at an acceptable frame rate and with decent visual effects.
Don’t get me wrong, my computer is by no means underpowered: It runs a decent Core2 duo 2.2 Ghz processsor (overclocked to 2.6), 1 Gig of RAM and a nVidia 8600 GT graphics card with 256 MB VRAM (slightly overclocked). It meets (and in some cases exceeds) the required configuration for playing Crysis. But guess what, the game stutters all the way. It struggles as if I was forcing it to be run on a Pentium 3 machine. I mean, this is a machine that runs Bioshock with most of the visual effects turned on and it doesn’t even break a sweat. Quake 4? Check. Halflife-2? Check.
Sure, I could probably manage to play it with all the graphics dumbed down. But that’s not what I bought Crysis for. What happened to all the mind boggling visuals you saw in the videos? I wonder how many people on earth managed to got to see that on their own computer screens. Not many I assure you.
PC game developers need to wake up face reality. What is the point of churning out visually great games if the only people who can play it are the ones with Alienware machines? How many people at least have the configuration that I have?
As a result of this we are now seeing a shift in trend. Gamers are seemingly moving away from the PC and setting their sights on consoles like the XBOX or PS3.
The good thing with consoles is that it puts all gamers under a common belt. Halo 3 will look as good on your machine as mine. No more boasting about the rig that you have. Consoles give you a certain amount of future proofing. At least for a couple of years. No more running around for component upgrades the moment the latest title hits the shelves.
This is exactly where the problem lies with PC game developers. They consider a PC to be an infinitely extendable platform. This is true to a certain extent. Components can be upgraded or replaced to run the latest and greatest games. And hardware developers like Intel and nVidia will only be too glad to churn out the new processors to up the ante.
But at what cost? I bought my graphics card for a premium towards the end of last year and it struggles to run a game released around the same time frame! Outrageous. I do admit that PC graphics are unrivalled. The kind of eye candy you can achieve by using a top of the line graphics card cannot be attained even on the PS3 which is (at least hardware spec wise ) the most powerful console to date. A classic example is Crysis for the Xbox which currently under development. It is not a port of the PC version because the XBOX has no support for DirectX 10. And I personally feel that the other real reason is that the XBOX cannot handle that kind of graphics. Period.
Also, some PC games don’t get released for the consoles. Even if they do, it may be well after the PC release. Not to mention the fact that it may not be released for the console you have (such as Halo, which is exclusive to the XBOX). Of course, the other way round is also true. Some games are released exclusively for consoles.
So unless PC game developers take a long hard look at the kind of system requirements their games are dictating and do something about it, we will soon see a shift in camps. I have been a loyal PC fan all these years. (where else would I play Age of Empires ?!) But with the kind of games that are being released for the consoles these days and the fact that games released for a console are GUARANTEED to work on that console (try saying that for a PC), I shall soon be in the market for an XBOX 360 or a PS3.
I wonder what TV I should buy to go with it. Hmm.
And as for Age of Empires? Well… my friend still plays that on a P3 celeron machine with all of 64 MB of RAM.
Happy Gaming,
Alex
