PC gaming is not in a bad way.

Fair enough, last year wasnt the best year for games, with lots of intended releases being delayed, but this year that is sure to change.

You would be surprised at the amount of PC gamers that can afford decently specc'd rigs.

Majority of PC gamers lie between the 20-35 age bracket, with quite a fair few being older (if not MUCH older) than that.

Sure, the younger, school going kids, who rely on playing games on 'Daddy's' PC wont be able to upgrade, but then again, a $500 gfx card isnt aimed at them anyway, is it?

Bare in mind that new DX card, ranging from $70 - $250 will be out soon, and the cost of CPU's is going through the floor, with new Core 2 being priced a little over $100 in the coming months.

Sure, not everyone can afford to stay with high end hardware (myself included) but who needs a X6800, 4 gigs of ram and a 680i mobo to play any game?

Considering my A64 3000+, cheap Gigabyte board, and 1gb ram can easily play any game out there, the only major cost is the GFX card, but, as I stated above, new cards will be relatively cheap.

Therefore, majority of people who are working, can afford to upgrade should they so wish or need.

I'm with Dublin on the upgrade costs. I just did GPU (7800GT), mobo (ABIT AB9), DDR2 (Geil Ultra PC2 800 2x512), and CPU (E6400) for $525US. If I can do it on disability pay of $600 a month, then if you're working you should be able to afford it. Where there's a will, there's a way! I'm just going to have to do some serious fasting this month, that's all.

lol


You could cook up that old ECS mobo you have there!!!

I am a dedicated and devoted PC gamer. I have many online gaming buddies and we have all chatted about Vista. From around 100 people I have chatted with, NON have Vista. Couple had tried the beta and dumped it. Dozen have a DX10 card and are disappointed with them, not as high a performer as thought. Almost everyone 90%+ have said they will upgrade to Vista if the latest release of HALO is Vista only!

I believe Halo2 for PC is being released in June of 07. At least it was the last time I checked.

Carl Sullivan said:
I bet you that if you got 2GB of RAM, that game would run fine. Having 1GB of RAM for Vista when it eats about 600MB of a fresh install, and then trying to play a game = not a good idea.

DublinGunner said: I was thinking of selling it. Like New ECS P4M800Pro-M $15 or will trade for 5 lb. block of cheddar cheese, OBO! <g>

Ray Wroten said:
I would bet that they installed Vista and then looked at how much ram it ate then dumped it. How long did they use the betas? Long enough to judge it? THe people that you have talked to about owning a DX10 card and them being disappointed with them, I almost dont want to believe just becuase if they have a good enough CPU and 2GB of Ram in their system, they can run ALL of their games on absolute max settings. I know I can. I am completely satisfied with my DX10 card. I bet the people you talked to had high expectations of the card for some reason. They probably over hyped the cards to themselves and then when they got it, they were disappointed.

And yes, Halo2 is a Vista exclusive.

CrAsHnBuRnXp said:

angryhippy aka payton said:

Yea they pretty much bought the DX10 card, installed it, cranked every setting on max and expected it to run flawlessly well above 30fps in BF2142. When frames dropped below 10 they got p**sed. That is there first thought, after they settle down and figure things out they are content.
Personally I have 2x 7800GT's running BF2142 @ 1680x1050 4x Antialiasing with some settings on low and medium. Runs perfect @ 45+ FPS.

I hate these kind of posts that say "Yeah my friend put an 8800GTX in his rig and it can't even run BF2142 at full tilt. FPS drops to 10 at times. The cards are a big disappointment." When they say the FPS dropped with the 8 series card did they have facts to back up their assertion that it is the 8800 card's fault? Do they have 2GB of RAM? Did 2142 run wth all the eye candy on, at max resolution, on their old vid card but no longer does so with the 8 series cards? What is the make up of the rest of their system? Please be specific, when you make statements like the above, to prove your assertion that an 8800series card can't run BF2142 at max everything. It blurs the argument and, sorry to say, shows the ignorance of the person making the statement as the card is just one part of the whole system and it cannot compensate for weaknesses elsewhere in the rig. Give us thye guy's specs and then we can see if the card is at fault or not.

You can have two 8800GTX cards installed and 2142 will still have a FPS drop if you have only 1GB of RAM or a weak processor. I have a single 8800GTS and it runs BF2142, with everything maxed out, without even heating up. This 8800GTS, is literally twice as powerful as my two 6800GTs, in SLI, overclocked to peak in 3DMark06. When I crank it up it hits 10800 in 3DMark06.

Also, remember that the 8800 is designed for DX10 which is a completely different package than DX9. It places much moe of the load on the GPU thereby relieving the CPU of many rendering duties. They are incredibly powerful cards but DX10 will push them much harderthan DX9 ever could.

Ray Wroten said:

Some settnigs on Low and medium????

I have x1800xt 512, 1gb Ram, 3000+ @2.3 and run everything max 12x10, apart from medium textures.

Why?? 1gb ram. Only reason. If your friends only have 1gb ram, tell them to turn textures to medium. BF2/2142 arent coded to use the frame buffer efficiently, and call to system ram for the majority of textures.

Also, what DX10 cards do they have?? What IQ settings are they trying to use? If they have a GTS 320, and they're trying to play @16x12 with 16xAA & 16xHQ AF, they will have problems.

You need to be realistic, and the fact that the BF2/2142 engine isnt really all that GPU taxing, performance depends a lot on your memory / cpu

You can say anything about PC gaming except it's on it's last feet. That sales are down (when they are), that less PC games were released in 2006 than ever before (and they did) that the average Gamespot review for PC games reviewed between October 1st and December 1st 2007 (The Xmas buying season when all good PC games are supposed to be released) was FIFTY-SEVEN PERCENT! When this year we have already seen 3 out of four 'hot' 2007 games being damp squids in reality, and with a six week old Neverwinter Nights 2 being thrown out of the US PC games chart in February by the RE-ENTRY of Bejeweled 2, a puzzle game, PC gaming is not doing well at the moment.

Now add Vista and the cost associated with upgrading, look at the UK PC market where it has been shown over and over the public do not spend more than £600 (equivalent of $700 PC) on a home PC, look at the marketing of CPU and Hard Drive space over graphics and sound and add in the next gen consoles and 2007 is going to be another rocky road for PC gaming.

If PC games don't continue to be XP compatible, DX9 compatible and 1.5ghz, 1gb ram system, at least for another eighteen months, then it will be moving even further ahead of the market. More and more PC gamers are not seeing a connection between modern PC games and their PC. Hence retro gaming growth.

Dismiss everything I have said, but if you accept that retro gaming is growing (check ebay) then you have to ask yourself why. You have to ask yourself why the Sims and Sims 2 and add-ons can sell in the millions and support multiple add-ons, and yet most HIT PC games of the last 4 years can't even sell 10% of their total, you have to say that PC gaming, Vista, DX10 and all the rest is all above most gamers. They want good games with good gameplay of at least 30 hours and able to run on the PC they currently have (average two year old technology. They play Far Cry and Half Life 2 and ask why modern games hardly look any better and yet demand such a high end system. They are being left behind.

The problem with PC gaming is everyone that reports on it earns their living from it in some way or another. So you always get the positive spin. Hardcore gamers are the other problem, as they refuse to understand they account for less tan 10-15% of gamers. What they want, what they are willing to spend, and what they are looking for in games, and not what the majority, want or can afford.

It's for all these reasons that I have not sold any PC game I have bought in the last 5 years. I have also bought a lot of classic games I never got around to initially (sometime because my PC wasn't powerful enough!). games like Privateer, Darkalnds, Dark Earth, Silent Hunter II, Battlezone II, etc. I now have a collection of around 200+ PC games, and quite expect to not be buying PC games with 18 months. Certainly last year I only bought 3 full-price PC games, with the average number bought being 4 in the UK in 2006. (15 years ago the average was 11!) I hope I am wrong, but was alway taught to be prudent. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. I have no expectation that Vista or DX10 is going to turn around PC gaming, and I don't expect Vista/DX10 games being any less cookie cutter and bland as XP games were...

While your telling me how wrong I am, remember I hope I am wrong too. I just don't think I am.

Merc said:

Sorry, ive heard this reasoning since the geforce256 and DX7. Don't you think that after 3
iterations of directx that the cpu should by now only be doing AI and physics ? lol

Sorry but for me DX10 is more like Glide was for 3Dfx cards years gone by.

To add, If it wasn't for trade secrets, DX10 would be running on linux by now

DX7,8 and 9 were all backwards compatible because they were built on the same framework. DX10 is new from the ground up , hence its lack of backward compatibility. At least that is what i have read, we'll have to see the benchmarks and independent reviews.

actually 98SE was capable of talking directly to the hardware, if im not mistaken it was NT versions of Windows that Utilized the HAL, or was GDI. I believe that DX10 will be supported in XP, just in a different way, sort of how WMP 11 is aswell. Considering MS wasnt ready for the OS themselves, Majority of people out there will not upgrade to Vista until at least 6 months have gone by, we have yet to pass 2 months.

Merc said:

That maybe true but remember that on its highest level DX10 is just another Programming Interface with hundreds of function calls. How the operating system and drivers implement
these functions is the real deal. In this regard theres no reason at all why vista dont have
a full implementation of DX9 but rather a 'emulation' via DX10

Remember how microsoft made it possible for win3.1 users to run 32 bit apps ? what did they do ? they supplied developers with the tools, in that case it was win32s(ubset).
What do you say ? Hows it possible to run 32 bit apps on a 16 bit operating system.
Well its true, with the right API you don't need to be operating system dependant.

Theres nothing technically stopping microsoft from implementing a DX10 subset in windows 98 for that matter....

Like I said, I only know what I have read in CPU and Max PC but it isn't so much making it backwards caompatible as the devlopers using it writing o a different interface. In other words, if you develop a title for DX-10 you'd have to completely rewrite it for DX-9 as the two are completely different frameworks.

Copied from Computer Power User March 2007 • Vol.7 Issue 3
Page(s) 48-51 in print issue

"Some examples. In DX9 and object used in the game loop must be validated millions of times but in SX10 it is rendered, validated once nd then stored for all future uses. DX10 has texture arrays, predicated draw, and stream output are completely new and greatly reducce CPU usage. From Compter Power User March Issue:
"Predicated draw helps determine which objects in a 3D scene will overlap other objects. The result is that the GPU won’t need to waste processing power drawing hidden objects. To exactly determine which objects are hidden, predicated draw calls for the GPU to first estimate the scene’s objects with simple box approximation. In DX10, predicated draw occurs completely on the GPU; previous DirectX versions require the CPU to work with the GPU for predicated draw.

With stream output the vertex and geometry shaders send their data output directly into graphics memory. In past versions of DirectX, the data would first pass through the pixel shader before going to graphics memory, requiring CPU intervention."

Then there is the completely redesigned Direct3D pipeline that puts most of the calculations through the GP rather than the CPU.

It ain't the same beast. It makes it much easier for developers to write their software and gives them a huge new arsenal of tools to use. In fact the developers were the ones screaming for a totally redesigned DirectX kernel, not MS. DX9 was what was keeping PC games in the past, it was a dinosaur and needed to go in order for gaming to move forward. Sooner or later you need to trash the old stuff and start over.

Of course the biggest whiners are the gamers who moan about the lack of growth and then moan when you revolutionize something and take the step forward they have been whining about. Then they moan that the new kernel needs a completely different GPU design to run this new software and would moan if it didn't requiere a new GPU architecture. Basically they moan and whine regardless of what you do.

Leonard Overbeek said:

You're right. But they would have to emulate DX10 functions via software in any OS apart from Vista.

So, if maybe you had an 8 core/processor machine, at around 3Ghz per core, it may be playable.

Yes, it is 'just' another interface, but you have to remember how the hardware deals with the fubctions in DX10 is vastly removed from earlier iterations of DX.

The majority of the data does not have to be processed by the CPU before heading off to the GPU, completely unlike earlier DX versions, where the CPU basically had to decode and suplly all of the geometry to the GPU before it could process & display it.

DublinGunner said:

Does that mean less frequent CPU upgrades will be needed once we have DX 10 graphics cards? I have a feeling I know the answer...