q3atest, anyone?
Just a pity id went down the drain and lost the will / people who were able to make good games :(. I remember when there was serious debate over UT vs. Quake, and people thought epic really were the underdog with little chance of success, that they’d get buried. Ahem. See how far id hath fallen :(.
(although TBH I think epic deserved their success - UT still rocks, even after the cynical money-making and poor releases of 2003/04/05)
Funny you bring this up. I met up with Mark during booth setup and as we were walking the floor together, we hit the Intel booth. He launched into his tirade, flinging 4 letter words at the top of his lungs while the Intel people were within earshot. Makes you blush, but he has a point.
-Chris
I think this notion of “Intel destroying PC gaming industry” is nonsense. Intel is just providing what its clients want. Not every single person on the planet is a game aficionado geek that buys a new PC every year just to keep up with the latest eye candy.
Let’s think, they (the makers of HL2) make money developing complex middleware and licensing it to other softhouses to produce games? And that requires the consumers to have the very latest hardware (a $10000+ PC)? And how’s that Intel’s fault? If I were the owner of some company I would go where the consumers are, just a thought… either abandoning PC or supporting the “shitty Intel IGPs”.
And since Java isn’t the hottest thing on consoles, if I were a Java game developer I would also worry about making my games to run in these “shitty boards” as well.
Never a truer word written here. The cards are what the cards are. We should write for the market - not what we think the market should be.
Kev
See this article for some stats on market shares for graphics cards as at the end of 2005: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdext/is_200602/ai_n16043801. I can’t get the original source of the stats since their reports are not free.
Currently Intel, ATI and Nvidia have about equal shares of 30%, but in the past Intel had a much higher share so most PCs have those ‘shitty intel boards’.
Another slightly older report, for the end of 2004: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20050728052358.html.
Says that stand-alone (non-integrated) chips on desktop computers are shared about 50-50 ATI vs Nvidia,
‘High-end chips’ are 75% NVidia, and
Laptops are 50% intel graphics chips.
On finding these stats, I was disappointed since I have heard that OGL doesn’t run well on most boards/drivers unless its an Nvidia card. However, if quake has used OGL in the past, does that mean that most/all graphics cards or windows computers support some minimum version of OGL? If so, why do the devs using JOGL have so many compatibility problems?
Keith
They’re not just cheap cards though, the biggest problem IMHO is that the drivers are really buggy, and tend to crash in uncatchable ways with no way of preventing it.
Annoyingly places like Dell sell machines with ridiculously fast CPUs, lots of memory and then go and shove one of those chips in to keep costs down. Worse, they’ll lable it a “high end gaming pc”, the buyer doesn’t know any better and we end up with lots of “why doesn’t you game work on my uber pc! I paid lots of money for it, it must be good!”.
Then, simply put, you should go read the transcripts of what he’s saying and think about it until you’ve understood the points contained therein. His key point - the one that underlies everything - you don’t even mention. Although you do mention something which supports his argument, amusingly :).
Summarizing poorly: when you make a game, you have to compete. Competing means equivalent-to-your-competitors’: graphics, gameplay, quality, depth, etc. Doing this cost money proportionally. You have to provide reasonable chance of recouping that money and making more than it cost, otherwise you will not be in business for long. The PC games business is competing with the console games business. There are > 120 million playstations out there, every one of which has a high chance of buying any game you put out there. There are approximately 900 million PCs out there, which on average each have a much lower chance of buying a game you put out there. Intel graphics chips account for between 20% and 60% of the section of the PC market which has a high-ish chance of buying games (according to games industry reports and internal marketing-research depts). To compete against consoles, you literally cannot afford to not work on intel chipsets.
However, each year intel chipsets increase in performance by around 5%.
Each year (averaged), console chipsets increase in performance by around 20%.
Each year, non-intel gfx cards increase in performance by around 25%.
So, if Intel stopped selling crap, the PC games business would be slightly outstripping the console games business in performance (and hence geting the cost for writing PC games down a lot, making them a lot more easy to develop and sell profitably).
Instead, Intel’s sales are gradually destroying the PC games business.
I’d hope Mark would find that a not-too-bad summary, but errors and ommissions my own.
Be really, really careful here - the report is not clear, but the following quote from that article suggests you’ve misread it (I read it the same way myself, first time)
…since the average cost of an nv or ati card is higher than for an intel card, this means the quote:
…does NOT mean “intel had 61% of new PC’s, before people upgraded with slot-in cards” (as I first read it, because that’s what we all care about), but in fact means “intel had 61% of the market” (in the terms that we count “market” - because we’re counting “installed user base” whereas they are counting “money in intel’s pocket”).
I would also point out that of the people who upgrade by purchasing an add-on card they are (guesstimate) probably more likely to do so on a non-intel integrated graphics, because they’re probably buying a better-quality mobo in the first place. So, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that intel has very close to 60% market share right now. This is a figure I’ve seen people like Mark throwing around based on market reports they’ve done themselves or bought.
While I can see the logic in the Intel argument - it also does sound a bit bobbins doesn’t it? I mean, the point of this thread is that the big games arn’t intended to be run on Intel chipsets - they arn’t properly tested on them and no dispensation is made for people running on them. They just stick a Required System panel on the box that says Nvidia or ATI card. So the cost of development and testing argument doesn’t ring true to me.
I also would think that the problem between PC gaming performance and console performance is more to do with the fact that you can buy the complete console for the price of an up to date graphics card. Thats never going to help a platform compete is it?
Kev “Intel saved my life” Glass
[quote=“blahblahblahh,post:27,topic:28791”]
How can one company’s sales destroy the PC gaming industry? That makes utterly no sense. I’m not saying I’m siding with Intel or Dell, I actually prefer nVidia.
I believe the issue is that, financially, you cannot “just do that” if you are a mainstream game developer - you can’t afford to. Or, to put it another way, if you do then you’ll just give up after one title and move to only making console games, because it’s less hassle. You do also, of course, have all the hassle of people complaining your game is rubbish because it runs badly on their 3 ghz machine (becasue they ignore the graphics card requirement). Most people have no idea what “MX” stands for (“crap graphics card” would be one way of putting it :P) and have no intention/ability to go and learn the details of which card is which before buying a game and a computer.
…but I’m just trying to explain his argument here, not make it for him.
I’d say that’s disingenuous - you’re talking about prices charged to early adopters who want TEH BEST GAMING SYSTEM!!! to show off / be happy about / do something with their copious spare cash, not about what’s actually needed to play current and upcoming games at high resolution with the majority of the effects (modulo some games these days add effects that they know only 1% of the market will be able to use).
If you know what you’re doing, a good-enough-to-play-all-games-for-the-next-12-months-at-least gfx card costs around £75, and the rest of the PC to go with it around £400. That’s the same price range as a PS3 - or even a 360 once you’ve bought decent controllers, the net connection, etc.
[quote=“Jamison,post:30,topic:28791”]
Sorry, I thought the last bit was obvious so didnt make it explicit:
Given all the above, most games developers cannot afford to develop AAA games - that compete with console games - on PC any more, and more and more of them are giving up on doing so, or are losing their crowns (e.g. id) to console-focussed companies.
It’s very hard to tell in the games industry how many companies are actually going under, because there’s dozens of games companies going bust and many more being bought out, split up, cut to pieces, etc every year. Ditto for trends in moving from PC dev to console dev - because develoeprs swiing back and forth from project to project, and each project takes 2-4 years.
But, from an economic standpoint, it’s pretty watertight and there’s not much you can argue with: this is, in fact, how funding and project-scope decisions are made in the industry, and they are definitely affected by the massive dominance of intel chipsets. It would be fair to say that intel has something of a monopoly, and one could even argue that they have every interest in destroying gaming on the PC because that would put GFX card companies out of business for PC - which would mean their great threat to profitibility in the chipset space would disappear. You could argue their purchase of GFX companies was part of this long-term strategy. But you’d be doing a lot of what-if’s and assuming malice in a lot of places where it’s probably just incompetence and laziness.
I doubt PS2 performance increased any number greater than zero since it was first released and IGPs such as this Intel one can do better graphics than PS2. I don’t buy the argument that a company satisfying its clients is guilty of killing the industry.
I have seen comments on forums of people running HL2 in a GeForce 2, with lower video settings of course, but running. The only reason for it not to run in Intel’s IGP is the will of the producers, since it can easily outperform a GeForce 2.
Given the quality I can run some old games of mine, I think this IGP can easily make PS2-like or XBox-like games in terms of graphical quality. Surely NOT PS3 or XBox 360, but I don’t think PS2 and XBox are that bad, especially because they still sell today. But we don’t see anyone accusing Sony or Microsoft of still selling these underpowered gaming hardware, or of holding “game softhouses” back because of it.
Um, hold on, thats the points - thats exacty what the main stream is doing - making games that don’t run on low end systems like the one the OP has. They’re rolling out games that are tested against the good hardware and sod the crappy stuff - good or bad, it’s still the case.
It’s indie folks that have to cope with all the crap cards to try increase the potential market so they can make some sales, especially in areas the big boys can’t be bothered with.
Hold on though, we’re saying that the average person out there hasn’t got a friggin clue what graphics card on a PC does what. They buy some bog standard box from Dell, it comes with some shit card - geeks like us tell them the card is crap so they go to the store and look for the bestest bestest uber goodness card they can find - see the price and thing, heh, I’ll just buy an xbox360 instead.
Fair enough, just doesn’t sound like it holds water to me. More like someone trying to blame incompatible software on someone else - hmm, someone in the software industry trying to pass the buck, never seen that before 
Kev
The drivers may not be the “best example of software” but look at EA games! NFS Most Wanted run flawlessly! By looking at the requirements they say they support Intel IGPs. Why EA can do it and other don’t?
If I were the only one in the planet seeing these problems I could believe that my IGP alone is the reason for HL2 not working, but given the number of complains on forums about the stuttering bug, crazy recipes for “curing it” (like manually hacking the HL2 files to remove the autosaves) and other crashing problems, I think HL2 engine has some degree fault in here.
[quote=“ChrisM,post:12,topic:28791”]
But it is possible in the Mac world. An advantage of having a single manufacturer. Of course the price goes up a bit in that case.
PC hardware is, in general, crap. Where I work we buy a lot of high-end motherboards, even they stink. In the past we have had various problems from all sort s of manufacturers, such as: USB doesn’t work at all, USB for mouse and or keyboard doesn’t work, PCI slots don’t work, some PCI slots don’t support bus mastering, etc. Dual processors don’t work, Quad core doesn’t work, hyperthreading doesn’t work. All of these things are just with regular Windows 2k/XP OS. It happens a lot. I think the commodity nature of the PC market with cheap parts being integrated by companies that don’t test things contributes to the effect. Sometimes it could be that certain specifications are ambiguous and that leads to incompatible devices.
Mind you, I suspect Apple machines have the same problem to a degree… but the advantage there is that if there is a problem, all the machines of that revision have the same problem so it is easier to deal with and work around. 20+ years ago when there weren’t really any "clone"computers, Commodore and Atari and IBM et.c would make a few models of computers and if you got one it would work the same as if your friend got the same model. Today it just doesn’t work that way.
That’s exactly why I put the “(averaged)” in there - console market upgrades by much more than 20% each generateion, but each generation lasts around 5 years. 20% may be a conservative estimate there - I was trying to do the compound interest rate maths in my head and tried to be conservative.
Those two statements are unrelated, bar the paranoia-theory I mentioned at the end - although there’s something to be said for the fact that producing better chipsets each year could be cheaper thanks to shrinking die sizes and reduced support costs etc. The rate of improvement of intel chipsets is considerably below the rate of improvement of all other electronics, which is (I believe) part of Mark’s fury - why is intel artificially moving their chips ahead slower than normal electronics, which get both cheaper AND better every year?
I do not claim to know the financial benefits - only that sometimes there ARE benefits (even just in basic cost) to keep your hardware upgrading over time, e.g. to lower power, smaller die size, etc - such that its not 100% clear that they keep the rate of improvement practically non-existent only to save money.
That doesn’t hold as an argument. Valve has more money than God (officially; didn’t you get the press release? ;)) and can happily afford to optimize for all sorts of chipsets that others cannot justify.
Firstly, PS2 and XB quality is utter crap and horrible to look at - at least, once you’ve played any of the 360 games on an HD TV (which is proving a LOT more common than I thought it would for at least another two years to come; seems like MS’s choice to force developers to build-in HDTV compatibility was a really good move).
Secondly, it’s not just a question of the hardware’s intrinsic ability, it’s the compound issue of how much resource (programmers, testers, debugging) does it cost a games company to achieve that ability.
Less GTA then I would have hoped for. The game had a lot of waisted potential. Expecially multiplayer. From what I read, TestDrive did it a little better.
Not to mention the darn cheating system. (rhinos argh!)
The physics were often very strange. Riding over a curb (near the jail) at about 120 the inner wheel caused my porsche to flip.
amd 2700, 1gig ram, geforce 6800… never had problems with other games.
At times I had to reduce resolution and whatnot so the game does not stutter at the wrong times.
[quote=“blahblahblahh,post:37,topic:28791”]
I partly agree with you here. I played Xbox for about two years till I upgraded my PC. I thought the graphics were just great, but once I got my PC, it just looked horrible. I have not played any Xbox games since then.
Just wait till you start playing 360 games…