Yeah I don't think overclock.net is where everyone hangs though.
Lookie here a bit. A little more diversified.
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
Lookie here a bit. A little more diversified.
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
pc gaming after nextgen consoles
- Thread starter ebola
- Start date
It's the same story on all the major PC forums.... techpowerup, overclockers uk, hardocp, xtremeystems...
All have a very very large percentage of users that could be considered on par with or faster then whats inside PS4....
The biggest problem with PC and I think shifty talked about this a while ago is when to draw the line between a casual PC gamer and an enthusiast PC gamer.... it's this reason that the STEAM hardware survey is useless.
You also have to think gaming is a hobby but so is building the actual PC's is too.....
I love playing games on them just as much as I love spending hours building them, tuning, overclocking and upgrading them that drives the PC forward.
You always want more, more frame frames, more resolution, more effects.... more Mhz, more memory.....
It's that bug that causes people to upgrade...... And it's something that you console users will never understand.
Even to this day I can remember the first time I ever upgraded my PC.... the first time I ever used water cooling..... and the first time I ever went sub-zero...
That experience is worth the price of the hardware....... Looking at the PC when you're done, having people admire it and being able to say 'I built that' is just a priceless feeling that a console will never be able to provide.
I think we can see from Sony's press event that they care about the membership of Facebook more than xtremesystems, et al.
But how would class a PC user as an 'average' gamer...
Steam survey is not representative of the enthusiast PC gamer, certainly, but it is indicative of the active game buying population on PC.
As a publisher you have to make a decision on what will maximize your sales, as a developer, you have to meet whatever min spec the publisher decides to force on you, unless your name happens to be John Carmack or similar.
Just a glance at a recent console port, the Dead Space min spec, we have 2GB of RAM and DX9, that's not set based on what's required to run the game, the game is made to run on that platform. I don't think that min spec isn't going to change dramatically just because Sony or MS release a new box.
It will likely get a bump because at some level it's a negotiation between the developer and the publisher, but I wouldn't expect miracles.
looking at the Steam survey it looks like the DX10 feature set is viable, you could make a case for 4GB, but that's cutting out a lot of potential market.
As a publisher you have to make a decision on what will maximize your sales, as a developer, you have to meet whatever min spec the publisher decides to force on you, unless your name happens to be John Carmack or similar.
Just a glance at a recent console port, the Dead Space min spec, we have 2GB of RAM and DX9, that's not set based on what's required to run the game, the game is made to run on that platform. I don't think that min spec isn't going to change dramatically just because Sony or MS release a new box.
It will likely get a bump because at some level it's a negotiation between the developer and the publisher, but I wouldn't expect miracles.
looking at the Steam survey it looks like the DX10 feature set is viable, you could make a case for 4GB, but that's cutting out a lot of potential market.
I assume current PC game specs are capped to something akin to consoles. The current consoles are the limiting factor devs are aiming for, and it's a short hop and jump from current consoles to a DX9 PC. AAA development on next-gen won't port well to low-spec'd PCs any more than they'd port well to current console (offering an install base of 150 million that AAA next-gen games will be snubbing to achieve something new and high end).
A next-gen Dead Space or anything else making use of PS4's 8 GB GDDR5 just isn't going to port well. Either you invest in an alternative renderer (in which case, why not port to PS3 and XB360 also?), or just have too high a spec and require gamers to upgrade.
Does Steam provide metrics on who's playing what game? Can we see that of, say, 2 million sales of Call of Battlefields, 75% are buying it to play in Intel integrated graphics?
A next-gen Dead Space or anything else making use of PS4's 8 GB GDDR5 just isn't going to port well. Either you invest in an alternative renderer (in which case, why not port to PS3 and XB360 also?), or just have too high a spec and require gamers to upgrade.
Does Steam provide metrics on who's playing what game? Can we see that of, say, 2 million sales of Call of Battlefields, 75% are buying it to play in Intel integrated graphics?
Silent_Buddha
Legend
How much of that will be directly dedicated to the GPU at any given time? Obviously not the full 8 GB. Likely not 6 GB (something has to be there for the always on OS, social services, background services, etc. that Sony emphasized in their Feb. 20th reveal as well as the game's non GPU resources). Possibly 4 GB. I'd say on average about 1-3 GB will be GPU assets depending on the development budget of the game. Perhaps as much as 4 as I mentioned. 3-4 GB is already common on the high end video cards. 2 GB for midrange. That will only increase in the future.
This one is going to be the killer. Almost 30% of Windows based machines according to the Steam survey are still using a 32 bit OS.
I just noticed something weird. Valve is listing Ubuntu as a "Windows OS." LoL.
Only 2 GB of memory are addressable by a single program in 32 bit Windows unless a program is large address aware. In general no publisher/developer will make a program large address aware as it can cause problems in 32 bit Windows, although it behaves well in 64 bit Windows.
How's is it a reality check?
You want a reality check then go and check out some PC forums and you'll see that the steam survey is not as accurate as you think
We should all know by now that just about any forum on the internet isn't representative of the general buying public. If it were, then Kinect would be an absolute failure.
But it turns out it isn't. Regards,
SB
That's interesting, I hadn't heard anything about that although I understand AMD are starting to implement HSA features in their discrete GPU's. Given the nature of HSA I'm not exactly sure what that means but in combination with physical communication improvements it looks quite promising. CPU -> GPU communications have been a disadvantage for PC's since at least the PS2 days! Anything that can bring them even close to APU like communication levels is pretty exciting.
3dilettante said:
Any clarification you can provide would be greatfully recieved. As you say there's still very much a large phycisal seperation as well as two seperate memory pools so I'm not sure how things could be greatly improved let alone brought on par with a fully HSA APU.
Shifty: Unfortunately the survey doesn't correlate that stuff, though Valve undoubtedly has the data.
My point is that the min spec isn't driven by the games requirements, it's driven by what the publishers sales group thinks will maximize penetration. It's all cost return based.
A lot of console ports to PC aren't done by the primary developers, they are done by small external companies, and as a result are relatively low cost. There will be a cut off point where the cost of the port out weighs the likely return on investment, that will dictate where the maximum min spec can be.
I just don't think you'll suddenly see a jump to requiring PC's with similar performance to the new consoles. That MIGHT make current gen ports make financial sense, but again I wouldn't see it as a part of something done by the core development team.
I'm sure on a fast enough PC you'll get the full experience.
I could certainly be wrong.
My point is that the min spec isn't driven by the games requirements, it's driven by what the publishers sales group thinks will maximize penetration. It's all cost return based.
A lot of console ports to PC aren't done by the primary developers, they are done by small external companies, and as a result are relatively low cost. There will be a cut off point where the cost of the port out weighs the likely return on investment, that will dictate where the maximum min spec can be.
I just don't think you'll suddenly see a jump to requiring PC's with similar performance to the new consoles. That MIGHT make current gen ports make financial sense, but again I wouldn't see it as a part of something done by the core development team.
I'm sure on a fast enough PC you'll get the full experience.
I could certainly be wrong.
Well we have a solution for the PS4 ports, it's a $1000 video card from nvidia, it features 6GB Ram
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6774/nvidias-geforce-gtx-titan-part-2-titans-performance-unveiled
It's interesting that we had a discussion about vram size and problems that could relate to ports if the PS4 would have 4GB GDDR5 and now we are looking at 8GB, i feel weak with my 2GB 680
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6774/nvidias-geforce-gtx-titan-part-2-titans-performance-unveiled
It's interesting that we had a discussion about vram size and problems that could relate to ports if the PS4 would have 4GB GDDR5 and now we are looking at 8GB, i feel weak with my 2GB 680
I guess that's a good thing as long as it doesn't impact the DX11 path. I'd have thought a game based on DX11 technology from the ground up would have been very difficult to scale down to DX9 but you obviously know a lot better than me!
Saying that though, surely they won't go lower than DX10. There's probably very little DX9 hardware out there anymore and of that which is left it's probably incapable of playing anything close to resembling a next generation game. Plus people still using DX9 hardware probably aren't in the market for anything beyond casual games in the PC space.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
As AMD transitions to more and more APUs versus traditional CPUs, that should in theory be enough to close the gap with regards to GPU compute over time. For GPU grahics rendering while rendering over the PCIE bus is less efficient, the GPUs will also be many times more powerful, hence I don't view that as a potential bottleneck for straight console to PC ports.
It just remains to be seen how GPU compute friendly Intel will make their CPUs.
Regards,
SB
I'm sure the consoles would be sitting very near the right of that bell curve today but the good news is that however far right it is today, it's a lot further left than it was in February 2005.
The physical distance is a factor, as are the steps in the PCIe protocol and data layers to send a request and receive a response.
Some old data puts it over 250 ns, and that's just half of the desired transaction.
The APU provides on-die facilities that should operate much faster because they don't need to care about distance or an external physical interface's protocol. Durango's coherent GPU-CPU bus isn't as wide as main memory, but it needs an order of magnitude less time and would be wider than PCIe. Since the coherent link is standard APU architecture, I don't think Orbis will be differing in this regard.
If some algorithm happens to hammer on this in a significant manner on these new consoles, it's going to be difficult to hide.
Cheers, I guess we'll have to see how things play out then. Perhaps PC's will be forced to go down the big APU route in order to keep up. Either that or they'll have to rely on SIMD heavy CPU's like Haswell or some sort of wokload split between APU based GPU and discrete GPU in AMD's case.
Bagel seed
Veteran
It's interesting that we had a discussion about vram size and problems that could relate to ports if the PS4 would have 4GB GDDR5 and now we are looking at 8GB, i feel weak with my 2GB 680
That's a good feeling
Another advantage to add to the pile, and to slow the obsolescence rate.Similar threads
