The Next-gen Situation discussion *spawn

[Nesh]

I see...so the people who don't spend hundreds on their video cards aren't "real gamers" now. In combination with the "your not a PC gamer so you don't know about tech" comment you made, I see where your coming from.

I dont think that the distinction he makes is related to "tech knowledge".
The distinction he makes is in relation to the type of games played. Usually those that play games such as COD, Mass Effect, Diaplo 3 etc are the people more likely to be dedicated gamers and thus more likely to want to spend more to get a certain performance.
I know where he is coming from because I see often people who although arent videogame fans or even hate videogames, often "game" on social networks like facebook (See farmville) or on games such as Sims. They kill time with non-demanding past time interactive software. So performance becomes irrelevant. Many of them dont even consider their selves gamers to begin with.
The COD, NFS, Mass Effect, WoW(etc) guy play more demanding games and will invest on more expensive hardware, not necessarily top of the line, but certainly hardware that performs very well. I wouldnt say that all of these guys play on 2TF GPUs and anyone who doesnt he is a Sims guy. Thats maybe a bit extreme. Less powerful PCs also perform at satisfactory levels too for more serious games.

But it would have been interesting if a survey was made by a company to collect statistics

 

[almighty]

I see...so the people who don't spend hundreds on their video cards aren't "real gamers" now. In combination with the "your not a PC gamer so you don't know about tech" comment you made, I see where your coming from.

The people that don't upgrade are not the ones that push the industry forward.

And I never said you know about tech, you seem to think you know everything about PC gaming and high end hardware when you've not had any experience with it.

I'm in a unique position where I'm able to afford a machine that is beyond even 99% of PC gamers but I've also used practically every CPU and GPU for the last 4-5 years so when people talk about capabilities I'm able to provide actual figures and numbers as opposed to just guessing

 

[Inuhanyou]

I've said many times that i don't know anything. Infact i said so in my very first post. That's what i'm here for, to learn from people like yourself.

My point is that your classification of what a gamer is, is wrong. We have people who have entree level set ups to play their collection of games on, and we have folks who use high end set ups. There is no distinction between the two besides how much power they've invested into their rig and at what price point.

 

[pjbliverpool]

What were the latest Steam hardware survey results?

If a next gen machine launches with the equivalent of 2TF in GPU power, what percent of PCs will it be better than?

I believe the answer to "how do you define a gaming PC" in this context is "Every consumer PC that meets or exceeds the minimum spec to play each given game".

Afterall, that is the market the developers of games are targetting and everyone in that market has the capability of playing the game on their PC whether they want to or not.

Or put another way, a PC cannot be considered a gaming PC in relation to a particular game if it's not capable of playing it. The owner always has the ability to upgrade the PC to make it capable of playing the game but if they choose not too then they are clearly not part of the developers target audience.

So in a way it's different for every game and will change over time but I expect most first generation consoles games of the upcoming refresh will settle on similar minimum specs on the PC side. DX11 capability will probably be a given and I'd imagine horsepower wise they won't be targetting anything less than NV 650 level and it's AMD equivilent but this is of course only an educated guess.

But using that guess as a point of reference the question is, what percentage of PC's sporting 650 level performance (virtually all will be consumer rather than business so that qualifier can be ignored for now) will have power greater or equal to the next generation consoles. And that of course depends how powerful the next generation consoles are!

So the bottom line is that question can't really be answered at the moment. But if we assume the consoles will be sporting Pitcairn class GPU's then we should at least be able to get a rough idea of how many PC gamers from 650 level upwards are running Pitcairn or faster level systems. My completely off the top of my head guess would be at least 50%.

Therefore, with a lot of assumptions and guess work I'm going to say 50-60% of PC's within the taget market for a given next generation game will be capable of matching the consoles experience. Take that with a massive dose of salt.

 

[(((interference)))]

I disagree with that, there are a lot of hardcore gamers who don't need hardware that can play the latest & greatest titles simply because they don't need the performance for the games they play.

See the horde of WoW,DoTA, or Diablo 3 players, never mind the millions of people who still play the original Starcraft regularly (or CS 1.6 or Source, even TF2).

I think the Steam hardware survey is a reasonable basis for our purposes since the members of the survey population can be considered gamers since they have steam installed (and so is unlikely to include office PCs or the average consumer, or even casual gamers - Steam's audience is mostly traditional gamers).


That said, these are the results of the latest steam hardware survey:
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=pc

 

[pjbliverpool]

I disagree with that, there are a lot of hardcore gamers who don't need hardware that can play the latest & greatest titles simply because they don't need the performance for the games they play.

In the context of the question, "how many PC's will be able to run next generation games as well as next generation consoles" how can it be fair to include PC's that can't play next generation games at all? Just because they are capable of some level of gaming doesn't mean their owners are at all interested in playing next generation consoles ports and thus they aren't part of that market. If you're going to include PC's with any level of gaming ability then you'll have to include just about every PC out there today since Facebook games are huge and will run on just about anything, including tablets and some phones!

Surely the far better question is "of all PC's that are capable of running next generation games, what percentage will play them as well or better than the consoles".

 

[(((interference)))]

No, that's not the question.

The question is, how powerful are the next generation consoles relative to PCs used for gaming at launch, and how big a difference this is from last gen (where the 360 was something like better than 95% of machines used for gaming).

 

[pjbliverpool]

Its still completely dependent on how you define "a pc used for gaming". But if you use the 360 as a comparison point there will no doubt be a higher percentage of pcs on par with or faster than the new generation of consoles upon their launch than there were when the 360 launched.

Probably the most accurate way to look at it is to look at the actual numbers rather than trying to work out a percentage of some undefinable base set. So how many pcs by the end of this year will be packing pitcairn or higher levels of performance? And how many were packing 7800gx 512mb or higher level performance back at the end of 2005? I expect the former number will be considerably higher, perhaps even by an order of magnitude.

 

[(((interference)))]

That definition is taken care of by using the Steam hardware survey results, as those are PCs used for gaming (and since most casual gamers haven't heard of Steam, mostly traditional gamers).

 

[almighty]

People buy consoles with the intent of doing heavy gaming.

So it makes to only compare that to people who buy a PC with the intent of doing heavy gaming.

 

[almighty]

That definition is taken care of by using the Steam hardware survey results, as those are PCs used for gaming (and since most casual gamers haven't heard of Steam, mostly traditional gamers).

I wouldn't use those results, if they gave a break down on an individual game level then it would.be useful.

 

[DoctorFouad]

People buy consoles with the intent of doing heavy gaming.

So it makes to only compare that to people who buy a PC with the intent of doing heavy gaming.

sorry but I dont know where you live, most probably in a developed part of the world, I can assure you that most PC gamers in this planet (Earth btw) have yet to adopt PCs with geforce7 / 8 level of processing power, let alone the kind of monster PCs that you are describing and comparing to xbox360/ps3...

 

[DoctorFouad]

How are you going to measure that? ND release a next-gen LoU/UC type game, that'll look amazing. How do you qualify that it is 'destroying' UE4 space shooter on PC running at 2x the resolution, 2x the framerate, and bettter IQ? Or an open-space Assassin's Creed? Or Battlefield 4?

I can well believe that, as always happens, there'll be a wave of enthusiasm for first-party titles on Sony's console that 'blow the competition out of the water', but such sentiments are going to be so subjective and dominated by art and style and non-technical features that the comparisons will be ludicrous ("This on-rails shooter looks a million times better than that open-world survival game. This photoreaslitic racer looks a million times better than that highly stylised but technically more demanding racer").

I honeslty dont have time now to search and give you specific answers and examples to your very interesting question (how do we know if one game is technically superior to another and thats its just not due to the better/subjective/artistic style of game developers ? but thats a different question than : can games be technically superior to one another even if they run on the same engines and the same hardware ?

for the second question, at least I think we should be clear of what we are talking about and what each of us is claiming, i dont understand what you are trying to say here. Now I guess there are 2 possibilities (correct me if I am wrong) :

1/ you are saying that any game running on the same hardware cant be technically superior to another game running on this same hardware. Now there are 2 possibilities :

a/ one game record a higher % utilization of processing power than the other, for this scenario the claim that the games cant be technically different is clearly false.

b/ both games are using the processing power at 100% (which btw wasent the case of first generation ps3 games, some SPEs were simply not used at all).

now even if we are in the presence of this scenario (which is doubtful regarding first generation games of nextgen consoles) , I am claiming that game A can still be technically superior to game B for efficiency reasons, you can achieve better results using the same number of processing cycles and the same bandwidth and the same quantity of RAM if your code is written and running more efficiently.


2/ You are saying that any game running on the same engine and the same hardware with the same hardware % utilization, cant be technically superior to another game running on the same engine and the same hardware with the same hardware % utilization.

if thats what you mean, I dont agree because of my argument of different games assets that suit differently different hardware. just read my response below.

You're changing your tune here. You said that Crysis beat everything that PS360 could achieve, so much so that current consoles wouldn't compete in their whole lifetime and gamers were bitterly disappointed. Now you're saying that it isn't about power but the art form as a whole, and a lower spec'd machine can produce better looking games. If the art and overall game can be a superior experience (which I agree with), then what's the argument with Crysis blowing away everything on consoles? Or, if Crysis was that good, how come every cross-platform game that'll run significantly better on PC in the same way Crysis on PC runs better than on console won't be dominating next-gen as you claim Crysis did this?

I didnt said it is about "the art form", I said clearly it is about which kind of "games assets" (including physics, AI...) developers choose to implement in their game. Thus a game can be technically inferior to another game even if both are running on the same engine and on the same hardware, because one developer is choosing to implement intelligently games assets that suits better this particular hardware, and this can be done only with exclusive games, for multiplatform games developers have to compromize and choose games assets that could run well on all platforms. (I thought I was pretty clear in my statements regarding this point, I even gave the example of high rez transparencies on xbox360).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

for the second question, at least I think we should be clear of what we are talking about and what each of us is claiming, i dont understand what you are trying to say here. Now I guess there are 2 possibilities (correct me if I am wrong) :

1/ you are saying that any game running on the same hardware cant be technically superior to another game running on this same hardware. Now there are 2 possibilities :

2/ You are saying that any game running on the same engine and the same hardware with the same hardware % utilization, cant be technically superior to another game running on the same engine and the same hardware with the same hardware % utilization.

if thats what you mean, I dont agree because of my argument of different games assets that suit differently different hardware. just read my response below.

Neither. We were talking about comparing games on PS4 to games on (far) more powerful PCs, and you suggesting the PS4 would blow the PC away. You can look at an example of Uncharted 4 on PS4 and say it's 'better' than any game on a more powerful PC, but there's no measure to that. It's just a visceral, subjective response. We've had many such discussions on this board where people make claims that different looking games on different platforms are superior technical achievements (PS3 exclusive corridor shooter is so much better than XB360 open-space shooter, yada yada). I'm sure we'll have more when next gen launches.

 

[I.S.T.]

Well personally I don't class those as gamers..... I know loads of people that only play The Sims on there PC, I don't class those as gamers either.

Playing only a couple of games constantly is not what a gamer is to me.

And 2 year old mid-range hardware should still be over 1Tflop

I gotta say, the amount of shit you're full of is quite something. I can see it all the way from my house. How did you pull that off? I'm quite impressed.

My 800 or so GLOPS GTX 650 doesn't qualify me as a gamer? How about the 300+ hours I've put into Killing Floor, Diablo 2(that one's got over 1K hours into it), Borderlands 1, the recent 53 hours of Batman: AC GOTY, the dozens of hours in various Serious Sam games, the hundreds in various Final Fantasies...

 

[DoctorFouad]

I gotta say, the amount of shit you're full of is quite something. I can see it all the way from my house. How did you pull that off? I'm quite impressed.

My 800 or so GLOPS GTX 650 doesn't qualify me as a gamer? How about the 300+ hours I've put into Killing Floor, Diablo 2(that one's got over 1K hours into it), Borderlands 1, the recent 53 hours of Batman: AC GOTY, the dozens of hours in various Serious Sam games, the hundreds in various Final Fantasies...

finally a reasonable PC gamer on this thread that dosent hold a narrow extremist unrealistic definition of PC gamers or what kind of PCs gamers use to play their preferred video games...thanks god they do exist after all here on this very BEYOND3d forum...

 

[I.S.T.]

Most of that PC gaming was done on a stock GTS 250, no less(I have my 650 OCed some simply because it was the first GPU I felt comfortable actually overclocking for more than 3 days).

 

[pjbliverpool]

sorry but I dont know where you live, most probably in a developed part of the world, I can assure you that most PC gamers in this planet (Earth btw) have yet to adopt PCs with geforce7 / 8 level of processing power, let alone the kind of monster PCs that you are describing and comparing to xbox360/ps3...

If your going to ask what percentage of PC's will be as fast or faster than the next generation consoles you've got to define a reasonable base population first.

We could just go with every PC in the world. That's easy enough to define and is probably in the order or 1-2 billion? It wouldn't be particularly sensible though or give us a particularly useful answer to the original question. So we could restrict that to any PC that is used for playing games. Okay, so how you you define playing games? Warcraft? SIMS? Online flash/java games? Solataire?

Again it becomes very difficult to define a "gaming" PC. So for me the most obvious base population to use - in the context of next generation consoles - is every PC capable of playing next generation consoles games. If a PC isn't capable of doing that, then the user isn't a "PC gamer" in the context of next generation console games and developers aren't taking account of them when making decisions about the PC port of the game.

A far easier way to go about it though is to just look at absolute numbers. That is where this argument is driving anyway isn't it? What is the size and power distribution of the PC market compared to the next generation console market and thus how will that effect developers decisions when considering PC ports.

So what is the absolute number of PC's capable of playing next gen consoles games - this is what developers will consider when deciding whether to make a port and how far to scale it down. And what is the absolute number of PC's capable of playing next gen console games at or above console quality - this is what developers will consider when deciding whether to give the port the full console treatement or even to give it extra graphical goodness over the consoles.

Take one as the percentage of the other and you answer the first question.

What is being proved by considering PC's older/slower than the example above other than to allow d*ck waving about "how tiny a percentage of PC's can match next generation consoles"?

 

[(((interference)))]

People buy consoles with the intent of doing heavy gaming.

So it makes to only compare that to people who buy a PC with the intent of doing heavy gaming.

Hardly, what about all the people who bought Wii's for Wii Sports and Wii Fit etc.
Or people buying Xbox for Kinect, or PS2/PS3 for Eyetoy, Buzz and Singstar?
Or PS2s and PS3s simply as a cheap DVD/Bluray player.

The truth is people use consoles in many different ways, and I'm not even sure the majority of consoles this gen are used for 'heavy gaming' now.

Oh and are you saying that people who play WoW, DoTA, Starcraft, Diablo, CS etc are not heavy gamers? Or basically, do you define heavy gamers to only include people like yourself, who have can throw money at quad GPU setups.

 

[(((interference)))]

I gotta say, the amount of shit you're full of is quite something. I can see it all the way from my house. How did you pull that off? I'm quite impressed.

You should have been here for the scaled vs native res thread where he was insisting that his visual acuity was better than the physical limits of the human eye.