Frankly, what he says is a little bit of BS. The PC would BE the gaming platform if devs started going for intelligent and effective piracy counter-measures, and ease of use in their games.

It's not so strange to see Sweeney talking about software rendering....IIRC, the original Unreal had a full-featured software renderer that performed quite well and looked very nice.

Software renderers allowed people who didn't have the latest gee-whiz graphics card to at least play the game. That's not such a bad idea, is it?

So many people in these comments are saying that as a PC gamer, consoles would make more sense. Hello? Any of you remember that genre called MMOs, like World of Warcraft? How about RTS? When those two types show up on consoles, with a keyboard/mouse, I will abandon my computer as a gaming platform. Until that day, remember that there is more out there than FPS and RPG games, and that some of us have no choice but to game on the computer.

I have to agree the original Unreal looked great for it's time and overall had quite a long lived experience behind it.

I still include Unreal tournament on every PC I sell and most of the buyers will try it and continue to play it...... Integrated graphics up until just recently have been despicable worthy of little more than contempt.

I have managed to play Warcraft III which was never really a demanding game in 2002 just barely on the 690g chipset.

the new ATI 780 shows the most promise but to be honest I believe ATI should have gone higher to the 3650 XT and raised the price of the motherboard at least as an option.... I know for certain I would have been able to sell it if it was within $25 of the 780.

I also believe on the dealer level their would eventually have been a push for these motherboards as an inexpensive gaming option that has been missing for the past 7 years in integrated solutions.

the 780's hybrid gfx option and it's improvements directly recieved from better cpu's has actually peaked my interest in getting a quad core AMD which just prior to the 780's release wasn't even a mild consideration while I waited for the next revision in hopes of more speed to compete more directly with Intel's quad.

for the first time in a year I'm seriously interested in AMD only because of the 780 motherboard.

They're just pissed off UT3 tanked. First it was pirates, now it's hardware.

Well, before they had lower than low end GPUs as integrated. The 780G is at least equal to a discrete low end card.

I've been playing games on the PC this whole decade and the story is always the same: Things are smooth for a short while untill a new game or group of games show up and choke any piece of hardware you through at them. This happens on the PC and not so much on the consoles because on the PC, the platform isn't standardized. There is no clear cut way to define the next generation from the last one, apart from API versions. There's always a lot of grey area in there.

But since the Radeon 9700 Pro, I thought GPUs would eventually advance to the point that they would last far longer than what seems like a 12-24 month upgrade path. Now I'm convinced I was dead wrong about that. I can't imagine the hardware ever staying out in front of the software long enough for what is considered "high-end" to become mainstream.

So who's the culprit in this? Is the software really that demanding, or is it that a lot of software these days is developed with the re-assurance that hardware is always moving forward, so less money can be put towards developing heavily optimized software? I think the latter plays a bigger part in it more often than not.

I can look at 3 recent games and take note of how they perform at 1920x1080 with high settings on an 8800GTS 640MB card. COD4 looks amazing and runs well at these settings. UT3 doesn't run nearly as well or look nearly as amazing. Crysis can barely move. I mean, I find it peculiar that these three games are roughly in the same technological class, yet there is such a wide range in performance. I just have a feeling that sloppy programming is at play because it's "too expensive" and there's never enough time to expect anything better.

so basically he's complaining that UE3 isn't able to run on the 10/100's of millions of el-cheapo computers that are in or headed for places like libraries, or dumbed down office computers/terminals due to the graphics hardware not being high powered enough...
anyone else see a flaw in that?...

i'm not saying he's completely wrong though
when you think about the top end titles now take 2years+ to develop
during that time 2 generations of video cards can pass by
when development time stretches out to 5 years you're essentially getting left behind

i'm thinking gpu performance curve is gonna get more shallow soon
the power vs performance curve is now a lot on the 'uncomfortable' side
gpu performance growth per generation used to increase a lot
its slowing down a fair bit and using up a lot more power
kind of like the way cpu's were going for a while

Console gaming will always be way bigger than PC gaming.
PC gaming is just too expensive and you have to upgrade often.
PC games most of time are unoptimized and run crappy with average graphics.Heres my conclusion, if you only use PC for gaming then it is a waste unless you got the cash to burn, unfortunately most don't.
Since I personally use my PC for gaming, net surfing,work,music,movies, so it somewhat justifies paying lots of cash for PC parts.

I agree 100% with Sweeney on the current state of PC as a gaming platform.

It has outgrown its market to the point that it can no longer sustain itself. Gaming consoles have caught up in many areas. The last piece is just a standardized keyboard/mice combo.

It is no surprise that big developers and publishers are favoring gaming consoles.

I do heavily disagree that developers should use software rendering for 3D graphics. CPUs are so much weaker then modern performance GPUs at graphics. It is like trying to make a 486DX66 to perform as well as an overclocked QX9770 at 4.0Ghz. The low-end, integrated GPU solution still place modern CPUs to shame. The games that do not require fancy graphics already use software rendering. So the whole argument is a moot point.

My thought on bitteriness of UT3 lackluster sales. It didn't do well, because the freaking game was out of the oven ten minutes before completion. The game mechanics are down and solid. The other 20% of the what matters to the end-user (UI, MP implementation and tweakability) is completely unpolished.

It does not help that UT3 had some competition at its launch. TF2, Crysis, Bioshock and Mass Effect.

Software rendering... I still think 256k color games (Jazz Jackrabbit!) were more fun to look at than the junkers out these days.

Actually, didn't AMD just put a full gpu in the 780 chipset?

a quick google search shows that there are numerous software rendering engines out there.

http://www.radgametools.com/pixomain.htm
http://www.transgaming.com/products/swiftshader/

Even though they exist, I haven't really seen them implemented in games.

Maybe nvidia's mafia-like control of the market has something to do with it.
("the way it was meant to be played")
The industry also seem to be shoving SLI and super high end CPU's down our throats recently too.
(crysis/ut3)

I'm glad they are slowly coming back to reality, and realized that they are only hurting themselves by marketing games/hardware to such a small demography.

Before now they've only been blaming their poor sales on piracy:
UT3/crysis/(insert game/crappy tech demo here) sales are suffering from piracy !!!1111one1elventy!!
more like nobody can play it, its only a graphics tech demo, game play sucks, drm is too draconian, people are sick of beta quality games with little or no future support, nobody cares anymore, pc gaming is dead/moved to consoles, etc.

Another thing that I think has recently started to hit games is the 2GB memory limitation, and instead of creating massively bloated games, developers have to start being more efficient.

Anyway, it really seems like this gaming alliance could actually revive pc gaming, and bring it back to reality where it belongs.

Well I can say that I don't know anyone who is interested in putting down the $$ to get a triple-SLI setup for gaming.

But lets not forget that the IHVs have a very sweet mid-range assortment right now. These cards aren't any more expensive than a Voodoo2 was back in the day. I think some folks get caught up on not having the fastest. There's nothing wrong with there being a extreme luxury high-end product. They exist in every other industry.

He wants to go back to software rendering...I can't believe I just heard that. Who knows, maybe voxels will make a comeback. You listening, Novalogic? LOL

This is the hybrid rendering we need, "software" and hardware, not raster and ray-trace.

They also need a way to figure out what to do with idle GPU shader processors, if there are any, much like they should figure out what to do with CPU cycles, if there are any free.