PC game sales decline for first time ever, Console sales continue to break records

[Traianvs]

The Audigy and Audigy 2 support DD5.1, but I can't think of a single game which uses it

Well, I know Hitman2 and Soldier of Fortune2 have it (btw these 2 games you get for free when you buy the card)

And, considering these 2 free games, and the performance of the card, the price is very cheap...

[CapitanGarlic]

I like them all. IMHO, PC's will never be able to do Fighting games as well as consoles, and Consoles will never be able to do FPS's and Strategy games as well as PC's. I'd like to think that it shouldn't be a matter of hardware, but rather games. If a game is good, I don't care what's running it.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Fez
And Asher stop posting uncredible sources. You are only damaging yourself. No console defeats my computer period.

Suddenly Electronic Art's presentation at SIGGRAPH 2002 is "uncredible".

Glorious!

They're only the world's largest games publisher presenting a paper at the world's foremost computer graphics conference.

Well, I know Hitman2 and Soldier of Fortune2 have it (btw these 2 games you get for free when you buy the card)

And, considering these 2 free games, and the performance of the card, the price is very cheap...

You're thinking of EAX-HD, which is not Dolby Digital 5.1. I have both of those games on the PC and an Audigy (btw, they're also out on Xbox (Hitman2) or coming out for Xbox (SOF2) in the near future).

And Xbox comes with 2 free games too. The price is beyond "very cheap".

[Boris Godunov]

Asher, admit it. Fez is your DL to make you look good, right?

Fez, PC games ARE more buggy than console games. Just look at the flap over Civ3. And then there's Hearts of Iron, and it's EU predecessors. And tons of other titles going back for years (Ultima 9, oy vey) There has been a sagging trend in the PC game industry to release incomplete games and fix them with patches later. I bet that is partly to blame for the decrease in PC game sales, as game buyers are finally becoming unwilling to plop down $50 for a product they aren't even sure will work out of the box.

Console games can't rely on patches, so they naturally are going to work more and be more bug-free. Especially since they'e designed for one system, not the mish-mash of components in PCs.

[Asher]

I'm about to head for dinner so I'll just do a basic "Gaming Architecture 101" for Fez:

When designing PC games, the code needs to be able to run fine on a vast array of systems. Systems with 128MB RAM, systems with 1GB of RAM. systems with Windows 98, Systems with Windows XP, Systems with Windows 2000, Systems with Windows Millenium, etc.

Systems with a Kyro II video card, Voodoo 3/4/5, Radeon, Radeon 8500, Radeon 9700, TNT2, GeForce 1, 2, 3, 4, and FX, etc. The amount of optimizations you can do for each platform is exceedingly minimal.

With a console, like the Xbox for example, everything is always the same. The developers can ALWAYS count on the exact same charateristics for each console. They can avoid and bypass the whole HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) DirectX uses on the PC and write directly to the hardware, letting them do far more things. Developers can always count on the graphics chip having, say, 128KB of texture cache so they can fill it up perfectly each time. On the PC, some graphics chips don't even have a texture cache!

Then there's the fundamental design differences. The Xbox has a unified memory architecture. The video RAM is the system RAM is the sound RAM. On the PC, if the CPU ever needs to deal with vertex data (which is very important, mind you, for things like collision detection), it needs to send this data back on the AGP bus from the video RAM and copy it over to the system RAM. The AGP bus is already nearly full because it's constantly loading the textures from the harddrive or RAM also. This is a major performance hit. On the Xbox, the CPU can just touch the vertex instantly in the RAM -- it doesn't need to move it anywhere.

The PC isn't designed around gaming, it has MANY design "features" that severely hamper gaming performance, which is why an Xbox will outperform a similarly configured PC by a substantial margin.

[Ironikinit]

I just wanted to point out that strategy games aren't unknown on consoles. In fact, two titles mentioned by name in this thread as examples of why players wouldn't use a console (Panzer General and Civilization 2) I can remember from the Play Station. I never played Civ 2 on the PS, but my friend did. He complained that the late game had extreme lag. I played PG all the time, though, and never had a problem. I've since played it (admittedly not much) on the PC and did not notice a difference. Other strategy titles I owned were A Train, Allied General, X-Com, and Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat. All of them ran fine, and I also got a CD player out of the deal by hooking the PS to my stereo. It really was a bargain and when I had company we could play hockey or Tekken.

Another supposed console drawback, that of lack of a mouse, seems I can recall a console system that offered one.

The PS had for me an advantage that others have pointed out and I strongly agree: ease of use. I didn't need to look for patches or reconfigure the system to play a particular game. Hmm, now that I think on it, making the switch to PC could be seen as an expensive blunder. Of course, free games are easy to find online, and when I made the change I was in a small town and made some more interesting friends online so I don't regret it. However, I really didn't need such an expensive system. I could've bought a much more moderate system for chat, outdated/low-end strategy games, browsing, word-processing, etc. and put the savings into about 12 different consoles...

[Giancarlo]

Sorry Ashboy, but no console is better than my computer.

[Asher]

Well how can I compete with that logic?

What do you have again, Fez? 1.4GHz Athlon with a GeForce 2?

Hardly a high end machine. I would rank your system above PS2 and below GCN and Xbox.

[Boris Godunov]

"If I just keep repeating it to myself, it isn't true!"

Fez, this thread wasn't saying anything about Consoles being better than PCs, just that they were outselling PCs and gaining in popularity.

No one can deny that PCs are far more versatile than consoles, and there's no way consoles will replace PCs. But consoles are specifically DESIGNED to play games, PCs are not. So in pure gaming terms, console quality will always exceed PC quality (in general). That's not to say there aren't some spectacular games for the PC, but it is much more difficult to make quality PC games than console games.

[Drake Tungsten]

Fez, this thread wasn't saying anything about Consoles being better than PCs

I am. Consoles are far better for gaming.

No computer is better than my console.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten

Fez, this thread wasn't saying anything about Consoles being better than PCs

I am. Consoles are far better for gaming.

Did you read my whole post, dammit?

Gaming, sure. But try word processing or graphics design on your console.

[Asher]

Pick the right tool for the job.

Civ would suck on the console, Mario would suck on the PC.

Voila.

[ixnay]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
Did you read my whole post, dammit?

Gaming, sure. But try word processing or graphics design on your console.

How on earth do you think I get all my image editing work done?

[Drake Tungsten]

Did you read my whole post, dammit?

Not really. I was too busy trolling.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Civ would suck on the console, Mario would suck on the PC.

Mario sucks in general .