Desktop Computers

I have to say, this is pretty strange. I seem to remember gaming PCs going out of date A LOT faster than they seem to do now days. What happened? Have we reached a point where bigger upgrades are getting harder for companies to do?

I don't think it's changed much for GPU's, it's slowed down a bit but not much. With CPU's though, single threaded performance increases have slowed down a ton in the past 5 or so years, and that's what most games still rely on.

Blame console gaming. We've been in the current generation of consoles longer than any other generation up to this point. And since 95% of games are cross-platform, most game creaters don't really want to completelly re-design the graphics for a game just for PC. so at best we might get some higher resolution textures and maybe some better lighting, and that's about it. But at the base of the game, it's designed to run on almost decade-old hardware(consoles).

Game developers could easily be releasing games that consistently push the bleeding edge of hardware or even beyond, but they wouldn't be able to port it to an XBOX 360 or PS3, so they dont.

Oh, it most definitely will. Even when the 360 and PS3 launched they were using hardware that was already a couple years old compared to PCs. It takes so long to develop a new console that even if the dev process starts with state of the art hardware, by the time it launches several years down the line it's relatively outdated compared to a PC. However, you can generally get similar results out of a console even with slightly lesser hardware just because it is the 1 set standard piece of hardware so the software can be optimized like hell for it. You can't optimize things as well on a PC with all the hardware variables. If I had to guess, I'd say that for a PC to beat out a consoles performance on a given game, it does need hardware that is at least 2-3 years more advanced, and that is probably exactly the line we'll be straddling with PCs vs the new XBOX 720 and PS4 when they launch. Games might look real similar for 6 months to a year even though PCs are more powerful, but then the PC will slowly pull back ahead again.

A lot of it probably has to do with how well stuff overclocks now on PC's too. Just the software that's included with motherboard drivers and GPU's can boost hardware a huge amount. I had never overclocked anything other than my old ATI 5850 until a few weeks ago, but I tossed in a $25 212+ cooler and bumped my 2500k up from 3.3ghz to 4.2 without touching anything other than the core multiplier, and I'm sure I can crank it up quite a bit higher once I understand how all the voltage shit works. Same deal with the ATI 7950; took it up from 850core/1250memory to 1125/1500 with 30 minutes of testing, and pretty limited knowledge of OC'ing.

Yeah, it's ridiculous how easy overclocking is nowadays. No more difficult than changing graphics options in a game.

Long gone are the days of having to use jumpers on the motherboard to overclock. That sucked.

Ordering this bad mofo up for my friendhttp://pcpartpicker.com/p/Qf64

Sweet site for tagging your rigs and setups. This way we can copy your awesome setups.http://www.polebird.com/1LkgAb

Sithro_sl said:

I have to say, this is pretty strange. I seem to remember gaming PCs going out of date A LOT faster than they seem to do now days. What happened? Have we reached a point where bigger upgrades are getting harder for companies to do?

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kids are one of the biggest gaming markets, kids all have laptops now and pretty soon most people won't even have PCs, just phones and tablets and maybe a console PC sales (including laptops) were down something like 15% last quarter, don't see that slide reversing anytime soon.

PC gaming is arguably stronger than ever. While pc hardware sales declined, PC software sales were up like 12 percent last year, while console software sales declined significantly.

I've said this for a couple years now, but I see a day in the not-so-distant future where your mobile phone will basically power all of your electronic devices. It'll be used like an interchangeable processor, and obviously it'll be mobile storage of everything you do. Use it as a typical phone, snap it into a laptop shell or something like the Surface if you want a bigger screen and keyboard, snap it into your desktop at home for the full desktop/multimedia/gaming experience. Maybe the desktop still has a dedicated GPU to push the much larger screen, but the phone will easily be able to provide the processing power and storage. Just think how far SSDs and flash storage have come in recent years. I bet 5 years from now we're toting around phones that are basically 1+ TB SSDs/Flash drives.

Yeah and 640kb is enough for everyone...

There will always be room for faster / more powerful. Unless we master shit like room temp superconductivity or quantum computers, bigger will almost always mean better.

Hardware sells are slow because of old consoles, no increase in resolution on the display front and in a small part AMD cpu's sucking balls. With new consoles this year and 4k monitors around the corner I think for a while we'll be back to 9-12 months upgrades.

mkopec_sl said:

Maybe for video cards, but not procs...

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They just need to get better at multithreading shit.

Did you take a look at what intel is offering at a server level ? I had to setup a server for a client and it was running 2 xE7-2860. I had no idea such monsters were available since Q1 2011. The tech's been here for a years, now we just need the software to take advantage of it and hopefully the 8 core architecture of the new consoles will make this happen.

task manager pic

So once i get my desktop fixed, I was going to use a DVI to HDMI cable to run my computer through my receiver to my 60" TV to game.

But then I have to figure out sound. I'd always used the soundcard on the motherboard. So any ideas how to make that work?