....and having said all that.

Good to see PC isn't being initially excluded from the Mass Effect this time around.

None of you guys apparently could take the time to read the issues before taking your shot. FAIL.

They are all self caused problems from using cracks, daemon, removing punkbuster, people removing files, a bad copied/mirrored patch, or a third party windows installer problem.

Glad to see the anti-crytek committee come out to play though, nice try.

It won't be long until Take Two sells... to someone. They are obviously interested in selling because they are really milking this for all it's worth and trying to raise some competitive bids. They wouldn't be doing any of this if they didn't want to sell. So it's only a short matter of time.

These are the first steps to the companies demise. Snubb PC gamers, then drastically change your identity and focus and sell out to consoles. Yeah looks quite promising, then again the owners can just sell the company and retire someday so no biggie I guess for them.

"I truly think console gaming is dumbed down."

I agreed with and vehemently believed that too, in the past. THE PAST!

The reason you don't see the ills of consoles yet is because it's getting the influx of current PC games moving to it. There was a reason PC games were better and more diversified for the last decade. So yes 50% or more of the top ten games on xbox are PC originals from PC game developers but that will soon change. Just wait till the developers will dumb down future games as they are made for console primarily and then PC is an afterthought, if that. I think people lack foresight of what will happen, same thing that happened in the last decade. Plus you can put alot less work into games on console and sell alot more to easily impressed console players, so that doesn't bode well for production value either.

This comment was edited on Feb 20, 11:44.

I like that a middle man like Dell is involved (never thought i'd say the words liking a middleman involved), atleast their motives should be more in line with what the consumer wants without some side agenda to cell GPU's, CPU's, Vista, etc.

Yeah, Cliffy has actually been doing something that is rather rare, he actually has been fairly up front with what he has been saying in his tidbits. He wasn't packaging his statements to be friendly or well recieved, like most devs do. Having said that, he does come off a bit as a rockstar that isn't. Especially like statements that PC is in disarray, I guess I better run out and get as console then. Comparing it to a fixed closed system like a console it can appear that way to them. And lets not forget money, a powerful motivator, but lets see if Epic still has talent to innovate or will GOW be aanother ten year old series.

This comment was edited on Feb 19, 06:34.

Yeah none of them are exclusive to PC at all.
Evidently your too simple to do any research on your own, so no more links for you.
Good try tough guy, you amuse me. :O
This comment was edited on Feb 13, 11:21.

How can Microsoft sign exclusive deals with game developers to purposefully "not" make a PC version, and yet somehow they are going to help PC gaming. Cut me a break.

Exactly how many of those "exclusive" deals did Microsoft sign in your opinion? I count zero. Even games like Halo, Halo 2 and Mass Effect ended up on the PC eventually. So before you make any more dumbfuck accusations let's start listing all of the (without a doubt numerous) games that MS paid money for to not come to the PC. Weeeelll? I'm listening...

Do you really think I would go out there and count them up and list them for someone acting like a dumbfuck like yourself? Kidding right?

Before you accuse anyone of being a dumbfuck make sure you aren't the one next time.
This will get you started in your search, I can't waste much more text on you than that - fool!
http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/01/microsoft-sever.html
Maybe you should go convince Microsoft that they don't really make exclusive deals.
This comment was edited on Feb 13, 09:34.

There should be an alliance of PC developers approaching those companies. Those companies having an alliance sounds like it will accomplish nothing, especially since microsoft's desires to promote an OS, a directx version and a console actually runs in contradiction to promoting PC gaming.

How can Microsoft sign exclusive deals with game developers to purposefully "not" make a PC version, and yet somehow they are going to help PC gaming. Cut me a break.

Damn, no more netflix HDDVD's. Bummer.

I wonder how much they were slipped under the table to make the move? Let's not be naive.

The cutting room floor, I don't even want to know what gets skipped on this next OS.
I was really looking forward to skipping over DX10 and wddm1. No one has really embraced DX10 so why not skip the hell over it now smoothly. No, Microsoft will make you embrace it, even if it takes not making anymore DX versions you'll use DX10 and like it or else.

DX11 would've been great to fix DX10 and wddm issues. Hopefully wddm2 will be a reality soon anyway, but will require new HW to utilize it. Even a year before Vista was out the wddm team new wddm 1 had some issues that needed to be fixed in wddm2. It's not like DX10 and wddm 1 couldn't be backwards compatible on the OS for existing legacy HW.
People can praise DX10 all they want, but it running the same type of functions as dx9 and performing worse every time shows there is obvious room for improvement needed.

I really hope Windows 7 isn't to Vista like what Millenium was to 98. Unfortunately it will likely be just that and them trying to get some of the stuff working in Vista that they couldn't during the 5 years of Longhorn development and restarts.

This comment was edited on Feb 10, 14:40.

@Creston
Yep, thx for the reminders. The abstraction of the hardware worked well if the game was wrapped in GL. I also forgot about the resolution limit and bump, I actually owned a pair ;).

This comment was edited on Feb 10, 14:08.

2) -Why did the original SLI die back in the 3Dfx days?

"2) I think mostly because it served no purpose. The Voodoo2 was so powerful that running two in tandem was completely useless. The market was also so small still at the time that nobody was buying a second card, and so for 3dfx to keep supporting it seemed stupid."

I think your depiction of the landscape of Voodoo 2 isn't quite accurate. IMO the Voodoo2 was the last great valuable SLI, more so than any choices in recent years that are often out done in performance and features by it's next generation single slot solution. It also had longevity. It was a niche product like all SLI but it was among the best.

The Voodoo2 filled a very valuable niche that while others were playing 3d games of the day(Unreal, Quake, etc.) in software mode at 512x384 or 640x480, people could for the first time run the game in splendid gl 640, 800, 1024,1280,1600 at better performance than software mode.

SLI didn't die, 3dfx tried to change the landscape by merging chips unsuccessfully, had some bad products, but the company fell into ruin for certain reasons and nvidia became an up and coming competitor, there was no death of SLI. Today SLI doesn't have the value, arguably, that it did in the voodoo days IMO.

This comment was edited on Feb 10, 11:04.

"I wish the industry would just adopt a frames-per-second standard of 60 or so."

Fairly easy if it's on a console at 720p no AA or AF or in-game visual settings.

But on a PC...
What resolution? 1024x768 or 1920x1200?
With AA, without AA?
With AF, without AF?
Which game settings - low, medium, high?
All those differences have huge implications.

The major problem with performance is people make poor HW buying decisions on PC. 3-way SLI isn't a good one. If you game then a 8800GT for a $250 price point is great decision at this point in time, while buying a 8600 GTS $120 value card is a bad decision by comparison for any longevity. Save money and buy appropriately. Then usually people after making that poor buying decision, a year later, have wrong expectations of expected performance in a game. They then complain they need to upgrade all the time on PC which isn't true, but they just need to upgrade smartly and at the right time then it's no biggie. 1900x1200 with AA and high game settings should not be expected to be playable at 60 fps with a single card and next gen games, that resolution pushes far too much through the pipeline and is far from common.

No SP campaign. The one thing that probably keeps the game from going down in history as epic. Skirmish is fun against AI though, which is all the game is unless playing online. They missed a crazy opportunity to have a rich story unfold the gameplay in a campaign.

Can you imagine the Core 2 Duo being frozen by litigation???

sheesh

It is rather funny to see NVIDIA do a 180 from last year when they were saying how AGEIA wasn't necessary to now all the sudden physics necessitates the parallelization techniques which are best suited to a PPU on their GPU's.

Does kind of make me snicker. Devs just have to become more proficient in multithreading and gamers have to get off their ass and buy a decent multicore CPU.

Havok has alot of potential still if Intel doesn't stifle them. We need good API's, SDK's and toolkits for implementing it then things will be golden.

This comment was edited on Feb 5, 19:23.

I don't remember how long ago the physx PPU came out but it's been a hella long time in HW years(like dog years but more).

Ageia didn't want to / couldn't make any next gen cards because it would cannibalize their only customers. No doubt advances could have been made to the PPU's, just wasn't economical or possible in their failing business.

I only hope that nvidia will not be afraid to make a next gen PPU that will be a clean break instead of leaving devs trying to stay compatible with the aged HW. A PPU today should be able to blow the doors off the original with what has been learned as well as just normal engineering and tech advances.

Hopefully they can make a clean break with their first implementation, as sad as it may sound to exisitng owners. I wouldn't want to see devs stuck having to support the old card's requirements when something a magnitude more powerful will be available, yet won't be utilized by devs due to them trying to support legacy HW.

It's like devs still having to support Pentium 4's instead of todays C2d's or quads. NVIDIA's first product would be a great time for a clean break. Then devs won't feel like they have to support equivalent of 6800 GPU's, if they start with a PPU equivalent to an 8800 GPU. Then we won't have to wait 5+ years to see what physics can really do, but 2 or 3 years instead with a clean break and uber fast physics HW.

The sad thing is if this breaks Gamespots back then IGN is left as the big hitter.
And I oh so much love to pay for faster downloads and to pay for demos and betas. IGN isn't better, but probably worse.