Sweeney: PCs Good for Anything... But Games [Mar 10, 2008, 8:11 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Unreal creator: Tim
Sweeney PCs are good for anything, just not games” on TG Daily is a Q&A with
the Epic CEO which, as the title of the article suggests, features some
negative comments about the PC as a gaming platform. This is actually just the
age-old complaint about PCs with integrated graphics, as he says that mainstream
PCs are not suited to gaming:
Retail stores like Best Buy are selling PC games and PCs with integrated graphics at the same time and they are not talking about the difference [to more capable gaming PCs]. Those machines are good for e-mail, web browsing, watching video. But as far as games go, those machines are just not adequate. It is no surprise that retail PC sales suffer from that. Online is different, because people who go and buy games online already have PCs that can play games. The biggest problem in this space right now is that you cannot go and design a game for a high end PC and downscale it to mainstream PCs. The performance difference between high-end and low-end PC is something like 100x.
PCMCIA does a similar thing for laptops - you'd just need to expand the scope quite considerably.
Erm. A large number of laptops require you to remove the frakking KEYBOARD before you can even get at the slot the memory is in.
Sure, we could make an easily upgradeable PC. We as in the PC industry as a whole. It'd also be completely incompatible with all the parts that currently exist. So who's going to be the first to take a gamble? Build an entirely new manufacturing line, do millions of dollars worth of R&D, millions more of testing, get the word out on the street with a massive ad campaign, etc.
It's really easy to sit here and bleat "Hardware manufacturers should just do blablablabla".
But if you take five seconds, ask yourself why THEY would do it?
Btw, things like that have been tried before. Back in the 80s, a bunch of manufacturers combined to form a standardized hardware base. All computers were identical, and the idea was that they could be easily upgraded etc.
MSX it was called. It was a great idea, until they realized that nobody was buying them. So which manufacturer is now going to take a hundred million dollar gamble, for what in the end will amount to zero extra profit?
What's in it for the hardware manufacturer? The answer is : Nada.
Creston
Erm. A large number of laptops require you to remove the frakking KEYBOARD before you can even get at the slot the memory is in.
Sure, we could make an easily upgradeable PC. We as in the PC industry as a whole. It'd also be completely incompatible with all the parts that currently exist. So who's going to be the first to take a gamble? Build an entirely new manufacturing line, do millions of dollars worth of R&D, millions more of testing, get the word out on the street with a massive ad campaign, etc.
It's really easy to sit here and bleat "Hardware manufacturers should just do blablablabla".
But if you take five seconds, ask yourself why THEY would do it?
Btw, things like that have been tried before. Back in the 80s, a bunch of manufacturers combined to form a standardized hardware base. All computers were identical, and the idea was that they could be easily upgraded etc.
MSX it was called. It was a great idea, until they realized that nobody was buying them. So which manufacturer is now going to take a hundred million dollar gamble, for what in the end will amount to zero extra profit?
What's in it for the hardware manufacturer? The answer is : Nada.
Creston
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