kiaghi7

January 06, 2011 at 4:14pm

Consoles, while enjoyable, are not the forward thinking, and ever advancing front... They are the result of that front being advanced and thought out in the PC realm, and then being packaged uniformly into a console.

 

Every single advance, even the current fad with motion control, has started in the realm of PC's and PC research efforts. Even the consoles themselves are merely a generation (or two, or three) old hardware with what would seem like pathetic performance for a multi-tasking platform.

 

To suggest that Sandybridge will provide a console like experience to PC's, for one, I'm not convinced at all. But more to the point, PC's have had their pre-graphics-card era, and it was a joyous time... However times changed...

 

No more was "Master of Orion" considered mind-blowing... Games started to become more and more 3D (polygons rather than sprites), and as such the load on the CPU alone was growing faster than the CPU's could keep pace. Thus the dawn of a discrete graphics card...

 

Even Sandybridge chips themselves admit the ultimate nod of practicality when they will disable their own graphical components when they detect the installation of a dedicated graphics card. That's a very good move on Intel's part, so that people can have their cake and eat it too.

 

For the typical PC, ones bought for back-to-school sales and the like, the Sandybridge will bring MUCH more customer satisfaction when it is more likely to at least provide a modicum of capability with some graphical processing on the CPU. This way, college kids who aren't computer enthisiasts can play some games out there without having to have a major rehaul done. So in that regard, yes sandybridge is a great idea and it will hopefully prove out its concept in the long run by being ever better.

The great downside of it however is that if it truly does "console-ize" the PC market, then it can quite possibly castrate future creativity and efforts to push boundaries in favor of "lowest common denominator" sort of development where a publishing house wants their game to be no better than -X- mark since they know -Y- quantity of the PC market has this much capability, and those folks may whine if the game requires more than what they got with the blue-light-special PC they found.

 

It truly is a double edged sword, it can indeed cut in such a way to expand and bring up the "minimum" level of gaming capable computers out there, and thus potentially making for more game interested customers. The terrible concequence is that if too many are content to stay at some pre-figured minimum level of capability, that could actually anchor developers lofty plans to a more terrestial goal, and in the end diminishing the end quality and potential of improvement in gaming on PC. As PC technology continued to make great strides and capability proceeded ever further, game development's pace could well suffer when publishers caring only about widest appeal orient the entire effort around the basic options rather than trying to push the boundaries of what can be done...

 

If developers are willing to develop in the mindset of "well let's make a game everyone can play at its best right now", then we'd never see games like Crysis, which literally took years before the -AVERAGE- PC was able to play it in high resolutions and good quality. It came out and it was infamous, partially because it was some sloppyness in the programming that caused it to be so resource heavy. However none the less, it was quite literally used as a bench mark of what a great PC is/was for a long time. Before that, games like Quake 3 and so on were used the same way, because it was a "real world comparison" rather than simply generated figures based on a program designed to do nothing but benchmark things, but isn't really an interactive game.

 

Sandybridge likely wouldn't kill off such innovative or forward looking games, and I highly doubt it's going to hurt them either, so long as developers are willing to require some sort of capability sufficient to get the most out of a game, beyond what the very minimum specifications in the average computer could yield...

 

It's always about "tomorrow" with PC's, today's dream-machine is tomorrow's plain-jane desktop that's considered typical. PC developers can't develop a game with "today's average" PC in mind if they have any intention of stepping into new territory, or trying to bring up the level even a bit, they have to consider the highest end PC's (for the very highest settings), take a step back from that just a little, and make the game capable of lower settings to appeal to a wider audience who may not be able to use all the bells and whistles in their current PC, but the game itself has plenty of life in it for the future.