PC still playing Amiga catchup

[Hammer]

Hi,

@Hammer

Ok, I would probably buy that, I keep forgetting a lot of people use laptops, even though they are unexpandable, slow, have poor graphics, and the only way to improve them is to buy a new one, I am not knocking you, I have a laptop too, a toshita satlite. I run Ubuntu 8.04 on it because I got tired of waiting for 35 minutes for it to boot up, and then another 10 minutes for it to call up Internet Explorer. With Ubuntu it cut down the load time to about 5 minutes and about a minute load time for FireFox. Sometimes i would rather use a C64, it booted and loaded faster.

smerf

Laptops are usually shipped with slow hard disks i.e. upgrade to 7200 RPM types.

After NVIDIA's mobile G8X GPU mess and EU's WEEE directive, large number of  14 to 15.4 laptops includes replaceable MXM GPU card. For example, 14.1 inch ASUS N80 laptop includes a replaceable MXM-II GPU card.

Refer to
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39253999,00.htm

In 2008, there's about 31 million gaming laptops sold i.e. an install base that rivals Xbox360 and larger than PS3.
Refer to http://au.gamespot.com/news/6210424.html

"The study further found that 42 million PC desktops and 31 million notebooks capable of playing games were shipped during the year;"

In terms of annual gaming laptop unit growth (i.e. 31 million per year), it easily beats the combined Nintendo Wii/Xbox 360/PS3 annual unit growth.

[Hammer]

Don't forget racing simulations. Here, you still get wheels, pedals etc.

In terms of revenue, racing simulations is minor in the PC market. **PC is dominated by MMORPG (in FPS format) and casual gaming (e.g. EA's Sims).

Anyway, US tax payer funded America’s Army 3.0 (using UnrealEngine3) is reported to have 20 million connections(downloads, on-line play) since June 17.

Stats
http://www.strategyinformer.com/news/3766/pc-largest-single-platform-for-gaming-revenue-is-about-11-billion

[Hammer]

And THIS is what happens with modern hardware when you force developers to "bang on the hardware" vs developer friendly, API driven devkits.

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/06/17/ghostbusters-on-ps3-lags-behind-360-version-developer-explains/

Factor in RSX's pixel shaders stalling during texture operations i.e. a known designed flaw for Geforce 6/7 series.

Anyway, more on
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/xbox-360-vs-ps3-face-off-round-20

Xbox 360 wins again in most of the multi-platforms.

[Hammer]

Hi,

I vote keep it open, I bet this thread has the highest % rate for reading than anything else on Amiga.org, I think Wayne should pay Amigaksi for this fight, it is the first time in years where I thought about going un in the attic and pulling out my old Amiga hardware and program books.

This whole thread is ridiculous, where else could we have this much fun?

smerf

Well, somebody has to start it.

[Hammer]

Hi,

But only in an emulator, or virtual drive

smerf

PC-DOS 1.0

"It booted flawlessly on a 3.00GHz PIV."

Refer to http://vetusware.com/download/PC-DOS%201.00/?id=4356

[Hammer]

gaming-capable and used to play games on are not the same thing.  Go to any retail outlet and you'll find Pc gets about 20% shelf space.

Retail space wouldn’t indicate market size.

  Ofcourse you can download PC games, but thats not relatively common.  PC gaming these days is heading towards role play/strategy genre that takes years off your life, and the FPS coz of the mouse and keyboard control, byt FPS's on consoles are becoming popular, just depends on what you prefer as a control method.

Reference 1 http://www.strategyinformer.com/news/3766/pc-largest-single-platform-for-gaming-revenue-is-about-11-billion

The PC is the largest single platform for games with annual worldwide revenue of about $11 billion. This is more than any of the console and portable systems from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

• In emerging markets such as Asia and Eastern Europe the PC has become the de facto platform of choice for games as console systems have not had major penetration in most countries.

• Even in North America and Western Europe the PC is the leading single platform for games with over $6 billion in combined revenue from those markets.

• Broadband penetration has been a key driver of growth and revenue growth for PC games, and is directly tied to growth in broadband penetration.

• The three biggest trends in 2008 were 1) the growth of online digital distribution via services like Valve’s Steam; 2) the growth of free games with a virtual item purchase model and 3) the growing presence of game cards at major retailers like 7-Eleven.

• Top PC games regularly generate over $50 million at retail revenue but can generate substantially more in subscription and/or add-on revenue.

• Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are the leading products for both revenue and profits. Several Asian MMOGs are generating over $100 million in annual revenue after 5+ years on the market. World of Warcraft is generating over $1 billion in annual revenue. The Lich King expansion to World of Warcraft outsold its predecessor. In 2008, two major new subscription MMOGs (Warhammer Online and Age of Conan) sold over 1 million units at retail.

• Digital distribution, free-to-play models and retail game cards are well-established in Asia, but just starting to emerge in North America and Europe.



Reference 2 http://au.gamespot.com/news/6210424.html?tag=latestheadlines;title;5

• According to the PCGA's 2008 Horizon's Report, PC gaming software saw global revenues reach $12.7 billion in 2008, a year-over-year rise of $1.9 billion, or nearly 18 percent. Overall, the study found that the PC software and hardware market stood at $68 billion in 2008.



Reference 3 http://www.edge-online.com/news/ea-pc-becoming-worlds-largest-games-platform

• "Electronic Arts chief financial officer Eric Brown has said that “the online part of our business is growing as much as 60% year over year" and that the PC is rapidly becoming the largest gaming platform in the world."

[Hammer]

To be fair, the PS3 also has a weaker GPU and a worse memory scheme than the Xbox 360. I see these to be more of a problem. Especially since Sony does have tools available to get you to use the SPU's relatively well even if you don't know how to (API's even ).

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/sony-playstation-ps3-developers-hirai,news-3346.html

"Sony says PS3 Intentionally Hard for Developers"

"We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?" explained Hirai.

[Hammer]

That's a very interesting way of saying "we f%%ked up on both our hardware development and developer tools". In fact it's so bad now that Activision are threatening to pull out of the market. Having difficult to code for hardware and poor dev tools is fine if you're the market leader such as with PS2. But PS3 is trailing hard behind both Wii and the 360 in terms of numbers and both of those have mature and efficient dev suites available to them. Tbh I can see the PS3 being this generations Dreamcast.

Unless Apple enters the console gaming market, a reduced competition would be bad for consumers.

[Hammer]

This is quite interesting to read. Especially since financial reports of these companies suggest that the PC is trailing the consoles. Case in point, let's look at EA:

Total PC: 430
Total Consoles : 1,799
Total mobility (DS, PSP, etc): 572
The Xbox 360 alone makes EA more money ($589 million) than the PC
(All in millions of $, from page 103 of their financial statement for 2008, http://investors.ea.com/annuals.cfm)

The same story is found for most of the bigger publishers.

BTW, I'm not saying the the PC market isn't bigger (even though that report you referred to is being sneaky in including online revenue on the PC side and not doing so for the consoles - even though Xbox live, PSN etc make quite a lot of money). But it's also much more crowded and so harder to make money in for bigger parties.

The key part of PC gaming’s growth is in Asia.

[Hammer]

I suppose that EDGE was just a joke then and they don't actually use OpenGL after all?

Refer to RSX's LibCGM.

You are taking PR talk from the CEO and pretending it's fact. This is not wise

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/06/10/valve-wont-develop-for-ps3-because-its-too-hard/

"Valve won’t develop for PS3 because it’s too hard".




http://news.softpedia.com/news/It-039-s-Very-Hard-To-Program-on-the-PlayStation-3-Says-Wheelman-Dev-107298.shtml

"We've heard Square Enix and Capcom, two local Japanese companies, complain about the problems they encountered when creating something for Sony's console, as opposed to the Xbox 360, which handles much better, and which, in Capcom's case, was the key to the Western market, in which Microsoft's console is more popular due to its lower price tag.

Recently, the executive producer for Wheelman, Shaun Himmerick, talked about the challenges the game he supervised encountered when it was brought to the PS3 from the Xbox 360 and PC platforms. He put it quite bluntly though, and stated that developing for the Japanese console was a real pain and you really needed to know what you were doing."


http://www.businessinsider.com/game-developer-rips-ps3-as-difficult-to-work-with-2009-2
But Midway Games (MWY) veteran Shaun Himmerick is less sanguine. In an interview with ThisXboxLife.com, Shaun says coding for the PS3 is "a huge pain in the ass.""



http://www.videogamer.com/news/exclusive_ea_explains_no_ps3_red_alert_3.html
EA says it's "tough to develop" for PS3.

He said: "We actually announced a PS3 version early on but that was when we were still doing a lot of technical exploration of the architecture. PS3 is a very powerful system but as you guys know it's very exotic and tough to develop for and our engine really at the time wasn't designed for PS3."

[Hammer]

That's what I figured-- processors are backward compatible so DOS should work but OS purposely is not allowing older 16-bit applications not to run.  

Constant switching between 16bit and 32bit modes introduces performance penalties.

Another case of APIs/high level stuff limiting what the hardware is capable of.

Another case of your lack knowledge on how modern X86 processors work.

[Hammer]

Which doesn't change that the PC gaming alliance is not actually making more money than the 'combined console consortium' (the PDF itself says the PC market is about 30% of the whole), despite having many more manufacturers, a bigger market presence and having a growing market (Asia) behind them.

From this PDF, http://www.pcgamingalliance.org/imwp/download.asp?ContentID=15559

"The PC is the largest single platform for games with annual worldwide revenue of about $11 billion. This is more than any of the console and portable systems from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo."

[Hammer]

I didn't say it wasn't hard to program. I said that Sony is trying to make it better and that they are using standard API's.

It's either thin-layer LibCGM or PSGL (OpenGL ES 1.0 (OpenGL ES 2.0 compliant except for the use of Cg instead of GLSL).

[Hammer]

My comments come from the same PDF. The console market as a whole is much bigger than the PC one.

Like Wii, Xbox 360, PS3, the PC is just like any other gaming platform.

[Hammer]

Hah.  They allow 16-bit applications to run fine under 32-bit versions of Vista but not 64-bit versions.

If you run a 16bit Windows userland program, it runs within a layer called Windows On Windows (WoW). WoW supports applications using the Win16 API and relies on NTVDM (NT Virtual DOS Machine). "Applications running in virtual 8086 mode generate a trap with the use of instructions that involve input/output (I/O), which can negatively impact performance".


Try running Stunt Car Racer DOS or EA's 688 Attack Sub DOS on Vista.

 There's no constant switching going on.  Processor supports it but Vista 64-bit won't allow 16-bit applications.  

The AMD64 processor in Long Mode doesn't support Real and Virtual 8086 modes.

Legacy support is best run in Microsoft’s VirtualPC, VMWARE, SUN’s VirtualBox, DosBox(software emulator for DOS/Win16 games) and 'etc'.

I prefer SUN's VirtualBox i.e. USB2.0 support.

[Hammer]

So I have to run a 16-bit emulator under Vista-64 to run 16-bit applications although processor supports it in hardware.

The lack of Virtual 8086 mode when you're in Long Mode is a documented limitation of the x64 ISA.

It's better to boot into Vista-32. Are those applications like VirtualPC using processor hardware or doing a software emulation of 16-bit application?

http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2005/pac346.pdf

"VT-x requires small emulator for real mode code".