Which way do you prefer or "Have it your way."

[spirantho]

I think the point is that the PC isn't a platform like a C64, Amiga etc. A PC is a bunch of cards stuffed together which may or may not run Windows. You can't standardise the platform because there's no platform to standardise!
If you wanted to make everything use the same standard and the same hardware then you'd need one company to take over what it means to be a PC, and as the PC succeeded because of its open nature, that's just not going to happen.

Not only that but it would be a terrible thing. I know what you mean about how much more we could do with an i7 but if we didn't have an open platform, there would have been no competition. With no competition, progress would be far far slower... we'd probably be using Pentium 2s or something still!

Look at the speed of evolution of the Amiga from the 1000 to the 4000 and apply that to the IBM PC/XT.

Fierce competition in the open PC market is what defines the PC and the technology behind it. Take that away and watch it stagnate.

Just my 2p.

[spirantho]

I think you'd actually find a P2 with a Riva TNT set-up would be rather less fun than you think, no matter how far it was pushed.
Remember that although a lot of code is lazily written for the big games, the hardware has a very efficient design. That's why games still look so good.

I think you're absolutely bang on about modern games being boring - the only PC games I buy are ones with "Civilization" and "Red Alert" in the titles, these days - but I think you're misplacing the blame.

It's kind of like saying that modern chart music is rubbish because we have CDs now. It's not, it's because chart music (and PC games) have become commodity items rushed out by large corporations for as little time and money and as large a return as they can garner. The fact that PCs are very powerful is nothing to do with the quality of the game - there's nothing to stop a coder writing really efficient, powerful code on an i7 - but even if he did that he might get a few frames per second more.... and a few fps more does not a good game make. In other words, instead of rubbish running at 60fps, he'd have rubbish running at 63fps.

That's why I have a PS3 for the occasional bash of Warhawk or Skyrim, and I have Amigas, C64s, Sinclairs, the rest... for when I actually want to play something new (to me).

Luckily I have a really interesting PC. It's my bridgeboard in my Amiga. It plays UFO: Enemy Unknown and Ultima VII, and that's all that matters.

[spirantho]

@rabindranath72

The mac is much less efficient than the Amiga. If you're impressed by that, remember that an A1200 can usefully write letters and stuff using Final Writer using just a couple of MB of RAM.

If you like fast, efficient OSes, then you should love AmigaOS!

[spirantho]

Yeah, I think we're both thinking the same thing here, about modern games (and music ).

But honestly, if you were to freeze the platform all that would happen is the games would just get worse (because most of the really big games are supported by people like nvidia and AMD to show off their hardware - take the hardware away and take away the support) and also the PC platform would die completely as a gaming platform because the consoles would continue to evolve.

[spirantho]

My point was that software has not evolved as fast (and well) as hardware. If I have to write a letter or document, I don't need a word processor which occupies 300Mb ram.

Quite agree.

But what I would say is don't blame the hardware- blame the software.
Of course if the hardware hadn't progressed so much then the software writers wouldn't be able to write such hogging software, but also a lot of really good applications wouldn't be able to exist either.

I'd rather have a machine that takes 300MB of RAM to write a letter, but also enables high speed video encoding, rendering and other stuff, than one which still works in 3MB of RAM but can't do other things I want.

It's not the hardware's fault that software writers are often lazy these days.