unF

" i can't even keep up every other generation anymore. it's depressing, really. shit, i could buy a GeForce 4 Ti or two gamecubes. fucking think about that. " - Prae

unF preach it brutha

Well, that's progress... especially in computers... Everything gets obsolete fairly fast.

My computer doubles as a very large paperweight

Just say "to hell with it" I save my money and keep this PC for a couple of years.

yep, gotta love that computer industry

stupid ass-whores

no kidding. i quit trying to keep up with it a long time ago. i'm just going to wait until my current computer completely craps out on me before upgrading probably, and just get all new stuff in bulk. besides, the only people who really need (require) all the most up to date hardware are hardcore pc gamers (and then thats only as far as the req's go for the particular games) and maybe high end 3d graphic artists, and the like. right now, my comp suffices my diablo2 and counterstrike needs quite nicely.

*quit lagging, dammit! i'm just opening my web browser!!! Punches monitor*

rune: there's one thing to be said about a fast changing environment, in which i have to be willing to spend the bling to keep up to date.

it's another thing entirely when every six goddamned months a *component* of my computer gets updated at the cost of *two entire* console systems.

This is why I don't play PC games.

IndyToad
New ones, anyway

It's frustrating...you spend like half a grand upgrading your computer, then 3 months later another part of your computer gets obselete.
e.g. I have a geforce2ultra on a 667mhz 384mb sdram machine and it works fine for CS,...but the newer games run like shit: e.g. JK2 and operation flashpoint...I don't know if it's cuz i'm running win2k or my processor is just slow but i get shitloads of lag....
fuggen a eh

Yeah, I know how you feel Prae... but those components that you refer to are pretty high end... you can get much cheaper components that may not perform as fast but are still extremely good deals.

And as you know most consoles are sold for a loss so I don't know if comparing the cost of a bleeding edge super-video-GPU-card-thing to the price of a console (even two of them) is a valid comparison. It's a pure supply and demand thing. The demand is very high for them and the supply is fairly low because they're hard to produce and use rare components. Consoles on the other hand are designed to be manufactured cheaply and are mass produced in much larger quantities (keeping up with the demand).

The problem with the videocard market from the seller's point of view is that demand for their products is essentially a sharp spike that is intense for several months and then evaporates completely. As a result they can't satisfy the entire demand (in what is already seen as a niche market) without risking an expensive oversupply of the market.

Many of these cards are so expensive to produce that an oversupply can be disastrous for the company. Case in point: Diamond Multimedia and Creative Labs really got burned on the Voodoo 2 cards that they produced. The demand for these products was really intense when they first came out so they made a lot of them. It ended up being too much and when the next big thing came out the demand for these products dropped dramatically and they were stuck with a lot of product in the retail channel that they couldn't get rid of and had to write off.

Another big problem is that the featuresets of these competing products is similar at every price point. Sure they all have their advantages and disadvantages but for practical purposes it mostly evens out. Companies desperately try to differentiate their products but sometimes end up competing on price in a market where the margins are already pretty thin. So you see that some companies switch chipsets in order to differentiate their product (Gigabyte, Hercules, etc) while others stop serving the market completely (Elsa, Creative Labs, Canopus, S3 (aka Sonicblue)).

Another thing to consider is that the shelf life for consoles is disproportionate to that of video cards. Consoles traditionally have been designed to last for around 5 years. This works well for the most part. When a console is released it eclipses the capability of the average PC for usually at least a year before the tables turn. The shelf life of the average videocard lately has been driven down due to the incredible growth of the market and the speed with which new parts are available. You used to have to wait years for a major leap in the technology and now it happens every six months.

The rate of growth and obsolescence for PC products is higher than any other product on earth. The videocard industry in particular is more indicative of this at the moment than other components (even CPUs) because it is experiencing explosive growth. A symptom of this is that new high end products are very expensive because they have to pay for all of that R&D somehow. The benefit is that there is a trickle-down effect to the technology. A $200 card will buy you a hell of a lot more now than it did even six months ago even if it's not the fastest thing around.

The videocard industry isn't the only place this is happening. Technology goes in cycles and every few years they end up having to change everything in order to make it more efficient and faster. So while it may be expensive to upgrade in between these cycles and replace most of your components (i.e. a 486 to a Pentium, a Pentium II to a Pentium III, etc) over time the cost of incremental upgrades within this cycle is negligible. You can usually find good deals to extend the life of your current hardware if you look hard enough. However this is only good up until the point where your hardware is completely obsolete. At that time you have to buy into the next generation technology if you need to keep up.

*claps hands*

thats the advantage of consoles. computers are constantly changing and on an upward spiral of technology that is hard to keep the hardware up-to-date so that your comp will be able to run the new games that keep coming out that require more bulk force for them to run, not to forget troubleshooting to get those games to run. also, since everyones pc is different, it makes it even harder on pc developers to make software that will be compatible with all these varying degrees of computers, where even more troubleshooting comes into play. whereas consoles are u buy one and get any game u want, and its practically a guarantee that it will work.

*sigh* if only pc's were that simple.

There was a "law" which was reckoned about 40 years ago. It stated that for computers, every 18 months, systems get twice as fast, for the same price (and so the price of cutting edge 18 months previous would be half what it came out at). That has lasted for 40 years...

Jalapeno: Yep, the advantage to having a console is a fixed hardware platform. The games are usually easier to develop and the support costs aren't as high (especially if you aren't supporting multiple platforms). The profit for console games is also usually higher because of this... especially after an installed base of hardware is entrenched. Computer games can take longer to make and have a lot of patches for them even after release because developers have to worry about thousands of different hardware configurations. Consoles do become obsolete... just not as fast as PC's. However console games become obsolete fairly fast relative to PC games.

The upside to PC games is that adding a peripheral is fairly easy and games support most of them (or can be patched to support them) whereas console games have to have support for them out of the box. The graphics quality of PC games also tends to surpass that of consoles within about a year or so. It's also much easier to do things like release new levels, a new bonus pack, or develop a mod for PC games. I'd say that currently a lot of PC gamers have the advantage of internet connectivity compared to few console gamers (especailly broadband internet).

Plus, console games tend to be "twitch based"...which is good in many cases, but I like playing games like Warcraft and the like. If you've ever tried to play an RTS on a console, you'll understand why it sucks a bum. The first time I ever played Civilization, it was for SNES, and I did love it, it's still my favorite game for Super...but when I tried it on PC, it was like a whole new level of game play.

Sure, they could just come out with keyboard/mouse support for consoles, but apparently there isn't enough demand for that kind of thing (even those for which you can get a keyboard/mouse tend not to have many games where using them is preferable over the normal controller).

Then, of course, there's the Macintosh line. Seems like it would be a good middle ground, yes? Only one thing, Apple got screwed by Microsoft and now PCs dominate the market (thus it's not really worth it to invest in a Mac, although that's slowly changing). One more way Microshaft has made our computer-based lives that much shittier.

yeah, the pc definitely has its advantages. i remember trying to play x-com on the playstation with the controller. it was next to impossible. i went and got the ps mouse like the next day. why didn't i have it on the comp? didn't have one at the time.

I like them both. I just wish PCs didn't have such an outrageous upkeep cost. takes like 5 mana of each color :-/