Chasing the PC Hardware performance envolope

I have a slew of PC’s in my office that do double duty. On one hand they aid in the chores of work and the other is entertainment. There was a time when both work and play were reasons to have the best built PC rigs.

Interesting enough for me the terms of work and play were very similar. Polygons, textures, and rendering of all types. The best CPU/GPU’s would cut the work in half and make the most recent game releases …. playable.

So something happened and it happened in or around November of 2007. Where the gaming side of performance ran head first into a high end fail. Both Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 failed to move considerable units.

It seemed that in almost any other year, high end PC gaming titles reigned in the need to upgrade or build an entirely new PC. Now for the first time in many years, people scoffed at the requirements and lamented the poor stories and mechanics of these games. I won’t go into the right or wrong in expectations of these titles, but just note that it became clear that punishing hardware specs were not going to fly anymore.

I’ll mention that November of 2007 also marked the release of Valve’s the “Orange Box” which provided games that both looked very well and ran nicely a variety of PC hardware. In short the PC specs were not steep and game play was superior to Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3.

Here I am with a new PC I’ve built with very nice specs. i7-950 OC’d to 4GHz and nVidia 285 in SLI, 12GB Ram. So why write an article minimizing the need for PC hardware speed. Well for one it’s just one PC and my work requirements are always edging higher. In years past I was upgrading and refitting 3 to 4 PCs at a time to cover gaming. Now what worked in 2007 is still capable in todays gaming. Dual Cores running 3.2 to 3.8 GHz will be very capable for some time to come.

The PC Gaming and Enthusiasts markets have allot less to build for. Today entertainment platforms are many, and the profits of PC game development aren’t. The high end PC Desktop is not venerable cornerstone it once was.

Valve has a pulse on their market and I don’t expect they will outpace what the a majority of the general gaming populace uses. http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/