[電子電玩] PCs are no good for games...

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1^# 大中小發表於 2008-3-11 09:35 只看該作者

PCs are no good for games...

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/36390/118/1/1/

For people who are stupid enough not knowing Tim Sweeney, please do google

引用:

TG Daily: With that much background and knowledge about what PCs make sense and which do not, I’d be interested to learn what PC you are using.

Sweeney: My work computers are Dell workstations. Currently, I have a dual-CPU setup, dual-quad cores for a total of eight cores, and 16 GB of memory. We at Epic tend to go to the high-end of things. Until recently, we used to buy high-end consumer PCs, simply because they tend to deliver the best performance. However, as time goes by, we constantly run into stability problems with CPUs and graphics, so we decided to switch to workstations. We just need very, very stable computers and they perform very well.

TG Daily: So, you aren’t really after the highest benchmark numbers obviously.

Sweeney: Part of the problem we see with these systems is that that they are ultra-fast, but often we see our PCs running under full load for 16 hours a day on various projects. We are constantly loading the systems, for instance using Radiosity. These computing tasks are extremely hardware extensive. Most of the high-end systems we worked on are just not engineered to support that.

TG Daily: What are your thoughts on the future of the PC as a gaming platform? Is scalability the future – we hear AMD talking about Spider and Nvidia is selling Triple SLI that will keep us upgrading over the next several years. Or did the industry lose its focus?

Sweeney: PC gaming is in a weird position right now. Now, 60% of PCs on the market don\'t have a workable graphics processor at all. All the Intel integrated graphics are still incapable of running any modern games. So you really have to buy a PC knowing that you\'re going to play games in order to avoid being stuck with integrated graphics. This is unfortunate, and this is one of main reasons behind the decline of the PC as a gaming platform. That really has endangered high-end PC game sales. In the past, if you bought a game, it would at least work. It might not have been a great experience, but it would always work.

TG Daily: Can that scenario change?

Sweeney: Yes, actually it might. If you look into the past, CPU makers are learning more and more how to take advantage of GPU-like architectures. Internally, they accept larger data and they have wider vector units: CPUs went from a single-threaded product to multiple cores. And who knows, we might find the way to get the software rendering back into fashion. Then, every PC, even the lowest performing ones will have excellent CPUs. If we could get software rendering going again, that might be just the solution we all need. Intel’s integrated graphics just don\'t work. I don\'t think they will ever work.

TG Daily: These are harsh words. It looks like Intel has a lot of things coming down the pipe.

Sweeney: They always say ‘Oh, we know it has never worked before, but the next generation ...” It has always been the next generation. They go from one generation to the next one and to the next one. They\'re not faster now than they have been at any time in the past.