Frog-2009 is looking to stay

Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2419

Frog-2009 is looking to stay

For years I got a new desktop machine annually.

I have a naming convention based on what their role is. And not only was there no N-2010 (no new work laptop, work desktop, home desktop or ultra portable) but there probably won’t be a 2011 one either (other than the recently acquired MacBook Pro).

A big part of the reason is that nothing is really making use of these latest/greatest desktop machines. As people have reported with the MacBook Air, even a relatively low end machine with a SSD can feel very snappy. That’s what I’ve been doing with my X-2009 machines – adding SSD’s to them which gives them a new lease on life.

Sadly, I haven’t even upgraded their video cards. There hasn’t been anything released to compel me to. The last time I upgraded a video card for something specifically was for Half-Life 2. But this machine handles L4D 2, SC2 and other such games without a problem.

It’s no wonder the PC makers are increasingly flailing about making strange new quasi-PC or Android tablet type machines.

So what is happening? In my view, we’ve reached the part in the exponential growth curve of performance (Moore’s law) where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to recognize the performance differences between a brand new machine and one that is 18 months old. This will only become more apparent as time goes on.

Locked Post

Advanced Search

Watch this post

Do not email me updates for this post Email me updates for this post

Successfully updated karma reason!

Jafo

Join Date 03/2001

+1845

RavenX ....no, that 280 will come screaming to a crawl when faced with FSX wound up to the max res/detail.

It really seems the spec requirements for FSX are simply open-ended....ie... there's maybe a 'minimum requirement' but no 'ideal/max'....

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting Jafo,

reply 51

RavenX ....no, that 280 will come screaming to a crawl when faced with FSX wound up to the max res/detail.

It really seems the spec requirements for FSX are simply open-ended....ie... there's maybe a 'minimum requirement' but no 'ideal/max'....

Ok, I feel like I should already know the answer to this, but, I'm gonna ask anyway. What is "FSX"? Is that "Flight Simulator X"? I know the 280 hasn't had a problem running anything I've played since I got it so I know my wife won't be pushing it too hard. The most intense thing she plays is the latest "Sims 3" game. I'll be buying her "Sims Medieval" next month and I'm already sure the 280 will run it at the highest settings too. I haven't checked out the Microsoft Flight sims since like 2000 or 2002, around in there somewhere. Either way I'm sure it would look sweet on my systems

Successfully updated karma reason!

Jafo

Join Date 03/2001

+1845

RavenX ...yes, MS Flight Simulator 10 [X] ... aka ... FSX.

Replaces FS2004 [FS9] .... which replaced FS2002, et al.

FSX is now FSX Acceleration .... and will take any amount of GPU power you can poke at it. An XFX GTX 285 'Black Edition' [factory overclocked] can 'play' it..... but....

Successfully updated karma reason!

Sign Up or Login and this ad disappears!
There are many great features available to you once you register. Sign Up for a free account and browse the forums without ads.

Quoting gsitetfs,

reply 48

I just went back home on vacation, and decided to leave the old laptop, took out the SATA hard disk which I figured to put in a new laptop. Mea culpa, I bought a new Dell laptop (i7, with ATI 1 GB graphics) in a hurry, didnt bother to look too closely under the laptop. When I unscrewed the small panel at the bottom, it was only the panel for RAM! the Hard Disk is inaccessible unless I remove *all* screws and figure out how to pop out the keyboard etc?? Then in a hurry, I managed to delete the first partition (100 MB) which turned out to be the boot partition.. Bye bye Win 7 Home Premium.

The goal was to run XP anyway, I love the Sygate Personal Firewall. Nasty surprise, XP image file re-burned onto the Hard Disk wouldnt load anymore.. SATA sucks.. after spending many hours trying to get XP to load.. I finally restored Win 7 from "Recovery Disk" and went online. Thats when I found out about "Press F6 to load Third Party Raid Driver" which has to be loaded *only* from a Floppy Disk.. Now floppy disks have stopped appearing in laptops since about 6 years ago.. Microsoft have purposefully neglected XP, not upgrading it to run on SATA Disks. Dell didnt have the drivers for SATA, turns out they were available from Intel. Then I found out about nLite and how it could be used to make a custom WinXP install disk incorporating the SATA drivers for XP. So I did manage to install XP.. then installed Sygate, but it crashed mysteriously again and again.. then the XP has to be re-activated within 30 days, but it seems it wont activate anymore. I clicked on some link there and the link is discontinued..

Deleted XP and decided to stay with Win 7. I thought I'll restore all the backups of Impulse games (elemental, Sins, and a few others). Now impulse says you can only restore backups to the operating system from where you backed up.. aggravations galore.

Currently downloading Elemental (2 GB) again, after getting the password reset for Impulse on my e-mail..

Moral: I should have stayed with my Old Laptop.. X-2010. Also, do much more research before buying.

I just redid my Compaq Mini for someone to borrow. No DVD drive or floppy, and I put Windows XP Pro on it. It was SATA as well, so I had to use nlite and create a new install of Windows XP to burn to disc specifically for my laptop. It's not too hard. There's lots of tutorials under "Slipstream SATA Driver for XP install"

http://maxeasyguide.blogspot.com/2008/04/preparations-for-winxp-installation-cd.html

Successfully updated karma reason!

I did something quite the opposite recently. Instead of upgrading, I downgraded. I had 2 old 166mhz desktops laying around so I built an "old" computer by combining their hardware. Oddly, when I swapped the processors in the 2 mother boards, one of them started operating at 200mhz instead of 166mhz. So now I have an old machine using Win98 that can play a lot of my old games which wouldn't work in my regular desktop, which is in the 2-3ghz range. Instead of upgrading so I could play new games, I downgraded so I could play old games.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting RavenX,

reply 47

Very true and well said, chief. I think the fault here lays in the fact that most app and game makers aren't taking advantage of what the newer machines and hardware can do. Only the newest of programs and apps are even taking advantage of multi-threading and using all the cores available to them. For most casual users the true power of the newest hardware is going to waste, both in terms of normal CPU's and Gfx Processors. That was part of my reasoning for getting the 560 Ti recently and not spending the money on the 580. The GeForce 280 I have is still plenty powerful enough to run all the games on the market and the main reason for my latest upgrade was honestly that my wife's machine needed the upgrade.

I thought it far more prudent to spend the money to upgrade my machine and then take my 280 and put it in her machine. That way we upgrade both machines more or less for the cost of upgrading one.

I suspect you guys are right in this regard. Though I'd point out that the effort and resources required to take advantage of the new hardware for what Frogboy noted are minimally noticeably improvements are likely to blame. No one is going to pay a programmer for thousands of hours of work to make ones FPS go from 50 to 60, or so that the AI can figure things out in 2 seconds instead of 2.5 because honestly that's not going to make any impact on sales but it will on creation costs. (actually it might effect sales in so far as some people may not be able to run the game, but you get the idea). But such seems to be the nature of the video business

Successfully updated karma reason!

"A big part of the reason is that nothing is really making use of these latest/greatest desktop machines."

Are we talking about playing at the the lowest possible settings here? I would love to see you play:

Supreme Commander 1 & 2,

Dragon Age: Origins,

Fallout 3,

Fallout New Vegas,

Mass Effect 2,

Metro 2033,

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky,

Arma 2,

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena,

Warhammer Online,

Risen,

RIFT,

Borderlands,

Company of Heroes,

Aliens vs Predator,

Empire: Total War,

Far Cry 2,

or even some of your own company's games that are a few years old now (Sins of a Solar Empire, Demigod) at their maximum settings. "Maxing" the video settings would be making use of what the game has to offer graphically, correct? I'm being merciful here and not mentioning Crysis at Maximum settings (also a game a few years old now). Try playing that on your 2010 Dell desktop at a playable frame rate.

I've recently upgraded from Dual 1GB 9600 Pro's in SLI, to a single Geforce GTX 460, and I've noticed a massive increase in performance across all the games mentioned above. That said, I'm comparing running those games on my 9600 Pro's at roughly "medium" settings to running those same games on my single GTX 460 on maximum settings. Admittedly, my processor and ram are roughly 2 years old now, but using a slower processor with a newer graphics card has its own inherent problems with not utilizing everything the hardware has to offer.

Sure, there is an exponential growth curve, but saying that "nothing is really making use of these latest/greatest desktop machines" is very uninformed--more than a little glib--and shows me you have done little to no research on newer hardware as well as the games of your competition. Furthermore, have you heard of Nvidia's CUDA technology? Quite frankly, I'm appalled any game developer would make such an uninformed comment, but from your recent "success" with the release of "Elemental: War of Magic," and "Demigod," How can I really be surprised?

There are plenty of graphically demanding games out there, specifically those that utilize DirectX 11 and tesselation. Look them up.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting Captain Pat,

reply 57

There are plenty of graphically demanding games out there, specifically those that utilize DirectX 11 and tesselation. Look them up.

Isn't it ironic that only one of the released games you listed uses DX11? Most of them don't even use DX10.

How is that using the power of the latest/greatest desktop machines?

Oh right, it isn't.

Not to mention no 64 bit clients and pretty much everything ported straight from the consoles. Yep, we're sure using the power of our machines to their fullest.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting Savyg,
reply 58

Isn't it ironic that only one of the released games you listed uses DX11? Most of them don't even use DX10.

How is that using the power of the latest/greatest desktop machines?

Oh right, it isn't.

Not to mention no 64 bit clients and pretty much everything ported straight from the consoles. Yep, we're sure using the power of our machines to their fullest.

Actually Savyg, there are 4 games on that list that support DX11.

Besides, the majority of the games that don't support DX11 listed above have massive performance issues running on just the standard settings on even new factory desktop machines speaks volumes... apparently not to you though.

By the way, just because the game is available on PC as well as console does not mean they are a "port." Even what you consider "ports" listed above have advanced graphical settings on PC, among many other options, that consoles do not take advantage of. For example there are massive differences, even to the untrained eye, between playing Dragon Age: Origins on an Xbox360 and on a newer gaming PC with a good video card, ram, CPU, etc., with the settings set to their highest. In fact, Bioware claims to have developed Dragon Age: Origins with the PC gamer in mind and then considered "porting" it to console. I'm not sure what you're even getting at other than proving you may be even more uninformed than Frogboy.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting Captain Pat,

reply 59

Actually Savyg, there are 4 games on that list that support DX11.

Besides, the majority of the games that don't support DX11 listed above have massive performance issues running on just the standard settings on even new factory desktop machines speaks volumes... apparently not to you though.

By the way, just because the game is available on PC as well as console does not mean they are a "port." Even what you consider "ports" listed above have advanced graphical settings on PC, among many other options, that consoles do not take advantage of. For example there are massive differences, even to the untrained eye, between playing Dragon Age: Origins on an Xbox360 and on a newer gaming PC with a good video card, ram, CPU, etc., with the settings set to their highest. In fact, Bioware claims to have developed Dragon Age: Origins with the PC gamer in mind and then considered "porting" it to console. I'm not sure what you're even getting at other than proving you may be even more uninformed than Frogboy.

Four eh? I see one. And several DX10 games. You'll have to point out which.

All I'm saying is that PC gaming has been held back for quite some time. By ports I was referring to the fact that we usually get the same textures, the same audio, the same product with higher resolutions. I don't really care about that anymore, honestly. They're fun games no matter what system you play them on and I'm just as happy to have PC games at all after so many devs dropped it.

I'll happily be considered more uninformed than Frogboy since I don't make games for a living. Thankfully, he has more ambition than 200 of me.

Successfully updated karma reason!