NVIDIA Quad SLI Disappoints

Vigile writes "While the death of PC gaming might be exaggerated, it's hard not to see the issues gamers have with the platform. A genre that used to dominate innovation in the field now requires a $1200 piece of graphics technology just to participate, and that's just plain bad for the consumer. NVIDIA's SLI technology was supposed to get a boost today by going from two GPUs to four GPUs with the introduction of Quad SLI but both PC Perspective and HardOCP seem to think that NVIDIA drastically missed the mark by pushing an incredibly expensive upgrade that really does nothing for real-world game play and performance. If PC gamers are left with these options to save them from consoles, do they even have a chance?"

Fishy

[qoncept]

There's something very fishy about the graphics card market. Using a substantially faster video card in a PC doesn't provide nearly the performance of a slower spec'd console. The console isn't burdened by nearly as much overhead, but that should not affect the GPU noticably. The only factor that I can see in play is that games can be better optimized when the developers know exactly what hardware will be used (as is the case with consoles), but surely having twice the power should be enough to negate that.

Re:Oh please

[JCSoRocks]

Yeah, this is among the most ridiculous things I've heard on here. Quad SLi is for the consumer just like a super computer is for the consumer. NVidia puts this sort of thing out to maintain its reputation as top dog in the graphics arena and to offer specialized niche users (read people that spend their entire day doing 3d modeling of some sort) an extra boost. This obviously isn't intended for average consumers when the motherboard you have to buy to support Quad SLi costs about half as much Joe Schmoe even wants to spend on his eMachine (not to mention the power supply and the cards themselves.)

Pros and cons of P.C. gaming

[mlwmohawk]

I'm not sure I'd say P.C. gaming is "dead" but I have my doubts about long term viability. As P.C. become even more connected to the outside world and more and more of your collateral exists in digital form on your P.C. The need for security and reliability increase even more. To circumvent the security in order to get good performance for games means that hackers can circumvent the security for their purposes as well.

A console who's sole purpose for existing is to play games doesn't need to (a) be a general purpose computing system and (b) contain anything particularly sensitive. It can dispense with operating system security. There is no way a P.C. can ignore the very real threat of intrusion, data theft, and risk of hijacking.

So, if a video card for your computer costs as much as a whole gaming system, what's the benefit of the video card? More over, if you have to jeopardize the security and integrity of your system to play games, is it worth it?

I can't say, I'm not a gamer and besides a little solitaire, I don't play games on my computer. So, in the abstract, I can't see the advantage of playing games on a computer when good/cheap consoles exist.

Only problem is...

[oneTheory]

...that an Xbox 360 pro (HDMI, hard disk, wireless controller) only costs $350 USD and already includes everything you need to play games. Your $200 card, $300 CPU will also need a case, mobo, RAM, keyboard, mouse, and now you're at $800 or so to "trounce" whatever the consoles can provide.

I think a lot of people just don't have the time to set up and maintain a rig anymore or they just don't want to go through the hassle, and contrary to the way things were in the N64/PS1-2 days consoles really don't seem that far behind PCs anymore but the prices are still way cheaper.

Office computers

[colmore]

The peak of PC (& mac) gaming was the early 90s. Games like tetris, civilization, sim city, lemmings, kings quest, red baron, played fine on standard issue office computers, and the platform was targeted at adults rather than the under 25 crowd. At what point in the 80s did Apple IIs stop getting ports? Since grownups outside a dedicated fanbase generally do not care about the next iteration of graphics and twitch style play, this meant that games had to use either innovative gameplay, storyline, or compelling simulation to compete.

It was also wonderful that games had small enough budgets and man hours of development that games could be signed by individual creators. Virtually nothing made by committee is as interesting as the enthusiastic work of a dedicated artist.

All the "are video games art?" questions amuse me. Because the answer is: they used to be, now they're straight Hollywood, with opening weekends and everything, and if that qualifies as art or not really depends on individual taste. But they aren't terribly compelling art as storytelling mediums (Chrono Trigger is the only non-adventure story game I've ever played that might make a decent non-licensed-property paperback) and they don't match film for visual spectacle. Interactivity is the fundamental nature of the art. Tetris is ten times the work of art that Final Fantasy is.

While I'm complaining: what's with the totally jockish attitude toward games. I have so little interest in proving my skill against testosterone drive 15 year olds, I can't even begin to describe it. Competitive online content, which is seeing the most energy and creativity on both PCs AND consoles, is a turn-off to most people.

Rhythm games are interesting because much like adventure games, they have a basic interaction model that is dirt simple, but they appeal based on the surrounding context. If you'd told me at the time that Parappa the Rappa was one of the most important games ever made, possibly more so than Street Fighter II, I'd have thought you were nuts.

There's a lot of innovation on the PC these days though. It's all in Flash. If you haven't played Desktop Tower Defense, you're way missing out (say goodbye to your productive time and sleep schedule though, 100 level challenge is basically impossible but you just keep wanting to try). I'd relearn actionscript (haven't played with it since Flash 4) to make some games if I wasn't very well aware that any good game takes hundreds of hours to write and under the hood if you aren't using complicated physics or AI it isn't very interesting programming. I'd rather invent a language or fork Minix or something.

On the other hand, MMORPGs are very interesting. Though I worry that WoW defined the success model too well and experimentation is going to fall off (given the huge investment it takes to launch an MMORPG this isn't so much a worry as a certainty).

Back to the main topic: it's no accident at all that WoW runs playably well on 8 year old graphics cards. Games that require specced out systems have a bright neon sign that says "hobbyists only." If you want a game that crosses over, make it run on whatever piece of crap integrated graphics they put in $500 laptops these days. Hell make it run on OLPC. Graphics can scale down much farther than the currently do, and most people don't mind. Most games could be reduced to Halflife 1 level graphics and still convey the important ingame objects and map features. One thing that I'm constantly bewildered by is that designers use all these polygons not to populate worlds with more interactive objects, but to dress up the same low moving object count we've had since Quake 1. Halo would play perfectly well with 500 polygon characters.

Or maybe I'm just bitter because 1991 era action puzzle games were the last genre I was any good at. I beat Oh No More Lemmings! as a 10 year old, a fact that I'm still damn proud of.

But don't worry, PC gaming isn't anywhere near as dead as arcade games.

Re:Oh please

[rucs_hack]

The pc gaming and console gaming crowds are quite often the same people, which a lot of these doomsayers miss.

I do get the impression from high street games shops that consoles are the new wave. Pc games are mostly relegated to a few shelves, or one small section.

This actually shows something entirely different from that which is apparent at first glance.

The old way of games purchasing is dying out at a rapid rate for pc gamers. We don't need to go into shops, we have steam, or play.com, or amazon, to name but a few online locations. Most polls that talk of reduced pc game sales aren't taking these online sources into account. It's been several years since I bought a game in a shop, a bargain bin copy of Rise of the Middle Kingdom.

Console gamers have online shopping systems, but those are very much first generation, and in my opinion, not that good. Give it a few years of work and we might start to see high street console game purchasing dropping. What will they say is the new thing then? Mobile phone games probably.

Re:Consoles always been cheaper

[LoofWaffle]

Consoles have always been cheaper than PCs

That statement is invalid. The PS3 cost Sony ~$850.00 to make and was intentionally sold at a loss. Had they sold the system at a profit, the price to consumers would have been have been close to a grand(likely more). Consumers would have had a fit if they had to pay "PC" prices for a console, even if this device is essentially a proprietary "PC" with a more traditional console controller.

For the nay-sayers who think PC gaming is dead...
Maybe I'm missing the picture here but given the inner workings of both the XBox and the PS3, their PC-like peripherals (sans mouse), their network-ability and the mod-ability of both into Linux systems, I would argue that console gaming is dead. The only problem with that argument is that the Wii (as the only real console left) is doing pretty damned well.

On a side note, even Apple has realized the benefits of being more PC.

I'd say the PC is doing fine, 1200 dollar video cards and all.

Re:Office computers

[TheSoepkip]

I agree with some of what you say. I'd like to point out that the "desktop tower defense" is leeching of a fairly substantial mod community in the War Craft 3 "scene" that build on one of the add-ons that came with the game (I don't know what WC3 is using as a source of "inspiration"). In that respect, I'd agree more with your statement if it said: "There's a lot of innovation, it's all in flash or coming from mods".

The PC is NOT a "platform"

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't disagree more. What's causing this gamer to be fed up isn't graphics quality, it's game quality. From the plethora of patches, bugs, crashes and incompatabilities that plague PC games

Stop right there! Its not the games themselves that are the source of the problem. It's thousands of different combinations of crappy hardware (yes I'm looking at you, Intel integrated graphics), crappy drivers, and random crap people have installed on their computer (virus scanners, etc).

Trying to make a modern game work reliably across all the different PCs out there is extremely hard (actually, more like impossible). Some of them have graphics drivers that are 3 years old, so they still have all the bugs that were fixed 2+ years ago. Others have just plain broken drivers that return success results even when DirectX API functions fail, or return failure in situations where it should literally be impossible.

Modern PC games usually contain *workarounds for specific known-bad video drivers* and as many as 5 custom rendering paths for *specific cards*. Developers work hard trying to make the PC look like one sane platform with compatible, working hardware. But the truth is that it isn't... every PC is slightly different, and so its a regular occurrence that a commercial PC game is released and it turns out to crash or have graphics glitches or not function correctly, on some percentage of the target market's PCs.

There is no solution to this other than to move towards a more console-like model for PC hardware and drivers (which Microsoft is trying to do with Games for Windows, but I doubt they will really succeed with that).

P.S. Your argument about Oblivion being consoleized overlooks the fact that Morrowind was available on the original Xbox. I agree that Oblivion was dumbed down for console though--especially in the limited dialogue. That was really a shame.

PC Gaming Far From Dead

[softwaredoug]

I'm glad that all the fanboys have left the platform for the consoles. There's more games available for the PC than ever before and many absolutely free. Its just so easy to create PC games (as opposed to getting another platform's SDK) and now with the Interwebs its become so easy to distribute them and develop communities around them. They aren't blockbusters, they are more like indy films. Better yet, they're indy films where YOU can actually have fun participating to make them better.

I think the state of PC games is back in the hands of the game hobbyists, maybe more like the early days of PC gaming, rather than the big companies. To me thats a good thing.

Re:Consoles always been cheaper

[electrictroy]

Well every "rule" has exceptions. There was PS3 at ~$700 and the 3DO at ~$700 back in the 90s. But generally speaking, consoles use one-generation-old technology in order to provide decent gaming at an affordable price (about $300). Nintendo's NES was providing 8 bit gaming while most computer gamers had already moved onto 16 bit. Super Nintendo provided 65,000 colors but computer gamers were already looking at 16 million colors. And so on.

>>>"A genre that used to dominate innovation in the field now requires a $1200 piece of graphics technology just to participate"

As I recall that statement would have been just as valid in 1990.
PC gaming has never been inexpensive to participate,
because PC gaming is always pushing the envelope.

Re:Consoles always been cheaper

[king-manic]

That statement is invalid. The PS3 cost Sony ~$850.00 to make and was intentionally sold at a loss. Had they sold the system at a profit, the price to consumers would have been have been close to a grand(likely more). Consumers would have had a fit if they had to pay "PC" prices for a console, even if this device is essentially a proprietary "PC" with a more traditional console controller.

That $850.00 is a guess by an analyst using estimated wholesale part prices and estimated associated costs. although I doubt the Ps3 was sold for a profit I highly doubt it was sold as a significant loss. Only a few consoles have been confirmed to have beens old at a loss. The dreamcast and the xbox. Other then those two any guess of a loss is just hearsay.

But who will save the consoles?

[CDeity]

"If PC gamers are left with these options to save them from consoles, do they even have a chance?"

Save PCs from consoles? As others have said, no console currently on the market can come close to the performance exhibited by even the ATI (or AMD, however you want to spell it) Crossfire solution, let alone the GeForce 9800 GX2. On a console, you're stuck with 1280x1080 at best with lower levels of detail in the geometry and textures. A $180.00 GeForce 9600 GT could provide equivalent or superior graphics at comparable framerates to current consoles. The article concludes the bottlenecks for the GF9800GX2 are 512 MB of RAM *per GPU*, each with a 256-bit memory bus. For some perspective, the XBox 360 has 512 MB *total* shared by the GPU and the CPU. The PS3 has 256 MB for the GPU and 256 MB for the CPU.

Also, both NVIDIA and ATI/AMD developed the graphics technology that went into today's consoles. It's not like console technology will somehow overtake what's available for PCs; it's the same technology, only the product cycle for PCs is a lot shorter.

Consoles simply cannot defeat the PC as a gaming platform on the basis of somehow having better hardware. Sure, Wii games are fun. Gameplay is always important, blah blah. That's no reason to assume consoles are, have, or will be crushing PCs anytime soon. As long as compilers are available, small timers will be making games for PCs. And successful small timers occasionally become bigger timers. But what about profit? We all played WoW on our PCs.

Here is why you shouldn't care too much about the results listed in the article. The GF9800 GX2 isn't just for 3D graphics. The reason why NVIDIA rushed the GF9800 GX2 to market now is to support the brave new world of high-performance computing they are envisioning. NVIDIA recently announced that a CUDA implementation of PhysX would be released; you'll probably want two GPUs for that. Additionally, CUDA 2.0 is due real soon now, and this will certainly have enhanced support for multi-GPU application development. To buy one of these just for gaming right now is, well, not economical. To buy a system capable of this degree of performance in this form factor (*eight* GPUs fit on one Extended ATX Intel Skulltrail) intended for research, scientific, or industrial computing is, well, a steal. Hats off to gamers for making this kind of technology affordable.

And now, the sensationalist closing: could this be the year of the Slashdot article summary that concludes without baseless rhetorical questions?