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PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

The Xbox vs. PC Gaming 31

Posted by Zonk from the face/off dept.
An anonymous reader writes "FiringSquad.com brought back their Face Off format to debate how the Xbox was beneficial or harmful for the PC industry. It's an interesting read with a special 3rd guest, Tim Sweeney from Epic Games, giving a few comments at the end." From the article: "The exact impact on Microsoft on the ATI/NVIDIA rivalry is difficult to know. NVIDIA received $200 million up-front from Microsoft for the Xbox. That was as much as the entire 3dfx company was worth in 1998, when the Voodoo2 was at its peak. Likewise, the original plan was for DirectX 8 to provide an API for the pixel shader in the GeForce 2 GTS. But something happened to the DirectX8 spec where all of a sudden, the minimum level of support was the GeForce 3. That something was Microsoft."
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The Xbox vs. PC Gaming More

The Xbox vs. PC Gaming

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  • Beneficial, Easily (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MBraynard ( 653724 ) on Friday December 02, 2005 @02:33PM (#14168050) Journal
    Essentially, the Xbox said to PC game developers: "If you can slightly tweak your product and make it work with our controller, we will give you a much bigger market of gamers to sell your product to."

    Games that might not have been made otherwise, or PC games that would never make it to the Xbox but had financing because of a developer's/studio's profit from another game that was on the Xbox, are the benefit.

    Are there really PC gamers who stopped paying PC games and went solely to the Xbox? Maybe a few. But are there people who never would have bought a PC game (or owned a machine capable of running said game) that _did_ buy that PC game for play on their Xbox? Yes, definitly a lot.

    • Re:Beneficial, Easily (Score:2, Insightful)

      by readin ( 838620 )
      Are there really PC gamers who stopped paying PC games and went solely to the Xbox?

      Maybe only a few, but I bet there a lot of people like me who, upon getting a console game, no longer felt the desire to upgrade their PC because the PC couldn't handle game graphics but was fine for business apps.
    • For sure!
      I'm one of those, who fealt it was a wiser investment in buying the XBox360 for $400+, instead of getting a PC with the equivalent sound and graphics power for $1500-$2000+

      Gaming is advancing too quickly for me to affordably keep up with them. I've noticed my problem when I had disable every single graphical goodie in Half-Life 2 just so I could play it. Even today, I'd have to spend more cash on a PC than the XBox 360 just so I can turn on all the graphical coolness and max out the resolution
      • Either you had a really old computer or some really crappy parts. I built my current computer in October of 2001 (1.2 Ghz AMD Athlon, 512 MB of RAM, and an ATI Radeon 7200 with 64MB of RAM.) I paid only $1100 (19" monitor, keyboard, optical mouse, 2.1 speakers and 40GB hdd included).

        My point is I can play Half-Life 2 on it with some of the bells and whistles at a higher resolution than a TV. If I turned those off I could increase the res close to true high def (1920x1080). So you buy a $300 computer a

    • Are there really PC gamers who stopped paying PC games and went solely to the Xbox?

      Yes, I was one of them. I had been a huge PC gamer, but after having been given the Xbox for my birthday, I soon realized after years of console neglect just how much fun it was to play on a console. I also appreciated the fact that I didn't have to upgrade hardware every few months just to play the newest FPS. With console games you just pop in the disk and play, as opposed to the PC where you patch, get new drivers, upgrade
      • I have a Gamecube so I'm not really a PC fanboy, but I like the PC more, probably more because of my preferred games (RTS and FPS). However, if you have to upgrade every few months to play the newest FPS, you are an absolute idiot, or cash is of no concern to you. Also, if you own a computer, patching, getting new drivers, defragging your harddrive, etc. is something you should be doing anyway, whether or not you play games.

        • "Also, if you own a computer, patching, getting new drivers, defragging your harddrive, etc. is something you should be doing anyway, whether or not you play games."

          Nonsense. I was a PC gamer exclusively for years, now I've mostly gone console. (Ironically, for this thread, the only current gen console I don't own is the XBox.) Since I stopped playing games on my PC I haven't had to upgrade it or update any drivers, and it's been rock solid. Then I played Civ IV and all of a sudden it's crashing to d

          • I did specifically leave out upgrading, as that does not need to happen nearly as often with less system-intensive applications, of which games are not the only ones.

            Even so, if you own a computer, you should patch it, you should get new drivers, and you should defrag it anyway.

    • Are there really PC gamers who stopped paying PC games and went solely to the Xbox?

      Heck yeah...

      I'm one of them. I switched over about 2.5 years ago, and I haven't regretted it at all.

      Now I buy a ton more games than I used to. On the PC I bought maybe 5 or 6 games a year. Now I buy about 20 Xbox games each year.

      The big difference is that now I am not spending my time, effort and money on just getting my hardware to work with the PC games. The final straw came with Rallisport Challenge. On my PC, it cras

  • Hi Alan, thanks for inviting me. I'm the stereotypical Guy On The Internet who apparently has nothing better to do than post anonymously on Firingsquad's horrible comments section.

    I would have cut that part out. This nobody is asked to give his opinion and he slaps the people giving him a voice.
  • I can't help but be disgusted when I see games being advertised on TV for Xbox that were released on PC first then ported to Xbox.
    There are plenty of Xbox commercials that do this, and nowhere mention any existance of a PC version.

    • Re:Harmful it is. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Gulthek ( 12570 )
      Why so?

      Did you also complain when the Lord of the Rings trailers didn't mention the books?

      Or when commercials home versions of arcade games don't mention that arcades had it first?

  • Juh!? (Score:1)

    by manno ( 848709 )
    "Likewise, the original plan was for DirectX 8 to provide an API for the pixel shader in the GeForce 2 GTS. But something happened to the DirectX8 spec where all of a sudden, the minimum level of support was the GeForce 3. That something was Microsoft."

    So you could do DirectX 8 like shader effects in software, on a GeForce 2 GTX, or for that matter the "nForce 2"'s integrated graphics?
    • The GeForce 2 can do fun litle things like the lighting in Doom 3.
      • Which doesn't involve a single pixel shader. Doom 3 only used shaders for post effects like the heat wave.

        The GeForce 2 didn't have pixel shaders, which is why it is a bit odd that the article mentions it as a point.

        My only guess is that they are insinuating that Microsoft pressured nVidia to delay implementing it in hardware until the GeForce 3. However, there are so many factual errors in this article that I really have to wonder if they truely know what they're talking about. Another prime example is whe

        • Re:Juh!? (Score:1, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Obviously you don't know a lot about the GeForce 2 hardware.

          On the NV1x series of cards (GeForce 1, 2) and above, nVidia provided limited programability in the form of register combiners. Register combiners were exposed only through OpenGL, through the NV_register_combiners and NV_register_combiners2 extensions. They provide per-pixel shading functionality, and a programming model that's partly configuration, and partly programming. While it doesn't provide the same programming model as DirectX 8's shaders,

  • Principle (Score:4, Informative)

    by olego ( 899338 ) on Friday December 02, 2005 @03:03PM (#14168349) Homepage
    In principle, the idea is great. Why not release a game for XBox if you're already releasing it for the PC? And, like the article mentions, sometimes it leads to great games playable on both platforms, i.e. Splinter Cell. But most of the time, the duality screws things up. Take Deus Ex 2, for example. Playing the game on a PC is, at times, painful because of all the compatibility checks (and limits) that had to be put in. The area size is about 1/10th of what it was in the original Deus Ex, because the Xbox didn't have enough RAM for a bigger room. And that's just one issue. So, in principle, the idea is great; but the best games are made when the development teams split up during the Hardware consideration of the game and write different code from then on. Sadly, not enough companies are dedicated to making excellent games at higher costs and potentially lower earnings.

  • XBOX has nothing to do with Direct X (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TheSkepticalOptimist ( 898384 ) on Friday December 02, 2005 @03:20PM (#14168517)
    Direct X has been a PC API all along, I didn't even think XBOX games were based on it, or at least, some offshoot from it different then the PC API. As for Microsoft changing Direct X on nVidia, well, MS could do what it wants, Direct X ISN'T an industry standard, its an MS standard. Neither is OpenGL an industry standard, but OpenGL is a cross platform API which ATI and nVidia could make more robust by optimizing their drivers for it, if they wanted to. Has the XBOX really impacted PC gaming? Well, considering that the most innovative and technically advanced games are released for the PC first, I don't think so. Quake, Half-life are two rendering engines that have been ported over to XBOX games. There is so much porting of PC games to game consoles, I would suggest that the only reason why game consoles exist today is because of PC gaming. Lastely, as long as PC technology evolves and improves every 6 - 8 months while game consoles remain static for 5 - 6 years at a time, I can't say the XBOX has had any impact on PC gaming. The Xbox360 may be revolutionary today, but give it 3 - 6 months and nVidia/ATI will release a video card that outperforms the 360 by a factor of 2, followed by one a year from now by a factor of 4, etc, etc, etc until the Xbox720 or whatever.

    • Neverminding the fact that the price of the entire console is cheaper than the "latest and greatest" video cards from either of the major manufacturers, typically.

      I mean, stereotypically

    • Um consoles pre date PC gaming.

      The first home video games came out in 1972 Since then consoles remained ahead of the home computer for gaming until the 486. Heck it took half a decade for the first home computers to come out and more than a decade for the first PC's.

      Even if you include the Spectrum, Commodore and Amiga, which I prefer to think of as hybrids, consoles pretty much invented home gaming. Sure the computers write the games but the consoles, and the market those games were invented for, defined t

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