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[Brahms]

Have minimum specs been stagnating recently? I don't buy much new games or keep a very fast PC. But it looks to me like they have, I suppose because the consoles haven't been replaced and we're also getting to the point where the effort to make a game look better isn't really worth the money.

Anyway, I'm thinking of getting a new PC next spring when Brink comes out, and though I haven't seen any min specs from it, I'm doubting they'll be that high. Whachu guys think bout it all?

[Junta]

There you go

[Hzza]

There you go

That took me ages to get. Then I lol'd.

Srsly though, I won't be able to afford any kind of reworking until the middle of next year, so I'm more then happy for games to have "stagnated" spec wise. I also think the Unreal 3 engine being as good looking/efficent as it is has helped this generation a shite load, although admitedly all games in that engine too tend to look quite similar even with differing art styles just from the very nature of the engine itself.

edit - I was also going to use Brink as a basis for upgrading, HIGH FAIV

[Brahms]

I'm also pretty excited that stuff is stagnating. Should make games more stable too.

Brink is apparently based on idtech 3, but totally reworked, so who knows how it'll run.

I've got a Geforce 460 1gb pinned as the basis for my next upgrade. Hopefully in five months the price will have dropped another £30, though just looking, seems like I still won't be able to run crysis on very high with that =[

[Hzza]

I'm thinking 1gig 5850 just because the 4850 kicks so much ass.

Also, Crysis is a terrible game, why would you want to run it at all, let alone on v high?!

[r007]

There's two things I think that might be responsible for this:

a) There's not been a whole lot of new engines out. Most Games we play still run Source, Unreal 3, etc. with minor modifications to account for development in Shader technologies.
b) The new engines (idtech3) are being developed with scalability in mind -- the games should also run on an iPad for example.

That said, the "available specs" are also stagnating a bit. We're still around 3 GHz CPUs, and only keep adding more and more parallel processing features that are rather hard to program for (given that every now and then, except for veeeery specific tasks, you have to sync up all the parallel processing, which makes it less efficient).

[Brahms]

Because I really liked farcry and farcry 2 was rubbish. And by the time I can run it at very high it'll probably cost about £5

True that, R007. I was thinking about Cod:BlOps coming out and running on the same engine as MW, a game that's like.. what.. four years old? But surely graphics cards are continuing to improve, as they're already massively parallel anyway?

(I don't really rate CPUs as having much effect on gaming, sue me)

[Captain Valentine]

I'm thinking 1gig 5850 just because the 4850 kicks so much ass.

Also, Crysis is a terrible game, why would you want to run it at all, let alone on v high?!

If you're going to get a 5850 I'd go for an EAH5850 it runs really well and looks super badass

There's lots of positive reviews for it as well.

I'd second that Crysis is a terrible game, no fun whatsoever.

[CruelCow]

Specs not increasing is a good thing for PC gaming. Having to upgrade your GPU and PCU every second year as an investment few people want to do, especially when the alternative is a console which lasts several times as long for a lot less.

I think apart from many games being released on pc and consoles (and therefor having a definite limit on processing power), we're slowly reaching the point of graphics being good enough.

[r007]

@Brahms: Just upgrading my CPU gave me a 2-300% FPS boost. It's not to be underestimated.

Graphics cards have -- at least in my observation -- improved in about the same direction as CPUs. Adding more features. More shader parameters, (=) more registers/cache/memory for the SPUs, more general purpose instructions for use as a computing platform.

I thing we also might've hit a plateau in rendering theory. You can do pretty much all of the "cool effects" you want with what we have today (light, bump, surface, texture, and what other -maps are still around, custom shader code, particle effects, you name it). Short of switching to raytraced global illumination for realism purposes (and do we really want realism?), there's not much terrain left where the graphics part of a graphics card could evolve to.

€dit: last paragraph -- what cruel said, in verbose.

[DeadlyAvenger]

It's because of consoles.

Take a look at some of the big FPS releases:
Bad Company 2
Medal of Honor
Modern Warfare 2 / Spec Ops

A lot of these games are developed for the consoles then ported for PC - and the consoles use DirectX9. They're limited to that by the hardware inside them.

It used to be a case that a brand new console using updated technology would come out every 18/24 months - but the 360 and PS3 have been around for years now - which means that all of these games are still on DX9.

If a new console came out - it would probably be DX10/11 and would therefore push developers to move forwards to make it easier to port games between platforms. Instead they have decided to release new form factors and wavey handey things - but the underlying technology behind it has stayed the same.

I think they're also hitting limits on how fast things can go etc. on CPUs/GPUs - hence why they have made a move to multiple cores / more advanced features rather than raw clock speeds.

[Mr Chug]

What deadly said. In a market where your mainstream FPS and RPGs (typically leading the way in ultra top shiny graphics tech) are developed with the console-first-pc-port-later mentality, it doesn't make sense for devs to go out of their way to make it any prettier than the consoles can run for an increasingly smaller share of the market.

You'll still get bizarre exceptions, ironically thanks to microsoft pushing DX10+ to get gamers to buy new operating systems. Just Cause 2 could run fine on DX9 consoles, but the PC required DX10, allowing a very pretty game indeed if you had the system specs, but also upping the min specs a bit for everyone else.

The current plan for miniaturisation in the semiconductor industry runs out in 2017 or so- at that point, transistors can't get any smaller without triggering quantum effects, which is pretty much the end of the line for silicon based chip advancement (and that's assuming lithography is advanced enough to get us there). That should stagnate minimum specs quite nicely.

[Brahms]

I agree about the extended console life thing. They seem to be extending the life via wankery mocap stuff that as tuff as hell PC gamers we can just spit on.

I haven't heard anything about a new generation of consoles in development. Is this just my ignorance?

It's pretty good news for PC gamers overall though. I'm looking forward to the day when my decent specc'd games machine is near silent and low power because the graphics just haven't improved.

[CruelCow]

The longer they can stay on one console, the more monies they make.

Also, with the move/kinect, I don't expect a new console for at least 1-2 years.

[claws]

If what I've heard is true then (on the Xbox side, anyway) they're thinking a little harder about the sequel than they were, but I'm sure Kinect is their main focus for now. I'd be surprised to see anything in the next couple of years.