New PC revolution

[SantaMug]

The PC needs to have a revolution as the current state of play is faintly ridiculous.

What am I talking about?

Upgradability that's what.

I work with fixed hardware platforms i.e. game consoles and the amount of power that is lost in software hardware abstraction layers in order to support some user one day upgrading their graphics card etc is absolutely daft.

We're losing over half the power of the hardware just support someone who might upgrade their GPU one day.

What the OS writers need to do is write specific drivers to a fixed hardware specification. I don't care how many specs there are but whatever makes financial sense.

I think one hardware specification per year which details a CPU and GPU (probably that's all that's needed).

Steambox maybe is this ideal but the other open platform OS's such as Windows, Mac OS etc all need to bring out a version of their OS with very thin drivers targeted at a specific specification.

Sure consumers should still have the option to buy the hardware abstracted version which supports all the millions of GPU variations out there but see how many buy that version when they see what they get for their money with the fixed spec version.

 

[pete1229]

Seems like you should have a blog somewhere or perhaps post this in the "Highly Technical" section, because in all honesty, you bore the crap out of us mere mortals.

 

[tolis626]

The PC needs to have a revolution as the current state of play is faintly ridiculous.

What am I talking about?

Upgradability that's what.

I work with fixed hardware platforms i.e. game consoles and the amount of power that is lost in software hardware abstraction layers in order to support some user one day upgrading their graphics card etc is absolutely daft.

We're losing over half the power of the hardware just support someone who might upgrade their GPU one day.

What the OS writers need to do is write specific drivers to a fixed hardware specification. I don't care how many specs there are but whatever makes financial sense.

I think one hardware specification per year which details a CPU and GPU (probably that's all that's needed).

Steambox maybe is this ideal but the other open platform OS's such as Windows, Mac OS etc all need to bring out a version of their OS with very thin drivers targeted at a specific specification.

Sure consumers should still have the option to buy the hardware abstracted version which supports all the millions of GPU variations out there but see how many buy that version when they see what they get for their money with the fixed spec version.

First off,what did you call Windows and MacOS?I hope it's just a bad choice of words,because both are the exact opposite of an open OS.Unless by "open platform" you mean that you can install it on pretty much whatever machine you want,which again isn't true,especially for MacOS.
Anyway...That's how things have been and how they will be for the foreseeable future.You can't just rule out everything else in favor of a specific configuration.If you're so bothered about it (No,half of a modern PC's power isn't wasted because of that),you can just compile a linux distro yourself,tailored to your own machine that will work perfectly for you and only for you.That's pretty much all you can do at the moment.

 

[VirtualLarry]

If Windows gaming APIs are so bloated and slow, then Steam, with a fixed hardware SteamBox platform, and an optimized OS for that platform, should mop up the market with ease. The fact that this hasn't happened yet, should be telling you something.

 

[PliotronX]

Nooooo, upgradeability is what sets PC's apart from tablets and consoles. The API's standardize software support and hardware manufacturers adhere to it. Just stick to Android hardware if you think software development is so held back. I prefer upgrading which is why Macs never appealed to me before they went Intel.

Exemplary of the non-existent inefficiency you speak of would be a similarly spec'd PC to the Xbox360, PS3, and the latest crop of consoles. They have dedicated hardware and OS's and they still don't outrun PC's. Bonus with PC's is you can tweak the settings to enhance framerate, consoles up until the XBone/PS4 have been "best effort" limited to 30FPS.

 

[Torn Mind]

Locking people in to a particular environment for extra computing power is useless if the program they use isn't used on the new platform, whether it be due to compatibility or cost. The fact of the matter is that consumers use their devices in limited ways compared to those in business or government.

Tablets and consoles are "average joe" consumer devices. The cost to operate these devices only involve the price tag on the device and the supporting software and the power consumption of the device. Not everyone uses computers for average joe tasks.

Software costs can add up much more quickly than hardware costs. For tasks that require stability (business apps and server), migration is not worth doing if it means things break or the costs are too high. Indeed, companies are willing to sacrifice power just to utilize virtual machines or use extremely old hardware to keep on using a critical app that they have.

Ah, so all people can fall to the whims of "fashion". I'll keep my upgradability and support for diverse OS's thank you very much. And use VMs.

 

[BrightCandle]

We're losing over half the power of the hardware just support someone who might upgrade their GPU one day.

He asserts must prove, so show us your evidence for this claim. I know the draw calls have some overhead, an overhead that has been dramatically reduced with DX10 onwards. Beyond that the GPUs performance is being utilised just fine. This is a myth that gets thrown around repeatedly but its a total fabrication. There is no magic 2x speedup for a console over a PC they get their efficiency in other ways, specifically:
- Consoles run at lower resolutions
- Consoles run at 30 fps
- Consoles use more blur to hide their low frame rates and drops in the 20's
- Consoles use cheaper less accurate algorithms but due to the lower resolution and blur its harder to see
- Consoles use lower resolution textures

The "optimisations" on a console are mostly about sacrificing image quality in one way to fund another in such a way that you get a better image over all, but fidelity is something you can give up when most people are sat way back looking at a TV, its not something you can give up when more of the gamers vision is filled like with a monitor.

There is no 2x speedup, I have never seen a credible source say so. But if you have the benchmarks I want to see them.

What the OS writers need to do is write specific drivers to a fixed hardware specification. I don't care how many specs there are but whatever makes financial sense.

They don't have the expertise. It takes the graphics companies DECADES of development to get the drivers to the quality of refinement they have today. The idea that MS could write them better is funny but completely wrong.

Sure consumers should still have the option to buy the hardware abstracted version which supports all the millions of GPU variations out there but see how many buy that version when they see what they get for their money with the fixed spec version.

The funny thing is you already get the option to do exactly this. You can buy a mac laptop, that comes with a fixed hardware from the outset and you get a new one every year. Heck you can buy a steam box and get fixed hardware as well. Or you could build your own, this sounds like a business plan to me (Build one machine a year from the available PC parts, write a custom gaming OS and sell the boxes and make royalties on the games). Sounds like a plan to me, go make it happen. Because the beauty of the PC market is there is nothing stopping you creating such a thing, its that very upgrade ability that could one day be the critical element that allowed your business to get started. I think such a business would fail terribly, mainly because the myth of performance is completely false and ludicrous but also because people underestimate just how many thousands of people work on each individual part of a computer. Even the next gen consoles are basically PCs now, just with their own OS (probably based on Linux and Windows).

 

[mfenn]

(probably based on Linux and Windows).

FreeBSD in the case of the PS4 (no pesky GPL terms), but yeah Unix.

 

[piasabird]

Go buy an xbox.

 

[monkeydelmagico]

The PC needs to have a revolution as the current state of play is faintly ridiculous.

What am I talking about?

I know exactly what your talking about! Why yes sometimes I do nearly faint at the ridiculous amounts of jiggawatts power of the modern CPU revolutionizing my visual gaming experiences with GPU ridiculousness. D: