Tim Sweeney Interview

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My work computers are Dell workstations. Currently, I have a dual-CPU setup, dual-quad cores for a total of eight cores, and 16 GB of memory. We at

Shame it's Dell

It's funny that he mentions leaving out the majority and problems with Vista even though their current games have these very problems. And if you have the hardware to run them at high settings it's just a bunch of brown, gray and bloom anyway...

Oh, and this:

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Everyone has a PC. Even those who did not have a PC in the past are now able to afford one and they use it for Facebook, MySpace, pirating music or whatever.

Earns Sweeney Sod a "die in hell" from me.

16 gigs??

Have you tried using the GoW editor? It eats your pc and your family.

Quote from dux

Shame it's Dell

What's wrong with dell? The PC I use at work is a Dell and it's silent and a total beast I wouldn't buy one for my home PC because I like building my own, but their high-spec range is very nice.

Agreed. Dell were terrible, their laptops and budget PCs probably still are, but their high end workstations are rather good. We have 20 dual-core intels with 4Gb of RAM at Uni just for XSI and they chomp through stuff and are quiet whilst doing so.

Btw that interview was pretty interesting -- especially the part about generalised computing potentially sounding the death knell for the likes of DirectX. I've heard this a few times, but it seems to be becoming more and more of a possibility due to the rise of multiple core CPUs. I do agree that it's a shame that the PC market has become a minefield in terms of disparate target audiences-- it's currently high(ish) end and then everything else. You either make a game that is dripping in bells and whistles and exclude most PC owners from playing it (Crysis..), or you have to make compromises to guarantee people with slower PCs can run it. How much you can compromise depends on how much money you have to throw at it, and whether the design even allows certain things to be culled in the first place.

If we do go back to old school software renderers (OK, a bit more advanced ), that will solve a lot of problems in one stroke. If you take some of the cheaper CPUs on the market at present and then compare it to the high end, although the difference is large, it is absolutely nowhere near as large as when comparing CPU and graphics at the same time. I'm just glad stuff like physics cards never got a foothold; that would've been another thing to pin down the PC market and further fragment the situation. Anyway, if newer CPUs all start to accumulate more and more cores, it won't be long before everyone has some pretty decent grunt even in a shitty PC that was never bought to play games. If everyone is using much the same thing in terms of functionality (you can do most things on a cheap CPU versus an expensive CPU, it usually just comes down to speed), then it's a lot easier to manage.

If we go back to having no dedicated graphics acceleration, the PC (once again) becomes an almost inadvertent games platform. I remember back when I was in high school around the time that 3D accelerators were just arriving. I swapped my friend his PS1 for my PC games for a few weeks. His parents had bought a PC for office stuff, yet it could still play the games I lent him more than adequately. There is absolutely no way that would happen now -- it'd be some atrocious integrated graphics chip that died the moment you started the game. Back when I got my first PC, everyone could play games on their PC even with a worthless packard bell. Anyway, that's part of what the PC is missing right now -- the ability to just start playing games on any PC without having to wander through a hardware minefield.

If everyone has to start rolling their own rendering software (or paying licensing fees to companies who write their own) it could be ... interesting. I don't think DirectX and co will disappear for the foreseeable future, but standardised, free APIs seem to be something we just take for granted these days. If you have to write your own renderer or be left in the dust by Carmack & co. it could get interesting...