The Futuremark obsession
Why the obsession with frame rates is endangering the PC games industry. Nathan Taylor argues PCs should focus on strategy and RPG's, where consoles can't compete.
Recently Futuremark released its latest 3D benchmarks for PCs. 3DMark Vantage is designed to take advantage of all the powers of DirectX 10 and multicore CPUs, with some pretty hard core testing routines designed to put even the most capable systems through their paces. It tests multi-threaded AI (which makes use of multi-core CPUs), supports physics processors and GPU-accelerated physics, as well as all the latest visual whiz-bangery. Of course, its release was almost immediately followed by patches and new drivers from AMD and Nvidia to make their cards more compatible with the benchmark (i.e. makes the result look better for their respective products).
Here’s the problem: a rather large proportion of current PC owners won’t be able to run 3DMark. At all. It requires both Windows Vista and a DirectX 10-capable graphics card, as well as some hefty processing clout. Forget about running it on a notebook or a PC that’s older than a year or two. Officially, its minimum system requirements are:
Processor: x86/x64 single core CPU with SSE2 support. Performance similar to Intel Pentium D 3.2GHz or better.
Display Card: Fully D3D10/SM4.0 compliant graphics card, 256MB
Memory: 1024MB
Free Disk Space: 2GB
Operating System: Windows Vista (Server editions not supported)
And its recommended system requirements:
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 or equivalent AMD CPU.
Display Card: Fully D3D10/SM4.0 compliant graphics card, 512MB
Memory: 2048MB
Free Disk Space: 2GB
Operating System: Windows Vista (Server editions not supported)
Of course, the graphics card vendors will love these benchmarks. They’re designed with future processing power in mind, which means that existing cards and systems probably won’t look so good when running them. Low benchmark results tend to compel enthusiasts to upgrade, even though there’s probably little need to do so.
I really don’t know how many more games will appear for the PC platform that will really push those kinds of performance levels. Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 were both critically acclaimed by games reviewers -- reviewers with systems tricked out so much that they could handle the extreme requirements. But when they hit the market they bombed. In their first month of sales in the US , Crysis and UT3 sold just 87,000 and 34,000 copies respectively. Meanwhile, console games were selling in the millions. Funnily enough, both of those games have system requirements similar to the requirements of 3DMark Vantage.
The fact of the matter is that people are holding onto their PCs for longer and price has become a much higher priority in purchasing decisions than performance. Game developers that target only the hard core gamer are on a hiding to nothing. They will be better served developing innovative gameplay for the PC, and focussing on those things that the PC is good at (especially strategy games and RPGs, where the control system of consoles can’t match up), rather than pushing the kind of system requirements that 3DMark Vantage encourages.
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