With some companies you can already see their graphics are 'too good for most', but other companies pride themselves on being able to reach a wider audience by scaling their graphics (like we've seen in SINS and SupCom). There will always be companies that go above and beyond to make their graphics as intensive as possible, but I think it will be a while before the companies that do appeal to a wider range of systems will phase out their lower end graphic options.

Depends entirely on what you like to play. I use a 5 year old computer for my primary gaming needs. I've dropped $150 into upgrades since I bought it. It still does wonderfully for brand-new games.

Then again, I've never made the mistake of trying to play Crysis on that machine. Funny, that. Crysis has the most beautiful graphics you've ever (or more likely never) seen. But its sales have been abysmal. When I play GalCiv2, I play it zoomed out so that all I can see is a bunch of icons. The movies are kinda neat, but I've seen games from 1998 with CGI about as good.

Mind you, I play GalCiv2. Until I feel like spending some extra money on a new machine, I'll never play Crysis. There will always be some developer who thinks they have to push the absolute limits of the latest machines and then some. And that developer will wonder why his sales are restricted to a tiny share of the market. Meanwhile, The Sims 2 is still going strong.

Awesome graphics gets you front-page photos and reviews in gaming magazines. Awesome gameplay is what gets you millions of sales. Too bad many game developers don't realize that.

Crysis hit over 1 million sales this past February when counting box sales. It's also not too far short of 2 million now when you consider box sales and online sales. Crysis has sold excellently, but the developer/publisher wanted to see Halo 3-like sales in the 3 to 5 million range. Considering the absurd requirements for Crysis, horrid plot/story, limited gameplay, and abysmal cheat-loaded multiplayer, they should be thrilled that they've sold as well as they have. Regardless of how good or bad Crysis sold, the developer/publisher is looking for any excuse to produce more console games and considered every single download of a no-cd patch or the full game as an instance of piracy and a lost sale--something that's obviously false.

Graphics are getting excellent, but most of it is designed to push overpriced high-end hardware. This is why a lot of developers wind up getting special cutting-edge hardware and discounts/freebies from Nvidia and ATI. There's a growing disparity between the high-end and low-end. This disparity is what hurts PC gaming.

I agree. I play games from my childhood still(atari, nes, vic-20) all the way to the newest games as long as they play well. I'm impressed by cool graphics, but if my computer can't run the game, then it's no good.

A lot of slow downs arent even graphical really. Sometimes it's physics, AI or poor coding. That's when it pisses me off - when a game doesnt even look as good as another one or it's not as sophisticated but there are major slowdowns.

You have just noticed that? That has been true for decades. There have always been games that when first released push a card to its limits, only to be considered mediocre when new cards come out.

In my opinion, there will always be games that push cards to their limits, and those that work on all machines. Games like Crysis exist primarily to encourage video card companies to improve their cards, and people to upgrade their machines.

Games like GalCiv 2, on the other hand, exist to entertain people and provide an enjoyable experience for everybody. Therefore, it makes very good sense for a game like GalCiv 2 to run on a wide variety of games to appeal to the widest audience.

I don't think we're seeing the end of anything, BTW - the new DirectX 10 graphics are certainly revolutionary, but we are at the beginning of the revolution, not the end. The existing effects have a lot of room for improvement, and there will be more incredible advances to some.

Yes, high end graphics is rather niche. However, as our technology advances it will eventually become mainstream and another card will take its place in the high end graphics niche. That's the way it's been for many years, and that's the way it will be in the foreseeable future.

It's simply the continuous improvement of technology that has been going on for a long time that you have noticed.

PC parts such as CPUs and graphics cards have much better price to performance ratios nowadays, I don't really think PC graphics are getting too good for most people's computers as these two components are much easily acquired than they were a few years ago.

ATI and Nvidia have both hit hard at the budget market with a wide range of cards, and some of them are pretty damn good. ATI's HD3850 in particular is one hell of a card, I only played $300AU for it and it can run a very playable Crysis at High settings and others as well (such as Assassin's Creed).

Thats one of the good things about consoles... you can just buy one and be done with it... you dont have to worry about upgrading to play the newest games, and they still look great compared to PC releases of the same titles. I'll always love PC gaming though...

Not really. You buy a Nintendo, a few years later they come out with a super Nintendo, then a N64, then a Gamecube, then a Wii. They cycle slower than computers are, but if you include all the different consoles, you're "upgrading" more often than you'd need to with a PC.

What..You just said they are cycling less...Consoles need to be replaced less often than pc parts. Also, console cost a fraction of the price of comparable pcs, and it's well known that Microsoft and Sony sold their hardware at a loss when they were first released.

What gets me is how games like F.E.A.R., Half Life 2 and even Bioshock can run fine and look decent on my old XP3000/GeForce6800 setup, yet games like Oblivion and Alpha Prime run like crap without having any better visuals than the others I mentioned. To me that just seems like there is a lot of sloppy, unoptimized code in some of those games.

My system being at best about 5 years old can still run most anything atleast on minimal settings, but I do find myself turning down a lot more Gfx options than I used to for most.

If you have a fat wallet, then I don't believe games outrunning your hardware will be a problem. It is the average(financially) person that has to decide if they want to pay 50 bucks or whatever to run a game like Crysis at severely reduced settings. A game which probably loses a lot of it's appeal without the pretty graphics.

One of these things is not like the other. Hint: what kind of environment is the former set in as opposed to the latter?

Yeah, I was running on a 6800 not too long ago myself, and it could run pretty much everything on the market decently until very recently.



Not really, as I've said I was running a 6800 not too long ago - it's what, almost four years old, I think? Depends on whether you want the latest, greatest card or if you just want to play games. If you just want to play games and don't care about always being cutting edge, the PC is much closer to the console in price and upgrade frequency.

It's really only the very high end systems that are so much more costly than consoles and need replacing so often. Basically, you're paying a lot more for bragging rights. If you just want to play games, then there's no need at all to upgrade with such expensive parts so frequently.

That's the nice thing about the PC: You can upgrade as much or as little as you want.



Except when they release a new console . The Xbox won't play Xbox 360 games.



Yup. I myself go with nVidia, and I love their 9600 line of cards - a huge performance jump over the 8600, yet very affordable. It's the first card in a long time I thought was really worth the cost of upgrading from my 6800.

Game developers have always used the current high end hardware. Whatever is current at the time. There was a time when PC hardware did not increase in performance at nearly the rate it does now.

i have a mid range pc as well as an xbox 360, and it has to be said the xbox is so much simpler, i can get graphics on my xbox that are as good as or sometimes better than my computer with minimal fuss, and unlike my pc i dont get annoying frame rate issues, and as i said earlier i get better graphics on my xbox than i ever could on my pc (gears of war) for a fraction of the price. the only thing tat keeps me interested in the pc is games like sins and gal civ that cant be done on the console.