Anyone else getting bored with PC hardware?

[Black Octagon]

Developments on the display front have been my biggest source of interest in recent years.
- Overclockable, 2560x1440 IPS panels
- 4K (and 8K)
- New aspect ratios like 21:9
- Low persistence technologies (LightBoost etc.)
- G-Sync
- Oculus Rift

Some of these technologies are only really helping LCD displays finally start to catch up with what quality CRTs could do years ago. But overall, things are moving forward.

I fully agree that on the source side things seem a little slow. That goes for both the PC hardware but moreso for the games themselves. I continue to hope that the new generation of consoles will push things forward, and that other variables will help the process (e.g., the Mantle API).

Slow progress to the hardware is not as big a deal as is the lack of concerted efforts to leverage what the hardware can do. How many games even properly leverage GPU compute, for instance? Multithreading? Heck, games are still coming out with silly FPS caps.

...

...The thrust of this post seems to have drifted a little. Bah, too lazy right now to rework it.

 

[DeathReborn]

To me the biggest drag on PC Hardware and the excitement it used to bring me is the trend towards more hand-holding and less advanced tweaking on everything buy jacked up price specialist/enthusiast gear. PC's have become less hobbyist and more mainstream & I blame Intel, Google, Microsoft & Apple for that decline.

I think that if AMD, Linux* & nVidia were the gorillas we'd see more craziness and more fun to be had.

*In it's many flavours...

 

[smakme7757]

My friends and myself were really big on Overclocking, cooling, benchmarking and the like from 2000 to around 2011. We were all born in the 80s and were taken on a pretty exciting ride from the lowly pentium 133Mhz to the Pentium 4 and AMD athlon - nehalem etc... Then around 2010/11 we all just sort of lost interest. My mates got into Golf, work, studies, traveling etc. I became an IT nerd with more of a passion for software and storage. Nearly all of us are now married and have kids. Maybe in our case it was just a simple fact that life goes on.

One argument is that the hardware hasn't been as interesting as before, but I think PC hardware is plodding along like it always has been. We just don't have the Ghz race anymore or the GPU wars. The software isn't as demending in the consumer space any more either. The days of upgrading every 2 to 3 years are truly gone. Even in the gamer space a new GPU is pretty much all you need to swap out after 3 years. My 670 GTX is still running games on High/Ultra depending the title and it's over 2 years old.

I really think it's a matter of life goes on for us who were into that stuff when we were younger and that the drive to overclock and buy new hardware is gone. Hell, my PC is at stock and it runs everything perfectly fine.

 

[Blitzvogel]

The most exciting thing is the rise of small indie developers that have the benefit of Steam and fundraising methods to create unique pieces of software. What is unfortunate is when they get bought out by bigger developers that kill the integrity of the products.

 

[HeXen]

I lost interest years ago for the most part. Back in the old Pentium days, OC'ing saw some real improvements, sometimes it was a must just to get get decent fps at affordable prices. Hardware is pretty boring now, even the new stuff often either yields no games or software that support it, or the ones that do, the result is so minimal that you have to compare screenshots and circle the areas in red to get anyone to notice, then everyone talks about how awesome it is. Yeah, screw that.

The most exciting thing is the rise of small indie developers that have the benefit of Steam and fundraising methods to create unique pieces of software.

I'm the opposite. The vast majority of indie games to me are not interesting and their are so many that they have literally convoluted the Steam Store that I have to know exactly what I'm searching for just to find anything.
Most of them look like 2d throwbacks anyway with the 3d ones having older graphics from the 2000 era.

I don't know how great many of them are to play since their style or genre isn't interesting to me. But if they're not careful, Indie games have the potential to be what Indie games back in the Atari days were...A flood of crap that overtakes the platform and leaves too much disinterest behind. Maybe it won't happen again but you never know.

 

[RussianSensation]

I think we should see a wave of next generation games soon though as developers start targeting XB1/PS4 as the lead platforms for their games. Order 1886 looks magnitude of times better than any PS360 game. It's just the current userbase for PS4/XB1 is still small for developers to start targeting those platforms on a regular basis as their minimum target.

I think with Witcher 3, Dragon Age Inquisition, The Division, we will slowly start to move away from last generation console ports. In 2015-2016, I fully expect a 2x increase in GPU demands once these games start arriving. Then on top of it, 4K panels will become more affordable and higher quality. These 2 factors should spur a major wave of GPU upgrades.

 

[2is]

I'm the opposite. The vast majority of indie games to me are not interesting and their are so many that they have literally convoluted the Steam Store that I have to know exactly what I'm searching for just to find anything.
Most of them look like 2d throwbacks anyway with the 3d ones having older graphics from the 2000 era.

I don't know how great many of them are to play since their style or genre isn't interesting to me. But if they're not careful, Indie games have the potential to be what Indie games back in the Atari days were...A flood of crap that overtakes the platform and leaves too much disinterest behind. Maybe it won't happen again but you never know.

I agree, I don't find the indie scene exciting at all and the mere fact that we're looking at it as the most exciting thing for PC's currently is pretty sad.

 

[Revolution 11]

I think we should see a wave of next generation games soon though as developers start targeting XB1/PS4 as the lead platforms for their games. Order 1886 looks magnitude of times better than any PS360 game. It's just the current userbase for PS4/XB1 is still small for developers to start targeting those platforms on a regular basis as their minimum target.

Order 1886 will not look that good. A lot of that video is cinematic trailer and the rest is a limited level and scenes. Preview gameplay rarely looks like the actual game, for reasons of scaling, financial resources, and level design.

 

[bobby45512]

I want to see more cpu's with low TDP's, SFF cases and builds. I'm more about saving desk and floor space to increase aesthetics.

 

[Cloudfire777]

Stuck on the same architecture for 2.5 years for AMD
First Maxwell cards was 28nm low end while rest is just boring GK110 rebrands
Broadwell postponed til late 2014 or early 2015 which will probably just be +5% in CPU performance and rest is concentrated around boring IGP power which few need anyway
DDR4 support only for the really expensive i7 hexa (?) cores


Yup, to hell with it all

 

[Bateluer]

and rest is concentrated around boring IGP power which few need anyway

Except all those CPU skus ending up in Ultabooks with 3K and 4K resolution displays. HD4x00 IGPs don't cut it for those resolutions. Intel and AMD should be commended for yanking up the performance of the IGP from the gutter into something thats almost passable.

 

[3DVagabond]

Yes, the hardware has gotten pretty boring. At least we still have each other to annoy and amuse. :-*

 

[Cloudfire777]

Except all those CPU skus ending up in Ultabooks with 3K and 4K resolution displays. HD4x00 IGPs don't cut it for those resolutions. Intel and AMD should be commended for yanking up the performance of the IGP from the gutter into something thats almost passable.

Have you seen the price for the notebooks with the GT3e (Intel Iris Pro) notebooks? The price premium itself for the IGP part is right there with a dedicated graphic card which is much more powerful.

For those who want a slim notebook with great battery life and do not care about the price, sure its a really nice chip, but I don`t like that they are neutering the entire mobile line and the architecture for the sake of battling with AMD that started this whole APU race.

I want a mobile Broadwell chip that have the very minimum on the IGP part that is required to decode a video on 1080p and maybe power a 4K display (not gaming), and the rest of the power envelope should be concentrated around raw CPU power alone.

Maybe its just me, but I dont like the direction both Intel and AMD is heading. They will never catch up with dedicated graphic cards anyway, atleast not with the price they are charging, and as long as the game requirements are progressing as well, it will be a neverending battle for Intel and AMD to catch up with the dGPU.
I can admit that the Apple notebooks that comes with i5/i7 and GT3/GT3e probably move a lot of chips for Intel though. Do not care for Apple, and I do not like this direction. Atleast not for me who exclusively run the high end dedicated graphic cards and need a CPU to follow the rest of the hardware.

 

[indy2878]

Slow progress to the hardware is not as big a deal as is the lack of concerted efforts to leverage what the hardware can do. How many games even properly leverage GPU compute, for instance? Multithreading? Heck, games are still coming out with silly FPS caps.

And as far as software games go, new hardware technologies mean the need for higher development costs as well. Its also disheartening to see the "need" for new games coming every year. Not every developer/publisher is a AAA title with a AAA budget.

Secondly, maybe PC hardware companies are just going WAY too fast to begin with. Sure, they may have the money and resources, but if the software is not up to par then its just a big wasted energy and effort into releasing new hardware every year. Also, the issue of overstocked inventories of hardware. What exactly do PC hardware manufactures do with these surplus, unsold parts?

If anything software is an important focus. You can have all the computing power in the world from a desktop gaming PC with 4 videocards, Xeon or Opteron Cpus, PCI-express RAID 5 SSDs, 128GB RAM, but its just a big waste of money and energy consumption if the software to back it up either doesn't take advantage of the hardware or doesn't require that much hardware to begin with.


I take it most in this thread focus on consumer based items. So stuff like Big data, NASA scientific computing, video animation development, etc... would be some of the exceptions to this rule.

 

[coffeejunkee]

Also, the issue of overstocked inventories of hardware. What exactly do PC hardware manufactures do with these surplus, unsold parts?

I often wonder about this too. On the one hand it seems they are learning, for example Asus had 16(!) H61 boards but just 5 H81 models. On the other hand, MSI has 8 different Z97 gaming models + 16 more regular Z97/H97 models. Either these guys have mastered the art of market forecasting or they're just dumping loads of boards every year. But where? Even at half price they're still too expensive for 3rd world countries. Also, it's too hard for average customers to choose. Even I have to make a study of the line-ups so people new to the market will just get overwhelmed.

Anyway, not really bored with pc hardware. Sure, perf increase has slowed down a bit but still it's more interesting than say, market for dishwashers.

 

[Tequila]

Still a lot to look forward to like virtual reality gaming. I still have a lot I can upgrade. I'm going to shop for a 4k monitor soon then see if Maxwell gets delayed any further and if so might upgrade to 780 SLI.

 

[MrPickins]

Once 4K catches on we should see big performance jumps in GPU's. As it stands right now no card outside the 295x(really two GPU's) is even close to letting you max games. My current setup cant push 120 fps @ 1440/120hz. And I would venture to say 99% of gamers dont run near my setup.

I really don't think that display resolution is holding back GPU performance.

The issues are more along the lines of heat/power consumption and die size/cost, neither of which will be alleviated until the 20nm node is ready for prime time.

 

[indy2878]

I'm going to shop for a 4k monitor soon then see if Maxwell gets delayed any further and if so might upgrade to 780 SLI.

Here's a good use for GTX 780 SLI:
Get three 27" 1080p monitors for your desktop rig or if you have the space in your home buy any brand of a 65" 1080p smart t.v.
Unfortunately for me I don't have the space for such things in my place so
I'm happy on a 19" Acer 720p monitor for a desktop rig and a 37" Sony Bravia Rear Projection (purchased in 2007) for the xbox 360 and gaming @ 720p.

I'm surprisingly happy as 10 Oysters Rockefeller from a decent seafood restaurant as well. :thumbsup:

 

[2is]

I think part of the problem also, is that a lot of us who were around during the "golden age" of PC gaming are older now with other priorities. Jobs, careers, families, other hobbies, etc etc so it's not quite as easy for us to get excited about hardware unless its really something special.

 

[indy2878]

I think part of the problem also, is that a lot of us who were around during the "golden age" of PC gaming are older now with other priorities. Jobs, careers, families, other hobbies, etc etc so it's not quite as easy for us to get excited about hardware unless its really something special.

That's true. Like you mentioned It depends what demographic we're looking at. Also we're probably just WAY TOO spoiled by all of these high tech stuff we have available. However, I definitely would rather have many materialistic choices than not have nothing to choose from though. But yes there ARE other stuff out there outside of a PC computer to get into even if its just temporarily abstaining from tech stuff and then getting back into it later on when you're interested again and newer, better stuff are out.

If you look at the overall picture, a lot of people are like

"Oooohhh, ooohh, I "need" this new (usually pricey) Nvidia GTX 780ti videocard or AMD R290X otherwise I'll not be happy."

Its not like all of these PC hardware we have is going away from earth any time soon. We can't just take all the gaming rigs in the world, toss everything out into outer space and never to be seen again.

 

[toughtrasher]

That's true. Like you mentioned It depends what demographic we're looking at. Also we're probably just WAY TOO spoiled by all of these high tech stuff we have available. However, I definitely would rather have many materialistic choices than not have nothing to choose from though. But yes there ARE other stuff out there outside of a PC computer to get into even if its just temporarily abstaining from tech stuff and then getting back into it later on when you're interested again and newer, better stuff are out.

If you look at the overall picture, a lot of people are like

"Oooohhh, ooohh, I "need" this new (usually pricey) Nvidia GTX 780ti videocard or AMD R290X otherwise I'll not be happy."

Its not like all of these PC hardware we have is going away from earth any time soon. We can't just take all the gaming rigs in the world, toss everything out into outer space and never to be seen again.

I agree, we are being taken over by materialism. Every new gadget is a "must-have".