I find it rather odd to be writing this on the same day that my better half published a blog about PC gaming, so I apologise in advance to all those who will see this as plagiarism but, the reality is… this has been bugging me for some time, and it only recently came to a head.

I am referring to the need for power when it comes to PC gaming. As a geek of the highest order who constantly demands more realism from a graphics card than is even possible with the human eye, I should probably understand that boundaries are made to be broken. In fact, if I have to be completely honest with myself then I’d say that there are no boundaries and shouldn’t be, we should take every step as a confident move towards a bigger and better environment… and yet, I am still faced with this contradictory quandary when it comes to gaming. The questions always arise when I’m booting up my PC to play a game which, I must admit, is not very often these days… and the reasons for the infrequency of my PC gaming are those self same questions.

i) Why must it take so long for even a bare bones PC to boot up when a console, which is effectively a PC these days, can be fully functional immediately?

ii) Why are we able to play the same games on a console that we can’t actually play on a PC, yet the PC is one year old (and already out of date in terms of graphic performance) while the console is four years old and still going strong?

iii) Why are PC games not released with the same empathy afforded to console games whereby they are not reliant on the newest, shiniest, fastest components?

I am blessed with two beastly PCs, one of which is geared specifically towards music production and the other is a graphics workhorse. Both machines were built to my exact spec, and both machines were at the top of their league when they were commissioned. The music machine will never be used for anything other than music, as it would pollute the speed of the hard drive too much and would render it more or less useless for music production, but the graphics PC is used for design work throughout the day and was supposed to be able to handle my gaming in the evenings.

At only one week old, I subjected the graphics PC to the glorious Crysis… I’d heard about the realism, the physics engine, the fact that the cut scenes would work from whatever vantage point the player found itself at, so there was a seamless interaction between gameplay and cut scene. Incredibly intense, and notoriously difficult in terms of finding machines powerful enough to render the graphics at 1920 x 1200 resolution with the highest texture and shadow details… but I had a MONSTER of a machine, so it would be no problem for me. After all, if you can’t play Crysis on a machine with 2 x Nvidia 8800 GTX cards then you wouldn’t be able to play it on anything… right?

Wrong.

With the game fully installed, I plug in my XBox controller to the USB port (never been one for keyboard gaming) and fumble my way through the settings to make sure everything is on full resolution so I can sit back and enjoy this reputedly beautiful game in all it’s stunning glory… and that’s when it hit me, or rather didn’t. My frame rate was around 2fps, and I am not exaggerating. I immediately assumed my PC had hung or some intrusive virus software had picked this precise moment to perform a full scan on my various drives. This, however, wasn’t the case. I entered the settings menu again, left the resolution at 1920 x 1200 and reduced the quality of the textures and shadows to medium and the game played fine.

I loved the game, but throughout every hour that I donated to the cause… all I could think about was how beautiful those few frames looked at the highest texture quality and I wanted to bathe in that beauty for myself.

After completing Oblivion on the XBox several times, I installed it to my PC and was again blown away by how beautiful it looked through my NVidia cards yet I had to turn the volume up to drown out the noise of my 1000w power supply sending massive amounts of power to my various fans to keep the processor and graphics cards cool. On more than one occasion I was subjected to the PC coming to a complete standstill with a non-responsive mouse and I would be forced to reboot. Again, my super computer wasn’t capable of playing games which really should have been a breeze.

In contrast, I can boot up my XBox in a second and within another 2-3 seconds I’m already at the menu screen of whatever game has tickled my fancy. I know that it will give me a decent frame rate with no drag, know that all the textures will look as detailed as possible, and know that I won’t need to go trawling the net for patches or new video drivers just so I can get it to work. I also know that, when I tire of playing the game for that night, I can quickly save and shut the XBox down in a matter of seconds. I won’t need to quit out the game to go back into my operating system, then shut the machine down and wait for all the temp files to be removed, everything cleaned up, my settings saved (why is this necessary every time??) and finally, after perhaps 2-3 minutes, shut the PC off at the wall.

My first real PC was an AST Advantage P100 with 16mb RAM, a 1.2Gb hard drive and 8mb of video memory. I recorded my first solo demos on that PC and it never struggled once. I was able to play all the latest games without worrying about compatibility problems and the system served me fine from 1994 until I upgraded to a Pentium III in 1999 and, in all that time, I never had to complain about anything not working.

What seems to have happened along the way, is that we reached a pinnacle… not a pinnacle of technology, but a pinnacle of greed whereby whatever we had now wouldn’t be good enough tomorrow. If the processor released today was capable of running at 1.4Ghz then how can we push it to 1.5Ghz tomorrow, and make sure that there’s software out there which is so hungry for power, so thirsty for progress, that it NEEDS the processor to be more powerful.

Somewhere along the way we stopped developing games that could run the gamut in terms of processor and graphics power and we turned instead to developing games that forced gamers to upgrade their equipment at an alarming rate. The games are becoming more realistic, the gameplay more immersive, and the escapism is so much more rewarding… but if we weren’t being forced to spend so much on our gaming equipment, would we have such an intrinsic NEED to escape?

If you need me, I’ll be pulling together a spec for my new gaming system.

Last five articles by Mark R

• From Acorns to Fish
• Alone In The Dark
• Why Borderlands is Better Than Borderlands 2
• Falling Short
• The Division: A Guide to Surviving the Dark Zone Solo