PC hardware has plateaued?

[Megalomaniac]

I am getting an itch to upgrade... but i can't justify it. My PC still runs flawlessly and does everything that I want. My firefox has 50+ tabs open, I'm streaming videos, playing music via winamp or pandora, working in AutoCAD or MSoffice or Photoshop or playing the latest video games - and all of this at the same time.

I'm looking in the display forum, and really, nothing is blowing my socks off, some of the best 24" IPS displayed are still the same ones from 2 years ago at least.

The only piece of my setup which I may finally upgrade is my RAID 6 array... I am running out of the 10TB of space i had on it using 2TB drives. Maybe time to move to 4TB drives and double up.

Nothing in the graphics department has really moved anywhere (blame consoles if you want) Crysis 3 is one of the few exceptions to this.

Anyone else have a similar "problem"?

There doesn't seem to be that much, in terms of software advancement in the last 2-3 years that would stress a PC as in the 30 years before that. Might as well just keep folding for the [H]orde!

 

[Dangman]

Not the right statement to say: It's the software that's plateaued, not the hardware. You have to write software to take advantage of the hardware power we have nowadays.

 

[Magix]

Could one cause for this be the fact that developers don't want to put too much stress on the computer because less intensive = compatible with more computers = more people will buy the game?
So that might hold back the innovation a bit.

 

[Dangman]

Could one cause for this be the fact that developers don't want to put too much stress on the computer because less intensive = compatible with more computers = more people will buy the game?
So that might hold back the innovation a bit.

That's a definite possibility. Blizzard and Valve are examples of these.

There's also the issue of costs: Generally, the more high-end the graphics, the greater the development costs since artists have to spend a lot of time churning out those 3D models. Not to mention programmers who have to debug or code and engine that could handle those powerful graphics. There are certainly exceptions like Far Cry 3 and hopefully the Fox Engine.

 

[Megalomaniac]

What about physics then? You have programs like Revit that have excellent physics and games like Mount and Blade that have ok physics.. Once you develop a physics engine, it just applies to all things that are in the game...


You are right Magix that software seems to have plateaued, and as Danny points out, in many case that plateau is one of graphics, not functionality. To my mind, it's similar to the old MHz race, where AMD started going sideways and being able to execute more instructions per cycle, so MHz started to matter less and less, except now it also applies to software.

 

[Dangman]

What about physics then? You have programs like Revit that have excellent physics and games like Mount and Blade that have ok physics.. Once you develop a physics engine, it just applies to all things that are in the game...

Not necessarily. You still have to code how the Physics engine interacts with your game engine and to code the necessary hook onto the items that would be affected by the physics.

 

[Cheetoz]

The quicker your AutoCAD renders, the faster you can stream the product, the more money is earned.

That is why you should upgrade.

At my company, if we upgrade and get our circuit simulations down from 6 days to 5 days, we can make some $$$$.

Unless this discussion was meant to be in the gaming section?

 

[Magix]

The quicker your AutoCAD renders, the faster you can stream the product, the more money is earned.

That is why you should upgrade.

At my company, if we upgrade and get our circuit simulations down from 6 days to 5 days, we can make some $$$$.

Unless this discussion was meant to be in the gaming section?

There is a much bigger market for people buying computers because of games, as opposed to editing

 

[stevedave]

Nope.

Progress is not always measured in performance metrics.

surely you saw a boy and hist atom...This will be the future atom based computers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oSCX78-8-q0

Then from there we will likely have genetic based computers which move into your body and replace functions like white blood cells.

.....as long as we can maintain a stable economy/society progress will never stop.

 

[Megalomaniac]

We still non bloated software to take advantage of all that hardware.
Revit is already doing some of that. And definitely the rendering softwares out there already take days to render some conceptual future projects, so people who use them would appreciate faster rendering times, instead of waiting 20 hours to find out that a detail was off, kind of like the punch card computers of days long ago.

 

[PTNL]

And definitely the rendering softwares out there already take days to render some conceptual future projects, so people who use them would appreciate faster rendering times, instead of waiting 20 hours to find out that a detail was off, kind of like the punch card computers of days long ago.

Yes, rendering can be a time sink simply due to the fact that you can build a raw project that takes more than a few seconds to encode. This is where offloading and some distributed computing platforms can improve the turnaround -- which also pulls you out of the consumer/prosumer product lines. The larger vendors include Vela, Digital Rapids, Fortium, BlackMagic Design, etc. Though I doubt any significant encode project would ever have an encode time of under a minute.

However, it seems like your thought process has gone from the vague to something distinct. Can you provide a specific question you are wondering about, or is this still a meandering thought?

 

[Megalomaniac]

Y. Can you provide a specific question you are wondering about, or is this still a meandering thought?

Still a meandering feeling more than a thought....
I can't remember a time in the past 10+ years when I spent this long of a period being happy with the computer that i had.

 

[PTNL]

I can't remember a time in the past 10+ years when I spent this long of a period being happy with the computer that i had.

Then just be happy knowing that the decision you made back then is still working out well for you.

 

[shantd]

Hey TC, just curious about your rig. Can you list your components & specs? It would better help us to answer your (fascinating) question: Has PC tech plateaued? It's taken for granted that every year AMD & Intel are gonna develop the new biggest & baddest goodies which make the previous generation all but obsolete. However, nobody stops to ask 'are these massive improvements actually being utilized'?

So in a nutshell, Danny Bui is spot on. The hardware continues to soar to new ground, year after year. But the software necessary to actually utilize it is WAY behind. Software's your bottleneck which is precisely why Crysis 3 on a $4,000 super rig, while clearly superior to the $299 ps3 version, is nowhere near the night and day distinction one should expect when spending over 10 times as much on the PC.

All that said, there are still many areas where PCs have far from plateaued. For one, going with multi monitor setups, super high resolution rendering to accommodate all those monitors, etc...So, even though you're somewhat bottlenecked when it comes to the games themselves, you've got lots of other areas itching to be upgraded.