Well, are you happy about "playing games and not being a gamer"?!? More specifically, do you understand what hardcore gaming does to your wallet? There's a tradeoff to be made, you understand.

"Non-gamers" shouldn't need a low-end solution; it's already there. It'll be waiting for them two years later when the high-end hardware ages and drops 50% in price. The games will be cheaper, too! Of course, you don't get to stand around talking to your friends about the latest games and tech, but that's something that only a HARDCORE GAMER would care about.

And you've got it backwards: gaming experiences for people are fundamentally THE SAME with only differences in opinion. Unless you have schizophrenia.

Quote:Original post by RolandofGilead
Figured out why I agreed with
gumpy macdrunken: hardware innovation stifles software stability!

Which is a really, pointedly stupid claim.

Quote:Do you realize just how many render paths there are in a 3D engine?

In a well designed engine, up to three. D3D 7 spec, D3D 8 spec, and D3D 9 spec. I assume this will shift to 8/9/10 next year. Most games don't even bother to provide the D3D 7 line anymore, and D3D 8 is getting shaky too.

Quote:Also, thanks for bringing up consoles, as this brings me to another point: it takes developers until the end of the console cycle to truly bring out the power of the hardware, that cycle lasts years so new generation cards come out faster than devs can grok!

That's because most of the consoles don't resemble each other or anything else. Developing for the PS2 is a wildly different experience from anything else. It takes a while to figure that stuff out. PCs tend to stay fundamentally the same from generation to generation, making incremental improvements as they go.

I'm with Run_The_Shadows here. It sounds mostly like you're whining because you can't afford to run with the big cards.

Quote:Original post by RolandofGilead
[..]I, and presumably others, would play more games if a computer is capable of giving an experience worth my investment of time and energy.[...]

I'm the person you refer to in your OP (that said the 7600 GT is for the "I like to play games but I'm not a gamer" crowd), and while I agree that I'd play more games if I could have "an experience worth my investment of time and energy", I disagree entirely that the problem is related to use of technology in the way you suggest. The reason I'm going with a midrange card is solely that I haven't seen any games that make good use of better graphics. Yes, they're pretty. So, what? I didn't pay for a light show, I want some gameplay, and I already have a generic RTS (Counter-Strike 1, plus many other HL1 mods such as TFC, DOD, etc) plus a few variations (UT2004 and it's many mods), a generic RTS (WarCraft 3, which has a far better UI than many others I've played), etc. Why would I want to buy something I already have, especially when the 'new version' removes features I liked and adds new ones that I generally dont?

To convince me a game will be worth my time and money, it can't be a drop of water in the flood of similar games out there, and that's all I'm seeing. The few games I might spend money on break the deal by being pay-to-play (without offering anything that justifies continuing payments) or are lack multiplayer (coop or vs are required to make a game playable long-term for me).

Technology doesn't make or break a game[1], but games can be sold on technology. The latter is the real problem, because it is difficult(if not impossible) to compete with quantity in a hit-driven market.
If only consumers realized that "save money and wait to see if something better comes out" was an option, and they didn't have to choose between "not-completely-crap game A.1.7a" and a "not-completely-crap game A.1.7b". Capitalism works better when people vote with dollars =-/

[1] Actually, technology does break games all the time. When games use so much technology that they can't keep a stable framerate, things get unplayable real fast (even if the framerate is always above 60 fps). Unfortunately, it seems the current trend is to move in the direction of technology overload.

Quote:
In another thread, someone described a car as being for the "I like to drive cars but I'm not a driver" demographic. You know what I think? Those people are never gonna be drivers because they will never have the experience that people with faster cars do! There should be two cars per generation, one that can drive and one that can drive really really fast.

People that "like games but aren't gamers" simply buy older generation video cards, and perhaps older games. It's not like you can't go to any electronics store and buy a cheap video card that will run 99% of the games currently on the market at acceptable rates. If some specific game won't run because it requires bleed-edge GPU capabilities they simply don't play that game (and not being gamers they are unlikely to be the type of fanboi that would go all goth because they can't play some game).

They only people that are hurting today are wanna-be hardcore gamers with no money. And poor wanna-be's are screwed no matter what their hobby.

Quote:Original post by Oluseyi
People that aren't gamers buy GPUs? And there I was thinking they bought PCs from Dell or HP (or Gateway or eMachines), or laptops from Dell or HP or Sony or Toshiba, roughly every three years, and got their GPU upgrades with that. You mean they actually go down to the electronics store and ask for the latest Nvidia GeForce 78000GTX (or whatever the fuck they're called)? This is a revelation![...]

In my post that the OP refers to, gamer was in italics to indicate I didn't intend the plain definion as 'one that plays games' but rather something that you might call 'hardcore gamer' or 'game addict' or something to that effect. While I play and enjoy some games, I don't generally enjoy modern games that make use of more advanced graphics technology (and thus wouldn't benefit from paying 4x more for 2x the performance).

Quote:[...]So get a job. Or get a raise. Live long and prosper. [smile]

While that fixes the OP's problem, it does not fix mine =-/