death of high end market?

I know this may be late but, I'm doing a bit of research for a personal project, and I wanted to get some opinions from some of you fellow enthusiasts out there.

A while ago Rahul Sood predicted the "death" of the high-end gaming/enthusiast market basically saying that people will stop buying the high end gaming computers with killer hardware; because everything will eventually get smaller and neater. What do you think? Later, after this statement, that firebird and envy 133 were introduced. Is there truth to this or do you think its hp's words via his voice trying to herd the flock?

Its interesting because Asus and the former executives from alienware each released a new line of gaming machines (nb and desktops)... Are they just trying to get the last pieces of a disappearing niche?

 

Nice first post and welcome

I personally don't think the high end market is going to die anytime soon but who knows what the future hold. Obviously the market is there because there is a demand for it but every few years a new set of consoles are released and you see people opting for them over the PC. Demand will slowly dwindle and prices will have to rise and soon (maybe) we may see the death of high-end gaming machines.

 

Welcome to notebookreview, CaptainCommando.

If developers continue making poor console ports to PC i bet it will die.

 

I was just playing Saint's Row 2, a prime example. Makes GTA:IV god like

 

"saying that people will stop buying the high end gaming computers with killer hardware; because everything will eventually get smaller and neater"
that's the most stupid prediction I ever read.
I hope the author likes playing crysis in a ZX spectum.
Moore's law as been around since 1965 and even today it's completely true. The sales of new hardware never have been so high.
People will never stop buying new hardware. Just ask around who will buy new i7 cpu notebooks or who will avoid buying one to buy a previous generation one instead.
the high end market will never die. there's always new applications who need more and more powerful solutions. and even if they are not related to gaming, it's for sure that they will be transformed into the gaming market.
Rahul Sood sold his soul to HP. HP never had high end stuff, it's not their target. I'm sure HP executives are happy about Rahul Sood declarations despite the total nonsense of reality.

 

I guess you haven't heard.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2007/09/idf-gordon-mo-1/

http://www.slate.com/id/2132826/

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/counting-down-to-the-end-of-moores-law/

 

High-end gaming is not going away any time soon. Yeah the stupid consoles are winning out right now, but there are still many enthusiasts and graphics lovers as well as typical consumers that realize how much better a high-end computer can be. I disagree with the notion that things are getting smaller, though maybe neater; look at displays that people use nowadays. Rather than simply being set watching TV or playing their consoles on them, people are now using larger and larger LCDs for their PCs. Notebooks have a similar trend when it comes to gaming because you can see how most people want to game on something 15" or bigger.

Innovation might be slowing down too, but it isn't completely gone by any means. These high-end computers are frontrunners when it comes to using top-of-the-line equipment. Apart from gaining mere bragging rights, it is a way for people to see what new and better technologies are up-and-coming.

That said, I do believe that high-end gaming is reaching a low point, but it isn't dead by any means.

 

This statement is heresy.

 

The high end is where the real action is in the market. Although they are not gaming machines, consider the MacBook Pro line. They command a small percentage of the market by units sold, but Apple is the highest profit per unit of any major computer vendor. Asus, Alienware, and Clevo all count on this segment to help their bottom line. These high-end systems keep getting more flexible in their application...I now have a laptop that can edit video faster than a Mac that cost over $4000 to put together 6 years ago for a third the price. The smaller laptops and netbooks account for the most units shipped, but there is a market willing to pay for powerful hardware for a variety of reasons, and there are computer companies that will continue to make them.

 

people say that since 1966. the true is that the limits are still very far away. 15years like moore say. 15years ago I was playing in a 486.
sure you can't shrink and increase speed, that's why you have multiple cores. that's part of the law. and it's still true today.
anyway the high end market wont ever disappear even in the end of moore's law.
there's always the need for more and more powerful cpu's. this it's true even with quantum computing.

this whole thing reminds me bill gates a lot. 1981 - "640K ought to be enough for anybody".

 

It really depends on the games and applications that drive the need for high-end hardware. Unless a new 'Crysis' comes out that raises the bar for what is needed hardware-wise (without releasing unoptimised games that won't run well on any rig) then every extra bit of computing power isn't really put to use. Furthermore which significant chunk of consumers would really give a damn about playing Crysis in 1080p with max everything? It's pretty and all, but if they could play it at base resolution for a fraction or play Sims3, WoW, edit photos, watch movies etc then what's the point of buying high-end when low-end and mid-end do the job you need. It's like a city-dweller who know's they won't go out of the city buying a ferrari as a car rather than a city car, they have decided that power, looks, status mean more than spending a fraction of the money on a car that does the city-car job and then saving the rest / spending it somewhere else. I'm not saying that high-end laptop/pc buyers are stupid - far from it - they just only represent a shrinking niche of the market since the current level of tech present in cheap-midrange rigs fulfils the needs for most people. Tbh I'd happily stick my arm out to say that at least 90% of consumers probably don't need a rig more powerful than my current CULV notebook, let alone a mainstream C2D.

 

You've played Saint's Row 2?

 

Yes, and it was awesome.
Way better than GTAIV. And much better optimized.

 

despite all the optimization, the need for more powerfull cpu's and gpu's will never ever end. DX11 is out and games will need more and more processing power to run. Perfection is not something that can be achieved. Just imagine faces, FPS character faces, they are very very far away from a human face, though the improvement from 10 years ago was just huge.

 

I wouldn't call it a high-end gaming market, I'd call it an enthusiast market. You will always have those people who want the best, fastest, etc.. Hardware will continue to improve, and so those enthusiasts will move along with it.

I think Sood's statement makes an assumption that the enthusiasts desire for the best hardware is directly related to gaming, and that's not the case. Even if gaming disappeared completely, you'd still have hardware enthusiasts want the latest and best available. It wouldn't be called a "high-end" gaming market, but it would exist, nonetheless.

 

Could not agree more, I have built a brand new gaming PC every December for the last 5 years (spend like $1500-2000 a year), but not this year. Last year when I built my current rig I went with a EVGA GTX 260 for my video card.. I just recently played Modern Warfare 2 and was able to run it with everything set to the highest settings and was getting 80+ FPS.. There is really no incentive for me to upgrade if I can play the latest games without any problem, and from the looks of it, it doesn't look like a killer must have title is coming out anytime soon.

 

A friend said (true or otherwise) that we are going to hit a limit (sometime in 2012) meaning that we couldn't actually get PC's any faster without turning to something like quantum computing.

Odd, it's backwards for me, although I don't know if Steam has bothered to update my copy of SR2 yet.

 

I actually agree with quite a few points you bring up, but I just have to play 'Devil's Advocate'.

You say DX 11. We hardly even have proper DX 10 games - actually I can't name more than 5 that actually use explicit DX10 enhancements (Lost Planet DX10 fur?). And, the few that actually do make good use of DX 10, are doing nothing that is so amazingly ground breaking in comparison to DX 9. Of course, one can nit-pick and see the clear differences, but the operative term here is 'nit pick'.

Plenty of DX 9 games are doing great.

 

Saints Row 2 is NOT optimized as well as GTA IV. The game is an awful port, and though GTA IV isn't great, it isn't as bad as SR2.

 

I think higher end laptops will gain in popularity and replace desktops over time. As technology progresses, and die sizes shrink and transistor counts increase, you will be able to fit a lot more power in a 17" form factor. This has a lot more appeal to many people that want to take their gaming with them, not to mention reduction in storage space and power use.

I don't see the market going anywhere though. PC games will always thrive as they always have. Perhaps we will revert back to independent projects more, but that won't be such a bad thing. Get away from the grubby hands of the money hungry public publishers.

 

Probably for you, but I ran 1920x1080 50+fps avg maxed in SR2, I couldn't do that in GTA4, not even close. SR2 was far better optimized on my system than GTA4, and was a lot more fun imo as well.

 

Video games are getting far more expensive to produce due to the high quality of the art that needs to be created. As a result of this games need to be released on consoles as well as the PC in order to turn a profit most of the time. Game devs are not going to waste time making the game look better on the PC, they will do direct ports as a result. Consoles have fixed hardware so it does not matter if PC hardware is far faster because game devs will shoot for the console performance wise. This will not change until the next gen of consoles hit the market.

tl;dr
If you have computer that can play console ports at acceptable levels now then you have a computer that will be able to play most PC games for as long as this console generation lasts.

 

The good thing about the high end market is that it is far more profitable than the netbook market. Businesses will always stick with profit. That will never change.

 

The high-end will always be there... gaming is not the only purpose for buying high-end. For example, why do old people buy corvettes and Ferrari, and then drive them really slow? Multimedia is the other valid reason, it requires some good power to do stuff...

 

The high end wont always be there. Time moves on and in my lifetime computer shopping will be similar to appliance shopping. By this I mean you will be able to buy smaller or bigger, different styling, and so on. There wont be any high performance though, not anymore than you buy a high performance toaster or washing machine. This is the nature of technology. Eventually you get to the point where any old hardware gets the job done. Even today the only thing that taxes my computer in any way is gaming, everything else pops up somewhere between near instantly to a few seconds at most. Storage improvements already here could reduce that few seconds down to next to nothing in the form of flash drives. I can now buy a video card that will play any game on the market and near horizon with plenty of headroom left over.

 

Thats strange, because there are 8 or so people on my cod team that bought saints row 2 from the steam deal for 7$, and ALL of us get better performance with GTA 4 . Also, Saints Row 2 has PS2 level graphics, and still has worse performance.

Say What you want, but Saints Row 2 will go down as the worst console-to-pc port ever. I mean u have a game that has LAST generation graphics, and it can't be run fluidly by ANY current system. http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=466


Look at that forum, and tell me the community is happy with their purchases.

 

With the toaster came the toaster oven. With the washing machine, came washing machines that inject silver ions into the wash.

The high performance market will always be there. It is where the profits are.

 

I think the current 280 and 4870 laptops, especially with SLI and CF, currently seem more about longevity than necessity with most games available.

That will probably change very soon. Margins have been tight with many software developers, and many have consolidated, with more concentrating on their products working for as many as possible. Some console ports are an exception to this, but it further shows the lack of development on PC at the moment.

With DX11 capable hardware around the corner and i7s in some high end machines now, the bar will increase at a faster pace again.

It's just a bit of a lull between cycles in my opinion.

The introduction of Win7 and the first release of a DX11 game demo (Dirt 2) is a sign of the inevitable change in pace again.

 

Whatever happens to hardware in the future, I am sure games and software makers will adapt their stuff so that it can run on it. If for some reason they stop making hardware any faster then obviously software/game designers will not make stuff that needs more computing power than is available at the time

 

I agree that computers are moving towards being (or in the case of lower end machines already are) comoditized. However, there's also a movement towards unification of platforms. Consoles are acting more and more like desktops, and cell phones are acting more and more like consoles. Another thing to keep in mind is that games aren't the only thing that drive high end hardware. Look at the movie and game DEVELOPMENT industries as well as architecture and engineering and science researc for other places that high end hardware is called for. The high end segment may contract, but it won't go away.

 

No, high end is almost never where the profits are. Unless you're a small, specialized, "boutique" shop where all you sell is "high end" things, companies only advertise their high end innovative stuff to make themselves look cutting edge and new. But They know that at the end of the day, its the mid range products that completes their bottom line.

 

In my experience, high-end products attract customers who generally buy mainstream products. The volume on the high end products is almost never high enough to support their existance alone.

Smaller, more specialized companies like Sager tend to be exceptions to the rule.

 

I would have to say the high end market is not going to die completely. Having said that, there is not much high end stuff left. Aside from a handful of companies still holding (got bless your 40% markups alienware), you can get the best(or dam close to it) for less than $1500, even under $1000.

 

Not true in the computer industry:

And that's on an estimated 5% market share, with very little on offer below $1000.

 

But that's not the "high end" really being discussed here. Macs sell their computers based on software and style, charging a significant premium on physical component cost. There dollar share has little to do with premium hardware (though their chassis is generally higher end than PCs). The high end here is more along the lines of comparing a mid range and high end model of the same laptop line. If you can find me a link showing that Macs make more gross profit from their high end macbookpro line as opposed to their lower end models then I might be inclined to agree with you.

 

High-end gaming is, like someone put it a few pages back, at a stand still due to console ports. We can't push our hardware to the breaking point because these ports are coded solely to push console hardware that never changes. The only way it will change is with a new console generation.

Don't count out PC titles that are built for the PC from the ground up. Crysis excluded, Supreme Commander was a good example of why a quad core processor was more effective in gaming than a dual core.

 

Perhaps we are participating in different discussions. I was discussing the high end of the computer hardware market. As for comparing Apple's high-end and their lower-end models, I think that was my point: Apple has abandoned the low- and mid-range market, and is now one of the most profitable computer companies, with a market capitalization (June 2009 figures) higher than HP and Dell combined and an average price per unit of $1410, compared to $519 for Windows units. { The Register}

That might not represent the most powerful notebooks on the market, but it is just one example of the strength of the high-end market. Dell, Clevo, and Asus sell a full range of machines, so it is not easy to do a full comparison, but the Alienware and Precision lines are among Dell's best money makers, and there is demand for these machines at even higher prices (I just configured the Precison I would ideally like for mobile video production, and the price came to around $5000...I can't afford it, but if I were making a living off video work, I would).