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2021: The year PC gaming left the desktop
Like the embarrassed tabloid columnist, desktop tower PCs have faced threats to their lives for years. No-decades.Phil Harrison of Sony has been ringing the death knell in 2006, he told Der Spiegel “PlayStation 3 is a computer. We don’t need a computer.” Even though we might not have one, the PC endured it.
The case changes from beige to black. The disk drive disappeared. We use it to browse the information superhighway in less time and more time to mine Bitcoin. But despite its changing appearance and usage, the concept of the PC—a box full of powerful components for games, work, and entertainment—is still prevailing.
Then, in 2021, cloud gaming and laptop hardware will catch up.
Nvidia’s GeForce Now quietly achieved major achievements in 2021, fulfilling the promise of streaming services over the past decade, and providing a high-end PC gaming experience for any device. Gaikai and OnLive are the first high-profile services that muster the courage through the magic of the cloud and promise to achieve high-end PC performance on any device, and the support for these boasted technologies is impressive. The game runs in a local data center, your input is accelerated from your machine to that data center, and then the cloud registers it and sends back a frame.
However, anyone who really tries to play games on Onlive or Gaikai can directly tell you why these services will not have an impact on the gaming environment. It doesn’t feel like playing a game at 1080p, but more like watching a 480p YouTube video.Even if you can figure out what happened, the delay is only High enough to time a shot or jump…a bit miserable. The core misunderstanding of their proposal is that we will accept the playability trade-off for convenience.
Nvidia is very aware that this is a market, and some consumers are happy to upgrade their 144Hz monitors to 320Hz, so you will not be asked to compromise on GeForce Now. You have to concentrate on the latency and the fidelity of the 1080p frames it throws at you from the gaming PC farm, and God knows where it is clear enough for you to truly appreciate the game running at maximum settings.
Not only that, this year it also upgraded its data center with RTX 3080, making GeForce Now the easiest and cheapest way to use a new generation of GPUs for gaming so far-and for most of us, it’s the only way. Although the global hardware shortage has brought all kinds of pain to Nvidia and its customers, it certainly did not hurt GeForce Now.
Not content to convince us not to buy a new desktop graphics card with GeForce Now, the company’s own mobile amp GPU is also strongly opposed to it. The smaller 3080 laptops cannot fully match the performance of their desktop counterparts, but they are far ahead of the desktop RTX 2080. Especially at the standard 15-inch laptop resolution of 1080p, this is enough to run any game you might be invested in at the highest fidelity settings. However, the most attractive part of the specification sheet is the word “in stock”. With desktop components drying up, gaming laptops are still available, attracting players away from more traditional large machines.
Valve hopes to maximize this idea through Steam Deck. Its Switch-like handheld computers have booked more than 110,000 systems in 90 minutes, and the lockers in the lockers of Zen 2 + RDNA 2 APU from AMD are enough to run heavyweights on the portable display in a brisk manner. Pound game. Of course, you can’t have one for a long time. This is 2021. But you want one, it’s important.
Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass also hopes to join the desktop action, adding streaming media capabilities to the “ultimate” tier of its members. Unlike the RTX 3080 device that might beat Shodan in a chess game, Game Pass Ultimate streaming uses Xbox Series X hardware, so its screen display is more gentle. But the reactivity and streaming image quality are there.
Users have voted on fidelity and user experience with their feet. Free and paid “founder” membership accounts for GeForce Now 12 million total users. Xbox Game Pass has nearly 40 million subscribers, although Microsoft has not broken down this number, so it is not clear how many Ultimate subscribers have access to streaming media.
How do these numbers compare to PC gamers? The latest report from DFC Intelligence (Via PCGamesN) There are 3 billion gamers in the world, and about half of them play games on PC. Although followers of Phil Harrison’s doctrine need to wait longer before condemning the demise of the historic tower, in 2021, cloud gaming has matured to the point where it begins to look like a realistic future.
This may be related to accessing the game, rather than accessing top-level components. “Netflix for games” has become the new “e-sports is now very important” for industry entrepreneurs, which is the mantra repeated by Nvidia itself during the release of GeForce Now in 2015. “Our target market is similar to Netflix,” Phil Eisler, general manager of Nvidia Cloud Games, said on the day of the launch (via Washington post).
It is also the core of Xbox’s message around Game Pass. “Use Game Pass to play it on the first day,” the service’s E3 display demo tells you, while the tile layout of the familiar game title appears on the screen.
In the end, paying to access hundreds of games a month instead of buying a single game is the biggest attraction, and playing these games on smartphones and Chromebooks is an added convenience and lowers the barrier to entry.
Sooner or later, cloud-based Netflix for the gaming market will compete with game consoles and traditional PCs. We think PC games will adopt a broader definition, which is good news for anyone with knowledge of Core i9, custom coolers, and encyclopedia of anti-aliasing technology. This means that suddenly more people are playing PC games at the highest settings-and more motivated to push developers to challenge fidelity. All around are high poly grapes.
In a world where everyone is playing games on the RTX 3080, no developer needs to block the PC port to adapt to the console specifications.
We can even give up the i9 and the custom cooler we used to cover it and just play it on the TV screen. We can buy Steam platform or gaming laptops. But some people never will.Because the enthusiast end of PC games has never real About convenience. Hardware and numbers are the focus, just like games.This is a market Game chair Has flourished.
If the desktop gaming PC is about to die, it will die long before streaming and mobile technology strikes.