PC Gamers, You Got HOSED! (pre-WWDC'24)
How Microsoft, Nvidia, and Intel Jerked Your Chain for 10 Years...
Microsoft Windows' Gamers, What a Waste of 10 Years (2010-2020)
For over a decade, PC gamers have been strung along, led to believe they were part of a golden era of gaming. In reality, they were pawns in a corporate game played by Microsoft, Nvidia, and Intel. Here’s how these tech giants toyed with the loyalties of PC gamers and ultimately left them in the dust as they chased more lucrative opportunities in AI and cloud computing.Microsoft: From Desktop Dominance to Cloud Capitulation
Pre-2010, Microsoft was content to rake in profits from Windows and Office sales, becoming a fixture on PCs worldwide. The company appeared to be an unstoppable force in the personal computing market. But as the 2010s rolled in, Microsoft shifted gears dramatically. Instead of enhancing Windows for the everyday user, they diverted their attention to Azure, their cloud service platform.Windows updates became sporadic and uninspired, focusing more on integrating users into the Microsoft ecosystem rather than improving the core PC experience. Office 365, with its subscription model, became the cash cow, while Azure started to directly compete with Amazon's AWS for the corporate cloud services market. The everyday PC user and gamer were left with a stagnant operating system, while Microsoft cozied up to enterprise clients, creating a corporate lock-in scenario and largely abandoning its grassroots consumer base.
Nvidia: From Gaming Savior to AI Juggernaut
Nvidia, once hailed as the savior of PC gaming, became a master of exploitation. Year after year, they released new GPUs with inflated prices, promising marginal performance gains. Gamers, driven by a relentless desire for the latest and greatest, kept the cash flowing despite the diminishing returns. But the real kicker came with the cryptocurrency boom.Bitcoin miners began snapping up Nvidia GPUs, creating shortages and driving prices even higher. Gamers, desperate to keep up, even resorted to buying used GPUs from mining rigs. But as the crypto wave crested, Nvidia had already set its sights on a new horizon: AI. They pivoted, channeling the revenue earned from gamers and miners into developing powerful AI-focused GPUs. The gaming community, once Nvidia’s loyal base, found themselves sidelined as Nvidia courted big business and research institutions, making billions from AI and data center technologies.
Intel: The Decade of Stagnation
Throughout the 2010s, Intel's dominance in the CPU market was unchallenged, but this led to complacency. Their incremental updates to the i3, i5, i7, and eventually i9 processors offered little in terms of real performance gains or power efficiency. The promised transition to more advanced architectures like ARM never materialized effectively. Gamers and everyday users were fed a steady diet of incremental upgrades with ever-increasing price tags.The wake-up call came in the form of Apple's M1 chip in 2020. Apple, fed up with Intel’s stagnation, developed their ARM-based SoC, which outperformed Intel’s offerings in both speed and efficiency. This was a clear sign that Intel had been resting on its laurels for too long, failing to innovate while continuing to milk consumers for every last penny.
Conclusion: A Glimmer of Hope with New Leadership
There might finally be light at the end of the tunnel for the beleaguered PC gamer. With new leadership at Microsoft and the advancement of Qualcomm's ARM chips, there is hope that Windows Copilot and next-gen PCs will usher in a new era. Perhaps now, with a renewed focus on innovation and efficiency, the PC platform can once again become a haven for creators and gamers alike.Yet, it’s a bittersweet victory. The last decade has seen PC gamers ridiculed for mocking Apple users, only to find themselves abandoned by the very companies they trusted. As AI and cloud computing dominate the tech landscape, the once-proud PC gamer must adapt, innovate, and hope that the next wave of technology finally delivers on the promises of a brighter, more vibrant future.
PC gamers, it’s time to wake up and smell the silicon – you got hosed, but maybe, just maybe, the best is yet to come.
So I say to PC gamers, are you gonna jump back to Windows or in other words are you gonna see what Apple has to say and make a hard choice?
Comments
The choices to change the industry need to be made by the game developers, rather than the gamers. What would be nice is if there was a cross-platform layer that sat between a game and the underlying system like a virtual game OS. Pretty much the only platform-specific complication with games is the rendering context. If the industry agreed to have a cross-platform layer take care of this part, games would be instantly portable to every platform.
Then Apple wouldn't have to help build Metal renderers for every engine, they'd build it once for the cross-platform layer and every engine would build against this. Kind of like how OpenGL allowed cross-platform builds but it would use each platform's graphics engine.
https://github.com/inanevin/LinaGX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGPU
The issues surrounding WebGPU show why it's difficult to pull off but that's because it's being decided for the web. Major game studios can decide the direction of a unified rendering layer more easily.
There's also a commercial issue for big publishers on how to monetize the games. Mac can sustain the unit price, mobile/iPhone can sustain the high volume but not both like PC and console.
There is going to be a limit to the graphics improvement needed. Current-gen hardware can already handle photorealistic rendering:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvW3_oaT1Yk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7tp4eg0ax8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6DnSWjG7bk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIGnx2jvrbg
This level of graphics needs Nvidia 4080/4090-level (or AMD 7900XT) performance, roughly 50TFLOPs. AMD sells GPUs at this level for under $700:
https://www.amazon.com/Sapphire-11323-02-20G-Radeon-Gaming-Graphics/dp/B0BR6L7TKR/
Next-gen consoles, likely a couple of years away, will be able to retail this hardware at $500. Apple wouldn't sell 50TFLOPs of performance for anywhere near $500. The Mac Studio will be 16TFLOPs with M3 Max at $2000.
Macs will likely be stuck in low-tier gaming support for a while. Mobile devices are reaching console level performance, which will helps boost support but a few things would benefit the whole platform:
Building a larger game library of existing titles. This means bundling old games with a compatibility layer and publishing them. This would help build the audience.
Promoting cross-platform game tools. This is the only way publishers can do day 1 releases on all platforms.
Partner with game studios, especially the likes of Valve to offer cross-platform game purchases so someone can buy Resident Evil 4 for PC and also play it on iPhone without buying it again and the cloud saves can transfer over.
They are less powerful devices but some of the software advances are helping like frame generation that can double performance. Microsoft is adding an upscaler to Windows:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/autosr/
Apple has this in Metal:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metalfx
The Windows one is designed to not need game support, the OS just makes the games run faster and it works with existing games. If Apple adds frame generation that is in AMD FSR 3, that will boost performance again:
https://gpuopen.com/fidelityfx-super-resolution-3/
Developers will find more ways to leverage the dedicated AI hardware in modern chips. 40TOPs+, even at 8-bit precision, is a lot of performance. If it needed higher precision and had to run slower, that would still offer a good speedup, especially if an engine could run some of its lighting/rendering pass on the AI chip while the GPU is doing something else.
Losing Bootcamp took away the ability to run a lot of games on Mac but there are a few inexpensive ways to run games now so there's not so much a need to decide between an expensive Mac or a high-end gaming PC like there was years ago. The handheld devices are $500-700.
The advances on the Mac platform help creators though, making games is better if they can boost FPS in the engines: