Quote: "Blame that on the Nintendo WII and the DS."
No he has a point, and it has nothing to do with other platforms really. Point of fact is that developers are getting too reliant on the speed of which the PC hardware evolves.
Just look at TGC working on X10 engines for their premier products when there's really no market rather than concentrating on their X9 engine that will be dominant for the next 2-3years.
By all means they should upgrade the engine to Shader-only cards, because by now a good majority of people have these cards to keep playing retail games; but no need to do something just to have what boils down to boasting rights.
Microsoft themselves aren't even pushing DX10 yet, because it isn't even finished.
I've played two games recently that I honestly believe are key to this argument.
Space Force, and Pirates of the Caribbean 3.
Space Force uses shaders without any real need, and a horrible engine forces those with low-end cards (i.e. GeForce 5200/6200 or Radeon 9200/X300) to be left out in the cold because they can't handle what is going on. These cards are the most predominant simply because current "Vista Essential" systems are sold with them.
Pirates of the Caribbean 3 is the opposite end of the scale really showing that too little shader dependancy again kills performance on the low-end but also doesn't give enough for high-end. So while the Xbox 360 version looks pretty awesome, the Windows version just looks painfully poor with quite bad framerates.
We really should still be able to play games on systems that Microsoft Performance Index at 3, (P4 2.5GHz/512MB/GF5200) without forcing people to upgrade to a Performance Index 4 system (Core2 2.0GHz/1GB/GF7600) just to run titles. Let alone run them with decent graphics.
The GeForce 7600 and Radeon X1600 cards should still be able to run roughly equal graphics to the 360, and developers should be optimising their games so they can run just as happily on lower-end system. I mean we've not really seen graphics improve much from the Xbox generation on Windows, yet we need ridiculously powerful systems just to run them.
This is what is honestly killing off the Windows/PC gaming community and reducing what people play away from Retail titles, and toward Independant titles. While this is good for those who are here to break into this, it's also bad that it is basically forcing gamers to buy a console to have decent games without spending a fortune every year.
