MEMBER BLOG

Outpacing the Technology from Today
Posted on Thursday, March 20 2008 @ 11:33:49 Eastern

I finally saw some videos of Crysis today, and I have to say that it is impressive visually. It looks as close to as realism as I think we have ever gotten in the graphics department, and quite frankly I smacked my face once because I forgot I was looking at a game for a moment.

But one thing troubles me about the game; it's not that the graphics are bad, it's just that they can't run at full capacity on any computer system. When I saw these videos of Crysis, it was only as HALF capabilities; even then it was still kind of choppy; stopping and slowing down at points when too much was going on at once. Crysis is a beautiful looking game, but it is TOO powerful.

And the funny thing is I have fallen out of PC gaming a long time ago. The last game I remotely wanted to play was The Sims 2, but I couldn't purchase it because the game wouldn't fit on my computer system at that time. Funny thing is I still have that same computer five years later, and it still runs smoothly, with only Impossible Creatures and the Original The Sims on it, as well as iTunes and other memory eating behemoths.

But a lot of PC games out there look interesting, at least the ones that are PC only, like the Witcher, Crysis, Warhammer 40k, Dawn of War or the upcoming Spore sound like fun games that I want to eventually play, but graphically it is impossible because the graphic technology is almost outpacing the graphic cards used to run the game, not to mention the processors that make the game go.

Now this is nothing new, since the late 1990's it seems like every new PC has an updated graphics card, or every other month a new Raedon 3500 w/e came out, which gave people the chance to update their systems by modding it, in a way. But for someone who is not that computer savy, it is hard to justify paying over $100.00 for a graphics card and not know how to put it in, with or without instructions. So with that, I can't update a computer I know is outdated by five years, and new games are all but impossible to run on the settings given to them.

This is actually a continuous problem I think, because I am sure there are numerous gamers in the casual PC market that are possibly in the same boat as me, as well as just game enthusiasts in general who love tight and complex controls and hotkeying over console gaming. The hardcore crowd probably has a $20,000 Alienware machine that was modded to play Crysis on two separate screens, with one disk, so they are not suffering too much with this problem, but the question is why is the technology of the future outpacing what is used now.

Best example I always had was the Blu-Ray system. The whole HD-Blu Ray thing was pointless, because both looked the same to me, and only Blu-Ray had slightly clearer sound. There is little, if any, difference between HD and regular tv; at best you can see things more clearly, which is good, but not justification for something that is used on at best one big TV in the household.

And other little known thing is that Blu-Ray is also old technology, since 2001 they have been working on a new, codenamed "holographic" disk system, that should be able to hold quite literally 100x the amount Blu-Ray can hold, and it is supposed to be released around 2010 or 2011.

In other words, the technology were creating for tomorrow is outpacing the technology we have now, and it is putting a damper on the PC industry because everything has to have some form of dynamic lighting or special effects to survive and be noticed in todays world. The graphics are bigger and better, but they are causing feebler systems around the world to buckle and chug and lag, sometimes so much so they fry the system. It happened to me once, with a windows 2000 computer that failed to run the original Sims  and its 2000 expansion packs. And Crysis is another example of this, as it is beautiful yes, but barely works because the graphics are so high quality that no PC machine, unless you have a state of the art machine from Nasa modded to play games and control satellites at the same time, can run it properly.

In the end, how much longer with this last? Will it come to a point where even modding wouldn't work anymore for PC games? It is hard to say what will happen as the PC industry goes on, but one thing is for sure, my old computer will be left in the dust, if it has not been already, and then I have to shell out cash for a newer system that is well out of my price range. So I guess it is a two-way street, in a sense. I need to upgrade eventually, while everything gets better with each passing week. Got to love technology and capitalism.