Do gamers shape the whole PC market?

[HEXUS]

Creating photo-realistic worlds, superbly shaded, at over 60 frames per second takes a hell of a lot of grunt. Tim Hatch explains how Intel's drive to satisfy gamers has positively impacted the whole consumer market...

Watch the show.

[Andrzej]

I remember demonstrating a system to a customer at a Brum-NEC show over 10 years ago

He went on and on about the kind of spreadsheet work he wanted to do and was the DX2-50 fast enough for his 'advanced data processing applications' ?

Some point during the conversation, I asked his bored looking son if he would be using the box at all

"Yes" replied the father on his kid's behalf, "But only for gaming"

:doh:

[Lee H]

In a nutshell...

Indeed they do.

Do you think you would have such a wide choice of mice and keyboards if there wasn't a gaming market?

The desire for the best performing hardware from these has helped the humble mouse progress from a rubbish ball in a box with 2 buttons to a teflon coated footed optical mouse with DPI switching on the fly and numerous buttons instead of 2.

[Andrzej]

Part of the ability to deliver increased feature sets is due to the OS/Apps guys knowing that the CPUs are ultra-fast and that there is stacks of memory available...

...cos the games are demanding it


I think I am right in saying that Call of Duty 2 (or was it Battlefield 2 ?), created a HUGE demand for 2GB system ram that had not previously existed - simply cos the amount of texture data etc that the game demanded from the box

[Lee H]

Yeap - when BF2 came out quite a lot of people including myself jumped to 2 Gb.

[Betty_Swallocks]

When non gaming friends and family ask me for recommendations I always point them at a cheap laptop. Not the very cheapest but something that will run Vista premium. It's all you need for 90% of PC applications and because it's all built in you don't get the driver problems that plague the rest of us when we install Vista. The ability to use the computer on the sofa, in bed, in the garden etc far outway the disadvantages of the small keyboard etc.

Only if they want to play games do I actually take the time to spec something suitable up.

[ryandeean]

Design and gaming, the only reason a mainstream audience requires faster PCs.

[Lord Midas]

Without a doubt gamers have pushed PC tech. Before all this with Crysis there was 2D, then 3DFX Voodoo cards hit the market. GL Quake came out and the rest is history. why else have 700million transistor GFX chips if not to play games. It sure ain't to watch family movies and browse the web.

Same with monitors. Ok, movies need decent monitors, but modern LCDs really came to the foreground due to fast paced nature of these blockbuster games.

[Salazaar]

I agree, parts of it is very much shaped by gaming.

Didn't the Core 2 architecture evolve out of the Pentium M, hardly a gaming CPU!