PC gaming is always going forward. While a new console generation takes years to arrive, PC hardware evolves in much faster cycles, with new generation of hardware popping up every 6 to 12 months. Vendors naturally want to sell you their latest and greatest toys - preferably every six months - but if you are a gamer that purchases a computer based on what games actually need, there is actually little reason to follow a six month upgrade cycle.
In addition to the hardware cycles, the PC side has the software development mixing things up: Windows Vista and DirectX 10 have been around for a while now, but do you really need DX10? What about Vista? What do games really need from a PC today? And how does the future look? We try to answer these questions, and give practical suggestions outlining a gaming PC worth buying today.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
Spiders: "We're going to cut straight to the chase so you're not left wondering: After a long period without clear answers, we have received confirmation that Spiders is being liquidated.
What does it mean? This means the company as a whole no longer exists. We'll cease our functions immediately. The planned DLC will release via Nacon, and then-- well, that's it.
We're sorry that it's come to this and would like to thank each and every one of you for your support over the years.
If you have any questions or run into issues with your games, please contact Nacon directly as we'll no longer be able to reply."
Interesting read, and it makes a lot of great points. The CPU IS becoming less necessary, but in some games like DiRT and Bioshock on PC, a Pentium 4 would be decent but simply couldn't compare to a dual core CPU. I tested DiRT out with both my 3.2 GHz P4 and my 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo E6850, and the difference was amazing. With my P4, when racing 5 or so other opponents, the game was playable but the framerate was really choppy. When I tried the same game out with my Core 2 Duo, with the same settings in the same race, the framerate was 3-4 times higher. When playing a game that supports multithreading, a multi-core CPU can't be beat.
On the RAM side of things, you can pretty much get away with 2GB, although I recommend a matched pair of dual channel PC6400 if you can get it.
Videocard side of things, DX10 is really overrated right now. It doesn't look a heck of a lot different right now, and running games in Vista is a waste of time anyways. The driver support from third party hardware manufacturers is lackluster at best. Not because of fault of the companies, but the fault of Microsoft's greed. Microsoft locks out developers from the OS keycode in Vista unless hardware developers pay Microsoft a development fee to unlock said code. Then the developers can properly make drivers for the OS. Do you really think hardware developers are going to pay M$ more fees just to make drivers for an already lackluster operating system? Not to mention how hungry Vista is for system resources.
I may not run the highest end hardware in my PC, but it's good enough to run anything I want to play at near maximum settings.
Here's my specs:
eVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 OC'd to 3.5GHz
4GB Corsair XMS2 RAM PC6400 OC'd to 933MHz
2x eVGA 7950GT KO Superclocked videocards w/ 512MB RAM each
I don't play most FPS games as they usually bore me, but Oblivion runs in 60FPS in most areas, and DiRT, Sega Rally, Bioshock and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory all run at a near constant 60 FPS. Unless you're wanting to spend beaucoup bucks on your PC, it's really not necessary if you want to play most games with acceptable settings.