Reaching A Plateau

I guess what I am saying is that the market for performance is reaching a plateau. I don't know about you, but I doubt even AGP 4X can feed enough vertices to a decent geometry or T&L engine. We can already see that in benchmarks of RDRAM based systems the system is going to require a hefty investment by game developers in techniques that are designed to help Intel sell 820 chipsets more than anything else. Now, that's not knocking Intel for being Intel. I am more interested in pointing out that the legacy architecture of the PC isn't hampering its growth any more than the lack of real demand for improvement.

The market for high-end products is shrinking in real dollar terms, at least at the desktop level. So, why is the investment in performance continuing unabashedly, as it has always done? I guess, we can call it progress, but I am flummoxed when it comes to figuring out who is going to reap the financial benefits.

Let's be honest, every one of you reading this is not willing to pay any price for performance. Five years ago that wasn't the case. Three years it wasn't the case. One year ago, there was a shift. Now, I reckon most of you are sitting on systems less than two years old, and thinking, I can live with this for a while. And, if you don't, you go out and buy something that isn't going to cost you over $1500. Only newbies pay that kind of price for a PC.

See what I just did? I just alienated a whole chunk of my audience.

I'm on this track because, I can't see where the push in the performance market is going to come from in 2000. There are no stellar titles on the horizon, and believe me, we would know about them if there were. There's no equivalent of Quake or Unreal to kick the market up the butt. I still contend that the game industry is going to be heavily subscribed to the console makers, and PlayStation 2 development in 2000, and is not going to be too hot on the subject of performance PC products. Why else is Sony going to all the trouble of talking up its technology?

Think about that statement. Sony is talking about the nuts and bolts of its PlayStation 2 box in a way that has never happened before. Console guys tend to be consumer marketers, and brand guys. They don't want to be at Comdex, or the some international solid-state circuits conference, as Sony has been. Sony isn't necessarily leaping ahead of the PC in graphics terms, but it is saying, "Hey, I don't have a legacy to worry about so, here's a brutish graphics workstation I'm putting together for a few hundred bucks."

Could it be that the PlayStation 2, with its hype and marketing, has become the killer app of performance computing for 2000? I am sure a lot of you, even those of you not normally interested in consoles, are going to give the PlayStation 2 some of your attention. You're speed demons, after all.

A couple of hundred bucks.

Like I said, no one wants to pay for performance any more.