AMD Got Game? New Initiative Too Murky to Tell
Yesterday AMD announced the next phase in its ploy to throw mainstream PC gaming a life preserver by righting all the wrongs foisted on us courtesy the PC's propellerhead legacy of enthusiast widgets, flexible standards, and fuzzy math. Branding it a "consumer information scheme" designed to make buying a PC as easy as picking up an HDTV (anything but easy, incidentally) AMD's planning to slap yet another sticker on computers that have been right and properly optimized "with the right graphic and processor components" for "cutting-edge" gaming. The logo will reputedly validate the PC's ability to play all tested games "the way they were intended -- all out."
Bold words. The implication based on the press release is that someone buying an AMD Game! branded PC will be able to pop a game like Crysis or Unreal Tournament III into their rig, fire it up at "developer intended" settings, then have a smooth average 30 fps+ play experience.
How's AMD pull that off? For starters, they divide their branding scheme into two sets of system requirements:
AMD Game! Ultra
- AMD Phenom X4 9650 processor
- 2GB DDR2 system memory
- ATI Radeon HS 3870 graphics
- AMD 770 chipset
AMD Game!
- AMD Athlon X2 processor 5600+
- 2GB DDR2 system memory
- ATI Radeon HD 3650 graphics
- AMD 770 chipset or NVIDIA nForce 500 series chipset
According to Anandtech, AMD came up with those requirements by running various internal benchmarks on Quake Wars, Half Life 2 Episode 2, World of Warcraft, Lineage 2, Sins of a Solar Empire, Command & Conquer 3, The Sims 2, and Zoo Tycoon 2 with the following minimum stipulations:
AMD GAME! Ultra
Runs at 1600 x 1200, default settings, above 30 fps (average frame rate)
AMD GAME!
Runs at 1280 x 1024, default settings, above 30 fps (average frame rate)
My thoughts...
1. Turns out "developer-intended" and "AMD-defined" are -- surprise! -- not necessarily the same thing. A game's "default" settings are nowadays established dynamically at the time a game is first run. One rig's "default" shadows-water-sky-on is another rig's "default" everything-off-or-bust. Crysis defaults to mostly "low" settings on my Macbook Pro in Boot Camp, but all "high" settings on my tower with an Intel 3 Ghz quad-core processor and SLI GeForce 8800 GTXs. I probably don't need to point out to enthusiasts how much Crytek's sandbox-shooter changes, visuals-to-physics-to-gameplay-mechanics, when you monkey with those settings. Playing Crysis on "low" or even "medium" detail settings is starkly different from playing it at "high" or "maximum." So right off the plate, we have a serious semantics snafu.
2. The AMD Game! Ultra specs are decent -- not enthusiast-caliber decent -- but arguably mainstream decent. I can see a Phenom X4 9650 with an ATI Radeon HD 3870 pulling its weight with...well, say games that aren't Crysis, and certainly World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online with DX10 disabled. But the Athlon X2 5600+ and Radeon HD 3650 are kind of performance-crippled for mainstream use, if by mainstream we mean someone with enthusiast-level performance demands but without enthusiast-level knowledge and/or research patience.
3. Tying industry benchmarks to a single company as a means of simplifying the buyer experience is riddled with political as well as logistical problems. You don't let one football team define the rules for the rest of the league. Moreover, Intel and NVIDIA aren't going to stand idly by and let AMD hog all the rules. And when NVIDIA and Intel grow their own "simplification" initiatives, we'll be in an even bigger mess of logos, acronyms, and dubious standards. Which brings me to...
4. Without a truly independent standard that all the key players including developers agree and stick to, there's simply no way to predict game performance and marry that appreciably to general consumer demographics. It's frankly delusional to think otherwise (though I recognize "delusional" and "marketing campaign" often go hand in hand). Exacerbating the disconnect, developers are still trying zealously to crack blackboards instead of simply making interesting, broadly appealing games. PC game developers today are still largely adolescent in scope, bragging about George-Lucas-like special effects and physics and A.I. metrics designed to punish the bejesus out of contemporaneously bleeding edge kit and make a few lizard-brain enthusiasts exhale a collective "Whoa!" without a thought to the other 95% of PC gaming's increasingly sophisticated (socially, politically, etc.) audience. Getting everyone involved in this industry to play nice together is still virtually impossible, and that problematizes every aspect of these "meta" metric initiatives.
5. I thought the idea was to strip away layers of complexity, not create new ones. How does dividing everything into two tiers (AMD Game! and AMD Game! Ultra) help? Enthusiasts won't pay attention, they'll just look at the specs and do their own research, while casual gamers won't know and could probably care less about the difference between "AMD" and "Intel," so I guess that leaves AMD's estimated 53 million "mainstreamers" (20% of the PCGA's estimated 263 million total PC gamers) to carry the water. But will they?
A mainstream players is loosely defined (by AMD) as someone whose "demand" for higher-end games has outpaced his or her "awareness" of what's necessary to make it happen. Mainstreamers aren't as savvy as enthusiasts, but they're not incapable of spotting the subtler differences between different game settings. They want the same experience their DIY buddy's having playing Crysis on a homebrew monster without the time-gobbling research.
6. What happens when the existing specs for AMD Game! or AMD Game! Ultra are obsolete? Where's the timescale? The upgrade plan?
7. AMD's official web presence for AMD Game! reads like a cookbook without quantities. We're told AMD "regularly tests AMD and third-party hardware and software in 'real-world' game scenarios," but offered little more than a handful of sunny, vapid quotes from "industry supporters" some AMD PR rep presumably requested each company provide for the site's official launch. (Just the logos would have done fine here, AMD.) The "tested components" page is particularly onerous, a contextless laundry list of PC parts from cases to power supplies to game controllers that reads like a sales catalog, and nothing even vaguely approaching a "here's what you get if you combine this and this and this" checklist. Put another way, if I hit AMD's site with only passing PC component knowledge, but wanting to play Lord of the Rings Online pimped out, I wouldn't have the first clue where to begin or what to buy.
Verdict: Another lame pseudo-marketing bid by a widget (CPUs, GPUs) manufacturer to reposition itself as a primary player in an increasingly amorphous and competitively unpredictable space (PC gaming) by boxing out meaningless system configurations that don't really tell anyone in any of AMD's three user tiers anything bankable.
My proposal: Drop the pandering industry quotes, burn the meaningless online vendor catalog, excise the vacuous lofty rhetoric, then re-label the whole thing AMD Game! Mainstream and AMD Game! Casual (just forget about fiercely independent enthusiasts, they'll only balk if you try to create a category that includes them).
AMD Game! Mainstream = specifications for AMD Game! Ultra
AMD Game! Casual = all integrated components, a slight downgrade from the AMD Game! specs
And since this isn't really an attempt to create an objective industry standard, drop that pretense altogether and pitch this as AMD's attempt to battle back against the price/performance tidal wave NVIDIA and Intel have been punching up since the debut of the Core 2 Duo and 7800/8800 graphics series respectively.
Re-Play
Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.
PC World's Marketplace
PC World's Free Whitepapers
tech news tech blogs community & forums laptop prices software reviews downloads
when will they just start making games that run like console games? i mean with half the power of a PC, you can run a game like Oblivion??? yet a PC requires like 10 times the resources of a 360 to run it.
yeah, i was a console fanatic, then a pc fanatic, and now i have too little time to play everything. i need to start beating my games.
but anyways, thats what we do. make things more complicated to make more money.
An Xbox 360 or PS3 can run the same game just as quickly as a more powerful PC for a couple reasons:
1. The PC isn't just running the game. The PC is also running a large OS and numerous other background processes.
2. The console version of a game is optimized for the console's hardware. The PC version has to work with hundreds or even thousands of different configurations, therefore, it cannot be optimized for any specific configuration.