Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Theoretically, my current desktop is in bad need of a refresh. I think I cobbled it together from slightly better than middle of the road parts in 2007-ish for...oh around $1300. Core2Quad@2.4Ghz, 4GB of RAM, Windows 7 x64, GeForce 9800 GT with ~ 1GB of video memory on it, spinning rust SATA drives.

I have yet to find a piece of software, game, whatever that's not reasonably performant on it now 5-6 years later. There's some high end virtualization stuff that just doesn't work on it anymore, and a few recent Demoscene releases struggle a bit, but if I keep with web surfing, document writing, music production, photoshop/gimp, and games, it run all that stuff well enough that I don't feel any pressure to upgrade.

It used to be that to run the latest AAA game, Emulation or Demoscene release I'd have to upgrade pretty much my entire machine every 2-3 years. Now I'm seriously considering going another year with this machine or making the plunge and building another. BSNES runs like a dog on it, but I can always ZSNES or SNES9x my way to good-enough-ville.

The churn just isn't there. Windows 7 is rock freaking solid, $500-700 desktops at Costco are better than my current desktop in every respect. If you buy a computer today, you can probably happily use it for the next 10 years and never feel the need to upgrade your system for any reason.

Software used to drive this stuff, but CPUs aren't getting faster in ways that users care, and cheap GPUs make up for the rest. There's no Doom or Quake or Crysis to force an upgrade (hell, most AAA PC games these days are just ports off of far less powerful consoles). Casual gamers are on WoW capable machines (an almost 10 year old game!) and have no reason to move.

The market is simply at saturation not death. It's become like telephony or indoor plumbing. Everybody who's ever going to get a computer (except for kids) has at least one. Hell, my 80 year grandmother finally bought a laptop so my mother can play out of copyright mp3s for her while she cooks.

The PCs are actually improving, but they are improving in things that are not immediately visible. Mostly, this is about, how

- IPS monitors are now way cheaper, so people can get nice 27" FHD IPS monitor for the price of 23" TN monitor few years back. And if you're adventurous, you can get QHD one from Korea for good money.

- SSDs are becoming standard. I know that "everyone who used it will tell you it's awesome and will want to have it for all time" sounds like fanboyism, but with SSD, this is really true. They add incredible responsiveness to any computer they are installed in. It won't actually compute any faster, but you will spend less time waiting and doing nothing, and that's worth it.

- While I can't say what users really care about, the CPUs are actually getting faster. Not only quad-cores trickled into midrange and AMD is now putting octa-cores (with slower individual cores, however) into upper midrange, but the CPUs are actually faster. Look at this benchmark [1] comparing Core2Quad 2.4 Ghz with current upper-midrange i5 4770k. The new CPU is about little less than three times faster.

So the PCs are evolving. And IMPO, SSD and IPS monitor is more important than new CPU anyway.

[1]: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/53?vs=836

And just to extend that point - people can upgrade to an SSD or a new monitor without buying a whole new PC (unless they have an ultrabook or all-in-one, and they are relatively new categories). Its not like the old days where you needed to upgrade your whole architecture (or buy a new machine) every couple of years.

I think the biggest problem with PC makers will be that a 2006 computer still does everything that a normal user needs very well. You can watch Netflix, browse Facebook, check your email, skype, play music etc. without any hiccups or reason to think that maybe you should upgrade. My mom doesn't need a IPS monitor, a SSD or a newer architecture processor and that kind of people getting a PC brought the growth of PC sales in the last 15 years.

I haven't bought a desktop in many years now, but I refreshed my laptop this past month after four years of service. The story is a little bit different but also points to a change in what drives the market.

The old one was a lower end machine of its era (Lenovo model 4446, Intel T4200, 2Gb stock) and clearly becoming too slow for some applications; higher-end video could not play at full speed, and streaming apps like Google Hangout were essentially non-functional. Add to it the fact that the battery was shot, the keyboard was dead, the fans were dying, and the CCFL backlighting occasionally flickered to half-brightness; there was a pretty good case for me to make the move before it stopped booting altogether.

While the new one(Lenovo model 20182, AMD A10, 6Gb stock) is definitely fast enough to do everything, including the majority of games, this aspect feels more like "pain relief" than "improvement" - the positive differences in upgrading are most visible in physical aspects of the package - screen brightness, build and weight, average heat output, keyboard and touchpad feel. Mostly better, although I dislike the touchpad - the multitouch is not as accurate as the older ones, even after disabling all the features.

And this is not a top-end laptop - it's a <$600 machine from late last year, purchased at $100 off as a refurb. The biggest bottleneck in its performance profile is the use of spinning disk storage(which, I should add, is more than I'm ever likely to use as long as I have it). And, I should reiterate - the performance problems of the previous one only came into play with some newer apps, mostly those that relied on GPU acceleration for video or 3D. To a lesser extent it had problems on CPU-hungry stuff(music production) as the fans gave out, but it was a very gradual degradation.

I think the most intriguing part of the new environment is in how it is informing how we write programs - a huge "style gap" has emerged between applications that can never get enough power, and those that can be unfathomably wasteful of power. For a lot of things, we can really say, "Given unlimited computational resources, how do we best solve this problem?" And the benefits of that thought process turn out to uncover new optimizations at the same time that they improve the code quality.

I think that with the new consoles we'll see a new push in graphics performance over the next few years which will drive upgrades in PC gamers. The optimisation tricks which can be achieved on console mean that spec-for-spec, a much more powerful PC will be required to run current gen console games in the next few years (just like this generation). The money is going to be in the gamers, and I would expect to see Intel make a push there (AMD is already in the market with their ATI purchase).

But I agree, for every other computer user, a PC they bough 5 years ago is most likely still completely fine, unlike those from the 90s and early 2000s, where after 3 years they frequently became near-unusable. A great development as a result of the slowdown of the spec race is the push for smaller/lighter/better battery life which is occurring - new laptops have near hassle-free portability while still being fully functional PCs.

I think that with the new consoles we'll see a new push in graphics performance over the next few years which will drive upgrades in PC gamers.

This has been true for the past several generations, but this round is somewhat different. Next generation's consoles aren't even using the best graphics hardware currently available. Video games aren't pushing the cutting-edge of hardware anymore, CUDA is. The money isn't in gamers anymore, it's in coinfarmers.

I'm not sure any generation of console has used the best video hardware available, though. For at least the current generation and the one before it, there have been video cards which cost more than the console hardware at launch, and even this generation which is, by all measures, a damn long way behind PC hardware still looks good. Not as good as PC, but you could mistake them at a glance.

I think there'll still be a big push as raw hardware performance on the PC keeps up with clever optimisation on consoles.

I'm just not seeing it. My 5-year old gaming PC, which has to use legacy video drivers, can play brand-new games which were just released at maximum settings.

I don't believe advancements in videogame technology are being held back by processor technology anymore.

I think you are correct. This soon-to-be-past console generation was particularly protracted and I think that reflected in the PC gaming market.

The PS3 is 7 years old

The 360 is 8 years old

The Wii is 7 years old

Games written for these platforms and then ported to PCs (or written with cross portability in-mind) just aren't stressing modern PCs at all. I built my system to be as-good as or better than any of those consoles and it's more than kept up.

UberMouse (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6023957) mentions

"For gaming that will change with the new console releases. The Xbox One is >4x more powerful than the Xbox 360 and the PS4 is >6x. It might take a few years, but the slump in increasing processing needs will probably die off."

Which is also true. Ports from those consoles will definitely urge me to get a better machine. Not only are the CPUs and GPUs better, but the games will be written assuming more RAM is in place.

glogla (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6024693) is also correct that dropping in an SSD would ramp up my system speed noticeably (my rMBP is twice the computer my desktop is without SSDs, with SSDs it chews it up and spits it out...it's almost absurd using my desktop these days to be honest). At this point I'm also noticing that my primary computer use (web browsing) is eating up more and more memory. I'd also need more RAM, which in my case means a new motherboard, which implies new CPU etc. The truth is my machine is so old now that it's kind of reached the point where I can't really just upgrade 1 part, or add a bit more of this or that. And I definitely want my next system to have at least a 5 year lifespan.

Things I was waiting for:

- SSDs to drop below $1/GB @ 500GB or more sizes

- A selection of sub $150 motherboards to support 16-32GB of RAM

- Waiting for the CPU core wars to stabilize (It looks like we're good there)

- Some of the AMD/ATI merger stuff to shake out. I was an old AMD fan, so I wanted to see what if anything they'd end up offering

- The PhysX, CUDA, whatever world to mature a bit and see how it all gets pushed down into consumer-level video cards

I think it's time and I'm starting to price out parts and research stuff. But like I said, I'm not feeling any particular pressure to do it today and the beauty of technology is waiting a while just makes things cheaper.

For gaming that will change with the new console releases. The Xbox One is >4x more powerful than the Xbox 360 and the PS4 is >6x. It might take a few years, but the slump in increasing processing needs will probably die off.

Compiling, virtual machines etc. With your setup it's SO slow. Not that it is bad, it's just you have your requirements which don't change.

Absolute true. I end up doing all that stuff on my work issued machine which is a nice modern rMBP with 16GB of RAM and SSDs, so that kind of work screams on it.

Oh come, you cannot find a game that is not reasonably performant on your "Core2Quad@2.4Ghz, 4GB of RAM, Windows 7 x64, GeForce 9800 GT".

How about any major game since 2010-2011?

You should be able to run Skyrim on that, probably not on the absolute highest settings of course but most games look good enough on medium these days.

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