My experience may well have been in 120. I don’t chase numbers. Or maybe I am just bad with them. I quoted “60” because I associate “60” with “superlatively smooth”. I could have said “120” because that experience really was “superlatively smooth”. If I don’t use my Quest 3, DCS and IL2 are also both similarly smooth. But they look nothing like MSFS. Now, I do not want to seem ignorant of the complexity that DCS and IL2 bring that MSFS doesn’t. Looks aren’t everything. That wasn’t my point anyway. Maybe this sim magic needn’t be dependent on local hardware. This wasn’t entirely obvious to me before the Tokyo flight. It’s obvious now. Does this mean that I’ve built my last PC? Probably not. But if DCS really wants to be DCS World instead of DCS: Syria, DCS: Norway and DCS: Clarkson’s Farm, it too will move to the cloud and maybe we all will be better off for it.
And it will constantly go down with crashes when Cloudflare or Amazon has a bug.
If it’s not physically in my room or on my physical SSD, for a one-time price, I want nothing to do with it.
Maybe I am old fashioned (i.e. a dinosaur)? But it is getting harder and harder for me to spend money on something that provides the illusion of ownership. Heck, I remember ranting and raving about Half Life 2 requiring an internet connection to register and finish the install of the game.
These days too many people (IMHO) blithely accept that an ‘always on’ connection to a server that can be shut down on a whim is necessary. I could accept that if I wasn’t sold a (full price) promise - if I truly don’t own it and my continued enjoyment is solely at the discretion of a game developer, sure let me pay a subscription/rental and be totally clear up-front in flashing neon 100pt font, “we can pull the rug out from under you whenever we want, probably in two years or less”. The free market will then determine what is a fair price.
But back to the late Triassic Harry_B. I remember when I bought a PC game, I owned the game. No different to a book or a video cassette, LP on vinyl or even one of those new fangled CD thingies. The internet was dial-up via winsock and IRC was cutting edge social media. A game didn’t require it, heck even if the developer stopped supporting or selling it I could still play it. When I was done with it, or bored with it, I could sell it… because I owned it!
I get it. No one seems to think this road will take us to a happy place. The ultimate curse was once “May you live in interesting times.” Now it’s, “May a data-center be built next to your house!”
By the way, did MS change something because last I heard, they were only streaming map assets, not pixels (or in other words, running the entire game in the cloud). Pixel streaming though is the only thing that would theoretically make a local powerful PC obsolete.
I’ve got a little story from the business side of this year’s Gamescom for you. Brace yourselves people, because this is coming to a cinema near you faster than you can blink.
Unfortunately I wasn’t at Gamescom myself this year, but my colleague who went to Cologne told us that he was visited by a sales guy who made the rounds pitching to game developers and other game related service providers (like us).
This company offers you a service fee per user per time used if you integrate their service into yours. What their service does is, it opens a tunnel and lets this company use a fraction of your bandwidth and your public IP to route traffic to the internet. So essentially, by integrating this service, you make all your users proxy servers to this company.
Now at this point, you should be asking yourselves this: “Who TF needs to route legitimate traffic through so many proxies?” And the answer is of course, no one. The sales person by the way didn’t get tired to mention in every 2nd sentence that this was perfectly legal and they had a bunch of big affiliates who were already integrating their service. He didn’t mention what kinds of customers they were selling this service to, but in the current climate, you can bet your buttocks that it is either AI crawlers or spammers (likely both).
I could already kinda see the dollar signs appear in my bosses eyes, so myself and my colleague proceeded to sketch out how we would have to disclose integration of such a service to our customers (we currently don’t use any kind of telemetry in our own binaries, for various reasons) and how that would cost us a good fraction of our sales. I then added that if they ever thought about going into business with that company, they would need to look for a replacement for me.
Seriously, **** this timeline we’re on.
Just wow.
hopefully it was 120 , that would be great imo .
regarding the consumer PC , I decided that I will keep my NB for now on . wanted also to buy new one for Xmas , but I dont think it is necessary at this point .
I am fortunate that I have abandoned the idea of VR or 4K gaming . happy with my 2K at 144Hz pancake for now .
regarding monthly fees for hw or sw … I dont know .
is regular buying and selling and buying new thing again different than that ? or taking a loan ? in the end the tech is moving forward and we are trying to keep with the current . we are not sitting on the same hw and sw for 20years or something .
out of curiosity is someone here with the latest and only tech from circa 2005 and still plays only titles like Strike Fighters , IL2 1946 , XP8 and MSFS 2004 ?
I get it in case that some time in the future I will decide to never buy a new hw again then maybe I would like to own my hw and sw so I can use it till the end of the days .
When I did my diploma thesis, for the price of one GPU, I could rent one for 3-4 months @ AWS. I’m not keen to see what the prices are going to be once you really can’t get that compute yourself anymore.
We probably should narrow down what we are talking about. General “computing” is the price of a sandwich and coffee. A RaspberryPi and $200 monitor will do everything a modern nerd requires just as well as a Macbook. Photo editing, video and music editing require a steeper learning curve and acceptance of more limitations. But for virtually nothing it does it and does so offline if the user desires.
What we are talking about is gaming. My participation has run off a cliff but I still think we are at a place I never dreamed would be possible in my lifetime. It is PFM! To capture this magic there are those who are willing to spend the money in a chunk to keep most of the horsepower at home; and there are those who spread the outlay to infinity and accept non-ownership as a fair trade. Anyone who plays DCS or ARMA is not on one end of that spectrum. They are in the middle at best.
Sending emails and browsing the web, they give you an ok experience. By the way, Google has been consistently working towards desktop mode for Android, that’s definitely going to be a thing in one or two years.
Try compiling LibreOffice on a RaspberryPi though. It takes my 5800X3D hours to do that.
And if you think that SoCs won’t be affected by the price hikes, I have some bad news for you there…
@smokinhole Back to the original topic. I love Xbox, I have the Xbox One S (2017), and the Xbox Series X (since it was released), and spent a lot of time playing only with Xbox One S/Seriex S/X controllers. Also bought MSFS 2020, which looks great, but unfortunately takes a lot of storage on Series X +/- 500 GB with all Worlds free updates. Got a good skill in singleplayer Call of Duty 2,3, WaW as well as multiplayer in Battlefield 4, but… There are some limits.
I mean, for the Falcon BMS 4.38, or IL-2 Sturmovik Great Battles series (those two don’t need to have the best HW on the market, right?), well, especially for DCS World and MSFS 2024, you need to have powerful PC HW. On the other hand, you don’t need to buy 64GB or 128GB DDR5 6000Mhz CL 30, the MOBO with X870/E chipset, and AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU because of 3D cache (everybody will try to recommend it, especially benchmarks in 1080p, even if its overpriced), with RTX 5070 Ti/5080 or RX 9070/XT and PCIE 4.0 SSD like is Samsung 990 PRO 2TB to enjoy them. Am I wrong with this opinion?
The much cheaper PC HW, such as MOBO with B850 chipset, with PCIE 5.0 for one NVMe SSD and GPU as well, 32 GB DDR5 6000Mhz CL30, and relatively cheap AM5 CPU as the Ryzen 5 9600X (5,4Ghz) 6 cores, with its superior core performance wich can easiely equal AM4 8 cores X3D CPU in gaming due to much better IPC and frequency - don’t speak about DDR5 and new chipset and superior in productivity work, and GPU such as RTX 5060 Ti 16GB or RX 9060 XT 16GB, with PSU Gold specification and only 650W is still more than enought + SSD like is Samsung 990 Evo Plus 2TB. This HW is not cheap, but I’m sure it will be enough for 1440p gaming. Yeah, maybe in case Meta Quest 3, not older MQ 2 / MQ 3S with the same lens and resolution, you might realize that those GPUs are not enough, but is no possible to decrease a bit some graphic details to get fluent works?
Do you really need expensive HW to enjoy a new flying combat simulator on PC, even VR?
As the IT Pro, I don’t like AI things too much. They can help if they are not mistaken, which happens very often. Right, new MSFS due to AI and cloud makes the 2024 version an incredibly stunning game (graphics, world detail), but it requires good internet connectivity, right?
EDIT: 16GB VRAM of GPU is enough to start to play with the local AI model. All data is private.
a note to add in this interesting conversation, some time ago i was thinking more and more to change my hardware, buy more ssd disks etc. My actual pc is a first gen i7 and the disks started also to get full, not have tpm 2.0 (for win11),… because the will to play bf6 i researched for alternative solutions, then tried the geforce now service and OMG i’m now entirely fan of it and more and more i will postpone the change of my pc, it play perfectly games that my pc not run or was like mehhhh but also many other games i removed from my disk saving space to use them on this clouding service. My math, to change my pc i needed to spend like +/- 1200 € thats like more than 9 years of monthly fees to this service, so i think its well worth the service.
So all this gaming clouds are getting better and better and yeah they are also contribute to the reduce (not want to say the end, because for many other things the home pc is very useful) the need of buying new cpu and new gpu only because game x or y that manytimes arrives and are not optimized with the mantra of “not run well? buy a new pc, we not have time to optimize the game”
Let me tell you one thing, my friend. For Battlefield 6 is not required TPM 2.0. Only what you need is a enable UEFI for boot + then enable secure boot. So if your MOBO/BIOS is capable, you can start to play Battlefield 4.
Windows 11 25H2 requires only a CPU with the SSE 4.2 instruction set as mandatory. See Windows 10 borked by update - #16 by Rapier
He said first generation i7. I don’t think that option exists in such a BIOS
Try to read this thread from the perspective of a tech-idiot. I am not. Well, if “tech” was a language this is where I’d say, “I know enough to order a beer and get slapped by the waitress!” A real neophyte would read this stuff and say “no eff-ing way!”
My PC runs BMS, IL2 and DCS fine at moderate settings in VR. None of them look great after being exposed to peak visuals, but they serve for my purposes. As I said when I started this discussion, I am not arguing against Mr. Tech-Jesus’ rant or the concerns of my tech-employed friend. I see both sides. It’s just that I can’t help but to be thrilled with what Asobo has given me over such a limited piece of hardware. And no tech skills needed.
Yeah, I wanted to help him, but unfortunately, his MOBO is really old.
I get where you are coming from Eric but for me it goes beyond a tech issue and into the realms of privacy, exploitation and a visceral hated of tech billionaires making a buck from my personal data and not only making me pay for the ‘privilege’ but lying to me by telling me it is for my benefit.
Another problem with putting everything in the cloud, you never know when the ‘rules’ will change because some other company takes over. Like anyone who handed over their DNA to 23andMe!