Epic on Mainsteam PCs
The past few weeks have seen numerous comments by some leading figures at Epic concerning the death of the PC, the PC Gaming Alliance and whatever else they feel like chatting about. In a new interview with TG Daily we see Tim Sweeney, the man behind the Unreal games, take a swipe at ‘Mainsteam PCs’ and integrated graphics.
TG Daily: But we mostly talk about conventional retail sales. Do you see an increasing divide between the Pc and consoles?
Sweeney: Retail stores like Best Buy are selling PC games and PCs with integrated graphics at the same time and they are not talking about the difference [to more capable gaming PCs]. Those machines are good for e-mail, web browsing, watching video. But as far as games go, those machines are just not adequate. It is no surprise that retail PC sales suffer from that. Online is different, because people who go and buy games online already have PCs that can play games. The biggest problem in this space right now is that you cannot go and design a game for a high end PC and downscale it to mainstream PCs. The performance difference between high-end and low-end PC is something like 100x.
He has a good point about many PCs that can be purchased at mainstream stores are utterly crap for playing games, and most PCs nowadays should come ready installed with a low-end graphics card at the very minimum so people can actually play some games.
However, anything that comes out of Epic does nothing to help solve this problem right now. They make fantastic 3D engines…but they are often so high-spec and -tec that even those with somewhat decent gaming rigs are struggling to play games from Epic and their engines.
If their involvement in the PCGA changes their approach then that would be brilliant.
Tags: Epic