And Here I Thought PC Was Better Than Console

Edits and additional text is in italics.

This is a bit of a train of thought and out of the way in the blogs to keep tidy a little.

I was sick and tired of the exclusives, features and just constant bickering between console devotes.

I thought PC was better than this.

I moved away from console as it chiefly did not allow me to do what I wanted with the hardware. Simple thing like playing music in the background, but also the games were just lackluster. Nobody pushed a system and features were cut to keep the performance suitable to consoles.

So I said to hell with it and built a PC, arguably the best gaming move I ever made.

But now this, I am right back in this mess and now there really is no recourse. Great, deadended and it is all our fault.

Yes this is going to be about nVidia and and games developers.

If I had a problem on console that was it the end of then line. So I have an issue on PC and I fix it. There is some hack, optimisation, driver or other operating system to fix my problem. I had the power to fix anything with the help of people and now once again that is gone. The worst part is, where do I go now, there is no PC2 or some other platform free from the vile corruption of idiots and morons obsessed with profit at any cost, even their own.

Tekfoil hat warning. I find it odd that the 900 series comes out and the 700 series instantly dissapears after selling off all the old cards in a fire sale. Well that part is sensible but the oddness is starting to creep in.

There was the 3.5gb issue to which there was no apology, no recourse for those effected and worst of all the CEO of nVidia had the gall to out right sneer at the people who put him where he is, like he was doing them a favour!

But hey I had my fun with that, and Meh it slides past now relegated to a mere annoyance rather than the outright stealing that it actually was. But hey I lost no money.

There have been games with Gameswork shoehorned in for years now. They were mostly harmless as Gameworks was a simple affair and could be shunted off to the CPU. Fine, annoying but fine.

Slowly the power creep set in.

More and more developer sold out their fans to implement lazy code, half ass their development and cheat the paying customer out of money. That was, is and will continue to be outright wrong. At this point I started to avoid where possible nVidia Gamesworks titles.

All the while AMD, not exactly saints, were slowly working on open sourcing game enhancents. Mantle was big, but then they just killed it, great back to nVidia and their continuing efforts to stop people playing games.

It should be noted that I place a certain amount of blame for this on AMD and Intel. By sitting idley by and watching this unfold with no comeback. Certainly did not help.

But now we are here. This is the oddity. The 700 series sells out quick. It was powerful it was fast and it was gone. Now you only have the 900 series complete with all the luxuries of deliberately gimmped cards, be it memory, bus width or just outright lying about the specs to everyone.

So now you are in a situation where either you were lucky enough to get a good 700 series card or had enough money to get one of the working 900 series cards. Everyone else well nuts to them, at least that is the official line from nVidia.

But now. Now we have games coming out that deliberately take aim at those who got good 700 series cards and makes then pay for their insolence. NVidia started attacking it own product lines. Adding features that people all ready paid money for and then denying them access to the very thing they paid for. Further than that they are currently deliberately degrading the performance of the previous generation. This is console behaviour. You have to imagine that working with nVidia is bad when even Microsoft cut all ties with them after the wreck of the original xBox

How in any reasonable manner was the GTX 960 out performing the GTX780. A card that is usually 34% faster than the 960 was and is being outdone. The only previous generation card to beat even the entry level gaming cards from the 900 series was the once $1000 GTX TITAN.

Call me crazy but this seems like it was done on purpose.

I could pass this off as a developer was just lazy and sold out if it was one game. But two within days of each other by different studios, one Indy and the other verging on AAA from different parts of the planet and different games styles and engines. No this is on purpose.

Why would you do this? Well to make money. Gamers with cash won't buy a 960 as it is entry gaming class and will plum for a 970 but they are gimpped so the ones with more money will get the top bananas the 980 and the TITAN X. This is as close as you can get to forcing someone to buy a better version of your product even if they didn't need it. NVidia are and unless stopped will continue to pressure their customers, the people who pay them, into potentially spending more money then they need to. Is this not illegal somewhere

What sort of messed up time do we live in where you need two, TWO $1000 graphics cards to run 1440p (not an uncommon resolution these days, even I have one) at 60 frames a second! WHAT THE FUCK!

What really worries me is nVidia has many publishers on their pay role. Two games have come out and I am guessing that more are on their way. It would be stupid to not assume this.

So once they attacked AMD because they were scared and greedy. That was fine we knew what we were buying on the AMD side and did so because the alternative was nVidia. Now it has just become pure greed. Now I cannot see how even nVidia loyals would continue to support a company who is out solely to make money even if it means harming their own customers.

How long before they start deliberately degrading the 900 series?

I moved to PC to get away from scum and filth like nVidia. And here we are.

Rant over. Do with this what you will. I will never even so much as advise an nVidia card even if there no alternative. If a time comes when the only option is nVidia, well geuss it is time to stop gaming.

Final edit: The telling thing is I am an AMD user and I am outraged over nVidia practices to its own customers. I could shrug it off as competition when it was aimed at AMD.

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DX12 is around the corner and my years old 6950 then bought for E150 beat the crap out of the consoles at their launch.

The problem is that most triple A games are developed for consoles first and then ported from XBox to Windows instead of the other way around. Personally I think we will see a shift back to PC gaming sooner than later because the current generation is just not cutting it, not even for the price.

I only have a few words. Why do companies exist...To make money that is the ONLY goal. Move the product. Make the newer product look better. How a company goes about making that money can come from several ways both good and bad.

The reason older cards are not as good anymore is the devs are not building games on that hardware anymore. They are completely different architectures that run game code in different ways. And most of them are shity ports from the consoles that the dev just wanted more money for their game so they made it work on the pc in the cheapest quickest way.

After seeing what nVidia is doing, I'd like to switch to AMD for my GPUs, but 290s/290Xs don't have RAMDACs. If I wanted to switch to AMD, I'd have to get a 280/280X class card.

You could change the title to this post and the items being described and it would relate to just about every tech or service sold in America today, it's how big business operates and it's not going to get any better until people choose not to buy their products or services.

Oh yes. And I am not some equal living share the wealth communist. Although better distribution of wealth would be nice.

I am not saying a company should not make.money, innovate, mover forward and push new products. But there should be a sense of responsibility. Profit making is fine but there is a point where profit takes a back seat to greed.

At thisnpount it is no longer about being able to further the company it is just the ruthless pursuit of cash by any means necessary. That is rapidly what it looks like happening here.

And the Ines that pay the price is us.

I am genuinely worried about the state of the GPU market. I known in the grand scheme is is nothing, but this my hobby. I don't want to see it stagnate or collapse all because of some jumped up twat in a leather jacket and his profit margins.

I also apologise for the no doubt numerous errors, I wrote this all in a phone. I just needed it out.

@blanger yes unfortunately this is true. Pretty messed up time money and company wise right now.

Edit: The real thing I cannot understand is how ever nVidia customer with all the crap they have been put through can say that they are ahppy with the product they got or how they are currently being treated.

How are you not all outraged?

Because I have not been put threw any crap. I have a 980 and none of my games even stress this card. And when I need to upgrade ill get the next X80.

People keep demanding better looking games yet want it to run on crappy hardware, which is not possible. Its like trying to drag race with a prius.

Any business is out there for the pursuit of cash otherwise get the fuck out of the business market or call yourself a non profit organization. Large companies like nvida need even more money just to keep the lights on not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to employ people and develop new hardware and drivers and everything else they are involved in.

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May not be a solution for most gamers but in my case, my solution is to stay off the "bleeding edge" when it comes to video cards, case in point I'm getting ready to switch my daily driver to Linux and wanted to switch from nVidia cards I'm using in my computer now, my solution was a pair of R9 270x cards, the price point was there (about $130ea after rebate) along with good driver support, of course the 300 series will be out soon and these card will be gone just like you described in your post but for now it was a good deal for me.

I'm a bit butthurt over the BS with the GTX 970, but so far it performs adequately to my expectations.

My bigger disappointment is in the gaming industry as a whole as of late. Developers seem to have lost the concept that games are an artform, not just a money maker. The last 3 Battlefield games I've bought have been complete crap. And even though I say I won't buy the next one, I probably will.

And every single day, we hear some news about some developer fiddling with their game to make it run better on console, and then just giving us PC users a slightly better version than that. Instead of doing some real work and giving us the good version, and the console plebs get the cut back version.

But no, Devs and publishing companies continue to neglect, abuse, and ignore the future of the gaming industry, for their preferred little walled gardens that are slowly dying because people are beginning to realize they aren't worth the money.

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I'm there with you. However I did like bf3 and 4 I will not be buying hardline. the "newest" game that i have purchased was dieing light and i played if for like 5 hours before stopping. In fact I play very few games now.

and to @blanger point as well. when i got my 980 it was already released for quite some time. buying the stuff brand new on release day is kinda dumb. Specially with the way things are being made today. games need 4 5 6 patches before they are playable, yet people still preorder their shit. I personally have not preorder a game since bf3 and i only did that because it was bf3 and i got extra stuff and went to the release night thing at the local gamestop.

Today I find that the game i play the most is the f2p dota 2. I will probably get the witcher 3 after i watch some twitch streams to see if it is any good.

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I agree with you @Zibob. Unfortunately I've noticed since being semi involved in PC culture again that there is a multi headed huge hype machine in the PC culture (i.e. PC master race). I always happened to notice that when you watch youtube especially the content creators send subliminal messages and try to spot promote the latest and greatest hardware. Forgive me for saying it on this website, but I guess you notice that the whole tek crew has x99 builds with 980's and DDR4 memory that they probably didn't pay a dime for. Just like the playground, you're not cool unless you have an x99 build with 5 grand worth of parts. Other guys like paul's hardware and Jayztwocents they get promotional products all the time and when they are done with them they throw them in the closet admittedly (or build their family new builds which is admirable). Sure, they do reviews for content on their channels and views, but come on, you have to see what they're doing intentionally.

From what I understand Nvidia corners the market in GPU products, seems like with AMD's outdated architecture even at release AMD seems to be eating Nvidia's dust and both companies know their position in this 2 pony race. I wouldn't hold your breath for either company to start being "ethical". Did you really expect the 970 to have the same VRAM as the 980...If so, then why would anyone buy the 980 for $200 more?

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Degrading performance of older cards via driver and game updates is a shit practice period

That is a lazy way to justify that behavior. Let's say you buy a car and after a year of owning said car that manufacturer send out and update that removed horse power and braking distance. I bet you would be pissed.

Hardware always outpaces software and it is unrealistic to expect consumers to buy a new card every generation.

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How exactly are they downgrading older cards? Perhaps I haven't heard of this issue yet.

And you don't have to upgrade every generation, or even every two, just turn down the settings of the newer games and they play just fine. Unless there is the aforementioned issue im not aware of.

Except that the 290 on a level playing field trades blows with the 980.

The 970 would sell by being cheaper vram is not everything the 8gb on 290s are next to worth.ess which is why people.largely don't buy them. You would buy a 980 over a 970 because, and it is, faster cards play better regardless of vram.

I don't expect them to be ethical, just not to look you straight in the face an laugh while light a cigar with your money.

When I had my GTX 670 and 560ti later in its life when new drivers would come out there where performance degradations. And it is also BS that newer games with the same exact engine would run worse on the same hardware.

Interesting, how are you measuring this degradation? I haven't had a card long enough to see this effect.

Uniengine and Unreal 3 I now use 4 since it is more current.

From what I know, RAMDACs aren't really useful at all if you are using digital signals (is DVI, HDMI, or DP). Not really sure why you want this relatively obsolete tech. If there is some reason for it, then let me know. My curiosity has me interested as to why this is a selling point for you.

So with only changing the driver your numbers are worse in unreal 3? By how much?

It happens fromtime to time on AMD as well. You will see people talking about Catalyst 13.12 (this still is held as gold standard AMD driver with some people) when ever new drivers come out. There was an issue with 14.2 I think, I had it, it messed up graphics in some games and some cards suffered significant slowdown. It was fixed next hotfix. But it looks like nVidia are now doing exactly this on purpose.