The final installment of TG Daily's three part interview with Tim Sweeney has been posted. Tim looks ahead to Unreal Engine 4.
Tim Sweeney Interview Pt 3
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Hopefully by the next consoles PC gaming will be dead and consoles will default to keyboard/mouse input. Then it won't matter that PC gaming is dead. 
Hopefully by the next consoles PC gaming will be dead and consoles will default to keyboard/mouse input. Then it won't matter that PC gaming is dead.
Sure it will, I won't have any new games to play.
Hopefully by the next consoles PC gaming will be dead and consoles will default to keyboard/mouse input. Then it won't matter that PC gaming is dead.
Sure it will matter.
Remember mods, custom maps, things like that?
Only Sony seems to allow a little bit of that, but I don't know if they'll take it as far as it has gone on the PC.
I still really hope PC gaming won't die.
Well, it won't, there'll always be people making games for it, just not the bigger companies.
right he didn't and i like that fact. but it's sad enough that he said that pc gaming comes after the consoles
but on the other side this has been an obvious trend for quite some time (years if i remember correctly) and i do remember the same thing happening when the xbox was released - what with halo coming for the xbox and not for pc when a whole lot of people saw halo as sort of the pc messiah
I'm not at all concerned about PC gaming dying. It won't, of course. The reasons are quite numerous, but take these two specific points from Sweeney's interview - the consolidation of computer components associated with the merging of CPU and GPU functions into a single architecture and the streamlining of the rendering process associated with bypassing DirectX. The realization of these two ideas will alleviate to some extent two of the hindrances to PC gaming - the cost of the machines and the cost of game development for the PC. Less components = less expensive computers. Less API overhead = less development time spent jumping through hoops trying make your game run well on a PC.
PC gaming may, in fact, be in a lull, but rest assured that we are certainly not witnessing its death.
PC gaming may, in fact, be in a lull, but rest assured that we are certainly not witnessing its death.
Whos to say the next ummz "nextgen" of consoles will even be half as profitable as they have been this round? It wasnt until the PS2 that they took market share away from PC's and Id expect by the time those consoles finally hit PC will be ahead by a very large margin.
Honestly I think its alittle short sighted to say oh we are concentrating on consoles when we know consoles are only generation to generation not a constant upgrade. Thats not to say they wont have the same impact theyve had this round but I just find it alittle hard to believe that the PC market wont be stronger by that time.
There is alot of forethought to other stuff in this interview but Mr Sweeny does sound alot more like a business man than he has in the past. Dont know if that would be a good or a bad thing at this point as business might drive things forward but where does the true innovation come from?
This coulda come straight from MS itself, I didnt realize MS put any cores in the xbox, I assumed they took technology from like IBM and pretty much dumped it straight in. I just didnt think MS was in the business of making CPU's or GPU's for that matter. I thought they were a software development company, one which would benefit greatly if eveyone was using their programming language, their set of tools and their development environment.
You do have to wonder where the performance benefits of having multiple cores drops off, like when do you get so many cores that threads become less manageable and actually have a reverse effect on performance. Sure you can use load balancing to spread the heat but under full load those processors are going to get very hot depending on how much power and what frequency they are running at.
Its obvious multiple cores have their benefits but for how long? Will it be like the frequency race when things die (dye?) off because a new technology surfaces and which platform will be the first to harness such technology?
Epic should really be looking like 20-30 years into the future perhaps even more, they have built a solid foundation for atleast 10 years. Im just wondering what will happen from now to then and whats going to happen if Epic changes their tune 10 years from now saying oh but we were wrong, PC should have been the platform we concentrated on for UE4.
Honestly I think its alittle short sighted to say oh we are concentrating on consoles when we know consoles are only generation to generation not a constant upgrade. Thats not to say they wont have the same impact theyve had this round but I just find it alittle hard to believe that the PC market wont be stronger by that time.
There is alot of forethought to other stuff in this interview but Mr Sweeny does sound alot more like a business man than he has in the past. Dont know if that would be a good or a bad thing at this point as business might drive things forward but where does the true innovation come from?
This coulda come straight from MS itself, I didnt realize MS put any cores in the xbox, I assumed they took technology from like IBM and pretty much dumped it straight in. I just didnt think MS was in the business of making CPU's or GPU's for that matter. I thought they were a software development company, one which would benefit greatly if eveyone was using their programming language, their set of tools and their development environment.
You do have to wonder where the performance benefits of having multiple cores drops off, like when do you get so many cores that threads become less manageable and actually have a reverse effect on performance. Sure you can use load balancing to spread the heat but under full load those processors are going to get very hot depending on how much power and what frequency they are running at.
Its obvious multiple cores have their benefits but for how long? Will it be like the frequency race when things die (dye?
) off because a new technology surfaces and which platform will be the first to harness such technology?Epic should really be looking like 20-30 years into the future perhaps even more, they have built a solid foundation for atleast 10 years. Im just wondering what will happen from now to then and whats going to happen if Epic changes their tune 10 years from now saying oh but we were wrong, PC should have been the platform we concentrated on for UE4.
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Let the complaining begin.
Continuation of a title relies on PC (mods, vaious methods for expansions).
Its never going to die.
The guys that make the games start by playing on PC. The industry may not rely on PC for financial gain, but it relies on PC to develope designers.
Enough of the 'console kiddy crap' coming from the hardcore PC gamers. Your not a dying breed, so stop crying about your wounded ego.
Continuation of a title relies on PC (mods, vaious methods for expansions).
Its never going to die.
The guys that make the games start by playing on PC. The industry may not rely on PC for financial gain, but it relies on PC to develope designers.
Enough of the 'console kiddy crap' coming from the hardcore PC gamers. Your not a dying breed, so stop crying about your wounded ego.
hopefully, pc's will have evolved far enough by the time of the next generation consoles that they abandon their plan for putting PC's last .... i'd really hate to lose all the tweakability and the customization
the thing about cheaper hardware in computers sounds good, like if you have a game such as WoW , it is a through-and-through PC game , but it runs like its on consoles because so many computers are able to run it well... if hardware manufacturers followed the same idea, we will have a majority of pc's with similar performance because the different performance level products they currently sell are consolidated into fewer choices.... like fast and faster, instead of slowest slow medium fast faster fastest etc where most of the computers are between slowest and medium
i had alot of fun customizing the games i installed , like getting custom characters in my old copy of quake2 or having custom crosshairs in ut2k4, it took work to figure out how to do it but when it finally worked it was more rewarding than beating the single player, and that was the reason i shied away from console games... everytime someone asks me to play on a console, i do it hesitantly because im just not used to how much the game is controlling me, rather than the other way round
the thing about cheaper hardware in computers sounds good, like if you have a game such as WoW , it is a through-and-through PC game , but it runs like its on consoles because so many computers are able to run it well... if hardware manufacturers followed the same idea, we will have a majority of pc's with similar performance because the different performance level products they currently sell are consolidated into fewer choices.... like fast and faster, instead of slowest slow medium fast faster fastest etc where most of the computers are between slowest and medium
i had alot of fun customizing the games i installed , like getting custom characters in my old copy of quake2 or having custom crosshairs in ut2k4, it took work to figure out how to do it but when it finally worked it was more rewarding than beating the single player, and that was the reason i shied away from console games... everytime someone asks me to play on a console, i do it hesitantly because im just not used to how much the game is controlling me, rather than the other way round
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Actually I love how this is going, alot of people come into a thread and expect there to have been all the kind of talk they expect.
You are the first one to mention console kiddy crap here, happens far to often these days. What are you defending?
The fact that they're putting the PC so much behind consoles saddens me as well of course, but it's probably an economic necessity if you have an engine that's so dedicated to running on all platforms at once. An Unreal Engine 3.5 might make sense, another iteration for the PC only, but then with all the changes they are making on a daily basis (soft physics and water being the next, as far as I can tell) it's really more an evolution than a revolution they're attempting with the Engine 3 team, and that's not bad and the PC will profit from it as well - particularly considering that there's a hard cap when it comes to processing power on current-gen consoles, but none on PCs.
His idea that everything moves onto the CPU is something that has already happened in the music industry by the way. You used to have tons of immensely expensive hardware synthesizers, drum machines, effect machines, loop processors, held together by a single computer with MIDI interface and sound adapter. Now what happened was that first some of those machines (particularly effect processors) moved onto PCI cards for the computer, and it went on and meanwhile everything runs on the CPU. All the hardware an up-to-date musician still needs these days is a couple of MIDI interface devices (for knobs and sliders), a keyboard and a computer. Synthesis, effects, it's all done on the computer, and a Quad Core can easily produce 1000 polyphonous voices (depending on instrument complexity and samples size), while hardware analog synths estimate 1000$ per voice, and the argument of (real) analog synthesis sounding softer is losing force by the day with better and better software synths coming out. A software piano instrument has 10GB samples, while a hardware ePiano has a couple MB only, and sounds way more like the real thing than the electric hardware version. It's really amazing how much the industry has advanced in the last couple of years here.
With gaming, there's of course mainly huge driver issues arising from that radical switch, because high end hardware isn't compatible with Vista's sound paradigm anymore. I can tell the same will happen if the industry decides (or Microsoft dictates) the move from CPU and GPU to CPU only.
Edit, @Peccavi: Could you please quote some of that "console kiddy crap" you were seeing?
Another edit, answering to this:
Well, however much PCs will have advanced by then, next-gen consoles will be as far and even slightly ahead - if we look at the PS3 for example, it introduced multiple cores while the PC was still stuck at a single one. Console builders do look ahead as well, and want to build a stable platform for the future. And even if they don't do so with technical cutting-edge stuff, as we se with the Wii, they can be successful if they have an innovative feature that sets them off from the competition.
His idea that everything moves onto the CPU is something that has already happened in the music industry by the way. You used to have tons of immensely expensive hardware synthesizers, drum machines, effect machines, loop processors, held together by a single computer with MIDI interface and sound adapter. Now what happened was that first some of those machines (particularly effect processors) moved onto PCI cards for the computer, and it went on and meanwhile everything runs on the CPU. All the hardware an up-to-date musician still needs these days is a couple of MIDI interface devices (for knobs and sliders), a keyboard and a computer. Synthesis, effects, it's all done on the computer, and a Quad Core can easily produce 1000 polyphonous voices (depending on instrument complexity and samples size), while hardware analog synths estimate 1000$ per voice, and the argument of (real) analog synthesis sounding softer is losing force by the day with better and better software synths coming out. A software piano instrument has 10GB samples, while a hardware ePiano has a couple MB only, and sounds way more like the real thing than the electric hardware version. It's really amazing how much the industry has advanced in the last couple of years here.
With gaming, there's of course mainly huge driver issues arising from that radical switch, because high end hardware isn't compatible with Vista's sound paradigm anymore. I can tell the same will happen if the industry decides (or Microsoft dictates) the move from CPU and GPU to CPU only.
Edit, @Peccavi: Could you please quote some of that "console kiddy crap" you were seeing?
Another edit, answering to this:
Well, however much PCs will have advanced by then, next-gen consoles will be as far and even slightly ahead - if we look at the PS3 for example, it introduced multiple cores while the PC was still stuck at a single one. Console builders do look ahead as well, and want to build a stable platform for the future. And even if they don't do so with technical cutting-edge stuff, as we se with the Wii, they can be successful if they have an innovative feature that sets them off from the competition.
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You mean a multi processor machine. But you're right, I should've written "the vast majority of PCs, like 99.99% of non-server machines" instead of "PCs"
If it has more than one processor, it has more than once processor core
Btw, it was a store-bought machine with dual P4HTs, so I wouldn't have considered them quite that rare
Btw, it was a store-bought machine with dual P4HTs, so I wouldn't have considered them quite that rare
maybe this is the reason why tim sweeney was saying pcs will follow, then... wait for pc hardware specs to match the consoles, then later on as the PC's get more powerful with time, we get resolutions and frame rates completely out of reach of the consoles... imagine those custom content which are made just for PC's , which would be too slow to run on the consoles... like i bet in a few months time with the next gen of video cards, custom ut3 maps will show up which run fine on those cards but if you try them on the ps3 or something they will be almost unplayable...
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I actually see this as more of a positive for PC gaming than anything else. The more game engines can scale, the more crappy computers can play them. Since practically everyone has a computer to start with (and far fewer people have consoles) this means that the market for PC gaming will be opened far wider.