Every year, the people at PC developer Stardock (Sins of a Solar Empire) release a report to tell their customers and fans how it’s doing. Here’s the 2013 edition. But before you hop over there, check this out.
The report usually includes some interesting analysis about the state of PC gaming. A standout chunk from this year’s report discusses a decade-in-the-making move forward for PC games:
For strategy gamers, the last few years have been a mixed blessing. There have been some great titles released but the innovation in strategy games has been diminishing. This is not the result of a lack of game design or inventive thinking. The problem stems from a catastrophic decision made at Microsoft: not giving DirectX 10 to Windows XP users
Microsoft continuing to sell 32-bit versions of Windows well after the hardware stopped being natively 32-bit has held back PC game development immensely.
Game developers have been stuck with DirectX 9 and 2GB of memory for the past decade. While this hasn’t harmed first person shooters (they only have to manage a handful of objects at once), it has been poisonous to other genres. Next time you’re playing an RPG in first person with no party you can refer to DirectX 9 and 2GB of memory as a big reason for that.
With DirectX 11 we can go to town with shader anti-aliasing and lowering the development capability requirements on having a multi-core based simulation (right now, nearly all of a game’s simulation occurs on 1 thread on 1 core). And with 64-bit, we can fit a lot more stuff into memory.
There are whole classes of games waiting to be made that require these kinds of advances. Luckily, after a decade long wait, we are nearing critical mass. The days of games supporting 32-bit OSes is, thankfully, coming to an end. DirectX 10 as a minimum requirement has also arrived.
Sounds good to me. My PC’s more than ready for this new status quo. Yours?
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