Why PC Gaming Won't Die

[gekko]

Originally Posted by KillerGremlin

I guess the next question is at what point does your console become a computer. You can't really sit on your couch, casually, with a mouse/keyboard setup, and you can't comfortably put your 44" HD-TV on your desk either. Personally, I feel that both the PS3 and the Xbox360 are more like stripped down computers than pure consoles like the Wii is.

The biggest problem gaming faces on the PC is quite literally the OS. While it does multi-tasking really well, multi-tasking is also what kills gaming. The CPU is quite literally grabbing information, executing a set number of cycles, then storing its current state, and grabbing in the information for the next task. Your PC may have a CPU twice the speed of a console, yet you watch the console pump out real-time HD graphics and wonder why your computer can't play Crysis. Your hardware is being crippled by the overhead of a OS that's designed to multi-task.

If a new OS came out that contained no GUI and only allowed you to run one program in full-screen mode, you could run games tremendously faster. Not going to happen, but running games on a multi-purpose OS is horrible for it. Hence why consoles exist.