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The 2009 Guide to Gaming PC Specs

The 2009 Guide to Gaming PC Specs

Figuring out 2009 and Beyond

To figure out what you need from a gaming PC, you first need to look at recent PC games - and that tends to take us towards games consoles. Like it or not, most major releases these days are developed for multiple platforms and console capabilities influence game development quite a bit. There are still no news on the next cycle of consoles as both Microsoft and Sony are still struggling to turn a profit from the current generation. Add the current the economic downturn and you can quickly see why they are in no hurry to start talking about the next generation. I predicted last year that we may start hearing about next generation consoles in late 2009 for autumn 2010 launch. I was too optimistic and now I doubt we'll hear about them until 2010. Sure, we might get yet another Xbox 360 or PS3 revision or two with smaller manufacturing process, but that doesn't really count.

Nintendo is obviously swimming in a big pool of money, but for our purposes, Wii is already "last generation" - it may have an unique set of controls and some innovative games but what gets done on the Wii is either a waggle-enhanced visual downgrade from other consoles or a Wii-exclusive that wouldn't work on any other platform due to controls. Wii is a not a factor for PC game development.

So, no new consoles in 2009 and almost certainly no new consoles in 2010 either. That means that the practical minimum requirements of multiplatform games on the PC (multi-core CPU, 2GB RAM, decent Shader Model 3.0 card) most likely won't budge for the next two years. If you already got that covered, your current system will keep running just about every game we'll see in 2009. Maybe not at the maximum detail level or with PC-specific additions turned on, but that's more or less to be expected as the PC technology advances.

DirectX 11

While game developers can be conservative and stick to what the masses have, PC gaming technology waits for no console. The next step in PC graphics is already coming with Windows 7 in the form of DirectX 11. The obvious reaction to that is somewhere along the lines "Huh? But I just bought a DX10 card!" or "Oh well, no point in buying anything until DX11 cards are available then!". Not quite so. DX11 just builds on top of DX10, it doesn't wipe the board clean like last time when Vista and DX10 arrived.

DirectX 11 is just an incremental update to DirectX 10 and not a Windows 7-exclusive - it will be also available on Windows Vista (but not on XP). DirectX 11 games will also run just fine on DirectX 10 hardware, assuming the game won't use any of the new hardware features or allows you to turn them off. While DX10 was a total reboot, dictating a new operating system, a new set of libraries (the actual DirectX) and a new piece of hardware to run it, DX11 transition will be smoother. Vista and any current DX10 card will work and benefit from DX11 improvements that don't rely on new hardware features - just like back when we moved from DX8 to DX9 on Windows 2000 and XP.

DirectX 11 is scheduled to be released together with the new Windows 7 operating system within the next year or so. Some rumors already put Win7 as early as late autumn while others expect wider availability only in early 2010. Considering the state of the Windows 7 Beta today, I'm inclined to guess on a probable 2009 launch, and in order to do that and get the new OS on every factory built PC for the holidays means that it has to be ready to go by early autumn - September or October.

While DX11 is still in beta, there are many articles about it available online. To summarize, it appears that there will be three major new features available to future games developed under DX11.

• Tessellation - Adding extra polygons to 3D models to smooth out any blocky bits automatically. ATI actually had tessellation support already years ago, but as it was never a feature of DirectX, it didn't get used in games. DX10 Geometry Shaders could, in theory, do tessellation, but in practice they were far too slow for the job. This feature will most likely require DX11-compliant hardware.

• Compute Shaders - These will allow programmers to run any code on your video card. It's effectively a standard for something both ATI and NVIDIA is already doing with CUDA and OpenCL. I don't know if this feature will be usable also on DX10 hardware, but I guess it's possible.

• Multithreaded Rendering - While nothing really prevents you from using multiple CPU cores in games with DX9 or DX10, the actual DirectX libraries have relied on old single-threaded model which has made the use of multiple CPU cores efficiently a pain. DX11 is supposed to fix things by making it a lot easier to offload graphics-related CPU code to multiple cores. Improvements in this area will most likely work on any DX10 card, but it may be that DX11 cards will benefit more as their hardware can take into account the changes in DirectX.

DX11 in Practice

What does all this mumbo-jumbo mean in practice? Well, we will see a new set of DirectX files in late 2009 for Windows Vista and Windows 7. There will also be a new generation of video cards offering DX11 hardware support around the same time. Then developers will get to work and, as usual, nothing much happens for a while - and it's anybody's guess how long that "while" will be.

As DX11 is just a superset of DX10, PC exclusive games may actually move to this new DirectX, "jumping over" DX10 more or less completely. Yet they will definitely keep the system requirements at DX10 hardware level for the foreseeable future. You get all the DX10 benefits and many of the DX11 benefits that way, yet the game will run fine on every DX10 card out there - and there are millions of those in gaming PCs today. The actual timetable depends on how rapidly users will migrate from XP to Vista and Windows 7.

On the other hand, multiplatform titles will stick to XP/DX9 level until we get a new generation of console hardware simply because every PS3 effectively has a customized GeForce 7900 deep inside that black box and even the latest Xbox 360 models will always have a slightly souped-up Radeon X1800-derivative inside. As long as a multiplatform title has to run on these two consoles, they dictate the "graphics budget" of a game. PC version might get some sharper textures or added shiny effects for high end setups, but the practical minimum will likely stay the same well into 2010.

Page 1: Introduction, Look at 2008Page 2: Looking Ahead: 2009 and DirectX 11Page 3: CPU, Video Card, RAM, OS...Page 4: 2009 YouGamers Gaming PCsPage 5: Closing Comments, Future Hardware

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