14 DAY TRIAL // How expensive is it to be a PC gamer? Well, that depends on your particular favorite game genre and of course on how often you replace or upgrade your hardware. Roy Taylor, vice president of content relation for Nvidia says as cited by Ars Technica, that most game publishers feel that hardware pricing is way too high, particularly when DirectX 10 is involved. This perception he says is created by PC manufacturers that push very high cost gaming machines on the market and only a very few less expensive but capable computers.
Taylor said that game publishers may not start working on games using the latest technologies available, because as one of them said "all DX10 machines are $3,000 and too expensive." Of course, $3000 is a very high price for a gaming machine and there are systems that top at $1000 and still support DirectX 10, but the gamers' experience while playing on Vista may be less than pleasant. In Taylor's view, the big OEMs and ISVs "think of PC gaming as a lucrative means of selling overpriced PC hardware better suited to winning magazine reviews than equipping end users with what they need to play the latest games." Taylor even suggests that this marketing approach is actually "damaging" to PC gaming.
One thing strikes everybody as odd, since Taylor is an executive in a company that makes most of its profits by selling high end video cards to the same PC manufacturers and system integrators that were criticized earlier for "overpricing" their products. Because DirectX 10 requires Microsoft Windows Vista (an operating system that has quite high system requirements) in order to run a DirectX 10 compatible video card (a card from the latest Nvidia or ATI generations), gaming machines that strive to be powerful enough to smoothly support the newest games on top of Vista can not be cheap. And all things considered, Vista is not exactly a gamer's choice operating system, as no matter how high the hardware platform, gamers will experience a comparatively weaker performance on Vista than on Windows XP.