Games are responsible for PC developement?

Servers come to mind.

Games have been a major driving force in the development of electronic technology (video cards, anyone?) but frankly that's incidental. Electronic development would have happened even without games, although it would have undoubtedly taken different directions.

Games drive some parts of hardware development. The video cards today are absolutely insane, they would be much weaker if it wasn't for video games. Same thing with high-end sound cards. Most people who need high-end sound cards are audio engineers, and they need more input channels, less latency, etc. Not 3d environmental uber sound in hardware. That's something almost exclusively used for games.

It's not surprising games drive hardware development, games are big business. Where there are millions to be made, there's some entreprenuer willing to raise money and throw engineers at the problem. Raise the stakes, 4 engineers becomes 20, becomes 50, becomes 100 and you can huge, insane, expensive, powerful and mass marketed hardware. It's not specifically games, it's any application that drives large economies. The server market drives hard drive performance, CPU speed, bus speed, etc. The business market drives office software, smaller hardware (business travelers don't like to lug 10 pound machines around with them), etc. Demand drives what people are willing to develop and market.

I agree that video games are responsible for PC development. Video Games, and other Graphical based purposes.

For anything nongraphical, 640KiB is all that is needed. Heck, you can run a web server on a C=64 running Contiki.

Quote:

Original post by The C modest god If there were no computer games at all, would a PC owner really need to buy a new computer? for what? to run a "better" office?

Yes.

Before games even became a market for the PC, business application requirements drove hardware development and upgrades. Once games became a viable market - after business applications had already set consumers on the upgrade treadmill - then the pace accelerated, but only at the top end.

It may shock you, but the vast majority of PC users do not play high-performance games, and never had. Their upgrades are driven by Office (you'd be shocked how many business apps piggyback off Office) and PhotoShop.

So, no. Your thesis is completely wrong.

Except for games and specialized stuff such as image, sound and video processing and creation, a 233 MHZ CPU with 128 MB of ram is more than enough, if the programmers would actually bother to design their programs properly, and not use all kind of bloated, unnecesary features.

yep, for most things I've seen being done in the average business, under 1ghz is more than enough power.

I think it is fairly safe to say that multimedia is what has been prompting development of things targeted at home/business users in the last 5-10 years.

Think about it, we got along fairly well with the 486's, things did a fair bit of what we wanted in a business, however a little more speed was needed to do things nicely. We long passed that point for most office application's real demands being met. From here, there isn't a hell of a lot to add, things need to be improved on the software end more than on the hardware end.

It is not so much about unnecessary features... well, except in the case of clippy. If programs were to be designed to be modular, then adding (or removing) features would be easy.

Also programmers get lazy after a while. I remember when the JVM would run excellently on a P1 with 166MHz. Now you need a Pentium five billion with atleast 10 Terrahertz to run an applet... the one probably most used thing for the JVM. And what exactly does the JVM do today, that couldn't have been done back when it was available on the P1.

Though I will note that new ideas and ways to program have also made use of the more available processor ability. First there was using text input, then functional/procedural, OOP and now the new one: Process based.

Ah, which JVM are you talking about? Java? I find there are only problems running applets when there is shotty porgraming involved, the JVM seems to be working a LOT better, and doing a lot more than before. But that would be another thread I think.