|
|
 |
 |
 | | | | |
 |
|||
 |
||||||
          |
 |
 |
||||
|
The Effect of Mass-Market Gaming On a cautionary note, Rob Hubbard, Electronic Arts’ audio technical director, has observed a trend away from high-powered audio systems. "Since PC (entertainment/games) sales are slowing down, there is a tendency to want to appeal more to the mass market. This creates a problem in that developers are catering to the lower-end PCs which typically have extremely bad hardware, and don’t have the horsepower to support the new DirectX technologies. This makes it more difficult to make decisions and know what to support for the high-end PCs."Some quick web surfing confirms Hubbard’s concern. An eMachines $399 eTower366 has a fairly disappointing "FM only" PCI card with no wavetable acceleration, and only a vague reference to 3D. Slightly up market from that machine is the Compaq Prosignia Desktop 320 priced at $999 (as well as number of other $1,000-range PCs) that hosts a Sound Blaster PCI 128. The 128 boasts many of the same features as our standard platform but with only partial hardware acceleration. Creative Labs’ developer relations manager, George Thorn, contends that the Sound Blaster PCI 128 drivers are highly optimized and that the processor hit on a typical sub-$1,000 PC is minimal. On a somewhat more promising note, Thorn reconfirms the presumption that the Sound Blaster Live! Card profiled in Table 1 will become well established in even the lowest-end PCs within a year. Creative hopes to drop the price of the Live! technology to the point where it will become Creative’s low-and mid-market OEM product of choice in the Q4 2000 time frame. Furthermore, rapidly increasing CPU speeds are reaching even these bargain PCs. As a result, some of the really interesting software synthesis technologies profiled in the "New Technologies" section should see increased consideration, development, and use in the absence of hardware acceleration. __________________________________________________ |
|
|
Features
