3D Gaming Grows in Influence

The commercial significance of 3D gaming on the PC has grown rapidly during the past few years. Although the overall rate of PC sales in established markets such as the United States changed little between 2000 and 2002, revenue from the gaming-enthusiast niche grew strongly. New OEMs, such as AlienWare, and established vendors, such as Dell, began offering system configurations specifically designed for gamers. Just this month, both Intel and AMD introduced PC processors aimed at the gaming market.

Gaming was one of the first applications for personal computers. Some of the earliest PCs were created with features such as color graphics and joystick inputs to support game play. Over time, PCs evolved to be more-general-purpose systems, and game consoles were created to provide the best game-playing experience.

By the late 1990s, even as companies such as 3Dfx and Nvidia were developing graphics chips for 3D gaming on the PC, there was essentially nothing else on the PC platform expressly designed to support gaming. The introduction of the PlayStation 2 seemed to show that consoles would remain the best gaming platform available, and Microsoft's decision to base its Xbox console on the PC suggested that reusing PC technology for gaming would require sacrificing the general-purpose nature of the PC architecture.

Consoles still have certain advantages over the PC. They can be faster than a PC using similar technology; they are more reliable; and they support a business model in which game sales can subsidize the retail price of the hardware. On the other hand, PCs can change more quickly, adopting the latest available technology for each product cycle—and game developers can incorporate these new capabilities into each new generation of game, rather than waiting for a next-generation console to appear.

When the 3D-gaming market proved itself immune to the malaise affecting the rest of the PC industry, it began attracting more-serious attention from PC chip and system vendors. Graphics-chip and processor vendors—which until late in the 1990s actively stifled bleeding-edge hobbyists from pursuing performance enhancements such as overclocking—began to tacitly accept such efforts and now are looking for ways to assist them.

Gaming has been seen as an impediment to the acceptance of LCD monitors, because liquid crystals respond to electrical stimuli relatively slowly. CRT monitors can refresh their images in less than 8ms, but an LCD can take up to 40ms to change its display. Gamers place a high value on fast displays and have therefore been slow to accept LCDs. Samsung recently introduced a 17-inch LCD with a 16ms response time, which will likely prove popular among gamers, but the resulting 60Hz effective frame rate is generally considered only a bare minimum for gaming. More work remains to be done in this area, and gaming may yet accelerate the adoption of more-advanced display types, such as organic LED technology.

Even more significant were Intel's announcement at its Developer Forum of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (which can alternatively be thought of as the Xeon MP Home Edition) and AMD's introduction last week of the Athlon 64 FX-51, which is derived from the Opteron 100 series. Gaming systems based on these chips, plus the latest high-end 3D cards, will sell for prices rarely seen in the past decade.

Success in the gaming market can position an OEM for better sales in other areas. We don't expect server processors to take over many home or business PCs, but every customer who buys a high-end system instead of a midrange machine contributes to the health of our industry.