Xbox7800

Over the last holiday season I found myself torn between the prospects of either upgrading my PC or buying an Xbox360. From college and the budget arena of "retro" gaming to my short-lived career as a mechanical engineer with its disposable income factor, I've been a multi-system gamer and knew that the purchase of a single next generation solution during that timeframe would not be my sole entry into the future territory of gaming. Thanks to the limited availability of the Xbox360 combined with the fact that most of its major titles in which I could fathom any interest would soon be released on the PC, I chose the slightly more expensive PC upgrade route. Going from an AthlonXP to an Athlon64 processor while at the same time changing from an ATI9800pro to an Nvidia7800GT produced a quantum leap in gaming power that tripled some benchmark scores while actually making some of the newest batch of games playable (the title F.E.A.R. really didn't do much on my old computer).

Having set up my previous secondary computer (a 500MHz Intel) to be a children's machine for a neighbor, downgrading my primary computer and reselling its now unnecessary parts for additional "rebates" toward the purchase of the new machine lessened the blow to my bank account. Frightened of being forced into the next generation graphics card community with its $300 entrance fee, though completely justified by the performace increase, the end result stayed very near my initial GPU budget of $200 thanks to the $30 rebate from the manufacturer, reselling the complementary Quake 4 that came with the card (another $30), and selling my ATI9800pro (essentially a third rebate for $100).

For the CPU on the other hand, I went the budget route with the Athlon64 3200. The supposed overclocking moster, the Athlon64 3000, disappeared from the market during my purchase, and I couldn't scrap enough from my old machine to justify an Athlon64 X2 3800 or the acclaimed Opteron 165 and enter the world of multiple processors. In the end, since my secondary computer grew to be what was left of my primary computer from the previous few years, I do have a budget multiprocessing setup. While one machine completes a CPU intensive task, I switch to the other one for more casual tasks that would have interupted or slowed down a single processor computer had both tasks been attempted on one (like encoding video while surfing or watching TV). Keeping my old primary machine intact also allowed me to leave the programs installed on it intact as long has they didn't require any graphics power beyond the onboard directx7 video solution offered by the motherboard.

So E3 started today with its hype intended to get me to purchase an additional gaming system since all three of the main players should debut and promote their new hardware and games. The question left to me isn't when will I become a multisystem gamer, purchasing more next generation consoles beyond my primary gaming device, my PC, but when I will I become a multiprocessor gamer? With all of the Xbox360 games showing up as ports on the PC and vice-versa, how underutilized is its powerful array of three 3.2GHz hyperthreaded powerPC processors (six logical cores) when my machine runs the same games using a single 2.0GHz CPU? How many of the Playstation3's (seven?) physical cores within its cell processor will do more than decode a dozen HD streams of pre-rendered videogame footage simultaneously? Give me an alternative and not another competitor for the bloodbath of FPS for my PC!

Until there's a killer app, new systems and hardware just serve as expensive coffee table pieces. I'll stick with the original games spilling onto my NDS, emulators on my PSP, and next generation games on my PC. Maybe hope rests with Nintendo's Wii (nee: Revolution), as it promises to bring the next generation of games from Nintendo through an original interaction device (motion sensitive controller) while still offering emulation for their last few decades of gaming history. Plus, they might have the price right: less than the $600 PS3, less than the $400 Xbox360. 2005 broke me with its $150 NDS and $250 PSP. Who had enough left over for even the dumbed down $300 Xbox360 core? By the year's end, I predict that Nintendo takes my next generation budget money. Someday, multiprocessor gaming will be ready for primetime. I still doubt that 2006 will be that year.