I don’t know if you noticed but the hardware advancement in the last five years has been poor at best.

This isn’t an heresy, even if this is a particular part of the industry from which you would expect only an exponential growth and nothing short of it. I’m nowhere an expert, but from what I’ve seen the situation has been deluding.

What are some of the innovations of the last years? The transition between faster version of AGP, The transition from AGP to PCI-Express, other various types of BUS, Hyperthreading, Dual Channel memory, the shaders on the graphic cards and, more recently, the new 64-bit CPUs. This is what I remember.

Now the point is that most of these have become mandatory but they have been pretty much useless on their own. All the transitions to better AGP versions have given 1-2 FPS gain in total, probably more because of driver updates than actual use. The transition to PCI-Express is pretty much the same. If you look the benchmarks there’s again 3-4 FPS difference tops. You’ll *have* to upgrade if you want take advantage of the new motherboards and new video cards, but the innovation itself has been pretty much useless, concretely and the press release were 100% pure hype.

Pretty much the same for the Dual Channel memory, you can disable it and still not really notice a difference. Hyperthreading is the first thing you disable if you play games, same for “Cool ‘n Quiet”. The shaders had an impact and became required in games, but again I find them more a forceful path that you cannot avoid more than an actual advantage that had a concrete, positive use.

What I see is that the only steady element that provided a noticeable advancement is the sheer power. Higher frequencies and just that. With the added problem of CPU needing all sort of sci-fi mods to not melt at the high-temperatures. I’ve seen more innovation in the cooling devices than the object they are supposed to cool down. Beside this, I also noticed that even the sheer power has slowed down its progress consistently.

Then we have the 64-bits. What a joke. I have an Athlon 64 because it is a good CPU. The point is that it is a good CPU for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the 64-bits. The CPU is good because it integrates the memory managment, keeping it closer and so faster. Something really simple. Just a few weeks ago Valve released a Press Release announcing the 64-bit versions of their games:

Combining the performance of AMD64 processors with the 64-bit version of Valve’s technology results in advanced and powerful games. This winning collaboration brings customers an amazing product based on the best of AMD64 technology and Valve’s software development.

Yes, sure. Concretely?

Well, concretely you can expect at least a 20% slowdown, if you are lucky, plus the bugs. A wonderful improvement, and it’s not even all. If you have the 64-bit version you are forced to “upgrade”.

What’s the point of all this? No, really. It’s beyond absurd. Who could release an ‘upgrade’ that slows down your game by a good 20%, adds bugs and nothing else? Who could release even a press release about this with a straight face?

You can blame the drivers, or the fact that the products weren’t built with the 64-bits in mind. What I think is that this is pure fluff and hype technology. The 64-bits will become mandatory as everything else and we’ll assume things are better even if they aren’t really improving.

This is the industry: finding excuses to convince you to replace.