Epic Games’ Tom Sweeney on PC gaming, Vista problems, and more

Epic Games CEO and founder Tim Sweeney expressed his opinion on the flagging state of the PC gaming industry. In an interview conducted by TG Daily, he pointed out the different problems the PC marke t is facing as well as some possible solutions the industry can take if it wants to make some headway against its rivals. You can check out the rest of the interview by reading our full article, accessible through the “read more” link below.

Mainstream PC users usually don’t put into mind gaming as one of their primary reasons for buying their units. The biggest uses for their PCs would mostly focus on for checking their email, or simply updating their Facebook or MySpace accounts.

This was one of the dilemmas Tim Sweeney, Epic Games CEO and founder, talked about in an interview conducted by TG Daily. He also expressed his opinion on how the PC is currently having trouble keeping up with the competitive gaming market that the consoles are monopolizing, as well as some possible solutions that the PC industry can go with if it wants to competitively make some headway against its rivals.

Sweeney also pointed towards the message that most current game developers are sending to gamers when it comes to getting the best bang out of their PC gaming buck as one of the biggest mistakes in the industry. It used to be that mainstream PC users can play just about any game on their machines with optimal results.

Games nowadays rely on high-end user specs if they want gamers to enjoy their gaming experience. A simple downscaling solution wouldn’t cut it either because of the huge margin created by PC manufacturers when producing their machines.

Another fault he pointed out was the continuation of Vista 32-bit version instead of sticking to an exclusive 64-bit platform. This causes old problems like virus and spyware to bog down user systems, thus making the PC platform unsuitable for optimal gaming conditions.

TG Daily also asked his opinion on the idea of using external graphic cards which can be plugged into your PC and raise its visual performance. Sweeney liked the idea of using a PC as “an out-of-the-box workable gaming platform”. However, this might not be a viable solution for gamers who want to properly step up their machines for gaming purposes.

Sweeney proposed his own solution to change the way how the PC industry can keep up with the current gaming trends:

If you look into the past, CPU makers are learning more and more how to take advantage of GPU-like architectures. Internally, they accept larger data and they have wider vector units: CPUs went from a single-threaded product to multiple cores…

Then, every PC, even the lowest performing ones will have excellent CPUs. If we could get software rendering going again, that might be just the solution we all need. IntelÂ’s integrated graphics just don’t work. I don’t think they will ever work.

It looks like PC manufacturers, and the industry itself, have a big job on their hands if they want to keep up with the standards of using today’s PCs as a solid gaming platform instead of an all-around performance machine. In any case, we’ll just have to wait and see if they are indeed up to this enormous task.