my motherboard its usb ports are broken I only have 2 left that work
I have a I5 35XX and i find it running all games as good as i need
Now i really need to upgrade , if one more USB breaks i loose either my keyboard or mouse
So after looking around its going to cost me £500 for a new motherboard processor and ram
and i will be 3-5 FPS better off it just dose not appear worth the money but i know one will break and im just praying that when it happens it will be a few years and i can upgrade to a much better system
It depends on how good they integrate into Visual Studio. Steven Klug from SoE talked about this at length. They liked the DirectX debugger and optimizer from Microsoft, and they liked Intel's optimizers, Parallel and Compose. They want those things as easily integrated into Visual Studio as possible. It's not that anyone forces these developers to use DirectX, it's just that it's much easier to write code for than relying on open source API that aren't integrated into Visual Studio.
It is much easy to write code for something been doing every day for long time but 95% company go with DirectX as supported more by video card manufacturers and windows is the most use OS on the pc market and dev or company will go where the money is to keep them self in high waters.
But don't mean that making a game to run in opengl is hard if that was the case we won't have Unreal engine or Unity work under opengl if was hard to do or even indie company working on there game to work on DX and Opengl if was a pain to use.
Vulkan has the same problems as OpenGL. It's not integrated into Visual Studio, and it doesn't have a proper debugger like Visual Studio Graphics Diagnostics. It's going to have very limited use in game development, no more than OpenGL.
You're kidding, right? If you think that are the problems of OpenGL... you can't be serious.
?
Visual studio doesn't encompass everything to do with development. It might be for you though.
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
It depends on how good they integrate into Visual Studio. Steven Klug from SoE talked about this at length. They liked the DirectX debugger and optimizer from Microsoft, and they liked Intel's optimizers, Parallel and Compose. They want those things as easily integrated into Visual Studio as possible. It's not that anyone forces these developers to use DirectX, it's just that it's much easier to write code for than relying on open source API that aren't integrated into Visual Studio.
It was never the differences in speed between graphical API, or loyalty to the windows platform, it has just always been easier to develop for DirectX since there's several powerful debugger and optimizer tools and it is so nicely integrated into Visual Studio, that choosing OpenGL for game development was kind of like shooting yourself in the foot. The developers that did use OpenGL for game development, like IDSoftware, did it more because of principle than anything else.
Vulkan isn't going to change anything I think. It's in the same boat is OpenGL.
Is that the new breed of developers? Then yes, indeed, I AM scared...
You can't blame the game developers for not willing to use OpenGL for game development.
People like to pretend it's evil Microsoft's fault, but they have little to do with it. OpenGL was from the start, developed for workstations, it was never meant to be used for gaming. The extensions were not targeting consumer PC, SGI wanted to sell workstations and needed an API.
DirectX was developed for gaming from the start.
I don't remember many game developers using OpenGL in the past either, IDSoftware and all the games made with their engine, could use OpenGL, but they were the exception to the rule. John Carmack ported his DirectX code to OpenGL out of principle, not out of necessity. He wanted to promote OpenGL driver development and he complained about DirectX a lot, but other developers almost exclusively used DirectX. It's not a new phenomenon.
Vulkan has the same problems as OpenGL. It's not integrated into Visual Studio, and it doesn't have a proper debugger like Visual Studio Graphics Diagnostics. It's going to have very limited use in game development, no more than OpenGL.
Anyone who says that they can't use OpenGL or Vulkan because it doesn't integrate with Visual Studio well enough is totally incompetent and has no business writing GPU code of any sort. It's one thing to say that you'd prefer that it integrated better with your favorite tools, but I find it hard to believe that that would often be the dominant factor in competent programmers choosing a graphics API.
One big problem with OpenGL is that it often lagged years behind DirectX in feature support. You'd get new features in DirectX, and you'd get them as extensions in OpenGL with erratic support, and then they'd be added to the core OpenGL API years later. If you wanted to launch commercial games as opposed to just tinkering with stuff and seeing if it works on your development workstation, OpenGL made it much harder to be anywhere near the cutting edge. But OpenGL 4 essentially caught up to DirectX 11 in 2010 and OpenGL hasn't lagged behind since, unless you're comparing DirectX 12 to OpenGL and not Vulkan today.
Another big problem with OpenGL is that it accumulated a lot of cruft over the years. So the API might have the way you were supposed to do something in 2000, and the way you were supposed to do it in 2005, and also the way you were supposed to do it in 2010 all sitting there as part of the API with nothing to point you in the right direction. If you learned all that long ago, much of which you learned is now wrong, even if it was the cutting edge at the time. Reading a several year old book will likewise point you in the wrong direction today even if it was right at the time. And that's even assuming that the book author had everything exactly right at the time of publication, rather than passing along things that were already obsolete but had been correct years earlier.
More importantly, Vulkan is very unlikely to have either of those problems. Avoiding the latter is the primary reason for Vulkan to exist as a new API rather than just incorporating new things into OpenGL 5.0. So while good reasons to avoid OpenGL, they're not good reasons to avoid Vulkan.
Probably the strongest reason to go with DirectX 12 over Vulkan is inertia. If you've got years of professional experience with DirectX and haven't looked at OpenGL in a decade, it's reasonable to go with DirectX 12 even if you think Vulkan is likely to be a little better. Having to relearn a bunch of things to use a different API is a real cost, and it means you make buggier or less efficient code for a while until you get the hang of things. If you think some other API is going to be massively superior, you pay that re-learning cost and deal with it. Most of the programmers who used to use Fortran have long since moved to something else, for example. But you don't do that just for minor benefits, and I don't think there's any real case for either DirectX 12 or Vulkan being massively superior to the other unless you care about which operating systems can run it, in which case you'd go with Vulkan.
Another reason for early adopters to go with DirectX 12 is that it's available today and Vulkan isn't. If you're a professional game developer wanting to use Vulkan, AMD and Nvidia will work with you and give you access to pre-release stuff. But working with a pre-release API and pre-release video drivers just isn't as good as having publicly released stuff available. Still, this is a problem for Vulkan that will go away very, very soon.
You mention debugging, and I rather suspect that you have no clue what you're talking about there. Debugging GPU code is weird. For host code, all that an API really does is to pass things along to the video drivers and say, I want you to do such and such eventually. The driver will usually say "sure thing" and return almost immediately, even if it doesn't get around to doing what you just asked it to do until several milliseconds later. If you move away from graphics, there are cases where a GPU won't even start on something you asked it to do until seconds or even minutes later. What the driver actually does with given commands can vary wildly from one vendor to the next and much of it is opaque to the programmer.
Debugging shader code is weird and for very different reasons. Modern GPUs want to have tens of thousands of threads resident at a time. (I'm using "thread" in the CUDA sense here; OpenCL calls this a "work-item" and Intel GPUs have something completely unrelated that they call "threads".) Data is being passed back and forth between threads willy-nilly, making it completely impractical to step through all your code and see exactly what is going on.
Even the time-honored printf statement is of limited utility. In OpenCL or CUDA, you can say something to the effect of, "Only have thread 0 print something." But graphics doesn't give you the thread IDs, as that's abstracted away and not entirely meaningful. Even if graphics did give you thread IDs, which work is done by thread 0 would vary wildly from one GPU to the next, and isn't likely to be consistent even on a given GPU running given drivers, as you'd have race conditions everywhere. Furthermore, what is actually going on when the GPU runs is internal to the GPU and the OS can't see it.
I'm not saying that debugging GPU code is impossible. You can write shader code to pass particular internal data back to you to help you see where things are going wrong. Graphics also has the advantage that when things go wrong, they tend to go wildly wrong, so someone who doesn't even know what you're trying to do can often tell you if your code is correct. (If you've ever seen any sort of graphical artifacting in games, you don't have to know the intended effect to know that you've found a bug.) But I am saying that even for a veteran programmer, if you've never tried to debug GPU code, it's probably very different from anything you've tried.
You can't blame the game developers for not willing to use OpenGL for game development.
People like to pretend it's evil Microsoft's fault, but they have little to do with it. OpenGL was from the start, developed for workstations, it was never meant to be used for gaming. The extensions were not targeting consumer PC, SGI wanted to sell workstations and needed an API.
DirectX was developed for gaming from the start.
That's about as ridiculous as saying that you can't use C++ for programming games because that wasn't the original intended use of C++, and for the same reasons.
You can't blame the game developers for not willing to use OpenGL for game development.
People like to pretend it's evil Microsoft's fault, but they have little to do with it. OpenGL was from the start, developed for workstations, it was never meant to be used for gaming. The extensions were not targeting consumer PC, SGI wanted to sell workstations and needed an API.
DirectX was developed for gaming from the start.
That's about as ridiculous as saying that you can't use C++ for programming games because that wasn't the original intended use of C++, and for the same reasons.
Actually, I'm going to come back to this just because it's so ridiculous. You know who built the key chips in the Nintendo 64? Silicon Graphics. Nintendo had openly been working with them for years earlier, leading to Donkey Kong Country in 1994, among other games. Because they apparently had no interest in game development.
PC sales are down, but they are still plenty good to keep things going. There are many things that tablets and phones can't do, so the PC is safe and sound.
To be fair, Intel didn't have a bad quarter; it was less than expected by some. I note too that Apple had a crap quarter selling fewer iPhones than expected and Best Buy also had a poorer than expected results tied to tablet and phone sales. The tablet and phone market is experiencing the same thing that happened with PCs previously; i.e. you don't need to upgrade your hardware to experience the latest content or upgrades need only be incremental; graphic card; SSD vs, mechanical hard drive, etc.
Many years ago, I worked in this industry and the metrics haven't changed all that much. There will be some market correction in that the better manufacturers will continue to exist and innovate. Those less less talented will go bye bye....
Man i used to upgrade my pc all the time for gaming. But since now i find that most new games just suck but have great graphics i just stopped doing it.
Indeed, I feel that while games have been increasing in graphics, they have been decreasing in fun/gameplay for me.
If this is true, why are places like Microcenter still raising the prices constantly on their video cards and processors, especially Intel/Nvidia?
Does PC mean already pre-built computer or does this include the components also?
I think this is a hoax...
There are a couple of reasons why the price would go up.
If supply remains the same and the demand increases, the price will go up.
If demand remains the same and the supply decreases, the price will go up.
In the context of your question, the answer is moot because video cards and processors are only components of a computer, not the entire computer. And we are talking about sales here, not prices. It is entirely feasible that a company can have a drop in sales, but an increase in gains, if they raised their prices. The reverse can also be true.
To answer your last sentence, it's hardly a hoax. IDC is religious about reporting accurate data. Whether or not the iPhone had anything to do with it, is purely speculation on the part of the news outlet reporting the information. Welcome to journalism, where facts don't matter, only "spin". The fact remains, however, that PC sales are down.
If you just want facts, IDC publishes all of their research online.
It also has something do with large companies not upgrading the computers they have. Many are holding back on upgrading to new PC's because they are uncertain of the future of the economy. Why buy now if they don't have the business to justify the cost down the road. The people that are buying PC's are those that are into gaming on the PC. Many of those build their own while some still purchase from custom builder sites (like me). Those numbers may not be reflected in this report.
I really don't have much experience with Windows anymore (home is all Mac and work is Linux for dev, Mac for everything else), but it seems to me that Windows users have always gone kicking and screaming from version to version. They had a meltdown at 95, another at 98, another at XP, then 7, then 8. Same thing is happening with 10 and eventually the assimilation will be complete just in time for the next version, like it always is.
my motherboard its usb ports are broken I only have 2 left that work
I have a I5 35XX and i find it running all games as good as i need
Now i really need to upgrade , if one more USB breaks i loose either my keyboard or mouse
So after looking around its going to cost me £500 for a new motherboard processor and ram
and i will be 3-5 FPS better off it just dose not appear worth the money but i know one will break and im just praying that when it happens it will be a few years and i can upgrade to a much better system
You can buy USB cards - if you have the slots for under £3 from e.g.Scan; a USB hub for not much more should also work or a keyboard with usb slot - less common these days though.
my motherboard its usb ports are broken I only have 2 left that work
I have a I5 35XX and i find it running all games as good as i need
Now i really need to upgrade , if one more USB breaks i loose either my keyboard or mouse
So after looking around its going to cost me £500 for a new motherboard processor and ram
and i will be 3-5 FPS better off it just dose not appear worth the money but i know one will break and im just praying that when it happens it will be a few years and i can upgrade to a much better system
You can buy USB cards - if you have the slots for under £3 from e.g.Scan; a USB hub for not much more should also work or a keyboard with usb slot - less common these days though.
Personally i'd just replace the mobo, its not that hard, and their not really all that expensive either, and if there is no need to upgrade the CPU, why bother?
As someone who works in the world of IT and MSP, we've been seeing the downward trend in "typical" PC sales for a while now:
1. Manager and up level people who don't need a ton of horse power are going more to mobile platforms such as tablets and convertibles
2.High end users and those with application specific needs (like CAD drawers, etc.) are still going with traditional high-power workstation class rigs
3. Depending on the industry, creatives are still predominantly using mac's
4. Worker-bee level are still getting lower-end laptops and desktops, though their companies are waiting longer to upgrade their staff (5 to 5+ years instead of more typical 3 year hardware refresh)
Which, in the end, is leading to an overall dip in traditional PC desktop/laptop sales.
Intel have known all of this for years - which is why their development has been focused on getting the same "oompf" out of smaller - and therefore cheaper - and more power efficient chips. And adding more and more powerful gpu capabilities to them as well.
And the potential market for "processors" is exploding: cars, watches, home security, TVs, toys, fridges - with LCD doors! Intel are not the only company competing for these growth markets of course but they are pursuing them. And small, low power consumption devices are the key to many of them.
And worth remembering as well that when it comes to PCs games started on ........ consoles. Well boxes we connected to our TVs anyway. Early Olivetti's, Commodores, Spectrums, Ataris - depending what country you were in.
But the other factor is, is that unlike actual PC sales, the sales of PC hardware, continues to increase, its a significant market at that, after all, if the demand wasn't there, then Nvidia and AMD etc. would be out of business, as nobody would be buying GPU's etc. So actual hardware sales, continue to increase, year on year. http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/details/pc-gaming-market-holds-lead-over-consoles
So, yes, people are buying fewer new PC's, but does that really mean that PC's are in decline? not if you look at the hardware sales figures, it seems the upgrade market, is positively thriving, maybe its just that PC's are no longer 'alien artifacts' that people are afraid to touch in case they explode or something, and instead are more knowledgeable, and, lets face it, more prepared to dig in and do a bit of DIY, back when i got my first PC, a prebuilt system, that had windows 3.1 or something on it, that was different, it was the last time i bought a pre built for one, after that, i got my hands dirty and built my systems, its a lot easier these days, and no soldering is required, and its less complicated than changing a childs nappy imo.
But the other factor is, is that unlike actual PC sales, the sales of PC hardware, continues to increase, its a significant market at that, after all, if the demand wasn't there, then Nvidia and AMD etc. would be out of business, as nobody would be buying GPU's etc. So actual hardware sales, continue to increase, year on year. http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/details/pc-gaming-market-holds-lead-over-consoles
So, yes, people are buying fewer new PC's, but does that really mean that PC's are in decline? not if you look at the hardware sales figures, it seems the upgrade market, is positively thriving, maybe its just that PC's are no longer 'alien artifacts' that people are afraid to touch in case they explode or something, and instead are more knowledgeable, and, lets face it, more prepared to dig in and do a bit of DIY, back when i got my first PC, a prebuilt system, that had windows 3.1 or something on it, that was different, it was the last time i bought a pre built for one, after that, i got my hands dirty and built my systems, its a lot easier these days, and no soldering is required, and its less complicated than changing a childs nappy imo.
Well, you also have to take into account that people have gotten progressively lazier as well.
I remember being thrilled when laptops came out. A portable computer I can take with me. Now I keep hearing people say laptops are too bulky and heavy to carry around. Really? No wonder tablets are popular. ;-)
Don't get me wrong. If I had a tablet with the power of a laptop or desktop in my hands, I'd be thrilled! iPad Pro is close, but not close enough. Maybe in a few more years.
This is what happens when you build better, longer lasting hardware. It takes longer to need to get new stuff when upgrades make it so much better at lower cost. I might add that the introduction to VR just may boost new pc sales this year if it all works out and they can lower consumer costs...
Well, CPUs will pick up when all those who listened to bad advice and bought dual cores suddenly find themselves in need of upgrade for gaming.
And GPU upgrades will always be in demand, so will SSDs when price comes down even further.
Also theres lot of those who bought consoles that will find themselves wanting a PC in some form when they see all the cool stuff PC offers that they cant have on console. VR on consoles? Yeah right.
Soon even my new phone will be superior to console lol
More accuarately is that PC based "consoles" (aka small format PCs) will take over that will also boost PC part sales, but it remains to bee seen will it be filed under "PC" or "console" as far as categorization goes.
Comments
As with everything it's the casual market that makes things massively profitable, these people are getting tablets now.
my motherboard its usb ports are broken I only have 2 left that work
I have a I5 35XX and i find it running all games as good as i need
Now i really need to upgrade , if one more USB breaks i loose either my keyboard or mouse
So after looking around its going to cost me £500 for a new motherboard processor and ram
and i will be 3-5 FPS better off it just dose not appear worth the money but i know one will break and im just praying that when it happens it will be a few years and i can upgrade to a much better system
But don't mean that making a game to run in opengl is hard if that was the case we won't have Unreal engine or Unity work under opengl if was hard to do or even indie company working on there game to work on DX and Opengl if was a pain to use.
Visual studio doesn't encompass everything to do with development. It might be for you though.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
People like to pretend it's evil Microsoft's fault, but they have little to do with it. OpenGL was from the start, developed for workstations, it was never meant to be used for gaming. The extensions were not targeting consumer PC, SGI wanted to sell workstations and needed an API.
DirectX was developed for gaming from the start.
I don't remember many game developers using OpenGL in the past either, IDSoftware and all the games made with their engine, could use OpenGL, but they were the exception to the rule. John Carmack ported his DirectX code to OpenGL out of principle, not out of necessity. He wanted to promote OpenGL driver development and he complained about DirectX a lot, but other developers almost exclusively used DirectX. It's not a new phenomenon.
One big problem with OpenGL is that it often lagged years behind DirectX in feature support. You'd get new features in DirectX, and you'd get them as extensions in OpenGL with erratic support, and then they'd be added to the core OpenGL API years later. If you wanted to launch commercial games as opposed to just tinkering with stuff and seeing if it works on your development workstation, OpenGL made it much harder to be anywhere near the cutting edge. But OpenGL 4 essentially caught up to DirectX 11 in 2010 and OpenGL hasn't lagged behind since, unless you're comparing DirectX 12 to OpenGL and not Vulkan today.
Another big problem with OpenGL is that it accumulated a lot of cruft over the years. So the API might have the way you were supposed to do something in 2000, and the way you were supposed to do it in 2005, and also the way you were supposed to do it in 2010 all sitting there as part of the API with nothing to point you in the right direction. If you learned all that long ago, much of which you learned is now wrong, even if it was the cutting edge at the time. Reading a several year old book will likewise point you in the wrong direction today even if it was right at the time. And that's even assuming that the book author had everything exactly right at the time of publication, rather than passing along things that were already obsolete but had been correct years earlier.
More importantly, Vulkan is very unlikely to have either of those problems. Avoiding the latter is the primary reason for Vulkan to exist as a new API rather than just incorporating new things into OpenGL 5.0. So while good reasons to avoid OpenGL, they're not good reasons to avoid Vulkan.
Probably the strongest reason to go with DirectX 12 over Vulkan is inertia. If you've got years of professional experience with DirectX and haven't looked at OpenGL in a decade, it's reasonable to go with DirectX 12 even if you think Vulkan is likely to be a little better. Having to relearn a bunch of things to use a different API is a real cost, and it means you make buggier or less efficient code for a while until you get the hang of things. If you think some other API is going to be massively superior, you pay that re-learning cost and deal with it. Most of the programmers who used to use Fortran have long since moved to something else, for example. But you don't do that just for minor benefits, and I don't think there's any real case for either DirectX 12 or Vulkan being massively superior to the other unless you care about which operating systems can run it, in which case you'd go with Vulkan.
Another reason for early adopters to go with DirectX 12 is that it's available today and Vulkan isn't. If you're a professional game developer wanting to use Vulkan, AMD and Nvidia will work with you and give you access to pre-release stuff. But working with a pre-release API and pre-release video drivers just isn't as good as having publicly released stuff available. Still, this is a problem for Vulkan that will go away very, very soon.
You mention debugging, and I rather suspect that you have no clue what you're talking about there. Debugging GPU code is weird. For host code, all that an API really does is to pass things along to the video drivers and say, I want you to do such and such eventually. The driver will usually say "sure thing" and return almost immediately, even if it doesn't get around to doing what you just asked it to do until several milliseconds later. If you move away from graphics, there are cases where a GPU won't even start on something you asked it to do until seconds or even minutes later. What the driver actually does with given commands can vary wildly from one vendor to the next and much of it is opaque to the programmer.
Debugging shader code is weird and for very different reasons. Modern GPUs want to have tens of thousands of threads resident at a time. (I'm using "thread" in the CUDA sense here; OpenCL calls this a "work-item" and Intel GPUs have something completely unrelated that they call "threads".) Data is being passed back and forth between threads willy-nilly, making it completely impractical to step through all your code and see exactly what is going on.
Even the time-honored printf statement is of limited utility. In OpenCL or CUDA, you can say something to the effect of, "Only have thread 0 print something." But graphics doesn't give you the thread IDs, as that's abstracted away and not entirely meaningful. Even if graphics did give you thread IDs, which work is done by thread 0 would vary wildly from one GPU to the next, and isn't likely to be consistent even on a given GPU running given drivers, as you'd have race conditions everywhere. Furthermore, what is actually going on when the GPU runs is internal to the GPU and the OS can't see it.
I'm not saying that debugging GPU code is impossible. You can write shader code to pass particular internal data back to you to help you see where things are going wrong. Graphics also has the advantage that when things go wrong, they tend to go wildly wrong, so someone who doesn't even know what you're trying to do can often tell you if your code is correct. (If you've ever seen any sort of graphical artifacting in games, you don't have to know the intended effect to know that you've found a bug.) But I am saying that even for a veteran programmer, if you've never tried to debug GPU code, it's probably very different from anything you've tried.
PC sales are down, but they are still plenty good to keep things going. There are many things that tablets and phones can't do, so the PC is safe and sound.
I self identify as a monkey.
Many years ago, I worked in this industry and the metrics haven't changed all that much. There will be some market correction in that the better manufacturers will continue to exist and innovate. Those less less talented will go bye bye....
Seaspite
Playing ESO on my X-Box
New players can get a welcome package and old/returning players can also get a welcome back package and 7 days free subscription time! Just click here to use my referral invitation
If supply remains the same and the demand increases, the price will go up.
If demand remains the same and the supply decreases, the price will go up.
In the context of your question, the answer is moot because video cards and processors are only components of a computer, not the entire computer. And we are talking about sales here, not prices. It is entirely feasible that a company can have a drop in sales, but an increase in gains, if they raised their prices. The reverse can also be true.
To answer your last sentence, it's hardly a hoax. IDC is religious about reporting accurate data. Whether or not the iPhone had anything to do with it, is purely speculation on the part of the news outlet reporting the information. Welcome to journalism, where facts don't matter, only "spin". The fact remains, however, that PC sales are down.
If you just want facts, IDC publishes all of their research online.
~~ postlarval ~~
Let's party like it is 1863!
~~ postlarval ~~
You can buy USB cards - if you have the slots for under £3 from e.g.Scan; a USB hub for not much more should also work or a keyboard with usb slot - less common these days though.
As someone who works in the world of IT and MSP, we've been seeing the downward trend in "typical" PC sales for a while now:
1. Manager and up level people who don't need a ton of horse power are going more to mobile platforms such as tablets and convertibles
2.High end users and those with application specific needs (like CAD drawers, etc.) are still going with traditional high-power workstation class rigs
3. Depending on the industry, creatives are still predominantly using mac's
4. Worker-bee level are still getting lower-end laptops and desktops, though their companies are waiting longer to upgrade their staff (5 to 5+ years instead of more typical 3 year hardware refresh)
Which, in the end, is leading to an overall dip in traditional PC desktop/laptop sales.
And the potential market for "processors" is exploding: cars, watches, home security, TVs, toys, fridges - with LCD doors! Intel are not the only company competing for these growth markets of course but they are pursuing them. And small, low power consumption devices are the key to many of them.
And worth remembering as well that when it comes to PCs games started on ........ consoles. Well boxes we connected to our TVs anyway. Early Olivetti's, Commodores, Spectrums, Ataris - depending what country you were in.
Apparently, tablets are toast too
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/03/intel_pc_sales/
But the other factor is, is that unlike actual PC sales, the sales of PC hardware, continues to increase, its a significant market at that, after all, if the demand wasn't there, then Nvidia and AMD etc. would be out of business, as nobody would be buying GPU's etc. So actual hardware sales, continue to increase, year on year.
http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/details/pc-gaming-market-holds-lead-over-consoles
So, yes, people are buying fewer new PC's, but does that really mean that PC's are in decline? not if you look at the hardware sales figures, it seems the upgrade market, is positively thriving, maybe its just that PC's are no longer 'alien artifacts' that people are afraid to touch in case they explode or something, and instead are more knowledgeable, and, lets face it, more prepared to dig in and do a bit of DIY, back when i got my first PC, a prebuilt system, that had windows 3.1 or something on it, that was different, it was the last time i bought a pre built for one, after that, i got my hands dirty and built my systems, its a lot easier these days, and no soldering is required, and its less complicated than changing a childs nappy imo.
I remember being thrilled when laptops came out. A portable computer I can take with me. Now I keep hearing people say laptops are too bulky and heavy to carry around. Really? No wonder tablets are popular. ;-)
Don't get me wrong. If I had a tablet with the power of a laptop or desktop in my hands, I'd be thrilled! iPad Pro is close, but not close enough. Maybe in a few more years.
~~ postlarval ~~
I might add that the introduction to VR just may boost new pc sales this year if it all works out and they can lower consumer costs...
And GPU upgrades will always be in demand, so will SSDs when price comes down even further.
Also theres lot of those who bought consoles that will find themselves wanting a PC in some form when they see all the cool stuff PC offers that they cant have on console. VR on consoles? Yeah right.
Soon even my new phone will be superior to console lol
More accuarately is that PC based "consoles" (aka small format PCs) will take over that will also boost PC part sales, but it remains to bee seen will it be filed under "PC" or "console" as far as categorization goes.