Why would MS feel threatened by Steam?

Why GFWL ruined Fallot 3 for u? I don't believe u.

Yeah, I bought the rival to 7900GTX, the Radeon X1900XT when it was brand new at $550 and then the 8800GTX came out and doubled the performance only 7 months later. I admit it felt a bit silly.

@disolitude:

I didn't say the GTX295 was trumped yet. And I paid under $130 for my card.

And I didn't need to upgrade my case, PSU, DVD drive, etc. Hell, you can buy one case and be set for a decade these days lol. I just did the mobo (Gigabyte board with Sata6.0, USB3.0, the works), CPU (Athlon II X4 635), GPU, RAM (4gb DDR3 @ 1066), and HDD (WD 1tb).

As for Crysis at 1080p, I suppose the framerate could've been under 30. My eyes aren't exactly the best judge of such things.

What if Steam reckoned that the best way to make their platform OS-independent would be to help Wine's team to complete all the parts that matter for Steam games? Steam developers should perfectly know which parts of Windows APIs they use and how should be a 1:1 functional equivalent of them.

But thinking again about it, even if I were right, releasing Fable III on PC wouldn't have anything to do with that and couldn't  do anything to ward off this supposed threat.

It did. There were times that i couldn't even sign in. It's even worse for multiplayer games like Dawn of War II.

Yeah, thats a cool price for that card. I'd put 2 of those in a crossfire stup and then we're talking :)

However, with that setup, would you say that the performance you are getting in games blows away the stuff consoles do? I was absent from PC gaming for a long time but when I decided to come back to it in late 2008 I went from HD4850 to GTS250 to GTX260 to finally GTX295 (cause of 3D vision)

I found that with the first 2 cards, I always had to make compromises with visuals which put the games I was playing visually to console levels.

The whole point of this debate is the fact that a user posted that his 400 dollar PC blows away the consoles and that hed rather play Fable 3 on PC...from personal experience I found that it really isn't the case. To blow away the consoles you need a 300 + dollar video card, which needs a 100 dollar power supply and a 100 dollar case to get proper cooling, you need a decent quad core CPU, the Ram needs to be low latency/high frequency...

Don't get me wrong, the PC arms race is fun, and it does blow away the PS360 but it can't be cheated and done for cheap...not possible.

I wouldn't say blows away, but PC games certainly top their console counterparts.  And I'd blame that more on developers than the hardware these days.  Most multiplatform games are basically console games with a shoddy, unoptimized PC port (GTAIV, ACI/II). Crysis and Metro 2033 are the only two action games released that really try to push the limits of modern day PC hardware, but neither Crytek nor 4A Games (going by Stalker) are known for being great at optimization.  They mostly brute force there way to the desired image quality.  Valve on the other hand has always been known for producing excellent graphics on even weak hardware, but that doesn't seem to be a priority for them anymore, given L4D2's visuals when maxed.

One place where PC does still blow away consoles, however, is scale.  A 4v4 in Supreme Commander with 8000 units roaming around and nukes going off left and right is damn impressive, even three years after the game came out.  I haven't gotten around to trying any more recent RTS games like Napolean: Total War or Supreme Commander 2 (which I refuse to buy given it was gimped in both econ and scale), but I'm sure at least the former is even more impressive.

Supreme Commander was actually one of the main reasons I upgraded my PC, given the game is completely broken on a 32-bit OS.  It will inevitably break the 2gb RAM limit in larger matches, thus crashing unless you hack both the game and Windows itself to allow it to use virtual memory on your HDD.  RAM alone would prevent either ps3 or 360 from handling anything close to what is possible in the PC version of Supreme Commander.

There were times when it wouldn't let me sign in and meant I couldn't access my saved games. It updated very slowly and a few times when it did update I had to reset my computer manually because it had frozen on me.

My biggest complaint about the game was that it used GFWL.

I don't know what you are talking about but you are full of shit.

I have a single 9800 GT for 80 bucks and I am running Metro 2033 on High, not Very high, and it has been consistently above 30 FPS. I was also running at 1620x1050 or whatever. So no, Metro 2033 High which makes the 360 versoin look like a pile of shit, runs perfectly fine on an $80 card.