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That isolated environment is called a game console.

We are in a weird situation with PC gaming. PCs have always been a hackers friendly platform. Both Counterstrike and DOTA started as mods. Skyrim is more of a platform than a game now. Of course, it also means cheating, but it wasn't a big deal back then. Cheaters were just shunned, or sometimes encouraged, depending on the context. No big money at stake, no big deal.

But now, we want a standardized platform for high stakes competitive play, so why not bring back consoles. They are more than powerful enough for this, and you can hook up a keyboard and mouse if you want.



people that play cs for real money target ~144 fps as the 99th percentile minimum. consoles aren't really designed for this use case.


Not sure why this has been downvoted, it’s strictly true. The console is not a reasonable platform for a competitive game which is cross-platform.


I think GP was suggesting that competitive titles should only be released on consoles, so that everyone would have a sandboxed environment with intrusive anticheat. my point is more that the hardware in current consoles isn't really suited for esports titles. consoles are mainly designed to run AAA games without dropping below 60 fps too often. this means selecting a relatively weak CPU so you can allocate more of the budget towards the GPU, which will usually be the bottleneck in this sort of game. you usually want the opposite tradeoff for esports; the graphics are not particularly fancy so you can get by with a middling GPU, but you care a lot more about fps, so you want a faster CPU. counterstrike in particular is almost completely bottlenecked by singlethread performance. even with a 9900k, a discrete gpu is barely above idle.


> consoles are mainly designed to run AAA games without dropping below 60 fps too often

This is not actually the case. It's part of what makes Doom's aiming for (and, with Doom eternal actually hitting) 60fps an exception. Most AAA games (including competitive games like COD) prioritize visuals over frame rate, and so they are typically aiming for 25-30 FPS.

Also, a number of graphical workloads are still bound by the CPU - such as occlusion culling.




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