That's the thing, most people do NOT upgrade their PCs
You are simply wrong. Not only will they, have have been doing it for the past decades. I remember when everyone in my neighborhood got those expensive Soundblaster cards, because they wanted to hear the awesome music/sound in the game.
However, as I said, they stop spending money for games that are old. Including WoW. THAT'S the reason many players are not into it anymore. They want current games and they moved on to others because it was outdated.
That's the other thing, consoles ARE the vast majority of the video gaming market.
Wrong as well. You have to look at the overall spendings. Since most games are outdated and people will not pay much money for them, and the hardware market is suffering as well from it, it's only the few console fanboys that now distort the market to the untrained eye. Meanwhile, money is spend somewhere else - e.g. last year I spend over 20k EUR on travelling alone. Video games have gotten out of fashion for many because of the industry's inability to deliver.
I have a gaming PC and a XBox, my grandson has his own XBox and my son in law has one as well, but they don't have a PC, just a laptop that my daughter uses to rip her cd's and do the budget on, an old POS laptop that has problems with Facebook games no less, but it did what they needed, run Office and burn cds, since all gaming is done via the XBoxes they have(I've finally convinced her to get a real PC by showing her Elite and explaining how I can teach my grandson MY passion for astronomy, physics and astrophysics via the game, she doesn't know it's on XBone, or she'd go that route).
As I pointed out ealier: consoles are expensive. Therefore, those people are not money constraint and would have no trouble upgrading their PC if they steamlined their finances.
The console game market is a multi-billion dollar industry, it's not a niche market by any means, it's THE largest part of the gaming market these days.
No, it's not. Since the new millenium, people play on their PCs, it's the rational thing to do. Most console vendors have gone out of business, leaving only Nintendo, MS and Sony in the market. Out of those three, no one can compete with current PC tech in their games, which was different in the console-heydays with great programmers and thought-through architecture, even on cheaper hardware.
CoD:AW spent more on advertising and PR than Chris Roberts has raised for Star Citizen by over twice as much, and that was JUST the PR budget for the game, it doesn't include the development budget at all.
Exactly: People are not doing R&D. Only PR. And that's the problem. The biggest example of fail was Destiny for example. So many millions spend in bought reviews from the corrupt gaming press. Then I read those reviews, decided it was a mediocre game, and then found out it won't even run on my system. Had they spend their budget more wisely, they could have landed the next hit. Now it's totally forgotten.
Same with Call of Duty: Why buy a new iteration? It's gameplay is repetitive and boring and the graphics didn't improve much.
I don't know where you got the idea that consoles were a niche market, the exact opposite is true, they are the majority market, have been for years now.
It's called history. Back in the late 80ies/early 90ies everyone was gaming on consoles and home computers, as x86 where really expensive and not as ubiquous as they are today. Now the situation has changed, everyone has PCs and can usually game on them (at least by adding a cheap midrange GPU), while only a few nerds (me included) have a console (I recently bought a Wii U to play Zelda).
Guess what - the PC plattform has consolidated other devices as well. We don't have Sat Receivers, VHS and stereo decks (save for the amp) anymore - everything runs on one plattform. And if you're low on money, you maintain it only once on your desk. That not only saves money and working hours, but it's also convenient because you need only one skillset.
As to that paper, it's a really cool thing, the math is a bit beyond me, I'm physics based, but I do understand the basics behind it. I also understand, as a coder, that creating something specifically FOR CUDA, as they did, doesn't mean it will work with OpenCL, quite the opposite actually, or they would have done it in OpenCL to begin with. You can't port CUDA functions to OpenCL, doesn't work, CUDA is proprietary, nVidia owns it and they won't share it. Rather sucks but that's how it works, often times open source software is simply not capable of doing what proprietary software can, especially in conjunction with proprietary hardware, open source is left in the cold with that combination at work.
That's what R&D is for. If FD would actually do that, people would support them. Otherwise, they will face criticism time and again in the forums and people will complain about prices for Horizon expansion and paintjobs because they feel they are getting an outdated game.
As to making the graphics in Elite better overall, sure, it's possible to do that, but the problem is, when you do that, you DO end up cutting out the low end systems,
As I said, that's not an issue. I don't play Elite on my PowerPC G4, I don't play it on my Zotac Box that runs my movies, I don't even play it on my MacBook pro, I play it at the desktop. And even the very old machines are DX11 capable.
It's not about enabling the game on the most exotic of plattforms, it's about providing people with a great experience on mainstream systems.
BTW, DX9 is horrendously outdated. We had DX10 since 2006 or so, and even here the industry moved on quickly, despite many DX10 GPUs being in the middle of their lifecycle. No need to support that. Or maybe add DX3a support for legacy NT4 installations as well?
