That article is flawed anyway:
According to Tom’s Hardware, the latest AMD monster CPU @ 1024x768 scores 110fps on Doom III. And a 2.8GHz Pentium Northwood that first saw the light of day back in August 2002? - 84.9fps.
...yet if you find the article in question (
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/11/21/the_mother_of_all_cpu_charts_2005/page27.html ), it is testing using a 2.8C and i875p chipset, not the older 2.8B on a slower FSB from August 2002. This guy is wheeling out his benchmarks as if they are gospel, but he can't even get his facts straight. Heck if he's relying on Tom's Hardware Bribe for his info he needs his head looking at anyway
Now that I've got the anality out of the way, I can move on to to the more abstract view of things. I think that PC gaming isn't dead because as a platform, PCs are becoming more and more common.
Go back 10 or 15 years. How many households had a PC? How many had more than 1 PC? The answer is, of, course, a helluva lot less than do now. It's actually getting fairly rare to find non-poor people that don't have a PC of some description at home now, so there is a large installed userbase. OK so they can't all run the latest-and-greatest titles, but people will still play games on them. Less than two weeks ago I installed a few games onto my gf's Mother's PC.
Some people are obssessed with being at the cutting edge of gaming, but there's millions of people out there having fun playing games that weren't released this year, or even the year before.
The amount of bug ridden, unfinished games on the PC is a depressingly growing trend. Add in the lack of originality and innovation (*cough* EA *cough*) and things aren’t looking good. You just have to look at some of last years ‘big’ releases to confirm things. Civilisation 4 was superb but, scratching the surface just removed the paint covering Civilisation 3, Black & White 2 was the same and FEAR - many peoples game of the year - was little more than a technical show piece with zero variation in environment or game play.
Hmmm, that sounds vaguely familar. Remind me what year we are in again? Games never ever had bugs in the "good old days", did they? Frontier First Encounters, anyone? Hidden and Dangerous? Games have got more complex as time goes on, especially where multiplayer is concerned, so it's natural that they should be a little more frequent. The difference is, these days "everyone" has an internet connection, so patching games is no problem. Go back to the 90s, and you were stuffed. I bought Unreal in May 1998 when it came out, but it wouldn't run at all on my cpu. So I had to spend loads on phonecalls to the publisher, and then was told they couldn't send me a patch, I'd have to go to a netcafe to download it onto floppies. I think about a month after buying it I finally was able to install the patch and get the game running. Gee, I miss those days so much.
Lack of originality and innovation? This is sounding like a stuck record, people have moaned about that for years. There's plenty of original games out there if people are willing to open their eyes and look for themselves, rather than just trying the most hyped titles. Civ4 is similar to Civ3 and B&W2 is like B&W - jesus, what does the guy expect? IT'S CALLED CIVILIZATION 4 BECAUSE IT IS THE SEQUEL TO CIVILIZATION 3 - WHICH MEANS IT'S HIGHLY LIKELY TO BE VERY SIMILAR!
To be fair the article is at least reasonably well written (hmmm... just noticed it was actually the OP who wrote it - hope he isn't too offended by my comments as I am not normally this cantankerous towards fellow forum users) and has some valid points - PC gaming is not a bed of roses. I've tried to avoid wheeling out the usual arguments that have been put forward a thousand times before on these forums like how PC games look better, you can tweak and configure them more, the input system is better, and there's some titles you don't get on console so quickly (if at all), and gone down a different approach.
Just to clarify, I don't have a problem with people who dismiss the PC as a gaming platform for their needs. I'm sure consoles are perfectly suited for the requirements of some people. But others, such as myself, certainly won't be hanging up our mice just yet