Is it too expensive to be a PC gamer? Roy Taylor, VP of content relations for NVIDIA, says that some gaming publishers feel that way, particularly when DirectX 10 is involved. But, he says, that perception is created by PC manufacturers who are primarily interested in pushing high-cost gaming machines rather than less expensive yet capable boxes.

Taylor's comments came in a brief article on his corporate blog that was intended to serve as a rebuttal to the notion that DirectX 10-capable gaming PCs are too expensive. Taylor recounted an unnamed game publisher who told him that his company was not interested in writing games for DirectX 10 because "all DX10 machines are $3,000 and too expensive." Such a view is ridiculous, of course, because DX10-class machines can be had for $1,000 and up. Whether or not you'd want to game on Vista using such a machine is another matter.

Yet Taylor has a theory as to why PC gaming gets a bad rap in terms of cost. He says that big OEMs and ISVs "think of PC gaming as a lucrative means of selling overpriced PC hardware better suited to winning magazine reviews than equipping end users with what they need to play the latest games." Taylor even suggests that this marketing approach is actually "damaging" to PC gaming.

A corporate executive of a dedicated video graphics card company critiquing the PC manufacturing industry for promoting high-end products may strike you as somewhat strange. After all, NVIDIA makes a good chunk of its profits on its high-end cards, and the promotional value of shipping the fastest GPU solution to eager reviewers is undeniable. NVIDIA, like ATI, fuels the fire multiple times each year with new high-end video card releases in a never-ending quest for the top spot.

As we hinted above, Taylor and his game publishing colleagues may be barking up the wrong tree. DirectX 10 requires Windows Vista and a DX10-capable graphics card, and Vista isn't exactly hot in the gaming world. A recent Valve hardware survey showed that only 1.21 percent of users—and these are gamers who enjoy titles such as Counter-Strike and Half-Life 2—have DX10-capable systems. Gamers are staying away from Vista right now, citing comparatively weaker performance on Vista than on Windows XP.

Eventually, as Vista gains in popularity from being bundled with new PCs and DX10-capable cards become the norm (and get better drivers), the problem should solve itself. Despite years of doom-and-gloom predictions from pundits, the PC gaming industry has continued to survive and has even shown modest growth.