Discussion of the next console generation

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weemadando
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Discussion of the next console generation

Post by weemadando »

They're teasing the shit out of it at CES apparently. I predict a last second reveal and a "see you all at E3".
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Re: New XBox announcement

Post by weemadando »

And despite all the teasing, there's no reveal.

Hurrah.

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Re: New XBox announcement

Post by Darksider »

Do we really need next-gen consoles? How much better can the graphics get?

I really don't feel like spending $400 on a new console right now, and I'm sure there's a lot of people who feel the same way.
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Re: New XBox announcement

Post by Sarevok »

The "photo-realistic" grapics of today is made of clever hacks and tricks. There is a LONG road to go in producing actual real time photorealistic graphics. IMHO we won't get there untill we can do real time GPU based raytracing. Progress is being made on that front but current consoles are simply not powerful enough to do it. So new hardware is needed.

Plus it's not just graphics. These days people are putting realistic fluids in games, for example that recent Alice game or Hydrophobias. New consoles would allow greater use of realistic liquids which could enhance gameplay.

In general great progress has been made in technical side of game development. With the ageing state of xbox360 we are only seeing scaled down implementations. A new xbox could offer some truly revolutionary graphics,physics and AI.
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Re: New XBox announcement

Post by Stark »

I'd buy a new console if it meant it wasn't based on seven year old hardware anymore; the improvement in image quality (even just between a game on 360 and a game on my shitty 8800) would be great, not to mention having more than 5 meg of memory. It has nothing at all to do with some mythical 'photo realistic' endpoint.

So long as they have a goddamn induction reader for pre-order, DLC or special offer tokens instead of TYPE IN LAMEO CODE, that is.
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Re: New XBox announcement

Post by Singular Intellect »

Darksider wrote:Do we really need next-gen consoles? How much better can the graphics get?
I won't be satisfied until we have virtual reality immersion indistinguishable from reality as we know it, and even then I'll still perk up at any proposed system upgrades.
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Re: New XBox announcement

Post by weemadando »

What kind of excites me is the mythical steam "10 foot interface". Having a gaming PC designed for controller use in a living room environment... I mean, it's still all the downsides of PC gaming, but the kind of economic and technical pressure (digital delivery, aggressive pricing/discounting) that Steamboxes in the living room could bring makes it compelling.
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Re: New XBox announcement

Post by Stark »

I'd rather better consoles, than a broken PC that fat people will use to buy dozens of games they never play through a UI that'll take years to not suck. :lol:

It'd be pretty funny if the next two proper consoles fuck up the same way they always do in design and we get stuck playing endless reams of shit through steam instead.

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Re: New XBox announcement

Post by weemadando »

It would be nice if everyone's innovations would meet in the middle. Digital content delivery and pricing models from Steam, just EVERYTHING multiplayer from 360 and errr, something from PS3? Their hardwares had a fairly low failure rate haven't they?

And then can we PLEASE not have have the goddamn artificial content barriers. But hey, compared to a unified super console, that's crazy talk.
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Re: New XBox announcement

Post by Starglider »

Darksider wrote:Do we really need next-gen consoles? How much better can the graphics get?
Current gen console games are rendered at about 1000 x 580, usually at 30 FPS and upscaled to 720p. This is why they're so blurry. Just being able to render directly at 1080p/60 FPS and turning down the blur will be an improvement equivalent to standard def TV -> full HD. Current gen games have done a lot to hide the inherent limitations of the rendering technology, but those work best for corridor shooters. Open world games still have draw distance problems, massive pop in, sparse populations (no real crowds or traffic jams) and really unconvincing foliage. World persistence and mutability is seriously limited by memory and GPU technical limitations.
Sarevok wrote:The "photo-realistic" grapics of today is made of clever hacks and tricks. There is a LONG road to go in producing actual real time photorealistic graphics. IMHO we won't get there untill we can do real time GPU based raytracing.
A lot of people in the industry used to think that, me included, circa 2000. Raytracing has lost a lot of its shine though. Intel have been ploughing on with real-time RT using masses of custom hardware, but even their most recent demos look crap. Meanwhile a huge amount of academic graphics research has produced a slew of impressive 'clever hacks and tricks'. Fundamentally RT is a brute force approach that will always be less efficient, in terms of image quality / GPU power, than the right 'clever hacks and tricks'. Just we used to think voxels or point clouds would be better than polygons, but actually everyone with a clue (which excludes anyone who believed that 'infinite detail' scam) realises that polygon represtations are inherently more efficient and more capable. In fact the next console revision will bring GPUs capable of decent hardware tesesslation, which will move us forward towards complex surface definitions (i.e. real curved surfaces) and reduce reliance on displacement mapping.
A new xbox could offer some truly revolutionary graphics,physics and AI.
Yes, effective GPGPU could allow games could be a lot more immersive, open world ones in particular. The theoretical usable FP power of an Xbox360 for physics is 115 gigaFLOPS (since only the CPU is really usable for it), the equivalent for the Radeon 7970s I just installed is 4096 gigaFLOPS each (with GCN those numbers are finally realistically comparable). If the NextBox gets something similar then that's at minimum an order of magnitude more physics objects.
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Re: New XBox announcement

Post by Vendetta »

Darksider wrote:Do we really need next-gen consoles? How much better can the graphics get?
Take, for instance, Forza Motorsport 4. The developers were simply unable to maintain a solid 60fps and have night racing (which means more light sources and moving light sources etc) or weather effects (which means more particle effects) at the same quality as the rest of the game.

So it's not just about "better graphics", more powerful consoles would first allow developers to do more whilst maintaining the current level of graphical fidelity.
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Re: New XBox announcement

Post by Mr Bean »

To add another issue, why do you think Corridor shooters are corridors? Or why destructibility is so limited? Ram limitations factor into both of those. Super long load times are another factor plaguing console games. A PS3 hack was done awhile back And reported by Toms Hardware that by adding an SSD speed you cut average loading times by half. And that was a hack job by some enthusiasts. If you had it done professionally and with a decent amount of ram and smart pre-loading to back it up you might see the PS4 or next Xbox loading games three times faster than the current gen.

The PS3 and Xbox 360 were very much hack jobs, done just as hardware was refreshing a cycle and there was a hundred and one improvement that could have been made. The PS3 was released in 2005 with an early 2004 GPU with only 256 megs of ram. The Xbox was just as bad, fancy CPU's or no the rest of the stuff in the box was lackluster for 2005 even then. Since we know we are not going to see anything PS4 wise until at least 2013 and the next Xbox seems to be in the same boat your talking about a massive difference across the board about what's going to be in the next consoles. Which is ironic considering Nintendo is going to release next year something next year which they are supposedly aiming to make just a bit better than the current gen hardware to keep costs down.

Speaking of consoles we really need to edit the thread title on this thread considering there was no announcement and probably won't be one this year.

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Re: New XBox announcement

Post by Starglider »

Mr Bean wrote:To add another issue, why do you think Corridor shooters are corridors? Or why destructibility is so limited? Ram limitations factor into both of those.
Actually the cost of content creation is the main limitation for the former and the lack of sufficient physics processing horsepower is the main reason for the later. Consoles can stream large worlds as demonstrated by Just Cause 2, GTA 4 etc, memory limitations mainly cause repetition (only a few kinds of car on the streets at once) and some pop-in on geometry and textures. For debris you run out of CPU/SPU power way before you run out of memory (particularly on the X360, which has twice the usable memory of the PS3); however memory limitations prevent destruction from being persistent. I'd note that 'corridor shooter' as a design pattern actually goes beyond even content limitations; if you look at say Duke Nukem 3D's levels, they are more of an interconnected network of rooms and areas instead of say Mass Effect 2's cunningly disguised corridors (or Skyrim's completely undisguised ones), even though the later are much larger. A lot of the corridor shooter trend is game designers just not trusting players to have spatial skills or not complain about backtracking or bother looking at a map. Dead Space is a little better about this mainly because the 'show pathing on my HUD' feature made the designers a little less anxious about players getting lost.
Super long load times are another factor plaguing console games. A PS3 hack was done awhile back And reported by Toms Hardware that by adding an SSD speed you cut average loading times by half. And that was a hack job by some enthusiasts. If you had it done professionally and with a decent amount of ram and smart pre-loading to back it up you might see the PS4 or next Xbox loading games three times faster than the current gen.
The important thing is not the bandwidth as such, it is the ratio of bandwidth to system memory, as developers generally size content to fill most of system memory (with a bit left over for streaming where applicable). The problem with SSDs is that they are still too expensive to be compatible with the idea of gamers downloading lots of full-size titles and HD movies, which will easily fill up a terabyte HD. A hybrid solution is possible, but somewhat shorter loading times are not as good a feature for the console launch hype machine as better graphics or gameplay. Fortuantely this is something you can differentiate between models and upgrade later in the console lifetime without breaking compatability.
The PS3 and Xbox 360 were very much hack jobs, done just as hardware was refreshing a cycle and there was a hundred and one improvement that could have been made. The PS3 was released in 2005 with an early 2004 GPU with only 256 megs of ram. The Xbox was just as bad, fancy CPU's or no the rest of the stuff in the box was lackluster for 2005 even then.
The PS3 was a hack job caused by the fact that Sony originally wanted two Cells. When the Cell turned out to be completely incapable of rendering 3D graphics at anything vaguely like competitive performance (and pretty useless for most other tasks, but that's another story) they were forced to grab a GPU off the shelf and shove it in. The Xbox360 on the other hand was an excellent hardware design for the time. The unified shaders were very forward-looking and gave developers a lot more flexibility in shader loading, the unified memory was vastly better than the PS3's split memory, the VLIW5 design was fundamentally much more efficient than the contemporary Nvidia shader cores, the CPU design was more like a hex-core PC than the 'PS3's dual-core PC with broken ridiculously hard to use DSPs glued on', the dedicated video scaler chip further unloaded the GPU and improved output quality over the PS3. Most of all the eDRAM was extremely useful and saved a lot of the most precious commodity, GPU-memory bandwidth; depth/stencil test and alpha blend are almost free on the X360, MSAA is much cheaper than PC or PS3, plus it saves a little system memory (storing the working frame buffer). Developing for the X360 is a vastly more pleasurable experience than for the PS3 with the sole exception of when you absolutely need more physics engine performance, at which point the raw FLOPS advantage of the SPU array is worth the pain of using it.

The only serious issue with the X360 hardware (in the late 2000s) was that it didn't include a high-capacity optical drive, and that's only because Microsoft weren't motivated to burn piles of money to win an optical format war. If it had a lifetime of four years like the original we'd have no cause for complaint, the huge drag on game development progress only developed because the manufacturers were determined to stretch out the console lifetime to twice as long in this generation.
Last edited by Starglider on 2012-01-15 06:36pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: New XBox announcement

Post by Stark »

How does Blu-ray licencing work? Are the next lot of consoles likely to all use BD, or is it the kind of format that Sony controls?
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Re: Discussion of the next console generation

Post by DaveJB »

Blu-Ray is controlled by its own standards group nowadays, which has its website here, though there are licensing fees, detailed here.

Nintendo have already announced that the WiiU is going to use a proprietary format with equivalent storage space to Blu-Ray, and it seems logical that PS4 will also use Blu-Ray. No-one seems to have any idea what Microsoft will do, but I'd imagine it'll be either Blu-Ray or an equivalent format; they can't realistically stick with DVD, and it seems too soon to contemplate having a console which doesn't use physical media at all.
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Re: Discussion of the next console generation

Post by S.L.Acker »

I don't get why Nintendo would bother trying to create the next Blu-Ray, they're never going to see a any sort of return on it and I doubt it will be all that cost effective versus just licensing the format. At this stage, even if they pulled a Sony and won the format war, not very likely at this stage, I doubt they'd make a huge profit with the death of the movie store. The only reason I can see is to keep money from Sony's pockets.
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Re: Discussion of the next console generation

Post by DaveJB »

I'm guessing it's meant to be a form of copy-protection. For all the jokes made about how the Wii doesn't have any games that anybody would actually want to play, piracy on the system is pretty significant, and having their own disc format could make things that little bit harder for pirates. Of course, the Dreamcast's GD-ROMs were meant to do the same thing, and failed pretty badly. :P
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Re: Discussion of the next console generation

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S.L.Acker wrote:I don't get why Nintendo would bother trying to create the next Blu-Ray, they're never going to see a any sort of return on it and I doubt it will be all that cost effective versus just licensing the format.
The amount of engineering work involved in these custom console disk formats is minimal. Most of the physical specs are identical to the original format, it's usually just different firmware and custom blanks. For example Dreamcast disks are just CD-ROMs with closer track spacing and a modified file system, many contemporary PC CD-ROM drives could be made to read them by flashing with hacked firmware. GameCube & Wii discs are derrived from DVDs in a similar fashion and use the same components and production facilities. I saw rumours that the Wii U would use discs derrived from HD-DVD, which isn't too implausible as the costs would still be much lower than making an optical format from scratch.
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