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 Digg.com Facebook Google Bookmarks N4G Gamerblips del.icio.us Reddit Slashdot.org StumbleUpon That is until someone else releases hardware that is more powerful than yours.... Or in other words:
'I'm buggered if I am going to cough up billions for dodgy hardware again.' :lol:
Seriously though, it is the right way to go, though not very exciting for us tech lovers out there.
Natal seems to be the first rung on the ladder. Amen to that...
So long as Sony and Nintendo are thinking along the same lines and build on their existing console then it should be good for all of us.
Though would have to admit that the Wii does seem a little limited in how much they can build on what they have compared to MS and Sony (primarily due to the lack of HDD storage) It's like Nintendo in 2005/6 all over again.
Graphics whore are going to be miffed. Well its a good job your console is about as future proof as HD DVD then......????? what planet is this person on????? so 32gb off an SD card isn't enough storage for the wii. especially considering the biggest wiiware games are 40mb.
pull the other one.
Or you could always run the USB loader and dump all of your games to a HDD and never have to use a disc again.
The one thats really got potential HDD issues in its future is the 360 as with all the new features being promised, especially 1080p movies, games on demand the ever increasing size arcade of i could see even the elite struggling eventually. Actually scrap that! Add blu ray drive to Xbox 360 then you'll be fine for years and years, MS. Hold on then guys. This is coming from a company who are about to release a supposedly gaming revolution in oh what's that? Hardware! WTF Microsoft if software is so important why release Natal after all surely you could create a better experience without the hardware?
Anyone else slightly confused by their remarks?
Also did they not say this a while back? Pretty sure they did and if I remember correctly I remember saying that as much as software is a good thing the hardware is what it runs on and software will always be limited by what is inside in the box... So Natal is a software upgrade is it. So the camera and box of electronics is a unique form of software then.
It seems to me that both the PS3 & Xbox 360 struggle to even do 720p properly at times so there's certainly room for improvement in the hardware department. The Wii has the option of using up to 32Gb sd cards which is plenty enough storage especially when you can use multiple cards.
It is rumoured that the next Nintendo console will be upping the power quite a bit and that sony are going to simply release a wii style power upgrade for the PS4.
To be honest I don't care as long as we get great games. They can stop developing new consoles for all I care, games are king and if they can continue producing good original games for this generations consoles then I will be perfectly happy. sounds to me like they will be releasing new hardware first as suspected. Other two will be a bit later meaning their hardware will prob be a little more powerful... so to counteract this issue MS dress up next gen as "all about services etc". Not bad thinking but why can't you have both? Unless Graphic Cards, Processors and all that stuff, make a huge jump in the next 3 years, it really is all about software.
Beyond Good & Evil 2, and Alan Wake, and Uncharted and all these games really do show a glimpse of what next-gen will be like. Its all about waiting for those big jumps by the companys that make the stuff, until then all the companys will still expand onto the console bases.
I honestly think the Wii is coming to the end though, there is only so much you can do, and they are nearing it. to be honest. inkeeping with the 360 philosophy then... :o
old hat DVD drives.
toshiba, microsofts HD-DVD drive partner just made a BR drive (the last company to do so - swallow that bitter pill) so a 360 BR drive could be on the cards... there was a rumour of it printed on N4G. And here we go again, Grasshopper the first to turn this into a fanboy-war, ..You really need to grow up sometime, It really is saddening to see all the bait your throw out mate. And there is a picture of Elvis doing the moonwalk on Mars. Come on grasshopper, N4G? If people think this place is bad, sheeesh. I have to say Shane Kim is an absolute marketing dick! Can you imagine him saying this just prior to a new Xbox coming out? What a pathetic marketing worm this guy is. And how insulting to EVERY gamers intelligence that he thinks we believe this crap. If we weren't in a recession, and Microsoft hadn't lost so much money desperately pushing out an unfinished, completely untested 360 just to be ahead of the Playstation, and more importantly Sony weren't so far from producing a new console themselves, he wouldn't be saying any of this rubbish.
I imagine every single gamer, regardless of age is aware that if Sony were to announce a new console Microsoft would take less than a week to announce their next console and talk of the next generation being software wouldn't be heard of again.
In an era when thousands of people are losing their jobs, and businesses and industries are struggling to survive, it amazes me people like Shane Kim. If Microsoft want to offset the loss of fixing a few hundred 360s, they could do no worse than to show Mr Kim the back door! The more Microsoft market Natal, the more convinced I am that it will fail. They utterly failed to do anything new/exciting/worthwhile with that little camera of theirs years ago, and I can imagine history repeating itself with this Natal thing.
If Natal is priced at £10 and could switch off my Xbox whenever I stick my middle finger up at it I might consider purchasing said 'hardware'... second hand! Nvidia GTX 300 series. Nuff said. N4G is just a site linking all the news about games up. hence news for gamers.
it wasnt its own story. i dont even think they run their own stories... So even if the greatest game ever made came out for Natal you would not want to get it?
Lets face it is looks a little bit odd to control etc but we have not seen what it can really do yet so should reserve judgment. I read that article. It was just some random persons thoughts, so I wouldn't even call it a rumour. Ive been on N4G a few times and to me it's just Blogs being reported as news stories, I wouldnt listen or believe any of the 'stories' that appear there.
CVG might be slow with their news but at least it pretty accurate and not full of Yanks! there's a massive room for improvement. games ought to run in 1080p, dedicated physics chips, more storage, graphical leap, way more ram etc.
i hope we don't have to wait another 5 years to see the next round of consoles. i wonder if many people will be praising this or smthg and these are the same people who have been laughing at sony's 10 year thing.
either way its a stupid idea. consoles are already way behind and they will risk being left in the stone age if they decide to do this. octo-core processors from intel, and nvidias 300 lineup.
they will smoke everything thts out now.
was hearing a 40-50% increase in gpu power somewhere a month or so back.
and thats all prob under a years time! I never get that when they say graphics are nearly as good as they can get. Do games look photorealistic? No (although car games get pretty close). They don't look as good as old pixar stuff, let along a real moving image.
With RAM chips relatively cheap, I can never understand why they don't fill the bloody things with as much RAM as they can realistically afford. I think that if they did indeed go for octo-processors or nvidia 300 series, and all this. They would actually have to battle it with other things, so that it all really does work perfectly. They cant just go here there and everywhere. And really, most of the stuff in consoles is from the factory's, and not off the shop-shelves really.
The chips for example were specifically built for the xbox 360 and the ps3, though each company didn't know that at the time. ..Remember reading that somewhere.
Either way, games are still coming out with really high quality features and visuals, im not in any position to complain. While I'm no tech nor software guru, it seems to me the answer lies in both camps. Each one needs the other to perform, yet each one can also do some tweaking to get more for less from the other once certain points of development and knowledge are reached for each camp.
MS is first and foremost a software company, so for them the natural choice would be to focus on software to push the envelope and play to its strengths. That said, MS does seem to realize that there are limits to what software alone can do and that some sort of hardware is needed. There are situations where each of the two are stronger and weaker than the other. I suppose one could like hardware to a skeleton while the software makes up the muscle tissue, etc. One without the other becomes all but useless. :) A fair point, although as I understand it the Nehalem i7 CPU, and it's lesser cousins which are coming to the market soon, are quite a leap from the Intel Duo Cores and Quad cores; never mind the CPUs stuck in the consoles! That's nice, but guess what? I, and millions of other potential customers, still don't appear to be particularly interested in Blu-Ray. Here. Have the whole bottle of pills, Svd. That too along with AMD/ATI's "Evergreen". Both will utilize full DX11, amongst other things. God damn! It makes me excited with anticipation! :D
Now, just let the pricing for SSDs drop dramatically and let the good gaming times roll even faster and further than previously. »oh god, i start drooling when i see intels E version, so beautiful. getting a few for my new rig and raiding those *******s sometime this christmas. made much easier with all the delays and all.......
and from your earlier post; the i7 has been out for ages now and priced reasonably i must say. x58 mobos though are kind of ridiculous. I'm sure Hirai and Iwata are silently applauding him for this. He's just held the generation up for at least another three years after all. This is just to buy time until we are out of the recession and they are at the optimal time to profit from a new system being launched at the inevitable £400-£600 it will cost. I'm sure there's headroom left in both the 360 and PS3 (a lot more in the PS3, one would think/hope) - so how about all games running at 60fps with no slowdown, no pop-up or pop-in, and no screen tearing?
Oh, and the PS3 at least, ought to be able to do all this at 1080p - or were Sony exaggerating the power of the Cell (note: rhetorical question!)?
:D not really, at least currently, my i7@4Ghz is ~ my old Q9550 @4Ghz, however where i7 destroys Core 2 in mem bandwidth, currently the only setup needing that is SLI or Crossfire with the top end cards or even Tri SLI, however that will change with the DX11 cards and beyond as with more processing power on the gpu means more mem bandwidth is required from the CPU and thats where Nehalem is very strong. »»
What about the new "GPGPU" called "Larrabee" from Intel?
It's new arquitecture is suposed to make graphics rendering a more "cpu-like" task thus making it possible to double it's performace every 18 months.
Some say since NVIDIA can't build cpus like Intel or AMD, they may be in trouble but is very unlikely. Either way customers win in the aftermath.
More info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_%28GPU%29
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-larrabee-nvidia-geforce,7944.html#xtor=RSS-181 It'll cost an absolute fortune, Larrabee is nothing more than a load of P4's on 1 silicon wafer. Gfx cards contain only a subset of the functionality of a general purpose CPU( the Cell processor in the PS3 is efectively the same as the SPUs on a gfx card, highly parallel, work well with simple functions on data but fall apart on intercommunication between cores and complex instructions ).
NVidia will only be in a crap position if Ray Tracing( best done on a larrabee type setup than a regular gfx card due to the complex computations and the cpu's allow more precise floating point instructions required for raytracing ) takes off in games, but thats not going to happen for a good few years yet In my opinion there's no such thing as 'the greatest game ever', as 1. games are constantly superceded 2. eventually everyone grows bored with whatever their current favourite game is. But ignoring that, if I suggest my current favourite game is the greatest I've ever experienced, it's not because of the method it allows me to control it. The graphics, the physics, the complexity of the virtual world, the animation, the story, etc are all far more important to the quality of a game. All these things improve slowly with each new game (give or take!), but ultimately the biggest improvements will only come with newer generations of console. Not movement registering software and cameras.
Everyone puts a value on gaming as a hobby. The value of gaming for me stops at buying a new console and new games. Natal might be an interesting concept, but so are jetpacks. In truth Natal isn't being made for or marketed to me as I've never cared for steering wheels, or swinging my arms when I play, or jumping up and down or holding a plastic toy guitar. I suspect those that own or enjoy those forms of gaming are far more likely to buy into Natal. although bandwidth is offset when the latency is still high.
There is very little difference between DDR3-1600 and 'fast' DDR2 at this moment in time. If it weren't for i7 then the price of DDR3 wouldn't make it an appealing upgrade at all. My God, don't tell me :shock: that Sony and MS may actually concentrate on interface and their go gameplay for once?? Yep price will inicially be a turn off for most the same story as with SSDs... but it'll come down eventually.
Indeed Ray tracing is heavy duty for GPUs but not for many-core CPUs. Difficult effects like reflections, lightning and shadowing are handled with mathematical precision.
Still some time until it hits mainstream meantime Intel takes notes from NVIDIA. And surely GPUs won't become obsolete anytime soon, because they still exceed in some areas like texturing. ahh yeah but its not directly down to the actual mem chips its down to the onboard mem controller and not having to route mem transfer requests onto the mobo and then ram and back again and vice versa. My overclocked 920( overclocked ) will handle mem IO of 6.4 Tb/sec which is quite impressive xbox does not need a blue ray add on...as you can see that is sonys downfall the only blueray systems that are selling are the ones in the ps3 and those are not even selling that well her in the states..not everybody can afford a hdtv and a blueray player... »»»it could make things real interesting. nvidia might start lowering the crazy rrp's of their high end cards and do a complete architecture overhaul instead of their classic recycling.
ATI gave them a real scare lately and fighting another giant may shake things up a bit. All about service will never fly. Once proper gamers see that this company has a console with much better hardware, their service will not matter at all.
They may be trying to go the route of Wii which i hate but they wont stand a chance without comparable hardware | 
