I have a device called a Dingoo A320 which is nice (a handheld gaming device), one nice feature is that you can use a cable to hook it to the TV and just use the device as the controller to play on the TV.
I know there are keyboards and now even mice that have all the hardware of a PC on just that peripherals. My dingoo can play 3rd and 4th generation games easily.
So is technology advanced enough that you could put all the hardware of a PS2 or Xbox (or maybe even a PS3 or Xbox 360) into the controller, and then hook the controller directly up to the TV w/o a console?
I assume games may be a problem (ie you probably couldn’t store 100 games on the controller affordably), but aren’t most 6th and 7th generation games 3-7GB nowadays? You could use SD or microSD cards for those I would assume.
I can see two things that stand in the way of a “PS2 in a controller” system.
One - it makes it harder to play 2-player games as one controller has to be hooked up to the other.
Two - power consumption. The CPU has to get its power from somewhere. I have a feeling depending on the TV to supply all of it through HDMI or USB is asking for problems. Wireless is pretty much out of the question.
There is a “console” that has some dozens of classic Atari-era and slightly later games, all packed into a slightly bulky joystick. So on one level, it’s been done.
OTOH, the hardware needed to drive a HD (never mind UHD) TV at acceptable frame rates, with the kind of full 3D modeling and high-resolution textures and skins… I can’t see that getting past power and heat-dissipation issues any time soon. A box at least as big as a fat paperback, with the power supply separate, that is too heavy to hold and possibly too hot to hold comfortably, is about the limit without a couple of breakthroughs.
Phones can approach the resolution, but not the framerates or overall modeling complexity, and even with middlin’ power games, my Note II can get uncomfortably hot in spots.
The Tegra X1 is the fastest mobile chip around. It’s too power-hungry for a phone, but in a tablet or controller form factor (like the SHIELD), it’s totally acceptable.
The simplest way to compare GPU performance is in their floating point rate (FLOPS). The X1 gets 512 GFLOPS in 32-bit floating point, and double that in 16-bit.
The GeForce 8800 GT also got around 500 GFLOPS of FP32 perf. It’s a pretty old GPU at this point, but there were plenty of games that ran at 1080p on that GPU. It could run Crysis at 30 fps at 1080p, and 60 fps at 720p.
In fact, it’s quite a bit faster than a PS3 (which was more or less a GeForce 7800), though it’s possibly more likely to be CPU limited, so it’s hard to do a direct comparison.
So it’s still at least one console generation behind, and several PC generations. That’s still quite a bit of horsepower, though, and a match for 7th generation consoles.
I realized that I got my generations wrong. I was thinking 5th generation was the current one. PCs are actually more like an 8+ generation console (i.e., already faster than whatever the next generation will be).
Yeah, if a controller for the current system breaks you can buy a new one, or even have a spare handy.
But if the console hardware is in the controller, what happens if your dog chews it up? Or someone spills a drink on it?
I’m not inclined to pool all of my computing knowledge and work out extensive either-ors, but my gut feeling is that it has to do with a lot more than just flops. You have to hook all that computing power to useful output, which is not trivial. I am also not sure that the demands of driving a mobile screen equate to delivering a full-res HDMI signal.
I think it might be possible to pack the hardware into something controller-sized (I was just blown away by the tiny motherboard etc. in a Zenbook), but the power would still likely have to come from an external box and I think the heat issues might be signficant. There might also be weight issues; I think such an all-in handheld would exceed comfortable holding limits, especially for hours.
One thing I have seen addressed is - where do you put the disc? I can’t see us moving back to cartridges, and needing an optical drive on the controller is going to make it far too bulky.
I ass/u/me the idea is to have such massive storage that games are either downloaded from a docking station sort of thing, or streamed in. Not unrealistic except in current cost, and as someone who once paid $100/KB for RAM, I can see 100GB in a handheld device being quite practical.
I think the catch is this: No matter how much you can fit into a controller, you can always fit more into a box. Given the choice between some and more, consumers will always choose more, unless there’s some other major advantage to the some. What’s the compelling advantage of a self-contained controller, versus a controller that talks to a box?
Oh, another problem is that you’d almost certainly need a wire from your console to your TV. If the console is in the controller, this would mean a wire to the controller. While this is obviously acceptable to some, given that a lot of controllers are wired, it’s still nice to have a wireless one (cord won’t get tangled when you move around a lot, you won’t trip over it, you can flop on the couch on the other side of the room, etc.).
Absolutely. However, every GPU produced today is going to be reasonably well-balanced between flops, bandwidth, fill rate, texture rate, and so on. It doesn’t make sense to just pack in 10x the number of flops without changing anything else. Therefore, flops alone are a reasonably good proxy for overall graphics performance on typical GPUs. It’ll get you within a factor of two, at any rate.
But the advantages of having a portable phone that you can take anywhere and use anytime greatly outweigh the higher cost, else they wouldn’t have succeeded. We’re not talking about making a portable, mobile console, it’s still going to need a television to hook up to. Although I guess it’d be easier to take your controller to a friends house than a console. Anyway I don’t see a huge advantage to the consumer in having the processors in the controller rather than a separate box.
And every system I have ever owned has gone through multiple controllers. Not because I throw them or beat them up or anything, but because they have a lot of fragile little parts that require the user to manipulate them, plus complex electronics and switches, etc. I don’t think it’s as bad as it was - I remember going through a ton of Atari 2600 and Sega Genesis controllers, but there is still an issue if your CPU is inside the controller and can’t be separated. What do you do when one of the sticks or buttons stops working? Take it to a repair place and wait a week for it to be fixed?
One solution I can think of would be to have controllers with cartridge slots (a la Sega Dreamcast) that a CPU unit could be plugged into or the ability to open the controller and transfer the CPU to another controller. But again, what’s the advantage to the consumer? I’d still have to buy a box, the only difference would be that instead of plugging my controller into the box, I’d have to plug the box into the controller.
Some people have been talking about having massive computers hooked up to a network which picks up all your controller inputs, does all your processing, and just sends you screens. Sort of like a “dumb terminal” hooked up to a mainframe computer, if anyone is familiar with that. You would just have a controller that would connect to the network, no box or any hardware beyond the controller. But the problem I see with this approach is it would require massive amounts of computing power and very fast bandwidth to send 60 frames per second to every user playing games. I don’t think the current internet infrastructure would support that.
It seems like the simplest way to get something like this would be to just add an HDMI out to something like a PS Vita or Gameboy. I’d be surprised if that sort of hack hadn’t been done before.
The clear advantage here would be having a portable game system that you could also use with your big screen when you happen to be at home. That seems to be the selling point of the device mentioned in the OP.
It’s only a little worse than Netflix. Anyway, it already exists. It’s not big or robust enough yet to support a full console launch, but that’s just a matter of scale.
