You didn’t answer the question.
How in the world is that a serious question? I’ve answered it about 5 times already in the thread.
I think using an ultrabook/netbook/htpc very low power, low clock speed 8 core CPU is an awful idea. It won’t even come close to matching the performance of the CPU I was using 5 years ago for most tasks. The “8 core” aspect of it is almost a gimmick. They’re very unlikely to utilize more than two for most tasks, which means you’re sitting on 1 or 2 1.6ghz core of a low power, low speed CPU.
Several times in this thread you and others have made the point that clock speed isn’t everything, which is absolutely true, but the key point you’re missing in this is that this argument works against you. The desktop CPUs that tend to be the fastest also do the most work per cycle. Laptop and tablet CPUs are stripped down and far less capable. An i7 running at 1.6ghz is significantly more powerful than an AMD bezos doing the same. So it’s actually a double whammy - the CPU is far slower in clock rate, and does far less work per clock cycle. The disparity between desktop and low power netbook/tablet CPUs is huge. I’d have to actually dig into the innards of the bezos architecture, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a 1.6ghz bezos core is less capable than a 900mhz i7 core for general tasks.
Going with 8 cores is almost a novelty. A way to sound impressive. Many slow cores is bad for performance, bad for programming, and just in general a bad solution to all but a few types of computing that generally aren’t applicable to gaming. It’s especially strange that they’re going that route since pretty much everyone agreed it was a massive failure with the PS3.
“Is it a brave new step forward”?
It’s not brave, no. When the 360 and PS3 came out, they were at least not totally outclassed by a mid end PC from a year or two prior. We don’t have enough information on the GPU in the next generation of consoles, but going by their CPUs, it seems like they’re shooting for a level of technology available to you’d find in a mid range gaming pc 5-6 years prior. If that holds, then the next generation of consoles is even less ambitious than the previous gen. They will be even further out of date at launch and it’ll only get worse with time.
Is it a step forward? Sure. Of course. Obviously they aren’t going to go backwards with them. One of the biggest limitatons will be overcome - the 360 and ps2 had 512mb combined ram for both system and video ram. Which was ridiculously limiting even by 2005 standards. Cramming their games into such a limited memory space is one of the biggest limitations of that generation of consoles. Going up to 8gb is a huge night and day difference which will give a whole lot more flexibility to the devs and make them spend less time cutting things out of their games.
DX11 is another huge one. DX10 was a major revolution that is basically unused because no one wanted to program a native dx10 game since it wouldn’t be multiplatform. Getting rid of all the legacy garbage alone is going to make game development faster and cheaper, and make the games actually look better and run better at the same time. We’ve been sitting on this development, unused, for most of a decade.
“is it condemning you to another decade of painful pc cross porting”? Of course. I mean, I can only hope it doesn’t last a decade, but because of the current model of subsidizing hardware sales to be made up by software royalties, there’s a disincentive to innovate and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was active collusion between MS and Sony to that effect. But yes, anytime you pick a moment in time and say “every game has to run on a system with this level of technology”, you’re hampering the innovation of gaming.
We’re currently locked into basically what 2004’s level of technology was capable of as far as gaming goes. It seems like the new generation of consoles will move it up to about 2008 (again, I may revise this with more information about the GPU, but that’s what they’re aiming at with CPU tech). So instead of being in 2013 stuck with 2004’s technology, we’ll be in 2014 stuck with 2008’s technology. And then we’ll be in 2022, stuck with 2008’s technology, which will suck pretty hard.
Getting rid of the DX9 legacy code and upping the ridiculous ram limitations will make crossplatform games easier to develop, so it will take less developmental effort for developers to make cross platform games that take more advantage of the PC, which ideally will lead to more games that at least try be good PC games. So I’m at least hopeful about that part. But fundamentally, yes, we’ll be held back to a moment in time as far as technology goes. We’ll get a big, sudden leap in gaming as many of the developments of the last decade are unleashed, but then we’ll stagnate from there and we’ll be in the same position for a decade, so overall it sucks.
That seems like a fairly well reasoned and accurate assessment. I can’t say if Sony will go the DX route or OpenGL, I think having an x86 instruction set will draw great dividends as there are more people aware of how to make it work.
There have been GREAT games on ALL generations of hardware. I think making something pretty, does not make it GOOD. I think making a GOOD game, one that has an intangible combination of involvement, replay value, adequate difficulty/user mapping, and appeals to a large audience is hard to do.
More hardware is better, to a point. I think Sony saying ‘sharing video socially is the new thing’ is a mistake.
Beef,
If the console makers decided to go high tech with console hardware, what sorts of things would become possible? How would games be different from what they’ve been since the mid-2000s?
Games will suddenly start using processing power for stuff other than graphics. 
And since some people seem to be having difficulty understanding that, believe it or not, games keep getting more expensive:
http://www.develop-online.net/news/43370/BioWare-dev-warns-against-economically-unviable-next-gen
And before someone says “but that article says it won’t be so bad this time” allow me to point out that A) “Not so bad” is not very comforting and B) Why even bother to say this stuff if you don’t think there’s a significant risk that it could be that bad?
The article you link to, itself points out that other developers disagree. Some say that they have managed to cut costs, thanks to new technologies.
Frankly I find the notion of a 1000% increase in costs to be ludicrous. Artists already work with high quality assets: complex 3D meshes and high resolution textures, which are then optimized and down sampled for the actual target system. So in terms of pure assets, the cost should not change at all. In fact it should improve, as less time and expertise needs to be thrown at the problem of optimizing on old hardware.
I can see things like voice acting - which is now expected in large volumes and in high quality, motion capture of animations, and writing staff increasing costs a bit, but for studios trying to be frugal, third party engines are likely to provide an answer in terms of improving AI, pathfinding, and most tasks involved in rendering modern 3D scenes.
Hmmm, now the CEO of Eidos is claiming that the new xbox requires an always on conenction and will watermark it’s discs to block used games.
http://uk.gamespot.com/news/xbox-720-could-block-used-software-says-eidos-president-6404465?
It’s also using the special hair algorithm developed by AMD. Taps DX11 direct compute to handle the physics for the hair. Which looks mighty good.
Playing through skyrim again reminds just how little hair has improved over the years. It’s still mostly this static, plastic-like set of polygons attached to heads.
Hmm,
Do I want to spend £50-£60 on a platform-locked game when I can get just as much from from “Great Little War Game” or “Dead Trigger”? which cost…errrrrrr, nothing.
Better processing and graphics only get you so far. The most fun I’ve had over my last 10 gaming years has been with Mario Kart Wii.
I really think the model has changed and big box, locked-in, ring-fenced consoles are not the future. I’ll go further. I don’t think there will be enough take up for any of the new generation big 3 consoles to make them particularly profitable. It may even be disastrous for such as sony.
Sure there will always be the hard-core gamer wanting peta-polygons on 4k displays but will there be enough to recoup multi-million game production budgets? I think not.
I suspect casual and portable gaming will be the real winner, on phones and tablets particularly (not even 3ds or vita).
And further. We are seeing a new generation of Android dongle sticks that plug directly into big screen TV’s and provide HD gaming in POV shoot-em-ups that is perfectly good enough for the average Joe. They turn any TV into a smart TV, a media centre and gaming platform and they are only getting cheaper faster and better. I currently have one that cost me £50 and it is astonishingly good. Lord alone knows what next year will bring. It will be cheap enough to embed that full capability in a TV and where will that leave the consoles?
I predict, within 2 years we will see a dedicated, famous name Nintendo game being written for Android/Apple platforms. At that point you will know that the console model is dead.
Agree 100%.
And I do think Nintendo will be the first to go. Guarantee that they’ll start shifting to a digital gaming marketplace, servicing hardware other than their WiiU/3DS within the next 5 years.
And Cliff Bleszinski thinks we might be right:
[QUOTE=Cliff Bleszinski]
I really think we’re in a massive state of turmoil," he said. "I think Nintendo could possibly be faced with the situation of becoming a company that only makes software moving forward. I think Sony and Microsoft are about to come to major blows. But at the same time, people love playing games on their iPad. The PC is going through a wonderful renaissance right now. I think we’re ready to do digital download games all the time…I just want to see what happens.
[/quote]
Well, yes and no.
I think it’s safe to say that there will continue to be a market for the “traditional core games” console experience of… I’m going to go with “roughly the same size as the installed base for the PS2”. Because the PS2 was a strictly-traditional-games platform - I mean, yes, you could use it to play DVDs, but I’m not convinced this was a major driver.
There’s always going to be a “core games” market. The question is whether it will be large enough to support the development costs of the consoles and games. And consoles will obviously “give” first, since the games can be made for the PC as well, though I’m not 100% sure that the PC market alone is big enough to sustain AAA development, so if consoles collapse hard, we may see fallout in that space as well.
All that said, I don’t think it’s entirely safe to count the 3DS out yet, for one simple reason: Japan. The thing is huge there. I’ve heard (and the numbers, as far as they go on Wikipedia seem to confirm) that it has a larger install base in Japan than the PS3 does. And the PS3 is basically the only ‘stationary’ game platform in Japan, since the 360 essentially doesn’t exist there, and PC gaming is a tiny, tiny niche. It’s not clear what kind of IOS/Android market there is there, but I think that market is a pretty strange case. And it’s probably big enough to sustain Nintendo and the 3DS for years. Which means that the 3DS will keep being made and keep selling in some capacity over here, because people will want the games that won’t be coming anywhere else. I don’t think it’s safe to call this platform down for the count yet, and I think predictions of Nintendo going software only anytime soon are ignoring this angle.
Nintendo executives have said (probably jokingly, but still) that they’d shut down the company if that had to happen.
That said, the company is NOT in a precarious financial position and is still making a ton of money off of the Wii, 3DS, and Wii U. The true test will be this fall, when Mario Kart Wii U and Super Mario 3D Wii U are expected to be released. If they sell like previous games in those franchises did, Nintendo will be set for another decade, minimum.
I think Nintendo has another advantage with handhelds as well; how many people are going to want to, or be able to give their children smart phones/tablet PCs/iPads? For reasons of cost, fragility, and protecting your kids from various issues that come with internet access. Going forward this niche may be the last bastion of dedicated handhelds, but I’d be willing to bet it’ll still be there for a good while.
Make no mistake that the 12 and under audience has always been a large segment of the handheld market and Nintendo has excelled in designing theirs to be very kid-friendly in terms of cost, durability, battery life, and ease of use.
I honestly think they’re the only handheld game company that stands a chance because of all that.
Don’t be so sure. Both of my boys have had iPhone 3gss for a year or so. Not because they’re rich or spoiled, but because the wife and I got new phones at the end of the last contract. Sure, they don’t have voice plans with them, but the have plenty of games.
Our two, 5 and 7 have picked up and played our nexus 7’s with a relish that has surprised me. They love “where’s my Perry” as much as any other game i can remember.
Plus the batteries last longer, the games are cheaper and they can watch cartoons and movies on them during car journeys.
And again, equivalent tablets are only going to get cheaper and better and I’m not sure the hand-helds will keep up.
I can only really speak from our own perspective but I certainly feel the ground shifting. (And I type this message sitting on my bed via an Android stick plugged into my TV and on which I have just accessed the BBC iPlayer and live broadcast TV) We haven’t been here before so it will be fascinating to see where it leads.
Really, you think that it’s more likely parents will buy, instead of a utilitarian device, a device they or their kids would find useful in day to day activities, a dedicated gaming device?
I know a LOT of parents with kids. Well to do couples and not so well to do couples. They all have cell phones and tablets, and all the kids use them to play games on them. Only one has purchased a dedicated handheld for their kid - and it’s an old gameboy!
I know, the plural of anecdotes isn’t data, but I’d be surprised if those things sell much outside of Japan.
Nintendo has sold 30 million 3DS systems since the handheld launched a little less than two years ago. So yes, this is happening a lot. Parents don’t want to give their kid a utilitarian device. They want to give them something they’ll play games on and be quiet.