You can’t honestly be taking the “clock tick is everything” arguement here, really? I’d also submit that multi-threading may have been an issue at the start of the LAST console rollout, but the vast majority of the issues can assume to be solved at this point, at least from the AAA players, and abstracted out at the API level.
Processor design is no longer a race to the top, it’s also a competition for price per unit, power consumption, and thermal design…compound that with an environment that doesn’t have all the crufty overhead of running an Operating System and you just can’t easily compare throughput on a console to a generationally similar PC. You’re also not going to have separate both a CPU and GPU’s on the motherboard, I’d expect them to be both on-die, and sharing L2 cache, making them cheaper than discrete solutions, and in some cases, faster, due to keeping more stuff on chip.
If I had to make comparisons, I’d say current tablets are similar in capability to the original Xbox, but at a FRACTION of the cost and power consumption, and are on a much more rapid improvement curve. The consoles don’t have the power consumption issues, but can benefit from being on-die, cheaply.
I bought it AT release for $35. not some time after release. And I don’t think Amazon had the console version out for that price for at least a month after release. Regardless, Pc prices usually come down sooner, usually start out lower, and usually reach lower prices during holiday sales than console games.
No it’s not ALWAYS this way, but on average, I’d say it is so much more often than not. To the point that it’s silly trying to argue some sort of equivalency.
Odds are, if you’re gaming on PC, and buying lots of games - you would have saved a bunch of money vs purchasing the same amount of games at roughly the same times as if you had been playing on a console. This is pretty much the universal sentiment everywhere I look. Except here, apparently.
Pretty sure he said, like three times, that cycles aren’t everything.
Also, as I understand it, there are many jobs in a game pipeline that aren’t as easily parallelized as say, 3D rendering, nor do they benefit from much if any performance improvement from being split up this way.
When you hold it to that kind of strict comparison, sure. But saying “all PC gamers are inherently cheaper than all console games” is a reach that requires a very special set of circumstances. You can game cheap on a PC and you can game cheap on a console. There’s no way to dispute that.
And, not to be muddying the waters, but the train wreck that is Aliens: Colonial Marines that just launched today serves as a valuable reminder why you might not want to buy games right when they come out, even if you’re not shopping for price.
Another way to look at it? Fine, PC gaming is cheaper if you can’t wait. Console gaming is actually cheaper and sports a larger library if you can, for certain very long values of wait. (The PS3 can play every single PS1 title. There are more of those than there are games on Steam. And probably GOG as well.). Of course, you could then argue that you could emulate. And that emulating can be kinda crotchety and annoying. But then, so is buying used games on eBay.
tldr: This discussion is complicated, annoying, and gives us nothing of value. Feel free to be convinced that the way you are doing it is best, but it’s not so clear cut as anyone would state.
You seriously think that the Ps3 has a larger library than the PC? Even taking PS1 games into account, you would be seriously wrong.
And my point isn’t JUST that PC games tend to be cheaper at release. They TEND to be cheaper at ALL times.
Some Steam sales have entire publisher catalogs going for $30-$40. Something NO retailer will give you.
Again, there is the tendency for this. It’s not universal, it doesn’t happen with every game, but on average you will spend less money on games playing on Pc than you would playing on console.
I don’t know why this reality offends you so much. I guess it’s that you feel the only thing consoles have going for them is their lower cost, and this messes with that expectation? Please elucidate.
Heh, just as we start discussing this I notice a new article up on Kotaku, discussing building a cheap gaming PC. Here’s a choice quote:
[QUOTE=Kotaku]
There are no Xbox Live or Playstation Plus fees to worry about, free games and mods open up a world of opportunities, and, of course, massive sales from retailers like Amazon, GreenManGaming, GoG.com, and Steam. At the time of writing, the Tomb Raider reboot is selling on GreenManGaming for $45, with a further $15 in credit. That’s already $15 less than console prices, with a further $15 to spend on other games. Bioshock Infinite also has a $15 credit! Why spend $60 when you could spend so much less?
I often buy games on release, but regularly save about $25 a game over console prices. That means that after just a handful of release date purchases, I’ll have saved more money by choosing to play on the PC rather than consoles.
It’s pretty unlikely that something with 8 cores and 1.6ghz clocks is running off any sort of intel chips and as far as I know AMD doesn’t have anything like that either. Those sorts of clock speeds much more closely resemble phones and tablets, which makes me suspect that they’re hinting at a tablet architecture.
If that’s the case, then not only is the clock rate slower, but the amount of work it can do per clock cycle is vastly less.
Console games decline as price as retailers want to clear out stock, so what’s going to be cheap at any given time is more or less random. Well, except that it skews towards less popular games, since they’re the ones less likely to sell out. I buy games on amazon during sales, so sometimes I’ll see “pc digital $3.75, ps3 $19.99” type stuff in the page. This is actually a pretty ridiculous point for you to argue on.
The reality is that you can’t sell console games for a few bucks for a profit. You only see prices that low when they simply need to get them off the shelf to recover some of their losses. On the other hand, you can start seeing profit on digital distribution at some absurdly low price per copy.
I have around 600 games on steam alone. A few months back I added up all the money I’d ever put into steam, and it came out that I spent about $3.50 on average per game. Sure, some of them are smaller indie games, closer to xbox live arcade titles, but I also have hundreds of AAA titles too. Now you can credit that to “buyer behavior”, as if getting a ton of games for cheap is some esoteric, obscure desire, but you couldn’t do anything like that for consoles. In fact, if I were to do such a thing on consoles, my extra cost on software would significantly be higher than all of my hardware costs.
Did you read my post? I talked about clock speeds with more nuance. A core i5 2.2ghz will outperform a pentium 4 3.6ghz easily. But this is actually a factor that works against you. If the new xbox cpu is based on phone/tablet processors, which again, given the clock speeds is pretty plausible, then you’re facing the situation where you’ve both got a lower clock rate and do far less processing per clock. The end result is that you’re not half as fast, you’re probably like 1/4th to 1/12th as fast.
That’s simply not true. Do you have some technical experience in multithreaded programming? Multiple cores has been the standard on PC CPUs for most of a decade now, and yet programs are still poorly multithreaded. Sometimes it’s a lack of dev effort, but quite frankly, only certain types of processing is suitable for multithreading. Very often you simply can’t do it, because one step in your execution relies on the result from a previous step, which means you can’t paralellize it, amongst other technical issues. You simply cannot easily evenly distribute the workload over multiple cores except in a few cases where the data is highly paralellizable like video encoding.
Having a lot of slow cores is, for the vast majority of programming tasks, substantially inferior to having 1 fast core.
In phones, sure. There’s no reason consoles should have to worry about their power and thermal consumption. They aren’t portable devices, they aren’t running on batteries, and they aren’t hurting for space. As far as price per unit - sure, if you’re happy with your xbox being a souped up phone, it’ll save you a few bucks.
Consoles still run an operating system, and the difference in operating system overhead is greatly exaggerated. The biggest area you save on is ram, but since ram is almost free now anyway that’s not significant. Of course you can compare the throughput of a console to a generationally similar PC - look at their results. If you run the same code at the same settings, does one output 30 fps and the other output 150 fps? That’s a comparison.
Faster than what? Certainly not a modern architecture like I7 and a PCI-E 16x card.
I actually said this myself before you did up thread - but who cares about power consumption? Cost is right - but would you be happy gaming on what amounts to a really fast phone for 10-15 years, when even phones begin to surpass you a few years into it? Just to save $50 or $100?
When, exactly, during the waiting cycle to console games become cheaper than PC games?
So “if you can’t wait” amounts to “waiting less than the generational gap between the ps1 and ps3”? So all you need to do to get cheaper modern games is wait about 15-20 years, then hope someone on ebay is selling whatever you happen to want? And for cheap.
The game library argument is even more ridiculous than the cost one. If you’re going to say the ps3 library includes the ps1 library, then the PC library contains tens of thousands of PC games going back decades, and additionally contains the entire libraries of every nintendo system, playstation 1 and 2, sega systems, etc. through emulation.
Low power also means simplified cooling, which is a big deal in a cheap box that’s stuffed under the TV with the dust bunnies and VHS tapes.
Don’t be hatin on stuff we haven’t seen yet.
[/QUOTE]
Intel’s nomenclature with the “turbo boost” stuff is sort of weird, but the effective clock rate of that cpu is actually 2.8ghz. Whenever you’re actually doing anything significant, it boosts up to the turbo speed. The 1.6ghz is just a nomimal near-idle speed to save power on the laptop.
It has 2 cores, I’m not sure what point you think you’re making with that. It’s not a phone processor, but it’s a laptop processor, which is a big step back from a desktop processor.
The tablet CPU thing is just speculation on my part, I admit it - but if the rumor is true, the general philosophy of having 8 slow cores is just flat out bad news. It’s just a bad design.
I honestly don’t understand the point you’re trying to make with that.
$300 YOUR cost. Remember, the Xbox was a 733 Mhz ‘kinda’ Celeron. It WASN’T a Celeron, but it was derived from it (I seem to think it was hobbled in cache.)
You don’t get it, and I can’t convince you. Processors are modular and made to order and I GUARANTEE you, you will be dissapointed, because it won’t equal a high end PC…there’s no way it possibly could. It would be too expensive and would still be hopelessly out of date when compared to a PC 18 months from now.
It’ll have 128 pipelines instead of 512, it’ll have 256mb of DDR3 video ram instead of 2 Gb DDR5.
And it’ll be just fine at what it does., and the PC/console circlejerk will continue for another generation.
I still don’t get it. You think a 2.8ghz laptop processor with 2 cores that costs $300 is more the more likely candidate for becoming the 1.6ghz 8 core xbox cpu than a tablet CPU with the cores doubled which would then match up perfectly?
If they’re going with a low power tablet architecture, the next generation will be significantly more outdated on launch day than the previous (ps3/xbox 360) generation was on launch day. As I said, those units were about a year and a half behind their times for lower mid end PCs. A souped up tablet - if that’s the case - or a low end APU like the ps3 is rumored to have will be significantly more out of date, more like 5-7 years out of date out of the box. You’d be talking about moving from the 360/PS3’s 2005 level technology to roughly 2007-2008 level technology. It would be a small generational leap.
As always, you guys don’t understand why PC gamers care about this stuff. You think it’s just some stupid tribal argument, like when people argue whether the xbox or ps3 is better with their miniscule differences, or if they like chevy or ford, or if they like pepsi or coke. Not at all. I’m not here to gloat how much better my choice is.
No, my actual concern is that since we’ve merged using the same hardware, just with you guys using low end 10 year old parts, and we get the same games developed for us for the most part, the capability and advancement of gaming is dependent on console hardware. We’ve been locked in a technological backwater for a decade now because of this. I don’t give a shit about the Wii - it can sell a billion units, move a billion games, and be loved by all - and I’m totally fine with that. Because the wii and PC for the most part are entirely seperate ecosystems. It doesn’t hurt me. It’s not holding back my gaming. It’s only because the ps3/xbox 360 try to mimic PC gaming with crappy outdated PCs that I have a problem with them.
You probably think I want the new generation of consoles to be puny and underpowered so I can gloat how much better my stuff is. Not at all. I want consoles to be as powerful as possible and it dissapoints me that the rumors indicate they won’t be at all. If the consoles were as powerful as a contemporary mid end pc at launch, at least we could move gaming from being stuck in 2005 to being stuck in 2012. But from the sounds of it, with these less than ambitious console predictions, it actually sounds like we’re going to be moving from 2005 to 2008. It’ll be nice, but not the generational leap I’ve been hoping for.
Curiously, in this article, a Gamespot representative asserts that “Sony has said publicly that they don’t intend to block used games on their next console.”
I don’t have a cite, but it seems an odd thing for the CFO to say if it’s not actually the case.
I suspect they’re going to keep track of used copies - tie them to the first account that plays them - and then demand some amount of cash to unlock them on new systems. There are games that work like this now - if you want to use the online component, you have to pay $10 to associate your console with the used game - so at least the company is getting something out of it. It seems like a more practical solution than the uproar you’d get from banning used games entirely, while still making sure you get a cut of the process and also making used games relatively less appealing.