Be Excellent To Each Other

Sure that's a problem, but Windows 8 will bed down in time, the same as Vista did. What I suspect will happen is Windows 9 will be along relatively quickly to correct the mistakes of Windows 8, same as 7 did for Vista. I have a strong suspicion that MS will either patch into Windows 8, or re-introduce with Windows 9, a 'classic desktop' mode and quietly drop the 'pseudo-touch' requirement.

But a key difference here is that Windows can't be 'broken' against your will the same as the consoles can (I'm sure I remember you having a right old rant about a 360 dashboard update Chinny), yes Windows will update and patch itself, but it'll never, ever, look completely fucking different one day after applying some updates and start bombarding you with adverts.

The Windows situation isn't perfect, sure, but are you really telling me it's better than where the 360 has ended up?

It's got lizards in it.

So yeah... About that PS4.

But seriously old chap, what's there to say about it?

We know the specs, we have no idea what it's going to look like yet, we know what the controller looks like, and we know that it'll host pretty much all the games of the next generation. Same as the 720, same as the PC, same as the Steambox, and the Wii-U might have most of it as well.

That's it, basically.

The next-gen is about choosing your faceplate, because the games are all going to be the same.

roffle it even uses Havok. You couldn't make this shit up !

Except, of course, that the PS3 had shiteloads of exclusives because the Japanese care for neither the Xbox nor PC (See, for instance, Demons souls). I see no reason for this to be any different going forward.

When I'm not using my MAC for WORK I like a CONSOLE to PLAY GAMES on with NO FUCKING ABOUT.

Anything else just causes havoc.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Dust. Wind.
dude.

Woah.

The PS4 isn't really a PC, you can't play PC games on it.

Although it's architecture being much like a PC is a good thing for everyone involved, I think. I wonder if they'll at least get full PS2 backwards compatibility via emulation?

To be fair, AE does have a point. New consoles used to be about magic and hitherto unforeseen power. That era does appear to be dead.

See also: Trains

Sony (probably) still have their heads up their arses, then. Technically, they're still riding on how good the PS1 was.

By coincidence, I actually bought a Wii U yesterday. My kids like it. That's literally all I have to say about it. Meh.

Does this mean this gen will be the same as last gen only a bit worse? All we need now is for Microsoft to make an awesome machine with fantastic games on the cheap so the hardware breaks all the time. Thanks multinationals!

Consoles that use PC architecture are just like PCs, which is why no-one bought the first Xbox and we all just used PCs. Also, there's no advantage to be gained from bare-to-the-metal coding techniques targeting fixed spec platforms running real time operating systems, which is why every seven year old $400 PC can turn out graphics the equal of a 360 or a PS3. Fuck me, I was certainly playing stuff that looked better than Uncharted 2 or Forza Horizon back in 2005 on my GeForce 6600. I'm almost certainly not making this shit up because I'm a fucking dribbling idiot. And I certainly can see how an octocore games console with eight mother fucking gigabytes of DDR5 RAM -- shit that's way faster than PC's lame-assed DDR3 bullshit -- is exactly the same as a PC. And I've definitely seen the ability to real time encode games down to a H.264 stream to be uploaded to the Internet for my friends to spectate on or even take control of my game in real time on Steam. Probably.

Man alive, there's some odorous bullshit being spouted in here, by all the usual suspects, I see. What a pissing omnishambles. Plus ça cunting change.

You're still wrong about the scrambled eggs, mind.

Not always strictly true.

Isn't the Dreamcast essentially a PC? It runs Windows CE after all.

Still can't believe we're finally getting Havok in the living room. Worth the entry price just for that, surely?

Can I POTW Gaywood please? I don't read BETEO WEKEO so have no idea how that sort of things work.

I dunno - I'm holding out for Bink Video support as well.

Again on Bloomberg there was an 'in depth' look at the next gen console battle. Mentions of games in piece (and that games in general, not a specific game or series)? er...none.

You should, you are in it lots.

What is Havoc?

The future of console gaming apparently

Havok? Most typically a physics engine, but can also help with things such as animation and other functions.

It's been on consoles for a very long time. What with being based on standard c/c++ code.

A film in which Anne Hathaway scores on the Craster Scale.

Just to respond to this, I was a heavy gamer between 1995 and 2005 and I didn't have a console at all. I had an expensive pc. A lot of people I knew were the same.

Malc

Indeed. It's only in recent years (the "HD consoles"/the advent of Havok in the living room) that I've moved away from PC myself. I've always had most of the consoles, but I barely used them.

And yet, we're still lectured daily on the merits of PC gaming! It's as if I wasn't sat at one 10 hours a day for the best part of 10 years.

I had one of these!
Edit, I still do somewhere.

I've had pretty much all of the consoles over the years, it was always PC first for me until the Dreamcast, then it was mainly consoles until a couple of years ago (apart from WoW), now i'm back to PC.

I just play games. Whether they come via consoles, PC, handheld, phones, boards or in the pictures that slither across my peripheral vision.

I'm definitely moving back to PC myself now. My chums have all got decent systems so that tends to be where we play. Not gonna discount consoles, though.

I like playing games and I don't mind what I play them on. I also understand that other people like playing games and I don't mind what they play them on.

I just wish everyone else thought the same.

I bought one from a car boot sale for 50p and sold it to a crazy Italian on eBay for about £40

Various reports saying Microscrofula will have a similar revealy thing in april.

I did see lots of speculation last week saying they have to have it before GDC (Games Developers Conference) so that the devs can actually talk about the games they are working on for the new Xbox and not just the stuff for the PS4 - GDC is down as the end of March so it may not be that long to wait

Oh God, this.

I play games on PC much more than I do on console, for pretty much the exact reasons AE evangelises about, but his constant fucking harping on about it leaves me slightly embarrassed to admit to being a fellow PC gamer.

They're shit and they don't have Havok.

Also its a C64 without a keyboard and 99.9% fewer games avaliable for it. Not even like the GX4000 which at least has enhanced hardware and exclusive titles.

He lied to us! Havok has been around for years.



Stinking PC owners trying to claim credit!

Not the C64's finest hour it would seem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSv1nZIarBg

Not this forums either it seems.

That looks great. I love stuff like that. Bet it plays like shit though.

That's because we don't have Havok. Or a PC.

Some real shite about Windows 8 in this thread but as I have already corrected the same crap repeatedly I will just satisfy myself with a

<< sigh >>

I've readily acknowledged the advantages of a fixed architecture and 'bare-to-the-metal' coding many, many times (in this thread in fact, IIRC).

That only buys you so much though.

The Jaguar octo-core CPU in the PS4 is a low-power AMD part that was originally targeted at the laptop and mobile markets. It's a capable CPU but it's got a low clock speed (1.6GHz) and it's no powerhouse. A good advance on the current-gen of consoles of course, but nothing to get overly excited about. AMD's (far more powerful) octo-core desktop CPUs have been out for the best part of 18 months now. You can currently buy a full-fat Bulldozer octo-core AMD desktop CPU running at over 3GHz for about £100. The Jaguar is a cut-down, clocked-down iteration of this CPU.

The GPU in the PS4 is reckoned to punch about as hard as a current desktop PC Radeon 7850, a capable card for sure and should allow the PS4 to deliever 1080p@60FPS, which again is a great advance on the current-gen, but very much in line with what I've been saying all along - the PS4 is comprised of current mid-range PC parts in a small box.

(Technically speaking of course the PS4 utilises an APU as the CPU and GPU are both on one die, but the net result is the same.)

The 8GB of system GDDR5 RAM is a surprise, I'll grant you that, (everyone was expecting 4GB), but again, let's put that into context. GDDR5 is the standard RAM even for low-medium end desktop PC graphics cards and has been for a couple of years - (it originally debuted in 2008 in the Radeon 4870, a high-end card at the time, so it's five year old RAM technology) - the current GeForceGTX650 for example, a fairly low-end part, costs £84 and has 1GB of GDDR5 on-board.

The entire system having access to 8GB of GDDR5 is an intriguing proposition, and will probably give the PS4 a solid technical advantage over the 720, but at the same time let's not get overly carried away, GDDR5 only really benefits graphics work (hence even low-end PC graphics cards having 1GB of the stuff strapped to them), so it remains to be seen what benefits it will equate to in the real world when used as system RAM as well.

Your reference back to the original XBox (which was effectively mainstream PC hardware of the day stuffed into a not-so-little box) is correct, but Sony at least emphatically pushed the esoteric hardware of the PS2 (remember the 'Emotion Engine'?) and the PS3 ('Cell Architecture') as being something unique and special, an approach that they've completely dropped for the PS4.

Finally, the real-time encoding and streaming of games to other devices or elsewhere is already underway by Nvidia as 'Project Shield', requirements will simply be any Kepler-based GPU, the cheapest of which is the aforementioned GTX650, which costs £84, so let's contain our excitement a bit on that one.

Still, nice of you to pop in again DocG! It's always a pleasure to see you post and chuck a few base insults my way, although I'm sure you've done better than 'fucking dribbling idiot' in the past. If you're still in touch with myp ask him for a few suggestions, he got pretty imaginative with his abuse

Ack! Come on chaps, you did see the bit where I specifically referenced 'arcadey console type games'?

Like a lot of folks here I suspect, I've owned both consoles and computers over the years, going right back to the 8-bit days.

My point about, for example, the PS1, was that it brought the arcade game Ridge Racer into your house, and it did with a little box of magic that just plugged into your telly. You didn't need to install anything, you didn't need to configure anything, and you didn't need to spend £1000 or more on a PC (£1000 basically being the absolute starting point for a PC you could play games on back then). I mean, fucking hell, even getting a basic game controller working on a PC twenty years ago was an exercise in hellish frustration, and god help you if you wanted two of them working at the same time.

And yet with the PS1, all you had to do was buy it along with a copy of Ridge Racer, plug the PS1 in, put the disc in, turn it on, and by christ it was a fucking 3D arcade game that still cost a pound a go in the arcades, in your own house, on your own telly. It was stunning, it was magical.

Of course we were playing stuff on our PCs at the time as well, Quake, Warcraft 2, Civilization 2, Command & Conquer etc etc but the PC couldn't do anything like the PS1 was doing. Even if it was technically capable of it - (which it wasn't since 3D acceleration basically didn't exist, hence my earlier point about the consoles bringing something new and magical to the gaming table, Quake was software 3D at launch with hardware 3D acceleration only coming later) - the huge financial and technical barriers to entry made it pie in the sky for most people. We do all remember config.sys and autoexec.bat and freeing up enough base memory to load a CD-ROM driver and even a fucking mouse driver, don't we?

Now if you didn't like arcadey/consoley type games then fair enough, the PS1/PS2 era may well have passed you by, but in my circle of friends and acquaintances we were all over that shit like a cheap suit - despite being mega-keen PC gamers as well.

That's really all I'm getting at here, this is probably the first generation of consoles that offer nothing unique, nothing new, nothing that can't be got elsewhere for around the same cost and at around the same level of convenience. At the PS4 reveal show one of the games was later confirmed to be running on the PC, the argument being 'well that's basically what it'll look like on the PS4', that's the level of homogenisation we're talking about.

I don't understand why it's such a contentious point. I'm not arguing about the relative merits of the platforms as such, just saying that they're all basically the same now.

The same hardware, running the same games, with the same controllers (remember you can plug a 360 pad straight into a PC and I wouldn't be surprised if the 720 wasn't the same), at the same sorts of resolutions and detail settings. (Initially at least, the PC will pull ahead as time goes by, as happened with the current-gen.)

Choose the box you like the look of most, choose your 'operating system provider', maybe choose based on platform exclusives a couple of years down the line (if there are any) - but the point stands, next-gen is 'everything's about the same' gen.

Has AMD not already got something like that? (Or am I thinking of something different and wierd?)

I can't understand why people don't think that this isn't anything but a reasonably interesting post. I've no idea if he's right but it sounds interesting, and plausible, enough. If PS4 and the new Xbox are "about the same" in terms of grunt (although I'd suggest there wasn't much between the PS3 and 360 either) what do they offer hardcore gamers?

I think loads of people on here can take up that mantle.