Will Consoles Merge Back Into PCs? 356
GamePolitics is running an interview with Randy Stude, president of the PC Gaming Alliance, discussing the future of gaming on the PC and the console. Stude has some interesting thoughts regarding the long-term viability of stand-alone consoles:
"The guts of every console should tell you that the capability is there for the PC to act as the central point for all the consoles. If you bought a PC and as part of that equation you said, Okay, when you're on the phone with Dell, 'Hey, Dell, on this PC, this new notebook I'm buying, can you make sure it has the PlayStation 4 option built into it?' Well, why not? Why shouldn't that be the case? [Sony is] certainly not making any money on the hardware. I mean, can't they create a stable enough environment to specify that if Dell's going to sell that notebook and say that it's PlayStation 4 [compatible] that it must have certain ingredients and it must meet certain criteria? Absolutely they could [do] that. Are they going to do it? I don't know. I predict that they will. I predict that all of the console makers over time will recognize that it's too expensive to develop the proprietary solution and recognize the value of collapsing back on the PC as a ubiquitous platform."
Re:No.... (Score:4, Informative)
GTA4 is known to have a terrible PC port. Most recent games would run just fine on a couple-of-year-old pc.
A surprising number of games even run on my parents' TIME (who've now gone bust) pc from 2003, and that has integrated graphics (admittedly it's an integrated geforce 4, not a via or sis crap).
Re:No.... (Score:1, Informative)
Keyboard and mouse support would be a great improvement for numerous game genres. In fact it would be nice if consoles started packing a keyboard and mouse in with the console. It might offer more incentive for game developers to start adding support for them.
Unless the hard drive in a console is readily replaceable with any size and brand of drive I want to put in it, then it doesn't matter. The largest drive available for the Xbox 360 is a paltry 120GB. For the PS3 it's not much better, only 160GB. My laptop has an internal 360GB drive and my desktop PC has two 1TB drives.
The 30" display on my gaming PC has a maximum resolution of 2560x1600 and cost the same as most 32" 1920x1080 HDTVs. Perhaps I'm just spoiled, but the resolution difference is incredible. At 2560x1600, you really don't even need to use AA since the pixel size is so fine.
Re:No.... (Score:1, Informative)
That isn't exactly true. In fact I play modern games on a PC that is originally from 2002. It still uses an old Pentium 4 (non-HT even). Over the years I've upgraded a part here and a part there. New motherboard with PCIe slots, more RAM, more powerful power supply and a new video card. The total cost of these upgrades was only about $300 spread over a period of almost 7 years. It runs just about any game I can throw at it very well. Looking at the requirements for GTA4, my "old" PC far exceeds all of the recommendations with exception to my single core P4 and that's probably only because they decided to use a software based physics engine.
Nobody will guarantee anything, but if you have any knowledge of building PCs then you'll basically be able to "guarantee" it yourself. Find the bottleneck in the system, replace the necessary parts and say hello to practically a brand new computer.
In addition, all PC games allow the user to customise settings to suit their computer. The user can find the right balance of settings that pleases them if their hardware isn't capable of handling full settings. On a console game you have no such ability. You're stuck with whatever limitations the console has. The way you make it sound is like a console somehow magically increases in performance over the years. A 5 year old console is no better than a 5 year old gaming PC and the truth is the PS3/360 were comparatively underpowered when they were released and now look simply abysmal next to a modern PC game. So yeah, a new game might run on a 5 year old PS3, but it will also run on a 5 year old PC with the right game settings.
Been done before (Score:3, Informative)
Amstad MegaPC [wikipedia.org] and the Sega TeraDrive [wikipedia.org], both obviously failed.
Those machines were basically just a PC and a Megadrive (or Genesis as you USians knew them) in the same box. I seriously doubt you could get away with integrating a console into a PC as an expansion card because then you'd need to start testing games on umpteen different mobo combinations to be sure of compatibility, negating one of the major benefits of using a console in the first place.
Also, I don't see how it would stop MS or Sony loosing money on hardware at the start of a generation (I believe 360 hardware now turns a profit?). A company like Dell isn't going to shoulder a loss for Sony as they're not going to see any licensing revenue from games. Consumers would see an integrated box that is more expensive than two separate boxes and vote with their wallets.
Re:No.... (Score:3, Informative)
Half-Life, Deus Ex, Unreal Tournament, Red Faction, all PS2 games with mouse and keyboard support. There are other games that support one or the other, you never really know unless you try. Did you know that Gran Turismo 4 has keyboard support for menu control? Found that out by accident.
Any PS3 game that uses the standard PS3 text entry API supports keyboards even if you can't use it to control the game. Oblivion is a good example of this, you can use a keyboard to name the spells and items that you enchant.
Huh? Don't most people have USB keyboards and mice these days? Because that's what the PS2/PS3 use.
Re:No.... (Score:5, Informative)
Keyboard + mouse is a lot more accurate in an FPS than a game pad. It's as if a top athlete were to participate in the Paralympics: not fair.
Re:No.... (Score:3, Informative)
My understanding is that the Power PC chips are actually SLOWER than x86-64 processor, but run much cooler, so MS went with them.
I don't know the details, I just dev for the thing.
And are you telling me that a Quad-core x86-64 machine couldn't emulate a TRI core power PC system? I find that hard to believe, even with the difference in instruction-sets.
Yep, that's what I'm telling you. Even better, you can't magically parallelize code, so having more than 3 cores wouldn't help much. So instead of getting the 4x performance you need for emulation by having a 12-core 3.2GHz cpu, you'd need a 3-core machine running at 12.8GHz.
And even that might not be enough, as the theoretical performance of the 3-core Xenon cpu of the xbox is actually twice that of the fastest quad-core desktop cpu.
You're not going to emulate a 360 any time soon. Hell, your wonderful quad-core system will struggle to emulate a PS2 [pcsx2.net]! Try it for yourself.
Let's keep in mind, Virtual machines are ALL emulation already. They are emulating a specific type of hardware that your system may or may not already have. The only limitation is core amounts. You can't emulate a CPU core your system doesn't have. Other than that, I really don't see how hard it would be to emulate a power-PC based system, as long as your machine had more cores than the system you were emulating.
Nope. There are two kinds of virtual machine, fully emulated machines which are horrifically slow (but compatible with a different instruction set), and virtualized machines which run directly on the cpu of the host (so must use the same instruction set as the host), only dropping back to the host to emulate a few devices, e.g. keeping the virtual machine's hard-disk in a file on the host's disk.
Most virtual machine software implements direct hardware passthrough to allow the child OS to have even a little performance at using the graphics card. You can't have direct hardware passthrough if the virtual hardware in the virtual machine doesn't match the hardware in the host.
Re:No.... (Score:3, Informative)
Yep it does put a little more strain on the wrist. I found that raising the mouse a bit, by using a large book/object, say a copy of the 1st edition AD&D dungeon master's guide, helped. Lap pads/desk pads work too. Or some of those little tables with the base that slides under the chair designed for less mobile folks.
http://www.walgreens.com/search/search_results.jsp?term=table&wsection=P [walgreens.com]
I must admit that I normally had the PS2/have the PS3 sitting on a computer desk (because I have Linux installed) so I only did the above when I moved it temporarily to the big TV in the living room for some purpose. But it worked well enough for playing EQOA, FFXI, Half-Life or Deus Ex.
Re:No.... (Score:3, Informative)
There's no proprietary USB format on the X360 -- it's just standard ol' USB 2.0. In fact, I've used my keyboard on the Xbox a few times, especially when typing passwords.