Next-Gen Game Consoles Still Years Off 386
jfruhlinger writes "Gamers who have grown bored with the current generation of game hardware will have to sit tight a bit longer. Word on the street has it that the next PlayStation won't be ready until 2014, and the next Xbox won't appear until Christmas 2013 at the earliest."
Microsoft has the most to lose by waiting (Score:4, Interesting)
They're already past the 5-year traditional console lifespan (a tradition that's been sacrosanct since the Atari days). And with Playstation gaining ground every day, they're looking real long-in-the-tooth of late. PS3 has MMO's now, user-created content, games that don't have to span several discs (because of the blu-ray drive), blu-ray movie playing capability, etc. The 360 was in the lead for a long time (in the U.S. at least) and MS could have easily secured that lead if they had followed the 5-year lifecyle and bitch-slapped Sony with a next-gen console in Christmas 2010. Instead we got the Kinect, their Wii knockoff that came years after the Wii novelty had worn off (my Wii is sitting in my closet if anyone wants to buy it).
It's a real shame too. Call me a nationalist if you like, but MS was the first American company to compete in the console industry since Atari. And it was nice to not have to wait until a title had been released in Japan for several months to finally get it in the U.S. Sony and Nintendo always treated the west like they were doing us a favor by lowering themselves to even release a game outside of Japan. MS was the first company in a long time to treat the U.S. and Europe as a first-class market instead of an afterthought. And they actually gave us Western-centric games instead of just poorly-translated JRPG's to boot.
Re:Weird abstract... (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with the PS3 is the GPU, it's essentially a GeForce7800GTX with a few mods. The other problem with the PS3 is the OS. It's so memory hungry compared with the 360. The 360 uses 32MB and it has a 10MB embedded frame buffer for render targets. The PS3 uses (last time I programmed it) 40MB main memory for the OS and 7MB of video memory with no embedded frame buffer. MSAA needs more memory in the PS3 but does NOT on the 360, unless you're going to do more processing on the MSAA frame buffer. The GPU on the PS3 is so slow that you use a significant amount of CPU time reducing the load on the GPU. You usually do backface removal, degenerate triangle removal, zero area triangle removal, offscreen triangle removal and triangles hidden by occluders removal just to reduce load on the vertex pipe. Then you do MSAA resolving and any other image post processing on the SPUs as well.
The PS3's GPU is a boat anchor. A year later and 75% the speed!
I will say however that it was fun to program. You spent all your time doing cool shit optimizing around the GPU, whereas on the 360 you spend your time dong game code. Booooring.
CATCHPA: irking. The perfect work do describe the PS3
Re:...and both have an operating system (Score:3, Interesting)
As a former game dev I'll tell you.
both consoles have 512MB total memory.
360 has shared memory, the OS takes 32MB. The 360 GPU has a 10MB embedded frame buffer. MSAA becomes memory-free under most circumstances.
PS3 has 256MB main memory, 256MB vram. OS takes up 40MB main memory, 7MB vram. No embedded frame buffer, Nx MSAA takes N times more memory for the color buffer PLUS you still need two non-MSAA color buffers for display. So on a 1280x720 2xMSAA game you loose 15MB for the OS and an additional 7.2MB for the MSAA color buffer, plus an additional 3.6MB for the Z buffer (which lives in the embedded frame buffer on the 360.) All in you're looking at a little under 26MB additional memory used just for graphics. There are additional penalties on the PS3 as well. The ABI used by the OS causes code bloat, measured around 1-3 MB per large game. They may have fixed it now, it's been a couple of years since I did that for a living. Also if you want to use many of the OS built-in menus (not all of them) you have to give MORE memory back to the OS.
BOTH are insanely slow (Score:4, Interesting)
You can see it best when you run a console game on a PC, the only taxing thing is when you turn all the options on (in your graphics driver) and raise the resolution because on the same resolution and same options as a console, your PC will fall asleep.
It ain't just GPU or even memory. It is even such a simple thing as HD speed. What game developer would code for the slowest laptop HD out there? A console developer.
Put all the limitations together and you can see why some of the biggest money earners in gaming history have not made their way on to the console. The Sims and WoW. None of the games are visually immidiately impressive but they simply take a LOT of memory and a LOT of random disk access.
Why? Because they are non-linear games. The next time you wonder at the marvel of the graphical complexity of a BF3 or even a Rage, ask yourself this... how much am I seeing at a time? Randomly? The games are on rails, with very old style dark corridors between areas to allow the swapping of areas. They remind me a LOT of theme park rides. Where you have large rooms seperated for sound and sight with dark corners.
The real way to tax a PC is to load up the Sims or Operation Flashpoint and to load up the scene with different models. The makers of F.E.A.R. talked about this, they could choose either to have a room impress with lights or with monsters but not both. Next time you see a "big" area on a console, ask yourself, what is missing. What did they have to cut in Y to make X happen.
With a PC, you can simply do both. That is why custom maps, mods and whatever are often so much more impressive to what the original game developers can do. Because anyone that uses mods KNOWS their PC must exceed the recommended spec, not just meet minimum. But on the console, it is all the same absolute minimum approach.
Remember all those people that thought a PS3 would make a good linux machine? They probably never tried it. When was the last time you where happy with a PC with 256mb memory, the smallest and slowest laptop HD they could find and a power consumption that would make Nvidia blush?