Microsoft Relaxing Xbox One Kinect Requirements, Giving GPU Power a Boost? 220
MojoKid writes "News from gaming insider Pete Doss is that Microsoft is mulling significant changes to the restrictions it places on developers regarding the Xbox One's GPU. Reportedly, some 10% of total GPU horsepower is reserved for the Kinect — 8% for video and 2% for voice processing. Microsoft is apparently planning changes that would free up that 8% video entirely, leaving just 2% of the system's GPU dedicated to voice input. If Microsoft makes this change, it could have a significant uplift on system frame rates — and it's not clear that developers would necessarily need to patch the architecture to take advantage of the difference."
Still lightyears off of today's PC hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
Is a 10% boost going to take 720p to 1080p? Or 1080p 30 fps to 60 fps? Not likely. Fact remains that even moderate PCs today outperform both the PS4 and Xbox One at a similar price point. Toying with 8-10% GPU consumption is insignificant in the big picture.
Re:Still lightyears off of today's PC hardware (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect that MS (and Sony) have no expectation of pulling a miracle out of their hat, or doing anything about the fact that consoles always become increasingly unimpressive vs. PCs as their release period drags on. However, given that MS is currently facing a modest; but somewhat embarrassing, graphical prettiness gap vs. Sony, they have a certain incentive to free up what they can to ensure that any comparisons are as flattering as hardware choices far too late to change will allow them to be.
Re: (Score:2)
Which is why I am considering a PS4....
I HATE Sony, and Microsoft's steaming turd is making me consider one.
Re:Still lightyears off of today's PC hardware (Score:5, Funny)
I have all new gen consoles (Wii U, PS4, and Xbox One) and frankly think it's silly to get pissy about one or the other. The Xbox One isn't a pile of turd because even if it doesn't give you 1080p 60fps on everything it still has great games like Dead Rising 3 which gives you many tens of hours of some of the best gameplay going that you just can't get anywhere else. Similarly the Wii U seems all but dead, but Pikmin 3 was my favourite game of last year, and the likes of Lego City Undercover and Super Mario 3D World were excellent so I really couldn't give a shit about how crap the hardware supposedly is.
Just figure out what games you like and buy whichever console has them. Most of the rest of what you read is just FUD, all the stuff about Kinect not being unpluggable and so forth was bollocks, you can, turn it off, unplug it, and throw it out the window if you feel like it and everything is fine. Both the PS4 and X1 have their quirks right now, the X1 is missing some UI functionality that the 360 had which is stupid and annoying, whilst the PS4's support for parties and online gaming is still worse than that of the 360s which is embarassing given it was the biggest criticism of the PS3 and they should've sorted that shit out by now. Despite these sorts of things it's stupid to say one is better than the other, sure BF4 runs at a slightly higher resolution, but it's also got less good exclusives - there are pros and cons to either system. If you're only getting one you just have to figure out which has the best ratio of pros to cons, but to me the biggest deciding factor would probably be the exclusives. I'm not into The Order, whilst Ryse and Dead Rising 3 were exactly my type of thing, but the PS4 is getting a new Uncharted game so it's really what sort of game you prefer, and ignore all the other bullshit, because it's exactly that, bullshit.
Honestly, the only thing I really hate about the PS4 and X1 is they both seem to have been trying to compete for who can make their console look the most retardedly like a 1980s VHS recorder. I think Microsoft just about won that one, but it was a pretty fucking close call.
Re: (Score:3)
I own both the PS4 and the Xbone from launch.
I have to admit, I don't think graphics are really "it" anymore - 720p on Xbone vs. 900p on PS4? (Yes, on BF4, it doesn't run 1080p either on PS4 - 1600x900).
Both consoles are doing relatively well - and outselling the Wii U (with a one year head start) in global shipments (I wouldn't be surprised if just a couple of months since launch, both Xbone and PS4 have outsold Wii U in global sales).
In fact, the big problem with both PS4 and Xbone is the software is extr
Re: (Score:2)
No it's a steaming pile of Turd because it is no different than a Xbox360. They had one at best buy playing the same game across both (Battlefield 4) and there was ZERO difference.
Even the bugfest that is BF4 had the same bugs across both platforms. For it's price it should be "OMFG! THIS IS AMAZING!"
Re: (Score:2)
Oh boy, more screaming 8-13 year olds spewing nothing but profanity and racisim while yelling like complete idiots.
Re: (Score:2)
Which is why I am considering a PS4....
I HATE Sony, and Microsoft's steaming turd is making me consider one.
You do realise that you could... you know, just not buy either? It's not like you have to buy one or the other or your dick will fall off.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, that's the answer to everything. Don't like our government, just leave the USA. Screw friends and family, vote with your wallet! Teach us how to punish ourselves to make these big corps feel bad, Obi-Wan.
Yes, thank you for drawing the obvious much-needed parallels between government corruption, family abandonment, corporate greed, and simply not wanting to buy a fucking video game console. I especially liked the part where NOT lunging to play the latestest and greatestest games as soon as possible was somehow interpreted as self-punishment rather than the lack of a socially crippling addiction it really is.
Re: (Score:2)
Teach us how to punish ourselves to make these big corps feel bad, Obi-Wan.
Yes punish yourself by not buying a new game console!
Non-Steam games on Steam Machine (Score:2)
The solution is to buy a Steam machine
When will those come to Best Buy
Valve will know which games you can play on it
Valve doesn't know much. Valve knows which games I can buy through Steam. But a Steam Machine runs not only games acquired through Steam but also games acquired through unknown sources. It's really just Debian with a real-time kernel and the Steam client, and the user can always exit Steam and drop to GNOME to run non-Steam games.
Re: (Score:3)
and the user can always exit Steam and drop to GNOME to run non-Steam games.
Indeed. All three of them too!
A lot more than three non-Steam Linux games (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
How do you get Loki games to run in a modern linux? I have all the Disks when Loki was around and I bought the games. they all stopped working after they changed the kernel significantly about 3 years after loki closed up shop.
I would LOVE to play those games again.
Re: (Score:2)
You use loki_compat [ukfsn.org]. But you're probably better off just installing an old Linux distribution in a virtual machine, because loki_compat is not what you'd call perfect since Linux is a moving target. SMAC is even more CRASHTACULAR with the libraries than it was originally, for example.
Re: (Score:2)
knows how to make the PS4 successful
Considering that "how to make [console] successful" seems, these days, to universally include the same moves that made Sony's treatment of PS3 owners so despicable, I'm afraid I'll need to see a binding "What we're going to do differently" list before they get another chance.
Re:Still lightyears off of today's PC hardware (Score:5, Interesting)
Fact remains that even moderate PCs today outperform both the PS4 and Xbox One at a similar price point.
I'm not quite sure about that.
PS4 has a GPU that is between AMD 7850 / 7870, when building your PC you'd pay 150+ Euro for the GPU alone.
Despite "common knowledge" that "PCs are faster", at least if we can trust Valve's statistics (about a third of their PC users run games on an integrated GPU!), no it isn't.
7870 is a good mid range GPU these days even in PC world.
One could argue about underwhelming CPU part , but 8Gb GDDR5 and software written to use most of it's 8 cores makes up for it.
Re: Still lightyears off of today's PC hardware (Score:3, Interesting)
My 7850 plays games quit well at 1080p at settings higher than condoles. Are there actually any standardized benchmarks showing that it's real world performance is in between a 7850 and 7870?
Re:Still lightyears off of today's PC hardware (Score:4, Informative)
Bear in mind that prices for AMD GPUs are a little inflated at the moment because of the crypto mining craze.
All the same, $150 sounds about right for the GPU in a mid-range gaming machine. Machines at that level are often built 'unbalanced' - a weaker CPU mated with a more expensive GPU, on the assumption that most games don't fully utilise the CPU. You only see serious investment on the CPU for higher end gaming machines or workstations.
Re:Still lightyears off of today's PC hardware (Score:4, Informative)
Bear in mind that prices for AMD GPUs are a little inflated at the moment because of the crypto mining craze.
Price inflation is mostly affecting Tahiti (7950/7970/280X) and Hawaii (290/290X). The Pitcairn-based cards (7850/7870/270/270X) haven't moved much. The deals aren't as good as they were in the run-up to Christmas, but that's true of just about everything else, not just AMD video cards.
The 7870 always had a street price of a bit under $200; the 2GB 7850 was usually around $150, with the 1GB version somewhat less (but not in much demand). I paid $179.99 for my 7870 and thought it was a pretty good deal.
Re:Still lightyears off of today's PC hardware (Score:4, Funny)
Sorry. I'm an Nvidia man, and I always will be.
Apology accepted. Accepting you have a problem is the first step out of fanboyism.
Re:Still lightyears off of today's PC hardware (Score:5, Interesting)
Despite "common knowledge" that "PCs are faster", at least if we can trust Valve's statistics (about a third of their PC users run games on an integrated GPU!), no it isn't.
Consider how many laptops are out there... My laptops have both integrated and dedicated GPUs, depending on when Steam's survey comes up they can get quite different results. For that matter I've been playing quite a few 'casual' games that shouldn't stress ANY CPU on my laptop.
Also, to echo the AC - Source on the 7850/7870 thing? I know that all of my cards from the last 5 years handles 1080P rendering just fine.
Re: (Score:2)
In many cases (as far as gaming systems are concerned) PCs are more powerful than consoles. The issue is that games cannot fully exploit that power because developers have to code to higher level abstractions to deal with the differences between systems, you can't rely on a specific speed of CPU, GPU, RAM, video RAM, bus, etc... and you can't rely on a specific amount of CPU cache, CPU cores, RAM, video RAM, GPU ALUs, etc... you can't rely on a specific architecture (exact supported instruction set) of CPU
Apples vs Apples (Score:5, Informative)
Fact remains that even moderate PCs today outperform both the PS4 and Xbox One at a similar price point.
Not in your or mine wildest dreams
The PS4 from Wikipedia "The CPU consists of two quad-core Jaguar modules totaling 8 x86-64 cores. The GPU consists of 18 compute units to produce a theoretical peak performance of 1.84 TFLOPS. The system's GDDR5 memory is capable of running at a maximum clock frequency of 2.75 GHz (5500 MT/s) and has a maximum memory bandwidth of 176 GB/s. The console contains 8 GB of GDDR5 memory" for US$399.99, €399.99, £349.99
vs
For just the base unit of the PC for the same price http://www.amazon.com/Dell-Ins... [amazon.com] Processor: Intel® Pentium® processor G2030 (3M Cache, 3.0 GHz), Memory (RAM): 4GB DDR3 SDRAM, 1600MHz-1X4GB, Storage (hard drive): 500GB Hard Drive, 3.5", 7200rpm, SATA, Optical Drive: DVD+/-RW Tray Load Drive, 16X, SATA Color: Black
I am a bit tired of these comments being modded up in the hope of PC gaming making a comeback.
Re:Apples vs Apples (Score:5, Informative)
Radeon 7770 (~1.3Tflops) roughly matches XBONE @ $109
Radeon 7859 (~1.8tflops) roughly matches PS4 @ $169 (139 with MIR)
The 8 core Jaguar is crap. Any dual or quad core CPU will probably run circles around it, including Core2Quads. Take a 5+ year old PC, toss in a new GPU and your done.
Re:Apples vs Apples (Score:5, Informative)
I'll be impressed if you can add 8GB GDDR5 and the rest of a SFF PC for under $330.
Re: (Score:2)
There is no point. CPU part isn't memory bandwidth-constrained. PS4 does GDDR5 as a way of unlocking more memory bandwidth for GPU which sits on the same memory bus as CPU.
DDR3 hooked to a decent GPU is going to be memory bus constrained in some scenarios. This will likely become a problem for XB1. It's fine for CPUs for a long time to come however - I did some testing and I ran DDR3 at 1ghz and 2.1ghz. No visible difference when paired with my massively overclocked i5 2500k which would absolutely crush thi
Re: (Score:2)
Your GTX 560Ti has 128GB/s worth of memory bandwidth, while the PS4 has 176GB/s. 176GB/s would put it between a GTX 660 and a GTX 670. Sure there is better, but it's still very respectable, and much better than the graphics card in the average PC.
Re: (Score:2)
Shared between CPU and PC. Mine is dedicated to the GPU.
And when it comes to actual GPU rather than just its memory bus, it's just plain subpar.
Re: (Score:2)
Meant to type out CPU and GPU obviously...
Re: (Score:2)
It's the exact opposite. Consoles are making a vastly suboptimal choice in bundling CPU and GPU on the same die to cut costs. It's far more efficient to have a powerful GPU with its own fast dedicated memory than have it share memory and die with a CPU.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't forget controller, OS, antivirus, etc..
Re: (Score:2)
None of these consume significant amount of the most important resource in gaming - GPU. On most systems, GPU will idle at around 1% on desktop use. On mine, openhardwaremonitor actually shows 0% GPU usage - because it's so low, it gets rounded down. On 2D desktop without aero, it may no even initialize GPU for anything other than 2D acceleration.
Xbox reserves 8% of GPU just for kinect, and another 2% for voice recognition. That's 10% overhead that does not exist on PC. Overhead that hits GPU, the thing tha
Re: (Score:2)
The 8 core Jaguar is crap. Any dual or quad core CPU will probably run circles around it, including Core2Quads.
Not really. These days games are heavily threaded. You have a deadline to meet, say 16ms if you want 60fps. Having 8 cores and a modern memory controller that to feed them is going to work much better than having two or four slightly faster cores. And actually for the kinds of processing that games do a Core2 is going to be slower, clock for clock.
Also keep in mind that consoles will always perform better than an equivalent PC in any well programmed game, since the game can be tailored and optimized specifi
Re: (Score:2)
Questionable. Nowadays consoles are no longer dedicated gaming machines - they run heavy operating systems that do a lot of stuff on the background, just like PC operating systems do.
Re: (Score:2)
But he is right that console developers target a GPU where they know its architecture, instruction set, memory amount, memory bandwidth, number of ALUs, ALU clocks, etc... (in addition to knowing that about all the other elements in the system that the GPU is connected to) and knowing this means you can develop much more efficient software and optimize for that hardware. On the PC side you don't know any of those things and even if you set a baseline for one of them you cant guarantee that it isnt offset by
Price breakdown. (Score:3, Interesting)
FX8320: 150 on sale, 170 Retail Pricing (This is the cheapest 8 core AMD offers and thus the closest CPU capacity to the xbone/ps4. Also power management allows underclocking down to at least 800 mhz, so you should be able to find an equivalent clocking to the 1.9 ghz one or both of those consoles uses.)
MSI 970A-G43: 70 dollars on sale Maybe 80-90 Retail
Hard disk: 50-150 for 500 gig to 4 terabyte.
Memory: 8 gigs for under 100 dollars, including ECC (Kingston ram. Look under server memory on Newegg.)
AMD GPU:
Re:Price breakdown. (Score:5, Funny)
You managed to match a $500 console using only $700 worth of parts and the assumption that you'll add a new $250 GPU in a year's time. By grabthar's hammer, what a savings.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Posting to undo accidental de-moderation. :(
Re: (Score:2)
However that PC does more than just games. If you're going to have a nice PC anyway, but want it to also do games, the incremental cost is not that high. The Gfx card is not longer the most expensive part of a good gaming computer.
Re: (Score:3)
You can do a lot more with the PC, however (that said, you can also get infected with a virus and suffer a good deal more frustration).
Still, I can play multiplayer without paying for a subscription, and have plenty of affordable games via Steam/GoG.
You can do more, but for more money, than a dedicated games console. Seems that you've missed the point of the games console completely.
Count on having to upgrade your games PC over the years though to keep games running at a decent level. You need to factor those costs in as well. The console will keep going, and games will probably get better as the toolsets mature. In the PC world the developers can assume that their users will upgrade to maintain relative performance.
Re: (Score:2)
Count on having to upgrade your gaming console ver the years to keep games running at a decent level too. Or are you honestly still running the consoles from a decade ago (or two decades ago)? Relative performance is slowing down, the top end games no long require significant expense to get a computer capable of running them (ie, sli or other hardcore setups). Meanwhile that same computer that players last year's games will still play last decade's games just fine, and do your taxes on the side, be your
Re: (Score:2)
Count on having to upgrade your gaming console ver the years to keep games running at a decent level too.
Not over its lifetime though, over its lifetime console games get better as devs get more proficient with optimizations and extracting the most out of hardware. On PCs you can't do that because the hardware range is so large so instead they are coded to hardware abstractions and the solution is just to 'throw more hardware at it'.
Meanwhile that same computer that players last year's games will still play last decade's games just fine, and do your taxes on the side, be your development workstation, etc.
I could also get a 3G Nexus 7, use Skype or Viber or whatever to make phone calls, connect a PS3 controller (and possibly HDMI-out) to play games and chroot debian to run all my ap
Re: (Score:2)
Best. Comment. Yet.
In fact, so good, that I'm only posting this in return for a cid so that *I* can come back here, and do exactly the same thing!!!
I've been saying it since modems and HDDs first began to grace the consoles, ESPECIALLY the Microsoft ones... after all, critical mass, monetization of the online services, and collection of personal data make it an almost inevitable, and high-value, target right now. Not the mention the possibilities for using all that excess CPU and GPU as a distributed server
Re: (Score:2)
I suspect that the PS4/XB1 8-core processor probably has performance on par with a high-end dual core Haswell i3. If memory serves, AMD's Jaguar cores perform something like half what Intel's do clock-for-clock, and they're running them at half the clockspeed.
The choice to go with AMD likely had more to do with AMD's willingness to design custom solutions rather than any technical superiority on their part. Intel could probably have whipped up a custom solution with more GPU execution units if they wanted t
Re: (Score:2)
Also, a single Jaguar core only uses something like 3mm^2 of die space. That leaves lots of space for GPU.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's be realistic. The only reason why it gets a boost like that is because of the GDDR5 in the system, you strip that out and it's slower than a PC built 5 years ago. But, your example is rather flawed, being that "buying a name" means you're gutting 20% of your upgrade budget.
And PC gaming has been killing consoles for the last 5 years, in fact it takes the wii, xbox and PS3 to equal the sales on the PC generally speaking. Not only that but in the last year and half, it's been a case of "the console i
Re: (Score:2)
PC built five years ago? On what budget?
That isn't relevant if spent a lot of money then...
Furthermore, PC gaming hasn't been killing console gaming. What's been killing it has been the flattening of genres. Everything now is some kind of generic 1st or 3rd person shooter. And THAT is thanks to the much lauded PC Gaming Master Race.
Gross.
Also I'd like to see some recipts on that figure about sales. VGchartz shows Bioshock infinite sold 5 times as more on ps3 and 360 combined than on Windows. Not just that
Re: (Score:2)
There's plenty of weird, inventive games out there... They just happen to be mostly indie, so they are released for the PC Master Race.
Big developers are the ones sitting on their asses, and that has more to do with the fact that modern graphics are expensive as hell than anything else. Hard to sink 50-200 million on a game that you don't expect to have a very broad appeal
Re: (Score:2)
Not really sure if that's the only thing. Games like Warframe, Hawken and MechWarrior online are PC based F2P and they have very good looking graphics. And they certainly do not have those kinds of budgets behind them.
Re: (Score:2)
Furthermore, PC gaming hasn't been killing console gaming. What's been killing it has been the flattening of genres. Everything now is some kind of generic 1st or 3rd person shooter. And THAT is thanks to the much lauded PC Gaming Master Race.
Agreed. FPS is played out; can we please move on and do something else?
Re: (Score:2)
VGChartz is obviously very very inaccurate. The list WoW: Burning Crusades at having sold 4 million copies, when blizzard said there was over 18 million active accounts at the time.
Re: (Score:2)
It's pretty close to being correct actually. Of those active accounts, many are in China and Taiwan which don't sell boxed copies, but play hours. It was assessed that only around 4-5 million accounts total out of 13 million or so when WoW peaked around Wrath of the Lich King were in areas where business model included selling boxed copy of expansion + monthly.
Re: (Score:2)
PC built five years ago? On what budget?
Roughly? About $700. So yeah, consoles haven't gone up and anywhere.
Also, VGchartz is uselss. It doesn't count digital sales, only retail sales.
Re: (Score:2)
That just gave me the idea for a game: "Euro-Pirates Vs. Space Pirates."
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, developers appear to have largely stopped focusing on consoles lately and are now spreading their focus pretty evenly between platforms. Most AAA games now get simultaneous releases on PC unlike before when we had to wait months or even years for console games to be ported, many of the older console games that dev said would never be ported got ported, and so on.
Steam Sales vs. Greatest Hits (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I was with you up until
in the hope of PC gaming making a comeback
As far as I can tell, PC gaming is doing just fine.
Re: (Score:2)
It's somewhat irrelevant what is faster or not. PC gamers will never use consoles, console gamers will never use PCs.
Re: (Score:2)
$550. Now all you need is a wireless controller, a Kinect, and free labor
Re:Still lightyears off of today's PC hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
Or 1080p 30 fps to 60 fps?
What really annoys me about this one is that plenty of games could happily run at 60fps for 80-90% of the time, but the developers don't want you thinking their game is slowing the system down when the action starts. So they just cap it to 30fps all the time for consistently crappy gameplay. I'd sooner do without a few effects.
Bioshock on the PS3 springs to mind, only because they included an option to turn off the framerate cap.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
While I agree that a PC that costs the same as a console is generally more performant, one of the benefits of the console world is that the upgrade cycle (in other words frequency of cash outlay) is a lot longer. In PC gaming, you are likely spending on average $500/year to keep up. In the console world, you spend once every 6 years or so. For those of us on a tighter budget, knowing that if I buy a console near the beginning of the cycle, I will still be getting similar performance near the end of the c
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In PC gaming, you are likely spending on average $500/year to keep up.
What the hell are you doing to your kit? If you blow $500 on a video card, you're doing pretty good for probably half a decade. Hell, you can get 3 years out of a sub-$200 last-gen card.
Yeah, PC gaming does have it's disadvantages vs consoles - some of the most onerous DRM in the industry, for starters (even everyone's darling Steam is worse than anything on a disc-based console game), but that claim was just bull. "PC Gaming" is not, and never has been, synonymous with "bleeding edge."
Number of players (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Are you the dumbass who thought that putting Cell into PS3 was a brilliant idea? You sure sound like him.
Re: (Score:2)
Most people do not buy PC for gaming. Those who do however typically do spend money on discreet GPU.
Make speech actually work! (Score:3)
I wish they would devote 8-10% of their resources to making their voice recognizer worth a damn. It was hilariously bad on xbox 360 and then I watched some xbox one launch parties and saw what a travesty it still was.
Re: (Score:2)
A full copy, without academic pricing or anything, (and get your checkbook ready if you need the supplements for a specific jargon set like law or medicine...) is pretty pricey; but you'd think that they'd be willing to license the same core for substantially less so long as they were assured that it would be useful only for providing voice commands to games and such,
Re: (Score:3)
There have been games that used "embedded Dragon", the PS2's SOCOM series for example, 12 years ago.
Probably related to this (Score:2)
http://www.geek.com/games/tomb... [geek.com]
I can't be bothered with either (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I've seen the improvement in graphics from my PS3 to the PS4 or XB1 just isn't enough to justify spending the money on a new console. I think like a lot of people I'll be skipping this generation and seeing what comes around in the next 5-10 years.
Re:I can't be bothered with either (Score:4, Insightful)
We're talking first gen /release day games here. Take PS3/Xbox 360 release day games and compare them to late PS2/Xbox games. It was exactly the same thing. Heck, just compare first year 360/PS2 games and compare them to new releases for those platforms. They are worlds apart. It takes developers a while to ramp up and get to know the architecture that they are writing for.
Also, waiting for the next gen console before upgrading is fine and dandy if you don't plan on playing any new console releases. Give it a couple of years and most major developers will no longer be releasing most of their titles for the previous consoles.
Considering the record sales of the new consoles, I don't think your assumption that a lot of people are going to be skipping this generation is anywhere near the truth. You still can't find Xbox Ones and PS4s on store shelves or online stock, they're selling faster than either company can produce them. There might be a very small pocket of gamers who will, but so far all indications is that most will be upgrading at some point.
Re: (Score:3)
"We're talking first gen /release day games here."
Irrelevant. Even on the first day the PS3 graphics blew the PS2 out of the water and then shot it up some more. Considering the PS4 is effectively just a PC with standard components there's no reason for it not to have blistering graphics on day 1 since game devs should already have been familiar with the hardware when preview hardware was made available (which was not the case with the PS3 and Xbox 360) and PC games libs should essentially Just Work when po
Re: (Score:2)
People have short memories: the big talking point when the 360 launched was that all the games looked like Xbox titles running in HD, or else they looked like a modest PC.
I mean, Kameo? Perfect Dark Zero? A passable port of Oblivion? These were not the games people lined up for.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know about you, but I can tell a vast difference between the quality of games that came out earlier vs. later, particularly in the same series (e.g. Halo 3 vs. Halo Reach vs. Halo 4).
Re: (Score:2)
[...] I think like a lot of people I'll be skipping this generation and seeing what comes around in the next 5-10 years.
I would expect that 5-10 years from now we'll have mirroring of our phones onto the TV screen and optional bluetooth gamepads.
Re: (Score:2)
I was kinda hoping that we'd left behind the desperate need for games to be propped up on their graphics. Can we not hope that actual good games will be released? Of course, we don't need new consoles for that either. I'm tempted to get the PS4, but I'm definitely going to wait until there's a sufficient library of games, and perhaps a version 2.0 with any niggles or bugs ironed out.
My PC is a higher spec than either console already, so I'm mostly hoping that developers just release games on more platforms,
have the money... (Score:2)
I have the money to buy an xbox one without giving it second thought.
But I just don't see a reason yet. No killer games on the xbox one. Little improvement in gameplay/graphics.
The only console I see right now with killer games (Mario 3D) is the wii u.
PC master race (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I have never seen a pc game that was custom made and optimized for my exact hardware, console games on the other hand...
Re: (Score:2)
Hardly surprising (Score:2)
I don't see Microsoft doing much different. Maybe they reserved the CPU/GPU for similar reasons and now they've figured they don't need to any more, or can wake
Because mathematically ... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why is a GRAPHICS Process Unit processing VOICE (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Probably because it's the right tool for the job.
Kind of ... (Score:2)
Kind of. It can do the job well enough that using specialized audio processing hardware is a thing for applications that have additional requirements besides "needs X GFlops for audio stuff", for example where power is a big issue (e.g. hearing aids) or where ultra-low latencies are required.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, I completely agree. And really, to defend their decision, it makes much more sense to give over 2% of your GPU to the task than adding a specialized piece of hardware which would likely increase the cost by a disproportionate amount.
Re: (Score:3)
The News here is that the Xbox is significantly crippled compared to the cheaper, less abusive opposition Sony!?
Less Abusive? What color is the sky on your planet, and are you accepting immigrants? OtherOS? Lik-Sang? Geohotz? Sony is unique in that they make Microsoft look friendly.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Too little, too late (Score:5, Interesting)
The vast majority of my time on the Xbone so far has been in the Amazon Instant Video app. It turns out that the Kinect is (or rather, could be) a great tool for occasional user input. The irritating thing about using the controller in this scenario is that it turns off after some period of inactivity (which is still long enough that your battery drains pretty quickly). So if you want to pause, or move on the next episode, you have to turn on the controller and let it sync wirelessly with the console, which takes a good 5 seconds.
Enter the Kinect.. now you can say "xbox pause" and it pauses. "Xbox play" resumes. "Xbox stop... yes... episode 6" goes to the next episode.
In theory.
The problem is, seemingly at random, one of the commands won't work. It opens up the xbox voice control screen which has some generic commands. It might say something like "Play is not available from here" or something. After many minutes of frustrating experimentation, it turns out that sometimes you have to say "select" before giving the same command that may have worked 2 minutes ago. So it's like, "xbox pause" then a few minutes later "xbox play... xbox.. xbox select.. play." That's dumb.
The other problem is the app needs to be intelligently designed for voice control. Amazon Instant Video is NOT one of these apps. The voice commands map pretty directly to the controller commands, but of course the controller is much faster than the voice recognition. A good example of where that's annoying is rewinding and fast forwarding. "Xbox rewind" starts rewinding.. at 2x speed. So if you want to skip back 30 seconds, it'll take 15 seconds to do so. That's no good. So you can say "faster" which increases the speed. Of course, it takes the xbox a second to recognize the command. If you're rewinding 10 minutes, you end up saying "faster [pause] faster [pause] faster [pause]." It's obscene sounding and it takes forever. Then you let it go for a few more seconds... and "play!" But the voice control just timed out, so it's still rewinding. "Xbox play!" and a second later it starts, but you rewound a few minutes too far. And it's too much of a bother to fast forward.
But that's mostly the app's fault, not the Kinect's.
Re: (Score:2)
But that's mostly the app's fault, not the Kinect's.
I hope that's the take-away that people are getting here.
Speech recognition isn't perfect on the One, but I do most of what you do, watching my Media Center machine as the "TV" in my One. I spend a fair deal of time saying basic commands, "Xbox Stop/Mute/Play/Turn Off," "Yes" and "No" at it, as it's fairly convenient. Most of the time, it gets it right, and rarely does it do something silly. "Stop" never deletes anything. "Pause" never records anything. The worst thing that happens is it ignores me and
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I find the kinect extremely useful on the xbox one. Not sure why you don't like it.
Re: (Score:2)
Because he's not you, and different people have different tastes.