Console thread

My roommate who isn't even a gamer told me... What a loss

 

Holy crap! No! So sad. RIP indeed.

 

Who cares! Gaming laptop's are dying off anyway. Time to hold on to your old socketed cpu and mxm gpu laptops as they are quickly becoming collectors items.

 

Clevo P75xZM/P77xZM say hi!

 

Yeah pretty much the only response from the void! Lol

 

Also I think what MSi is doing with the GT72 and GT80 is pretty epic in that they actually advertise 2 generations of upgradeability

 

We need better mobile CPU's though

 

One of the first titles that got me into gaming in general was Halo on the original Xbox. Very fond memories over the years having sunk thousands of hours into the PC version and still playing it to this day. Also playing Halo 2 over splitscreen and Xbox Live at my friend's house. Shwords (shotguns & swords) on Lockout and snipers on Ascension FTW. As influential as CoD is, Halo 2 was the first title that really took online FPS gaming to a whole new level and into the mainstream.

I miss the days when consoles could compete neck-and-neck with high-end PCs hardware wise. With the uber efficient Intel and Nvidia silicon we have nowadays, wish those days would return. It would benefit everyone except maybe M$ and $ony, maybe that's why they went with cheap slow AMD instead.

 

With what DX12 does, I don't think CPU power will matter for the near future [...being the current console generation]. An i5 quad @ 3.2GHz is this console generation's Intel dual core @ 2.4GHz.

 

Mobile CPUs aren't the problem. Thinbooks and ultrabooks are the problem (fsvo "problem"). They're so compact that there's no way to get decent airflow through them so they have to be cripplingly underclocked.

Sony Computer Entertainment bet the entire farm on Blu-ray and Cell, and then lost the high-def war to Netflix. The company is still recovering. They had to go with something relatively simple and cheap for PS3's successor because they couldn't afford anything else.

As for why Microsoft went with the same AMD Bobcat architecture for 360's successor? Probably to be able to compete with Sony on price point. Discrete CPU and GPU would have come with a significantly higher price point.

 

I don't think Sony lost the High-Def war to Netflix considering when the PS3 was being developed Netflix was still a disc-only service and the war was between Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Sony won that war. And I don't think it's a matter of they couldn't afford anything opposed to they learned their lesson that you can't sell something that costs nearly $1K to make at a $600-500 price point and hope that software licensing fee's will cover the difference. The PS3 started to turn a profit after they ripped out the cost of backwards compatibility hardware, bluray became cheaper, and the overall manufacturing cost became cheaper. I will say that the Cell architecture was the pain point for PS3 and why it only worked well specifically for PS3 exclusive content. It wasn't winning any awards with 3rd party developers, which is why this round went to x86.

Side-Story, the earlier PS3 development kits cost $10K and were notorious for failing. I can tell you there is no "greater" feeling than to be working on one when it bit the dust. Don't know what the PS4 kits cost but being on the x86 i imagine it's at a much lower price point.

 

Microsoft didn't lose. They abandoned a sinking ship in favor of streaming. Blockbuster Video went bankrupt. Netflix went whole-hog on streaming and tried to spin off (and probably sell off) the disc rental business but relented after customer backlash. Blu-ray didn't win anything; it's merely clinging to the last vestiges of the physical media ship before it sinks forever.

PowerPC is not fundamentally expensive. GameCube, Wii and WiiU use PowerPC-based processors. The bulk of PS3's early cost is Blu-ray. Sony counted on Blu-ray to pay for itself and then some, positioning PS3 as the reference Blu-ray player. Didn't happen. SCE* have been deeply in the red for most of the past 10 years as a result of that and only recently have they gotten into the black. Strong PS4 sales have helped with that.

No, it didn't. Removing the Emotion Engine chip had little to do with manufacturing costs. Emotion Engine was dirt cheap to manufacture and incorporate, and recall that they didn't remove the Graphics Synthesizer chip until several revisions later.

The real reason for removing backwards compatibility was an attempt to deter consumers from buying PS2 versions of games for play on PS3 consoles. Sony's take for PS2 games was less than their take for PS3 versions of the same games and they were losing money over it. This in turn encouraged developers to focus on PS3 versions which had higher higher royalty rates than PS2 versions.

That's how PS3 started becoming profitable.

Certainly a contributing factor. Cell is a great architecture for deterministic processing like media decoding and Monte Carlo simulations. It's terrible for branch processing like game actor expert systems and player input. It's also really hard to develop on compared to conventional architectures. It was a terrible choice for a game platform. The only reason that Sony went with Cell is as an anti-piracy mechanism. It was, and still is, impossible to emulate Cell on commodity hardware in anything remotely close to real time.

I still maintain that Sony chose Bobcat/Jaguar because it was cheap. All of Sony's previous consoles have a great deal of in-house R&D behind them. PS4 is different. It's almost entirely off the shelf parts with relatively little R&D effort or cost from Sony. It lets Sony sell PS4 at a profit.

 

I don't see physical media disappearing until there is a perfect world where ISPs don't have control over the quality of data or throttle/charge customers because of bandwidth usage. TWC still doesn't allow streaming over 1080i on Netflix or Amazon. I don't want to sound like Randy Marsh here, but there are some situations where physical media makes more sense.

 

Playing Halo 2 on the XBox 1 is still among my top gaming moments. Back in the day I'd play it 2-3 times per month at LANs with up to 4 XBoxes connected in 4-player-per-console split screen; they're rarer now, but still happen occasionally. It's no coincidence that the XBox 1 is the only console I own; Halo 2 is my favorite in the series, and while the 360 can play it, the emulation isn't quite as good as native when things get hectic. And sure, the PC version runs much smoother since it's not limited to hardware from 2001, but it isn't always feasible for everyone to have a copy of the PC version at once.

I also appreciate the non-traditional-controller games for consoles. The most recent game I bought, for any platform, was Rock Band, and there really isn't an equivalent for PC. Similar with Guitar Hero, DDR, various Wii Sports titles... they make a case for having a console as well, even if it is a generation or two out of date.

My roommate has far more consoles than I do since he grew up with consoles and only recently switched to primarily PC gaming, whereas I grew up with PCs and only recently got a console. So all told we have a Retron 3 (NES/SNES/Genesis emulator), two XBox 1's, an XBox 360, a Wii, an XBox One, a PS/2, and a GameCube. But none of them see a whole lot of action, and the One is actually the least-used of the XBoxes.