routerbad

Thought this was good article.

 

What do you guys think?

 

http://www.destructo...on-247611.phtml

Very nice blog post.  Puts some things in perspective regarding innovation in the industry.  Every innovation can be traced back to Nintendo.  Sony's brand of innovative ideas is moar RAM.

So many farkin sooks on this site i swear, Walk outside into the real world and you will hear and see a lot worse. 

Agreed, I think a lot of people who place themselves in a minority group like that end up losing all perspective.  They start thinking that they are the only ones who ever get any kind of poor treatment, then start assuming every word coming out of everyone's mouth is directed at them, and meant as an insult.

It was a african american person saying the "N" word and thats their word not ours. However he is not gay so he can't use the "F" word.

You can't let labels and words define you, people will say what they will say, sometimes people say insensitive things.  If you are hurt by it, message shokio and ask that he refrain from using the word.  If he does, great, if he doesn't, you know to avoid his videos.

Saying that only certain groups can say certain words is a very exclusive mindset, if you expect others to be inclusive and accepting to all walks of life, you should too.  People do not own words, it is a tool used to convey a variety of messages, and anyone is allowed to use whatever words they want to that end, the choice is yours whether to express how you felt about his choice of words, to him, or to ignore his message altogether.

Well that's just a cynical view. I'm not saying there isn't a possibility the PS4 will be priced out of the market but that's not a given and to just assume that is silly. Sony are well aware of their mistake and this is indicated in the price of the Vita which could have been a lot more. They are aware they need to be careful when it comes to pricing the PS4 and whilst it will likely be more expensive then the Wii U I don't think it will be significantly.


I disagree. They are competing with Microsoft and Nintendo and that is where they stand.

I know they are competing with Nintendo and Microsoft, but Sony believe they are above competition, they have always acted this way.  The entertainment division culture is very arrogant at Sony, they don't believe anyone can touch them.

I do believe that was the whole intention of my post. The only way to make change is if more people let themselves be heard. But the average person doesn't care. Until it affects them directly, that is. It's great to be optimistic about change, but it's also a good trait to be realistic.

 

Anyway, I agree with everything else you said. I just don't like how dtrex made it seem like he was entitled to something from a company.

Agreed.  We aren't entitled to any product or service, we either accept the price and terms that the provider sets or we take our money elsewhere, simple as that.  Well, it is much more complicated than that but that's a simplistic yet mostly accurate way of looking at it.

I'm boycotting Nintendo for neglecting Metroid and F-Zero, their constant rehashing/milking of popular series and their backwards online practices.

okay

As long as it makes them money, they don't care about the minority. Companies don't care about you, they don't owe anything to you. They just want what's in your wallet. Why do people feel so entitled? When more people care and stop giving their money to those companies, then maybe something can be done. But like I said, most people don't care. It's the cold, hard truth. Learn to accept it.

It's true that companies primarily care for what's in your wallet.  The way to make them care what you want is to be scrupulous about who you open your wallet for.  If enough people vote with their wallet, the company either has to change to move inline with consumer demands or get out of the business.  That's also a cold, hard fact.  Boycotting is a powerful tool, but for it to work it needs voices, loud voices, to carry the message.  The problem is that for publishers they have their hands into every gaming genre anyway so more than likely they have a game somewhere that you actually like and want to buy.  For me in particular I've about had it with EA altogether.  I refuse to play Madden because of their shady and anti competitive licensing agreement with the NFL (I know it's legal, but since I don't agree with the practice, I choose not to buy the product).  I don't particularly enjoy any of their other IP's either, but I really want to support what Criterion are doing and i love the Battlefield series, and don't like CoD.  Those two IP's I really enjoy and would love to own on Wii U.  I will be buying NFSMWU and BF4U if it comes, however much I dislike the anticompetitive and anticonsumer tendencies of EA.

Sure believe what you want, the director has said a $500 console with current hardware running games like Crysis 3 can be on a powerfull pc is simply not possible. Yes CryEngine 3 will run on wiiU, but that doesn't mean you can run it all maxed out. Just the gpu you need to max out crysis 3 on pc will cost you over twice the total cost of a wiiU.

There is truth to this, not quite double the cost, but it does cost quite a bit to max out Crysis.  None of the consoles will see a maxed out crysis.

Yeah I would like integration with common social networks, as well as a little more functionality for the camera and mic in the gamepad, I'm sure things like that will come in due time, seeing as it's a brand new online system and partnerships with third party social networking companies take time to develop.

Wow, that really is Yoshi.

I refuse to believe that anyone in the gaming industry doesn't know who Yoshi is.

Agreed, he no doubt did his homework to make sure the pattern wasn't registered before using it.  There is absolutely no possibility, even if you aren't a Mario fan, not to know who the characters in Mario are.

I understand that. But I refuse to believe the Wii U vs PS4/720 is the same (tech wise) as the Wii vs PS3/360. That's always been my point.

No where near the same. 

Say all you want about the tech demos. I doubt the 8gb of GDDR5 is a lie. That is obviously a huge advantage.

The fact Nintendo only put in a meager 2gb of ram kinda ticks me off. Ram that is theoretically slower than XBOX 360 and PS3 ram.

Yeah no.

The Wii U GPU has 32MB of edRAM embedded on the GPU substrate itself.  That is a ridiculous amount of embedded cache and is ridiculously fast.

Also, GDDR5 is DDR3 with a higher clock and super loose timings.  This is speed over latency.  DDR3 that is in the Wii U and nextbox, DDR3, has a lower clock, lower voltage, and tighter timings.  This is latency over raw speed. This makes it really great for linear, sequential reads/writes.  GDDR5 handles larger memory swaps better, like RAM mapping textures, but isn't as great for general purpose computing, because it takes much longer for each individual memory operation to complete.

I'd say the gap must be big enough that developers ain't willing to make games for it and say the specs are weak and lack of 3rd party support. Even say the ps4 is at least twice as powerful as the wii u that's still a huge increase in performance.

How developers use the hardware is where it counts though.

That isn't that great an increase in performance.  If I went and spent $1000 on a GPU that is twice as powerful as the one in my PC right now, it would amount to probably 10-15% in game performance increase.  And really that's just frames, I can still play the same games all on max settings over 60fps.  twice the raw power means very little when the entire system is soaked in code.  Also, many devs don't have devkits yet, they didn't start getting them out until december to many of the developers who applied, like Criterion.

I don't remember, but I thought the 720p idea (of a non-demanding demo on alpha hardware no less) was simply due to screenshots that they had been given, being set at a certain resolution.

 

Perhaps it was 720p or perhaps it was 1080p.  I don't know.

 

But WHAT IS HILARIOUS is that Sony specifically mentions PS4 GAMES will NOT render at 4k resolution, but it will upscale MOVIES and playback native 4K MOVIES.

 

NOT GAMES!!!!!!!!

 

YET, when sony sounds out press screen shots of their games, guess what resolution they are... 4K... LOL

 

Case in point - http://blogs-images..../KZ4_Chase1.jpg

 

All of the game images sent to Forbes, etc. from sony are in that fake resolution.

 

That image is in 4K resolution as defined by Wikipedia as Ultra High Definition Television at 3840 x 2160 resolution.

 

not only is sony oblivious to how obviously fake that makes their press screenshots, it seems no one is reporting it either.

 

Not only was their presentation filled with target renders and who knows what (I hope to Heaven the PS4 is capable of more than what they showed...), but then they go and ADD pixels to their screenshots so that the non-discriminating public can post them in forums saying "look at how much better these are..." and it isn't even representative of the actual tech demo or target render.

 

Classic Sony.

Maybe they were actually playing a video and it had been upscaled to 4K?

True, but what we do not really know is how that compares to PowerPC.

 

I suspect even a relatively weak x86 would trounce a PowerPC.

 

Also from X-Bit:

Those are pretty major improvements over the earlier architecture IMO.

Yeah x86 and PPC are different animals, but suffice it to say that PPC Power Architecture are seen more often in supercomputers and in spcaecraft, aircraft, etc.

True, but what we do not really know is how that compares to PowerPC.

 

I suspect even a relatively weak x86 would trounce a PowerPC.

 

Also from X-Bit:

Those are pretty major improvements over the earlier architecture IMO.

Yeah x86 and PPC are different animals, but suffice it to say that PPC Power Architecture are seen more often in supercomputers and in spcaecraft, aircraft, etc.

PowerPC has stagnated though, so I would be surprised if it doesn't come close to current x86 architecture.

 

That said, what is the AMD low-power architecture based on?  Intel Atom had more in common with Pentium 3 than Core, which was very much the same generation as when PowerPC was at its peak. 

 

In fact, the laptop I am using right now is using an ultra low voltage Pentium Dual Core (based on Core 2 Duo) and it utterly trounces the best Atoms at very similar power consumption.  Low power CPUs are just such a confusing mess, as a high-end CPU can be clocked low and get better performance with the same power consumption as a dedicated low-power CPU.  That segment is generally more about cost than the best performance per watt.

 

I think many people underestimate how much difference 8GB of RAM could make.  If a developer wants to really tap the next-gen console, they will have to ignore the Wii U entirely.  The reason they got away with it for so long this generation is they held back all the innovation that greater RAM and CPU power could bring to gaming, in favour of being able to run on consoles.

 

Once we have two consoles with much more CPU power and 8GB of RAM, eventually games will start utilising that in ways that CAN'T be scaled back to less RAM or CPU power.  After all, that is the point, to get the absolute maximum you can out of the machines.  At that point Wii U is going to again miss out, as the Wii did.

 

We already see this when they release a game on home console and portables.  The portable version gets its own separate version, not a port, and generally its a steaming pile of crap in comparison.  I tried playing Lego Harry Potter on PS Vita and it completely sucked compared to the PS3/Xbox 360 version (though granted, it was ported from 3DS).

That's where hardware tessellation, hardware lighting, etc can really cut down on RAM utilization.  Add to that Wii U has a relatively massive on die cache which is unthinkably fast, which cuts down on the need to swap in and out of main RAM pools as often.  The RAM does help a lot with unoptimized code, but there are diminishing returns there as well.  The idea is to try and reduce the need for massive amounts of data sitting in RAM and letting the GPU handle some of the functions that would normally be handled with memory mapped textures.