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I was actually excited when I first saw DirectX 10 screenshots. You actually get foliage with DirectX10, especially in the third set. (Check out the mountains in the back.) Pity that Vista's poor uptake meant nobody besides Crysis or Hellgate: London did much with with it.

DirectX 11 was even more impressive--tesselation essentially gets you a hojillion transformable polygons for free. Check out the crowd animated entirely in GPU hardware.

If you really can't tell the difference, just rejoice, quietly, that all of your gaming needs were met nine years ago. You'll never be tempted to buy a new video card for that XP rig.

not as crazy as it sounds, with CryEngine for Cinema http://www.incrysis.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=945&Itemid=1

Even though I mentioned it, you still ignore price.

In (just to pick some numbers) 2015, a game console costing $300 will have better graphics abilities than a $300 handheld, simply because non-mobile platforms don't have the same design constraints and goals that handheld platforms do.

And a $600 mobile device (which the phone carrier will subsidize down to $200) might have equivalent graphics, and save you from having to buy both.

As to speed: Yeah, sure. And, by God, I could play Crysis on my 7-year-old single-core Dell laptop, if I wanted to prove a point by doing so. But it's a far more enjoyable (and prettier) experience on my quad-core SLI desktop.

I never said there don't exist games that benefit from faster hardware. Crysis is obviously one of the most resource intensive games. And yet, you can still run it at 30+ fps on very high with a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo.

Until games become absolutely photorealistic, the machines that run them will never be fast enough, and we're obviously quite a long way from that level of perfection.

You're missing one of the considerations in game design, which is the current state of user hardware. Games get designed for the hardware that users will have. The developers aren't going to design a game that will run at 5 fps on half their customers' hardware. They could make games that are completely photorealistic today, but nobody has the hardware to run them, so they don't.

Or let's put it a different way. The XBOX360 is from 2005. The Wii is from 2006. Even if newer consoles are released over the next few years, the installed base of people who only have the existing consoles will be large enough that developers won't make a substantial number of titles that require the faster hardware until the bulk of their prospective customers actually have faster devices. A 2014 mobile device doesn't have to beat a 2014 XBOX, it only has to match a 2005 XBOX and it will be fast enough for enough recent games that plenty of people will put off buying a newer console until there are a larger number of games that require them. And then the mobile devices become part of the installed base and developers see to it that their new games run well on them.

And WTF would I want a "docking station" for, except to complicate my life? Who in the hell would want their personal telephone/pocket computer tied up playing games in the livingroom, especially if it takes extra hardware that is otherwise useless to make it worth doing?

I say "docking station" but if you prefer it could just as well be wireless.

Let me put it a different way: It's a console, perhaps made by Apple or Google, that integrates with your mobile device. There is no reason you would have to take the device out of your pocket. It doesn't stop you from using it while your kids are playing games. It doesn't stop your kids from playing games when you take your phone with you to work, because they have their own phones.

The advantage is that it has all your stuff on it. If you go to your friend's house and use his console then you still have all your music and video, all your saved games, all your user preferences, etc.

Storing it all in "the cloud" is lame. Your media would have some crap DRM that only lets you play them on a fixed number of devices to stop you sharing your cloud password with The Pirate Bay. If you have 1080p videos and you're in a place with a 10Mbps internet connection then you can't stream them from the cloud, but you could play them over wifi from a device in your pocket. If Sony's servers get hacked and Anonymous deletes all your stuff or your private files end up on Facebook, you're SOL. If you have all your stuff in the Sony cloud and you buy an XBOX, you're SOL. The cloud is hype from cloud vendors.

Open this image.

One of those images is a photograph. The other is in-game. Even odds you can't tell which is which.

Even if you can, it's not immediately apparent. Games are close enough to photo-realism that they're indistinguishable at first glance.

Unfortunately, sales figures for Crysis are hard to come by. From a simple google, 50% of the historical press releases are showing how people aren't buying it because of the heavy system requirements, the other 50% (usually released later on) are saying that sales exceeded expectations, etc. It sold over a million copies worldwide between the November it was released and the following January, according to http://www.incrysis.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=612

That's a quarter of Counterstrike's *total* sales figures within three months. One fifth of Doom's. One tenth of Half-life / Half-life 2's lifetime sales. That's pretty astounding sales if that's true. Saying piracy harmed that? That's really a stretch. Maybe it wasn't profitable even with all those sales? That's much more a business issue and cost-analysis, but saying that it didn't sell, possibly due to piracy, is really a big stretch. Bear in mind that it was universally recognised as an extremely high cost development because it *WAS* so demanding on the hardware. The Wiki pages says 1Gb of textures, 1,000,000 lines of code and 85,000 shaders. That's WAY, WAY more than predecessor "big hits" ever required. If it wasn't "competitively" profitable, this is probably due to the wrong kind of time-money investment trade-off, which was plainly visible from day one and the reason that the "Can it run Crysis?" jokes are STILL around.

"Piracy is perceived to be a sufficiently significant problem that dealing with piracy is as important as dealing with marketing, deadlines, etc. It's a core business concern."

I call bullshit. Piracy gets little mention in comparison to other things, there are few effective counter-measures and actual prosecutions are rare if not damn-near non-existent. Or, by now, each vendor would have their own hand-rolled DRM instead of just licensing Securom, etc. Spending even 10% of a games budget on DRM would see seriously stringent and complex DRM far beyond what anyone has bundled into a modern game. As it is, we get half-baked, re-re-re-re-licensed standard libraries, like slapping on a sound engine, or something similar. I would hazard a guess that licensing a game engine costs MUCH more than licensing Securom. Even a physics engine would cost a lot more. And you probably find that in-house development is orders-of-magnitude more expensive, and that's the "secret sauce" of any games development shop. The rest is just licensed libraries to save people from reinventing the wheel each time. DRM is one of those. If people are spending more than 10% of their budget on anti-piracy measures and messages, I would be flabbergasted and I would be telling them to stop pissing money away.

Piracy costs money, no doubt. It will cost a few genuine buyers no matter what people say, but to say that it's a core business concern? I doubt it. Getting the sales to even have to *WORRY* about piracy would be the best sign that your games company is doing well. How many types of DRM are there in use in major games studios at the moment? How many hand-roll their own because the console-based ones are insufficient for their needs? So long as you stop "casual" copying (i.e. not a determined person trying to make a copy), that's as far as you can go and as far as it makes sense to go. Once you get a game to the distribution stage, the rest is mostly just licensing some library to save you having to code your own, putting out scary warnings in the press and maybe following up the odd prosecution or two - I should think any large software house pays more in patent-licensing on software patents (in countries that have them) than they ever would on anti-piracy measures.

Your measles analogy would work if it weren't for the fact that we have data pre-measles (and pre-DRM) and that we have modern data about non-immunised people (and non-protected games). The fact that they *aren't* trumpeted from the

The article is skimpy on details, I got this after a bit of digging around. There are 4 primary modes of the suit
1. Strength
2. Speed
3. Armor
4. Cloak

Oh and you need $500 graphics card and Vista to run it. More details here.

Mind you... I really want to play THIS