Slashdot Mirror
On Next-Gen Consoles And Technical Innovation
Thanks to GamesRadar for reprinting an Edge feature discussing likely technical innovations which the next generation of videogame consoles may introduce. The piece discusses the impact of massively parallel computing on consoles, noting it's "...been plagued by a lack of good development tools, and with most developers taking three years even to get familiar with PlayStation 2's brace of vector units, this must be a real worry." It goes on to discuss graphical effects, from post-scene processing ("allows subtle ways of changing the look of the game in terms of brightness or colour saturation") to depth of field ("The biggest question remains whether developers will find any useful in-game applications for such technology.")
That article has to go down in the hall of fame of utterly crap EDGE articles. (Hey - it's a *big* hall...)
The author demonstrates a complete lack of understanding about consoles, and many of the techniques he talks about are possible and in use on current-generation consoles.
The concept that until the PS2, consoles had merely been a subset of the wider PC industry is laughable.
No, it seems to me that basically after the recent editorial walkout at EDGE they had a guy with practically no technical knowledge about consoles who happened to know a guy who worked at Climax, and they were desperate for content, so he wrote this bullshit article.
Of course, as with all EDGE articles, they never identify the authour, which in his case, is probably good for him.
Check this statement out: Despite the howls of anger this statement will provoke from musicians, AI specialists and physics fanatics, at the end of the day videogames are all about pretty visuals.
This was discussed here on Slashdot a week or so ago, and fortunately the statement is only partially correct. I see nothing wrong in game makers creating cool graphics, it's not like when a new game comes out to my playstation 2, I have to get the latest geforce card to get maxfps. By all means, the game makers SHOULD make use of the capabilities that lie in the graphics card.
However, there are fortunately still games that rely on a great story. Finaly Fantasy would have been half the game it is if it weren't for the story. Gameplay and challenges are also important parts of a game. That statement is nothing more than BS, like most of the article.
I've always been able to predict upcoming technologies on video cards and gaming consoles by looking at 3d modeling software like 3dstudio. New techniques you see show up there, will show up as hardware solutions some years later.
Things that are normal in 3d software now but are missing in hardware rendering are things like decent refraction, area lights, global illumination, caustics, raytracing. We can expect to see at least some of those implemented in hardware somewhere in the future.
Maybe you are thinking PC = x86 machine, the comment makes sense if you consider PC to mean simply 'Personal Computer'. Until the PS2's coprocessor-heavy architecture arrived, all consoles have been similar in architecture to personal computers - a single general purpose CPU doing all the work.
Considering the Xbox/GC as the last of the monolithic designs where clockspeed was the answer to everything, and PS2 and future consoles as multiprocessor dsp farms where memory bandwidth is the answer to everything makes a lot of sense to me.
As for the techniques mentioned being possible with current consoles, that's true - but only in the same way that the last of the Nintendo games ventured into 3-D - It's possible by clever programming pusing the envelope, but it's not what the next-gen N64 machine was designed from ther ground up to be capable of.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
What did the PS2/GC/X-Box era provide? At least when it came to new gaming experiences?
DVD-storage made it easier to make games more data-big.
That's a minor thing. The major thing, however..is that they were able to make games even more intense.
Starting with games such as Dynasty Warriors, games were able to put more enemies and more objects onto the screen than ever before. This allowed a lot of new types of game play that we never had before. As well, the processor could handle higher AI priority for this as well.
This legacy then moved on to games such as Ratchet and Clank, and Halo. That's really what the current generation provided.
As well, the processing power now allows the room to add a lot of slight graphical touches and cool things that just make one say wow. I like such cool touches. They just make a game feel so much more fleshed out.
So what will the next generation provice? Not very much. More realistic graphics (not needed, to be honest)...
Possibly the ability for advanced AI, but I'm not sure how much that's a factor of processor strength, and not of programming.
What am I looking forward to? From all the rumors I'm hearing, I'm looking forward to Nintendo's next gen, with the potential for a second 3d display on the controller itself, oh and by the way, it's a touchpad as well. That provides lots of possibilities for second displays/or lots of possible fun for multiplayer gaming.
Technical Innovation:
ABILITY TO SEE SOMETHING ELSE OTHER THAN IMPROVED GRAPHICS!!
Aggh this drives me mad! Please, please I don't care if it looks good, you only bother with it because pretty pictures market well.
[/semi-troll]
Ok maybe it is a troll but would you still mod down if it's an important point to make?
A blog I run for the wealth
In hindsight, PlayStation2 marked the transition.
*cough* The Dreamcast blew away the PS2 in graphics and innovation (at least in the beginning) so other than the use of DVDs to hold data and built in DVD player, the PS2 was nothing more than a modified PS1.
Second of all, the article misses the most important factor to note in modern games. Load times.
Ever since the PS1 load times in games have annoyed the hell out of gamers. The Dreamcast and the PS2 both outright failed to solve the issue, the Gamecube resorted to mini-discs, and the Xbox fell back on precaching large portions of the game at a time. What I really want to see (or not see) is a decrease or a removal of load times in games. Being forced to stare at a "Loading" screen is no fun. It takes me out of the game. That said, get rid of the things. I won't even pick up Final Fantasy Anthology or Chronicals because I'd rather play my SNES originals just to avoid load times.
"Yet Microsoft's decision to ditch Xbox's Wintel legacy shouldn't have been much of a surprise. There are many reasons why consoles have diverged from the Intel and AMD way of doing things. The primary reason is the general-purpose nature of the PC."
Um. He makes it sound like the XBOX suffered by using Intel. Seeing as how the XBOX is arguably the most graphically imrpessive system out this generation, I don't think he has a very strong leg to stand on here. It's not the processor that's doing the graphic grunt work, it's the NVidia chip along with it. That actually wasn't a bad move by Microsoft. Besides, once consoles get powerful enough, general purposeness isn't such a bad thing.
Eh. I guess some peeps look for failures even when they're not there.
"Derp de derp."