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.")
What the hell are you talking about? All consoles predating the XBox and Gamecube were co-processor-heavy architechtures, with slow main CPUs, fast/feature-full graphical sub-systems and dedicated sound CPUs. The PS2, with his many co-processors, is not much different from a SNES, which had a puny 3.5 MHz CPU, a co-processor dedicated to sound decompression and tracking, and a complex set of logic chips that took care of (at that time) complex graphical operations like scrolling layers, alpha effects and rotation/scaling.
>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.
Only if your definition of "all consoles" is "Nintendo consoles."
Sega Genesis: 68000 + Z80 (see here) The 32X bolted another processor on the top, etc.
Atari Jaguar: 5 processors in 3 chips, including a 68000 (see here
Sega Saturn: Dual SH2 main processors + SH1 + 2 graphics chips, etc. (Counted as 8 processors here/a)
The PS2's multichip architecture is probably closest (ironically) to the Saturn, while the Dreamcast is much closer to the PS1.
How about do what Metroid Prime did on the 'Cube? It avoided load times by loading rooms as you passed through the doors (actually, as you shot the doors to open them). From the user's perspective, zero load time.
--- Bwah?
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