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More On PS3 and Xbox 2
News for nerds writes "The BBC has news about the next-generation game consoles, with comments from various third parties. According to Rory Armes, studio general manager of EA in Europe, they have already received the development kits from Microsoft, but not yet from Sony and Nintendo. He assumes Sony's PlayStation 3 will have a little more under the hood and be more cost-efficient than Microsoft's Xbox 2. Gerhard Florin, head of EA in Europe, remarks 'PS3 will provide graphics indistinguishable from movies.' Spider-Man 2 or Toy Story 2, that's the problem."
The PS3 is rumored to have a very fast processor
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http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/15
hack a day
Nintendo is not an American company. It is not traded on the American exchanges like Sony and Microsoft are. Press about Nintendo is not as useful to the people who actually get "gaming" news from the MSM, except to give perspective compared to Sony and Microsoft, and yes in the American market it is relatively doom and gloom for Nintendo. This is all logical and matter-of-course.
And for a little perspective on rushing things... The GBA and Xbox both came out in 2001. The NDS is already out. Nintendo is the one complaining about the pace of the console cycle. This does not make sense. I'm just saying.
Parent is mostly right.
for the last couple generations (which is when consoles went fully 3D) at the launch of a console, the games looked better than pc games. It took pcs a couple of years to catch up.
The thing is, consoles used low resolutions. 320*240 to 512*384 mostly. Even now, only a few games support 640*480. Compare this to pcs where the expected resolution is 1024x768 to 1600x1200 and you can see that consoles have been "cheating" all along.
They got away with it because TVs weren't capable of greater resolutions and the native interpolation made things look smoother (blurrier, but smoother).
With the advent of HDTVs, next-gen offerings will all have to support HDTV which means a significantly increased strain on the console engines. Will this mean PCs will catch up quicker? We'll see...
Actually, Sony has stated that the PS3 will use a blue ray drive. Whether or not it will burn remains to be seen, but I'm predicting no.
This is a common misconception. Star Wars II in digital projection had a resoltion of 1280x1024. Many graphics cards can now do this resolution with very high polygon counts without much trouble.
What really differentiates PC/console graphics and render-farm graphics is in the physics engine. The article mentions this as well. The reason Pixar films look so great is because they have very detailed physics models that do a lot of particle interactions--ruffled clothing, waving hair, splashing water, etc. The next generation consoles will have the capability to do *some* of this.
Yes, it's true PC's can't do cinema type CG rendering, but not because of the reasons you give.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
No, the development kits sent out to game developers were essentially modded G5s. Pretty much any gaming mag will have the scoop, like Game Informer.
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(^.^) INFECTED
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It's one of two "concept shots" that EA released a while back showing the estimated capabilities of next-gen systems. They also showed a fairly nice racer screenshot with a very high-poly car and trees with good-looking autumn leaves... quite impressive, assuming that they really do approximate next-gen graphics. The folks over at The Magic Box had both of them a while back, but you'll have to dig around to find them.
--- Bwah?
Heh. Looking at your first link, I think you should consider the source a little bit. This is the same guy who believes he knows how to counteract gravity and travel faster than light. So if it's all the same to you, I'll consider his "analysis" of the cell processor with a large dose of salt.
You want to punch...they gave you the power glove.
Nintendo (that is, Nintendo of America, the corporation) didn't give us the Power Glove. It was designed by Abrams Gentile Entertainment, Inc., and developed and marketed by Mattel.
Actually Nintendo released that the GC could do 6 to 12 million polygons per second when it was actually capable of 20+. They gave the real world specs for the GC.
Sony and M$ are the liars.
http://www.segatech.com/gamecube/overview/
I think Cringley's recent comments respond to your post nicely -- he says (to this effect anyway) "Would you rather have a Gateway LCD or a Sony LCD". He's speaking to the coming/rumored/inevitable sale of Sony products by Apple (and possibly vice versa); They already sell Sony cameras, for instance, so DVI displays and other hardware is the natural progression. What this says to me is that Apple wouldn't want to get in the way of SCE, they'd want to partner with it. So just like you say, Apple still stay a computer company, but partner with "Best of Breed" manufacturers to fill these other roles, like Sony.
:-)
Off topic and and only tangentially related, consider the excellent ps-one emulators available for the Mac.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
You need to stop drinking the Sony Kool-Aid. "Fundimental revolution in processor/computer design" is the sort of BS phrasing Sony has been putting out about the Cell for ages. It's the exact sort of thing I was talking about. Sony promises the moon, and delivers a processor that is pretty decent at vector calculations.
The PS2 was supposed to be a mindblowing revolution in hardware design too as I recall. The chances that the Cell processor is actually a disruptive technology seem very small at the moment.
I read the internet for the articles.
Pixel Count has next to nothing to do with movie quality rendering. Shading, Lighting, and Animation are what make movie quality rendering. Real Time Global Illumination? I don't thinks that's going to be a feature of these consoles. How about Caustic effects? Real Time Refraction? probably not. Those are some of what set a movie quality renderer apart from your 3d accelerator chipset. Not even polygon count does as much as those things to increase the realism in a rendering.
If you see spelling or grammatical errors don't blame me. I tried to preview but IE here at work borked the CSS
The pics were posted on the CNN story. http://money.cnn.com/2005/01/06/commentary/game_ov er/column_gaming/index.htm
(hope that link worked)
It has the pic of the racing game there also.
MoH
(AC)
Uhhhh...It is the Mac Mini. It has a Radeon 9200 (better than the gForce 3 in the XBox), a 1.25 GHz processor (Better than the 700 Mhz Celeron in the XBox), 256 MB of DDR RAM (better than the 64 MB of RDRAM in the XBox). For $29.99 US you can get a TV video adapter from Apple. Play flash games, shockwave games, emulate old systems, and play modern games ported to Mac (there are some). Plus, when you are done gaming, you can watch movies and listen to music. When you are done with entertainment in general, take it off the top of your TV and put a monitor and keyboard on it, and work.
Macs have been notorious for having the smallest selection of crappiest games. The only decent ones are games that are ported from PC.
I'll give you that the selection of games on the Mac is not wonderful, but you're a little off here. There have been a number of great games that started on the Mac and then moved to the PC, or in some cases never did.
Wolfenstein 3d was a mac game before there was a Windows port, and one of the first FPS games, it ruled at the time. The Marathon series were some of the best FPS ever made and were the predecessors to Halo. Marathon 2 had voice chat with your team (and teams for that matter) ages before any PC game. The plots were also way, way better than any current FPS that I have played. I know people who installed mac emulators just to play Realmz which was a RPG that let the user create their own campaigns. How about Myth? It was at one time mac only and the most popular game ever sold (overtaken by the sims). Escape Velocity is a simple, but very fun space shoot em up that was on the mac for years before a pc port arrived. I'm sure there are plenty more.
The Mac is not the best gaming platform in the world, but most of the good titles make it to the Mac and it has some gems all it's own. Characterizing the games as crappy is way off base.
Halo was orignally a Mac game, meant to showcase OSX, before Microsoft bought Bungie.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Thats a difference that simply fades away over time, a ten your old renderfarm can't really do much more then a PC from today. Sure a PC can't do exactly what the renderfarm can, but thanks to better algorithms it can get results extremly close to that of the renderfarm with much less wasted CPU/GPU (no need to render hundreds of polygons when a single one with normal or parallaxmapping will do). PC also don't need to do renderings at cinema useable resolutions which reduces the work they need to do even more. If you compare the ten year old Toy Story with todays Doom3 there really is not much difference when it comes to the rendering quality, a little to less polys here and a unsharp texture there, but thats something that will quickly disappear in the next years. Beside from that, such issues are exactly my point, in a movie a blury texture doesn't matter, you simply don't move the camera close enough so that the viewer notices, in a game players will stick there noise into the wall, so even if the PC renders better then the movie, the results will be worse. Interactivity ruins the results today far more then the rendering power.
I rarely do this on Slashdot, but I'm calling pure BULLSHIT on this one.
The interactive documentation built into Xcode is a pure delight. Double-click on a Cocoa/Carbon/QuickTime/Java method or function call and you get an instant lookup to extremely comprehensive documentation.
Every method in the class, full description of all params, cross-referencing to related methods, historical notes on version compatibility.
As to its highly organized and fully up to date web site documentation: Apple *uses* Google for its web site searches. It is fast and efficient.
Google does index Apple dev. I've many times found links to just the right posting in an Apple hosted Cocoa/Carbon/OpenGL mailing list or other article simply by entering the function name in the Google search box.
In short, you simply don't know what you are talking about. Maybe you're just innocently ignorant, but I really don't know what people like you gain from contributing such misinformation. You've made at least one Mac OS X developer mighty annoyed at the fiction you're trying to spread.
The fact that you've been moderated +5 Interesting shows that the people who have mod points today are as clueless as you. Don't think I'll bother to read any more of /. today.