Slashdot Mirror
Next-Gen Console Wars Will Soon Begin In Earnest
When the Wii U was released at the end of last year, Nintendo got a head-start on the long-awaited new generation of video game consoles. Now, Sony has announced a press conference for February 20th that is expected to unveil the PlayStation 4, codenamed 'Orbis.' This will precede the announcement of the Xbox 360's successor, codenamed 'Durango,' but that too will likely be announced by E3 in June. Specs for development kits of both systems have leaked widely. The two systems both use 8-core AMD chips clocked around 1.6 GHz. Durango has 8GB of DDR3 RAM, while Orbis has 4GB of GDDR5 RAM, though Sony is trying to push that up to 8GB for the console's final spec. Reports also suggest Sony is tinkering with its controller design, going so far as to add a "Share" button to let people exchange screenshots and recordings. Developers indicate the systems are very close in power, though Sony's system currently has an edge. With the upcoming announcement of the PS4, the big-three console makers will kick off a new round of direct competition. They'll maneuver to one-up each other with the most powerful hardware and the slickest software. However, they'll also hope the release of three major consoles in rapid succession will help to anchor a part of the games industry that no longer enjoys the dominance it once did, thanks to threats from mobile.
Somewhere, a Nintendo exec is opening a bottle of Jack Daniels to pour a toast to the one year they had a current gen console.
But seriously, any word on the optical drives for the new consoles? I imagine Sony will stick to a blu-ray drive (I just hope they lose the bluetooth remote and include an IR sensor this time). But will MS swallow their pride and go bluray (widely viewed as a Sony technology), or develop some proprietary optical drive, or use some sort of SSD-type technology--or take the REALLY bold, and risky, step of going download only? I think they would be better off swallowing their pride and going blu-ray myself. But, then again, I say that as someone who has a lot of blu-ray movies and who would really like one console to watch all my stuff instead of several.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Starting the launch with Mario Sequel 58, Zelda Remake number 14, Halo 5, and who can forget Final Fantasy XIV - II: Offline Edition?
Nintendo had crappy sales of the WiiU and the 3DS and so MS and Sony probably smell blood
announce their new consoles now to keep people from buying a Wii U. not like there are much games for the Wii U anyway. most of the good ones are still months away
Dev consoles have better specs than the actual consoles, because they need to run unoptomised debugging code..
X86-64? cpus? will they be able to run linux or a full windows desktop?
Now a nice to have will be some kind of cable card / tru2way / allvid system as well.
The winner will be decided by which one will allow "install another OS". We can trust that this time, Sony would mean it.
Meh
My Feelings
It seems to me if these things are going to be running powerhouse next gen games, then they are going to really have to optimize these games to be multithreaded. Hell my Galaxy Note II runs with a 4 core processor at this speed. Perhaps I'm out of line, but I would have expected at least a *slightly* higher clock speed.??
After all the shit Sony has pulled, who's gonna buy something new from them? Seriously their list of customer abuse is long...
Time to let Sony die.
err what was the submitter smoking when they wrote that - no way that the marquee games like halo ME3 etc are going to face any threat from mobile any time son
It's a PS2 with a tablet forcibly inserted.
Well considering both the PS2 was/is and PS3 was/is (depending on which firmware it has) quite capable of running Linux, I would say yes.
The Android concolelets, like the Ouya, could be about to upend the whole thing. It's just one more consequence of the "good enough" being embraced by both gamers and the industry. Nintendo was in this space before, and they'll definitely have to compete with Ouya, Gamestick and the sea of nameless Chinese manufacturers of Android mini PCs. The heavy games, those that needs tons of storage, CPU and GPU power will still be around, of course, not everyone who bought an Xbox was playing those. Problem (for MS and Sony) is, there's a new kid in town who wants to eat up some of that (the heavy gamer) marketshare: Valve.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Microsoft's Durango will probably run some Windows 8 variant. Sony's Orbis is rumored to run Linux.
"Sony has announced a press conference for February 20th that is expected to unveil the PlayStation 4,"
I think the moron who wrote this meant to say "in which it is expected they will unveil".
Cretin.
I honestly would not be shocked if MS did not include a Blu ray, and instead kept pushing digital downloads and more local storage. BR is not the must have next step DVD was comming from VHS. Im not trying to hate on Blu ray I have 2 players one on main computer and one for the master tv room, and I use them very seldom. The movies are more expensive and if its not a AA++ blockbuster made within the last decade your not really getting much of a difference picture wise. I guess as far as a game console goes I would just assume opt for bigger storage and install/uninstall the games im currently playing if im too lazy to swap the disk out (usually just once) during gameplay. If excluding a BR drive knocks a hundred bucks off the model price I would just go with that, the incentive for blu ray just is not good enough in hindsight. (Does anyone think BR takes forever to load? Both my drives take much longer to load then dvd, and they have decent read speeds. I find myself using the xbox dvd drive and only use BR for...well just blu rays...all 10 of the ones I own...)
That doesn't really seem like a revolution; just a new competitor making headway into the same old space. The revolution would be if NONE of the next gen consoles sell well because all but the hardest of the hardcore are too busy playing Cut the Rope on their iPads to bother purchasing a console at all.
#DeleteChrome
my own game rig has 32 gb
and as far as video if i want i can toss in a nvidia sinlge 8GB card
and guess what i can upgrade.
And can render half a trillion fully-effects-processed polys per frame at 128 frames per second. The little plastic dual-thumb controller still means that the speed at which I turn and aim is capped, so it's not possible to play online with PCs without even the very worst PC players stomping all over the very best console players, but at least it looks nice.
I have been playing the wii up to now. I am actually interested in the Wii U. But the price is just too high for me to get it.
370 bucks for a gaming system with one game. Then each subsequent game is $60 new, $50 preowned. I am going to pass on that.
For comparison the wii launched at $250 and games were less than $50. 20% jack up in 7 years is too much. according to [1], inflation since the wii launch is only 14%. So definitely, the price rose.
[1] http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
fts: "Reports also suggest Sony is tinkering with its controller design, going so far as to add a "Share" button to let people exchange screenshots and recordings."
Does a controller really need to be wasting space on a ridiculous "share" button? It needs to focus on being comfortable (in size and shape) and positioning as many controls relevant to PLAYING the games> in easy to access configurations.
Putting a "share" button on a console controller is the equivalent of when keyboard makers thought everyone needed "Email", "WWW", and other program specific buttons on their keyboards. Notice how you don't see those much anymore? That's because they were pointless, and so is a "Share" button. Button space on a controller is premium space and doesn't need to be wasted on "fluff".
The Xbox, Durango or whatever, supposedly will also double as a Steam Box to break into the market for Valve and offer double your money for MS. Discreet Steam Boxes will come later after the hardware prices fall and Valve can get an acceptable level of playability out of it. Valve can't compete on price at the moment (or power if price is matched) so they'll break in then ween off. Maybe. Now we see why Apple TV and not next gen consoles were Valve's biggest worry.
My concern is primarily compatibility. We've got a good sized collection of games -- far more dollars invested there than in the consoles -- and if the new hotness won't play them, it's not coming to my shelves.
Not sure how to deal with the lies: XBox 360 claimed they would implement compatibility via downloads; then they didn't produce the downloads for the best games (the Mechassault series for one example.)
Then there is "the cheapening": The PS3 (original) came with PS2 hardware, and that really worked pretty well. Then they took that out. Which doesn't work for me, but I do have the original version. Sadly, only replaceable via EBay now because the newer PS3's stripped that out.
So PS4, XBoxXXX... going to wait and see if they obsolete my game library, and if they do, pffft. If they don't, will wait at least a little and see if the compatibility is decent.
Really not very happy with these companies.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I think that the new steam (Linux) box by Valve will grab a significant market share. Why? because it will be much more customizable, AND run current PC games.
..........FULL STOP.
More interestingly, how are they going to keep it cool without noise? People are used to PCs that whirr, they are less forgiving of consoles.
I thought that playstation traditionaly ran a modafied free or net Bsd wonder why they would break with there old kernal
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
You are aware that AMD's current CPUs are bigger, hotter and slower than Intel's, right? I'd guess AMD gave them a better deal because they need the money.
Have you used an Xbox360? Quiet, it isn't.
Oh FFS. That reeks of cluelessness and desperation.
Sony, sure enough.
It's funny... we hear "after the PSN fiasco, I won't trust Sony with my dirty underpants, much less buy their next console. Fuck Sony."
"After 6 consoles, damnit, I'm not giving Microsoft a dime since they can't be bothered to make decent, reliable hardware. Fuck Microsoft."
and then.... "new specs are leaked......."
SHINY! ME want!!!
Typical. :)
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
You forgot cheaper. :) That's why I buy them. :)
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Why? because it will be much more customizable,
No one gives a crap....gamers want to play games only Slashdot nerds have that kind of fetish for customization.
AND run current PC games.
No, it doesn't. Check the list of Linux compatible games on Steam, it's very short. Sure if you want to play Team Fortress and a few indie stuff then you're in luck, but if you want to play native Linux versions of stuff like WoW or STO, or Skyrim, or XCOM, then you're screwed.
Wow, the PS4 is going to run Commodore's 8-bit OS?
AMD's integrated GPU are far more capable than Intel's. If you haven't noticed already that all current gen and next gen game consoles already have AMD parts. Intel CPU was only used on the original Xbox and no where else.
On modern games, GPU rather than the CPU has increasing becomes the bottleneck. AMD can deliver a SoC solution like their APU line with integrated CPU + GPU for game console for cost reasons and overall system level performance.
My hardware purchases are driven by the games I want to play. I'll not be buying the next Play Station because because Sony killed the PS version of the Everquest franchise. I'll be upgrading my PC for Everquest Next.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
The rumour is that the PS4 will actually use linux as the backend OS for the developers, might be bullshit but could be interesting.
Just told my bro, who owns a 360, to get ready to shell out some dough for a new Xbox. He gave me a dirty look and said he's finished with Microsoft consoles because of, quote: "They Nickel and Dime me to death".
As for me, I'm very content with the Ouya and my Linux desktop. Gaming doesn't have to mean $600 for a console, plus subscription, plus $70 games. That's outrageous, for me at least.
I would assume that the "share button" is sony's attempt to put a social media component into their platform. Maybe one of of you younger guys can explain the draw, because I surely do not get it.
Why do so many games try to push a social media component. Like DIRT3 for example. I it constantly asking me to share a video on youtube. Why?? Why would anyone want to watch a video of me playing a game like it is some kind of real life event? I sure as heck have no desire to watch other folks play a game.
Sure, I love to play MMORPG's and the like, but for the love of god, stop trying to get me to post that shit on facebook or youtube. How about spend time creating a compelling gaming experience rather than an extension of your marketing machine.
AMD also come with integrated graphics that don't suck, I think you'll find that's been the deciding factor....
That is bad luck for you. I had an xbox 360 for a while, and I actually never had a single issue with it. I did sell it after a while though to go back to PC gaming. ;)
Seeing as that you have had 5 replacements, it seem the customer service is doing well. Also, are you sure you are doing it right if you broke 5 boxes?
Combining the openness of Android with the user experience of a traditional console is pretty revolutionary. Both users and devs no longer being bound to the chains of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft could have a transformative effect on the industry.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
"Next-Gen console wars will soon begin in Earnest"
This is going to hurt Earnest!
Keep dreaming.
Microsoft's console will just be another Xbox 360 variant, while Sony's will be another PS1/2/3 variant. They've changed CPU architectures every time, so there's no backwards compatibility with any previous games, and the only reason the PS2 could play PS1 games was because it had the hardware of the ps1 in it. The original PS3's had the PS2 hardware in it. Don't expect the PS4 to have a the last 3 processors in it, that would raise the cost.
No what we are going to see is the same kind of emulation that goes on on the PC, in software.
The PS3 could run PPC linux, but it was crippled and not terribly useful.
Because some nerd on the internet wants it to happen.
TL;DR
Reason : Yet another Awful Macro Devices shill piece.
"Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and (likely) Valve are AMD houses. Apple is about to drop Intel big-time, as its entire computer product range swaps to ARM."
Do your homework. Apple will not be switching from Intel anytime soon, as that will mean falling behind by 3 years, again. The ARM parts are nowhere near performance parity with an Intel chip. Hell if AMD is having problems with this, what makes you think anyone else isn't?
What we have are two different dynamics in play. The power-saving ARM parts are increasingly being found in devices that need to last all day, and aren't always engaged in wait loops, which is what most games do. The Intel x86-64 parts meanwhile are perfectly fine doing wait-loops, but at the expense of not using 50-75%-87.5% of the CPU.
I don't need a new console (I have an xbox 360). What I need is more *games* for it.
I don't exactly know and am honestly too drunk and lazy to google it, but if memory serves me right, the time between console announcement and actual appearance on the market seemed to be pretty long, so i think we look at 2014/2015.
Plus i think it is entirely possible that the announcements (NOT the actual market releases) are made a bit earlier this time to get people to diss the Wii U and wait for the "big thing"
Reports I've seen are that there will not be compatibility with PS3 games, so the PS3 library is lost to consumers who buy into the PS4.
Without backward compatibility Sony may as well forget launching. Not enough 1st party titles to justify it for consumers.
The new AMD chips ARE basically 8 core. Where the confusion comes in is: They're not 8FPU. They're 4 FPU with 'lower' resolution modes splittable across both cores of a module. IE if you compared them to pre-FPU hardware or integer only processing they should come out comparable. But most of the multicore benchmarks are focused on FPU performance, usually for encoding and such.
Given that the consoles primarily push the FPU related tasks to the GPU and mostly use the CPUs for logic related stuff it probably won't affect real world performance nearly as much as benchmark performance.
I say this as someone who is probably going to skip the AM3+ generation of processors however. Unless of course I need a 4+ GHz rig for PCSX2 emulation (A strong possibility.)
Personally, Consoles are dead to me. I'm tired of these gimmicky neutered PCs. You can't upgrade them, so their cycles drag on for multiples of actual hardware (moore's) cycles, ignoring exponential advancements and holding back the industry of games. These console specs are already shittier than a budget PC build I did for $500 today. When they're released a similar spec'd PC might be $300 or less, or even doable in a laptop. With a PC you can add on another GPU via Crossfire/SLI or hell even just more RAM for a relatively cheap and simple upgrade path -- Just ensure the PSU is big enough from the outset. Hell, AMD APUs eliminate huge RAM to GPU memory bandwidth burdens, and have "dual graphics" tech where you don't have to disable onboard GPU, it can assist the discrete GPU like crossfire, giving a really cheap upgrade path.
The thing is, it takes a lot of money to re-engineer assets (add more vertices & re-rig meshes, re-test animation & key to audio, re-bake bump-maps, ect). So, shittier non-upgradable neutered PCs, i.e. consoles, are harming the games industry. Hardly anyone is making games that push the potential of even mid-range PCs nowadays because that means re-engineering and re-making everything just to dumb it down enough to run on consoles, which much like Windows, you pretty much forced to support because you can't ignore their market share. Those side-by-side Console vs PC videos are pointless, the only thing that's different are the particle counts and shaders -- The assets are the same, even though the PC has TONS more memory, so you could have at least twice the polygons in a scene, you don't get that detail because the game assets are designed to run on the shite console hardware in addition to PCs (if at all).
Not to mention the amazing stuff you can do in real-time with atomic physics, voxels with marching cubes, fluid dynamics, offloaded to powerful GPUs -- Fully destructible down to the inch worlds, smoothed by geometry shaders so it doesn't look like small scale minecraft & optimized by sparse octrees. Materials can be SOLID, not hollow. The chunks you can take out of walls show the cross section of the brick & mortar, or wires and pipes and insulation, etc, not-pre-baked breakable sections. Shoot bullets through a door and see rays of light beaming from the holes into the dark hallway, zoom in and peek through holes... Weaken the door by the latch then shoulder ram it. No need for pre-scripted play paths, let players make their own way in. Pour acid on materials that dissolve at different rates, fire burns just the wood of a structure -- fires burning INSIDE walls, thermal vision showing precise heat maps, where a player leaned against a cold wall momentarily. This is only a small sample of what's capable on mid-range PC hardware that we're missing out on because of the damn Neutered Consoles! It's not just realism that suffers, entire game worlds with crazy new mechanics that eat tons of RAM to compute also suffer.
You know that terribad AI that your digital foes exhibit in games? PCs have an abundance of RAM and CPU to use, we could have much more advanced AI except that on consoles the AI budget is 1% to 2% of resources because everything has to go into graphics just to compete with mid to low-end PCs, and games would require all new level game logic and testing paths for the different platforms (to dumb it down for Consoles).
As a small developer, Fuck Consoles. They're dead to me now. The publishing system sucks, it's overpriced, no user generated content, vastly different APIs to adapt engines to for maximum vendor lock-in, when we just need a standardized cross platform API like OpenGL. Devs want and need you to be able to play your game on whatever hardware you want. Console makers hate your freedom, they want to make it as hard as possible to get you the games on every system, esp. for PCs, and they do everything they can, even bribe devs with hundreds of millions just to get exclusivity rights for a title -- Conso
Where does it say x86-64? Sure it's not AMD's new 64-bit ARM CPUs they're talking about?
More interestingly, how are they going to keep it cool without noise? People are used to PCs that whirr, they are less forgiving of consoles.
I just build a new i7 system using Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO CPU fan and COUGAR CF-V12HB Vortex Hydro-Dynamic-Bearing (Fluid) case fans and SSD drives. It is almost whisper quiet with 5 case fans and the CPU fan. The blu-ray drive makes more noise than the fans. The point is, they can make it quiet if they want to. The technology is available.
just hook your PC [running Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X] up to your TV and use a wireless controller, it's cheaper
Until you find that you have to buy two PCs and two copies of the game because unlike the console version, the PC version doesn't support split screen.
I love making & playing games. It's my new favourite art-form. [...] As a small developer, Fuck Consoles. They're dead to me now. The publishing system sucks
The publishing system was put in place in the mid-1980s to reassure retailers and game buyers that games wouldn't be the sort of absolute crap that me-too developers were putting out for Atari 2600 in 1983 and 1984. It is intended to sort the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats, those with talent from those without, etc. As 140Mandak262Jamuna wrote: "it is better for millions of people who have no talent to stop creating content and reducing the signal-to-noise ratio in the contetnt [sic] universe."
Couple of examples of Tegra3 / android games
I agree that Tegra 3 graphics look great. But how do mobile games not based on pointing actions control with just a flat sheet of glass and a tilt sensor as an input device? I can see a first- or third-person shooter mapping movement speed to the distance between the thumb's initial position and its current position and aiming to swipes in the right half (like a laptop's trackpad). But for those gamers who aren't big fans of M rated games, how would a platformer like Mario or Mega Man be controlled, where the player needs jump and fire actions always accessible? I tried playing in an emulator, but my fingers kept missing the on-screen A and B buttons because my eyes were focused on the action in the middle. And no, I don't think people are necessarily going to want to have to buy a $62 Bluetooth iControlPad to play a $5 game.
I imagine some share actions would require out-of-band exchange of friend identifiers, the way multiplayer on Nintendo systems has worked since 2005.
Otherwise, I'm sicking to my android phone, my MHL adapter, and my SixAxis gamepad.
Did your Android phone get upgraded to Android 4.2? I'm told the Bluetooth stack change in 4.2 broke SIXAXIS controller support for quite a while.
No, it doesn't. Check the list of Linux compatible games on Steam, it's very short. Sure if you want to play Team Fortress and a few indie stuff then you're in luck, but if you want to play native Linux versions of stuff like WoW or STO, or Skyrim, or XCOM, then you're screwed.
Of course the list is short, Steam for Linux just got announced and even the client is still in beta.
available but not inexpensive enough for a console... sadly
I bet your PC isn't shoved into a console sized box either. They don't have room for six fans, so the fans have to spin faster, louder, etc. Not to mention the overall restricted airflow.
Well, I just build an I7 3770 (not a K) with 16gb 1600mhz kingston and I'm running it without fans at all using an open case and at 25C.
The technology isn't just available. It's been there for some time now.
Why not stick 16 or 32 GB in it, if you use 8GB dimms it is cheap. Will be even cheaper by the time the thing is released.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
It does not matter who are in the business and which is the best for who and when. We just need the choices and competition.
which still plays everything at fullscreen and maximum shiniez - Saint's Row 3, Skyrim, Max Payne 3, Borderlands 2 - all look utterly amazing. Only two glitches on install - Rage, which required the special magic Catalyst drivers, and Psychonauts through the Humble Bundle which turned out to be a corrupt installer. 4 TB of HD space means all my movies are on the system and shareable with the 360s in the house through TVersity. 360 wired controller plugs straight into front USB port for racing games. It wasn't cheap, but it wasn't frighteningly expensive - it wasn't absolute cutting-edge hardware, it was the best bang-for-buck I could get at the time.
So if I could build a machine with this power 2 years ago, why are the front-runners in the industry only just getting round to it now? Are they always going to be behind the curve, because they're having to homogenise the hardware? By the time they've finalised the design, got the devkits out to the software houses, and prepped the factories for production of the final unit, are they're always going to be x amount of time behind the leading edge?
Maybe they're just counting on the fact that the bulk of console gamers will be impressed by 1920x1080 at 60fps.
As excited as I am for the next round of consoles to come out, I also am dreading it. As a relatively poor college student, I can only imagine being able to afford one of the consoles. I'm really hoping the capabilities of the hardware is close enough so I can focus my choice solely on the software. After choosing a Dreamcast as a child, choosing one system will never be the same.
Or can you show statistics that gaming HTPCs have become popular, as opposed to an extreme niche?
I do this.
That makes you one out of seven billion. One out of seven billion is not a market. Even 150,000 as FunkSoulBrother surmised three years ago isn't a market compared to 25 million consoles. There have to be a critical mass of HTPC owners before major PC game developers will spend the time=money to add features to their PC games to target HTPC owners, and it appears some people are dead set against setting up an HTPC.
Wonder if I could do Game cube to? I never looked into it.
To play your GameCube game discs in Dolphin, you'd first need a homebrew-enabled Wii console to dump your games. I've read that most PC DVD-ROM drives can't read the sector format used by GameCube and Wii discs, which differs slightly from DVD.
no one is using cartridges for new games.
Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, and PlayStation Vita use cartridges. Sony tried discs in PSP, but it added too much weight and dragged down the battery life.
The publishing system was put in place in the mid-1980s to reassure retailers and game buyers that games wouldn't be the sort of absolute crap that me-too developers were putting out for Atari 2600 in 1983 and 1984
Too bad that idea failed so miserably.
It would have been worse without the lockout chip. Tengen and Codemasters were the only unlicensed studios that really knew their stuff. Everyone else's unlicensed games for the NES ended up rougher than licensed games released around the same time frame. Imagine if the NES were dominated by games comparable to Bible Adventures or (God help me) Action 52.
Whichever is the better media center will probably be the winner. I wish one of them would have a cable card slot and lease the UbuntuTV or TIVO interface for live TV and DVR...
I think Nintendo 'ruined the soup' so to speak with the Wii U. They had a product that worked, that sold, that made them money. I dislike it personally but the Wii was a good seller for Nintendo for years. It was not however, on par with the PS3 or 360. With the Wii U, Nintendo has just crawled into the HD era and just barely. They were 6 years late to the party and it seems from some sources that it can't quite keep up with those devices.
On top of that, Nintendo felt the need to completely change the interface while keeping the old wands optional but not included. We all know how optional accessories go down in history ...
Now we have Microsoft and Sony dropping in hardware that will make their own previous consoles look slow and underpowered with games that try their best to show off those new capabilities, and I'm quite certain that where Uncharted 1-3 made the Wii look like a toy, Uncharted 4 will do the same again.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
mmm, both the PS3 and xbox 360 were pretty noisy at the start of this generation, people still bought them and they gradually got quieter as the generation went on.
What gets me with my PS3 (a 40GB UK model) is it seems to have two noise levels, too quiet to notice while playing and sounding like someone is hoovering in the next room. It switches between these noise levels periodically while playing.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
A master cooler with a cougar and lube. WTF are PC companies smoking these days?
You are aware that AMD's current CPUs are bigger, hotter and slower than Intel's, right? I'd guess AMD gave them a better deal because they need the money.
Troll Much?
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
It's called Orbis because the price will be measured in orbits.
This time around though Lex Luthor won't be here to save us.
neither major video game publishers nor the general public have caught on that a PC can be connected to any flat HDTV.
Have you got any data to support that assertion?
As Raymond Wolfinger pointed out: "the plural of anecdote is data." One is that Mortal Kombat (2011) isn't ported to PCs, nor are most other games in that genre. In fact, the only fighting game series I'm aware of that sees regular PC ports is Street Fighter. See also comments by kamapuaa, FunkSoulBrother, CronoCloud (again), and several more dismissing the likelihood of the public adopting home theater PCs as a viable alternative to traditional set-top consoles.
ANY PC can be plugged into a TV in seconds now, HDMI is pretty much everywhere.
Except on pre-2007 TVs that are still in use. Three households in my (family-wide, nonscientific) survey sample do not have an HDTV in the living room. Two have an SDTV; another has an earlier CRT projection monitor with 1080i component input that was purchased along with the house.
geeks has cards that fit any budget
But first you need to build a desktop PC to plug the card into, and this PC has to look good next to the TV as opposed to the standard 8" or 200 mm wide office tower. "I already have one PC; why should I buy another?"
with the hardware being cheap and plentiful a lot of folks are catching on that it isn't a big deal to just plug straight into the PC.
The hardware is not as cheap as a seventh-generation console quite yet: "I'm not putting together a living room PC rig just for one game, and I'm not lugging my desktop between rooms or stringing destructive ground-loop-ridden HDMI cables around the house so I can play a game on my PC on my [big TV] in my living room." --adolf
all I have to do at the shop is show them how Windows Media Center has all my ripped movies in a nice easy to flip through library with box art and synopsis
In my country, we have a concept of secondary liability through "inducement", where ripping videos is a crime and/or tort and demonstrating the use of ripped videos is demonstrating a crime and/or tort. The big nationally-known chains that sell PCs and home entertainment products aren't going to demonstrate something unless it's unquestionably legal. So what steps should I take to help this movement spread out of your shop?
and follow it up with firing up Just Cause II or Batman AC and letting them see how smooth they look and its "Hey I want MY PC to do that!"
That or they'll walk away with the impression "PCs are for violent games and consoles are for the E or E10+ rated games that my kids can stomach."
Ultimately, I believe that open set-top devices such as HTPC are the optimal long-term solution, and I've been collecting arguments on both sides for years on my pages about the debate (HTPC in general and HTPC gaming). But I feel that if I don't play devil's advocate, and I instead express my true belief, the randoms tend to either moderate my pro-HTPC posts down as Overrated (when they have mod points) or make more anti-HTPC posts (when they don't). By parading the anti-HTPC randoms' arguments, I'm trying to encourage HTPC supporters to reply with their strongest counter-arguments. Arguments about the pros and cons of HTPCs appear more useful to me than ad-homs like "the people making the arguments against HTPCs are random Internet users". Perhaps more reliable statistics will appear by the end of this year once Ouya comes out and Big Picture has a chance to gain users.