Nooo, do the math. Fine I'll do it for you. If you bought a PS2 in November 2000 for $300, that's $5 per month going to today. If you bought a PS2 in May 2002 for $200, that's $4.65 per month If you bought a PS2 in May 2003 for $179, that's $5.77 per month If you bought a PS2 in May 2004 for $150, that's $7.89 per month going to today.
Yes you'll get to keep playing the PS2 after today, but the newest systems have the "hottest" games. Anyway, the most bang for the buck is if you'd paid $200.
Likewise you should not buy a 360 this Christmas. However in a year or two when the price drops by a hundred bucks that would probably be the best deal for getting to play the newest, best looking games for the least money per month.
Which makes sense except that the PS2 dropped from $179 to $149 way back on May 11th, 2004. You could've been enjoying it for a year and a half now. If you'd been willing to pay another $50, it dropped to $199 back on May 14th, 2002. That's 3 and a half years ago.
Basically I'm sure you had your reasons and things going on to keep you busy, but there's a limit to the depths of frugality that make sense. If I still had time for PC gaming, I wouldn't spend $500 to upgrade my video card, nor even $300. The best bang for the buck is still for $150-200. New cards drop to that price after less than a year. Presently yeah I could save 20-50 bucks and get a GeForce 6600 instead of a 6800, but I'd lose a third of the performance without saving a third of my dollars.
Some developers took advantage of the xbox's greater power and made better looking versions of games that also came out on the PS2. It seems like those developers would appreciate the more powerful system and therefore MS would be doing themselves a disservice; particularly if the PS3 has more bandwidth.
Read it again. The actual FPS increase was 2-3x using a 4200 and 6800, insted of a GF3 and 7800, and while using the same CPU for both GPUs. Factor those in and it's more like 4-8x.
Now I know both CPUs aren't made by Intel, but clock for clock the PPC is supposed to be faster than than the P4. Furthermore, take any benchmark and a 3.2GHz P4 or PPC will be at least 3x as fast as a 733MHz P3. Photoshop filters, mp3 compression, AI routines, it will be 3x or faster. Not 2x. I can find pages on the net for this too.
You do realize the $50 you'll save will only buy you between 1 and 5 games right? Probably 2 or 3 really good ones, or 1 new release. What have you been playing all this time instead?
I'm being conservative with the CPU. Compare the 733MHz to the 3.6GHz in almost any benchmark, and the 3.6 will be at least 3 times as fast. But I didn't claim the 3 cores would make it 9 times as fast.
Now I found some benchmarks for those games tested with cards from a GF4200 to a 6800. Keep in mind that the GF3 was even slower and paired with a 733 chip, not the latest and greatest. Also remember that the 7800 can do twice as many frames as the 6800. So just from the benchmarks alone, the 6800 on Farcry get 83fps at 1024x768, and the 4200 gets 34.5 at 800x600.
I'm not sure we've agreed to this, but I consider the increase in resolution and effects a hard to quantify increase in power. So the fact that the 360 can take an xbox scene and render it in HD with new effects and still get at least 3x the frames makes it 8x as powerful.
For Doom 3 a 6800 Ultra Extreme at 1024x768 High quality gets 100.2fps. A GF4200 Ti at 640x480 Medium quality gets 36.7fps
So taking these fps's and doubling for the 7800, then doubling again because the GF3 was half as powerful, and that appears to show that even with increasing the resolution and effects, the 7800 is 8x as powerful. This still doesn't consider how much worse the fps's would have been with a 733MHz chip.
So if the PC can do 8x better at high res, why can't the 360? If memory bandwidth really is such a bottleneck, what was MS thinking?
So you're saying Microsoft doesn't need to get as many consoles into living rooms as possible to sell software and gain market share from Sony? The PS3 comes out next year, in 2006.
There's no point bringing emulated xbox titles into this since the 360 is spending so much power just translating the game. Drive speeds also don't matter much once data is loaded into RAM. For memory bandwidth, the xbox has 6.4GB/s, and the 360 has 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth, 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM, 21.6 GB/s frontside bus. So that's almost 4x.
You are correct that at 1280x720 the 360 may not be able to render 8x as many polygons compared to 640x480. However since the card has been optimized for 720p rendering, it probably can. It can also do some shader effects with little to no performance hit. So while there might not necessarily be 8x as many polygons, the overall power of the machine in reality should be 4-6x.
Suppose we benchmarked games on a 733MHz PC with a GF3 and an Alienware machine today with PC games from 5 years ago. I expect the new machine to get at least 8x the frames. Isn't that what we're talking about here? And if we use todays more complex games, the 733 won't even be able to run them. The combination of increased graphical complexity and better image quality is what makes the 360 4-6x more powerful.
The 360 is only 2-3x as powerful as the xbox? Think for a moment. 3.6GHz vs 733MHz, and there's 3 cores. Just one core is at least 3x as fast, and 2nd gen games will take advantage of all the cores. Now look at the video card. A GeForce4 Ultra was twice as powerful as a GeForce 2 or 3, which was in the xbox. The GeForce6800 was more than 2x as powerful as the GF4. The GF7800 is about 2x as powerful as the 6800. Meaning the 360's video card can render over EIGHT times as many polygons and effects as the xbox. Don't believe me? Look at the latest computer games running on 7800s and remember these games are limited by having to be compatible with so many different CPUs and cards.
So the 360 and PS3 will be at least about 4 to 6 times as powerful for second and third generation games.
When? After parents have spent a hundred or three on their kid(s) other toys? After Christmas when spending drops? The cool thing is we have 14 days to post in this thread. So if there's no flood of 360s by the 22nd, I can remind you that your conspiracy theory was wrong.
You picked some bad examples, because Halo 2 looked much better than the original. Madden 06 wasn't enough of an improvement to shell out money for. Vice City was good and fun along with GTA3, but San Andreas didn't hold my interest. As for comparing Mario 64 to SMB3, I think it's more telling to compare Burnout 3 on the xbox to Burnout on the PSP. Which one looks and controls better? xbox.
If you're trying to make fun of the power supply problems, the 360 displays I saw at Gamestop and CompUSA both had quiet but powerful fans blowing air out the top of the cabinets. Those machines are probably getting better airflow than 90% of the 360s that are being played at home.
When I was a teenager I cared enough about videogames to play them everywhere. These days I like playing the PS2 and xbox, and when I do I want the best graphics and experience. Therefore I'm never going to care about re-worked versions of Darkstalkers, Twisted Metal, Metal Gear Solid, Wipeout, Ridge Racer, Grand Theft Auto 3, Need For Speed Underground, MediEval, Burnout 3, and SOCOM.
You say they're not ports, but did the gameplay change? No? Then they're just the same old games but probably with some deficiencies thanks to the portable system.
At which point the gamer will have to tap the reset button or deal with the mis-calibration.
All the systems have boot animations. I won't be surprised if Nintendo uses theirs for initial calibration. Perhaps a shimmering bulls-eye pattern with a "cursor" that moves around as the player moves the controller.
Wrong. Expect the PS3 to come out in the summer or fall at about the same time as the Revolution. Sony knows it needs awesome games, not just incremental improvements like the 360 launch titles, and that takes time. Sony also never was ready for a Christmas 2005 launch, and only said Spring 2006 to get gamers to wait before buying a 360.
As someone else said, it could calibrate the stick on startup. What he forgot is it could auto-calibrate on booting, so the player doesn't have to.
Moreover, games will use different movements for actions, so simply shifting on the sofa won't automatically do something on-screen. Worst-case scenario is the character is in a dangerous situation and the player has to pause before shifting themselves. How inconvenient is this to most people? Not very. For those with hemorrhoids who need to squirm, I suggest applying Preparation H before playing.
I'd be happy for games to fall in there. More importantly, I think the vast majority of gamers perceive realism differently from the general population. Gamers are so used to non-photoreal imagery but have seen the quality increase towards photoreal that they will easily accept games that fall into the valley. It's like the CG Neo in The Matrix Reloaded's burly brawl against agent Smiths. Most of us could tell Neo didn't look quite real, but it still looked awesome and we'd love for our videogame characters to be that good.
Perhaps yours was defective or you were using non-alkaline and non-rechargable batteries? I used ni-cad rechargables and got at least 2 hours. Alkalines were good for 3+. At home of course I used the AC Adapter.
How many would call Chess or Monopoly art? To be good at them requires skills, but art? Then compare them to the "art" of swordfighting, then Chinese martial arts that are realistically only meant for performances. The artistic elements relate to dancing and expressiveness. Hollywood swordfighting has expressive elements, but fencing, not so much. Coming back to Chess or Monopoly, there's little expressiveness, so they aren't arts, and neither is Tetris.
Not anymore. In FF2 I got to a cave with a poisonous floor and had to run in circles for 3 or 4 levels to gain "levitate." Turns out I'd been too speedy and hadn't been killing as many baddies as the designers expected.
Grim Fandango had an excellent story and characters. Remove the puzzles and it would be a great interactive movie where the player felt like he was moving things along, and clicking on objects to hear the inner monologue of Manny Calavera's thoughts. But it's the puzzles that detract from the art. One definition of art is that it explores the human condition. That is why great movies like Casablanca or The Godfather are considered art. By some in the art world, any game that includes puzzles or other distractions from what makes the piece meaningful, will never be art.
There have already been art installations with computer generated projections and videos. The next step is to really make them interactive where the art responds to the people, or leads them to discoveries. But puzzles and gunfights in games will probably never be art.
People decide who the cameras watch, unless there's been a technology shift.
Most people are lousy and pretending to browse, their body language gives them away, including not spending enough time reading the text on the back of the product, or glancing around too often.
Do you want to leave getting caught to dumb luck? One of the biggest reasons why people get caught is the security recognizes them because once the cross the ethical barrier, they keep shoplifting, then they get noticed and eventually arrested.
Your xbox trick will guarantee AP remembers what you look like, and like I said, most theives can't stop themselves from trying again.
If any of those criminals looked distinctive enough, eventually the AP team might've kept an eye out for him or her and one day caught them with the APS watching through the shelving, then instructing the cashier to process the transaction normally before making the apprehension.
Except that the eyes in the sky watch for stuff like that, and how is a non-employee going to know if the APS (plainclothes guy) is watching the cameras, which happen to watch the electronics quite well.
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Nooo, do the math. Fine I'll do it for you.
If you bought a PS2 in November 2000 for $300, that's $5 per month going to today.
If you bought a PS2 in May 2002 for $200, that's $4.65 per month
If you bought a PS2 in May 2003 for $179, that's $5.77 per month
If you bought a PS2 in May 2004 for $150, that's $7.89 per month going to today.
Yes you'll get to keep playing the PS2 after today, but the newest systems have the "hottest" games. Anyway, the most bang for the buck is if you'd paid $200.
Likewise you should not buy a 360 this Christmas. However in a year or two when the price drops by a hundred bucks that would probably be the best deal for getting to play the newest, best looking games for the least money per month.
Which makes sense except that the PS2 dropped from $179 to $149 way back on May 11th, 2004. You could've been enjoying it for a year and a half now. If you'd been willing to pay another $50, it dropped to $199 back on May 14th, 2002. That's 3 and a half years ago.
Basically I'm sure you had your reasons and things going on to keep you busy, but there's a limit to the depths of frugality that make sense. If I still had time for PC gaming, I wouldn't spend $500 to upgrade my video card, nor even $300. The best bang for the buck is still for $150-200. New cards drop to that price after less than a year. Presently yeah I could save 20-50 bucks and get a GeForce 6600 instead of a 6800, but I'd lose a third of the performance without saving a third of my dollars.
Some developers took advantage of the xbox's greater power and made better looking versions of games that also came out on the PS2. It seems like those developers would appreciate the more powerful system and therefore MS would be doing themselves a disservice; particularly if the PS3 has more bandwidth.
Read it again. The actual FPS increase was 2-3x using a 4200 and 6800, insted of a GF3 and 7800, and while using the same CPU for both GPUs. Factor those in and it's more like 4-8x.
Now I know both CPUs aren't made by Intel, but clock for clock the PPC is supposed to be faster than than the P4. Furthermore, take any benchmark and a 3.2GHz P4 or PPC will be at least 3x as fast as a 733MHz P3. Photoshop filters, mp3 compression, AI routines, it will be 3x or faster. Not 2x. I can find pages on the net for this too.
So why did MS hamstring themselves with the I/O?
You do realize the $50 you'll save will only buy you between 1 and 5 games right? Probably 2 or 3 really good ones, or 1 new release. What have you been playing all this time instead?
I'm being conservative with the CPU. Compare the 733MHz to the 3.6GHz in almost any benchmark, and the 3.6 will be at least 3 times as fast. But I didn't claim the 3 cores would make it 9 times as fast.
Now I found some benchmarks for those games tested with cards from a GF4200 to a 6800. Keep in mind that the GF3 was even slower and paired with a 733 chip, not the latest and greatest. Also remember that the 7800 can do twice as many frames as the 6800. So just from the benchmarks alone, the 6800 on Farcry get 83fps at 1024x768, and the 4200 gets 34.5 at 800x600.
I'm not sure we've agreed to this, but I consider the increase in resolution and effects a hard to quantify increase in power. So the fact that the 360 can take an xbox scene and render it in HD with new effects and still get at least 3x the frames makes it 8x as powerful.
For Doom 3 a 6800 Ultra Extreme at 1024x768 High quality gets 100.2fps. A GF4200 Ti at 640x480 Medium quality gets 36.7fps
So taking these fps's and doubling for the 7800, then doubling again because the GF3 was half as powerful, and that appears to show that even with increasing the resolution and effects, the 7800 is 8x as powerful. This still doesn't consider how much worse the fps's would have been with a 733MHz chip.
So if the PC can do 8x better at high res, why can't the 360? If memory bandwidth really is such a bottleneck, what was MS thinking?
So you're saying Microsoft doesn't need to get as many consoles into living rooms as possible to sell software and gain market share from Sony? The PS3 comes out next year, in 2006.
There's no point bringing emulated xbox titles into this since the 360 is spending so much power just translating the game. Drive speeds also don't matter much once data is loaded into RAM. For memory bandwidth, the xbox has 6.4GB/s, and the 360 has 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth, 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM, 21.6 GB/s frontside bus. So that's almost 4x.
You are correct that at 1280x720 the 360 may not be able to render 8x as many polygons compared to 640x480. However since the card has been optimized for 720p rendering, it probably can. It can also do some shader effects with little to no performance hit. So while there might not necessarily be 8x as many polygons, the overall power of the machine in reality should be 4-6x.
Suppose we benchmarked games on a 733MHz PC with a GF3 and an Alienware machine today with PC games from 5 years ago. I expect the new machine to get at least 8x the frames. Isn't that what we're talking about here? And if we use todays more complex games, the 733 won't even be able to run them. The combination of increased graphical complexity and better image quality is what makes the 360 4-6x more powerful.
The 360 is only 2-3x as powerful as the xbox? Think for a moment. 3.6GHz vs 733MHz, and there's 3 cores. Just one core is at least 3x as fast, and 2nd gen games will take advantage of all the cores. Now look at the video card. A GeForce4 Ultra was twice as powerful as a GeForce 2 or 3, which was in the xbox. The GeForce6800 was more than 2x as powerful as the GF4. The GF7800 is about 2x as powerful as the 6800. Meaning the 360's video card can render over EIGHT times as many polygons and effects as the xbox. Don't believe me? Look at the latest computer games running on 7800s and remember these games are limited by having to be compatible with so many different CPUs and cards.
So the 360 and PS3 will be at least about 4 to 6 times as powerful for second and third generation games.
When? After parents have spent a hundred or three on their kid(s) other toys? After Christmas when spending drops? The cool thing is we have 14 days to post in this thread. So if there's no flood of 360s by the 22nd, I can remind you that your conspiracy theory was wrong.
You picked some bad examples, because Halo 2 looked much better than the original. Madden 06 wasn't enough of an improvement to shell out money for. Vice City was good and fun along with GTA3, but San Andreas didn't hold my interest. As for comparing Mario 64 to SMB3, I think it's more telling to compare Burnout 3 on the xbox to Burnout on the PSP. Which one looks and controls better? xbox.
If you're trying to make fun of the power supply problems, the 360 displays I saw at Gamestop and CompUSA both had quiet but powerful fans blowing air out the top of the cabinets. Those machines are probably getting better airflow than 90% of the 360s that are being played at home.
When I was a teenager I cared enough about videogames to play them everywhere. These days I like playing the PS2 and xbox, and when I do I want the best graphics and experience. Therefore I'm never going to care about re-worked versions of Darkstalkers, Twisted Metal, Metal Gear Solid, Wipeout, Ridge Racer, Grand Theft Auto 3, Need For Speed Underground, MediEval, Burnout 3, and SOCOM.
You say they're not ports, but did the gameplay change? No? Then they're just the same old games but probably with some deficiencies thanks to the portable system.
At which point the gamer will have to tap the reset button or deal with the mis-calibration.
All the systems have boot animations. I won't be surprised if Nintendo uses theirs for initial calibration. Perhaps a shimmering bulls-eye pattern with a "cursor" that moves around as the player moves the controller.
Wrong. Expect the PS3 to come out in the summer or fall at about the same time as the Revolution. Sony knows it needs awesome games, not just incremental improvements like the 360 launch titles, and that takes time. Sony also never was ready for a Christmas 2005 launch, and only said Spring 2006 to get gamers to wait before buying a 360.
As someone else said, it could calibrate the stick on startup. What he forgot is it could auto-calibrate on booting, so the player doesn't have to.
Moreover, games will use different movements for actions, so simply shifting on the sofa won't automatically do something on-screen. Worst-case scenario is the character is in a dangerous situation and the player has to pause before shifting themselves. How inconvenient is this to most people? Not very. For those with hemorrhoids who need to squirm, I suggest applying Preparation H before playing.
I'd be happy for games to fall in there. More importantly, I think the vast majority of gamers perceive realism differently from the general population. Gamers are so used to non-photoreal imagery but have seen the quality increase towards photoreal that they will easily accept games that fall into the valley. It's like the CG Neo in The Matrix Reloaded's burly brawl against agent Smiths. Most of us could tell Neo didn't look quite real, but it still looked awesome and we'd love for our videogame characters to be that good.
Perhaps yours was defective or you were using non-alkaline and non-rechargable batteries? I used ni-cad rechargables and got at least 2 hours. Alkalines were good for 3+. At home of course I used the AC Adapter.
Loved that system.
How many would call Chess or Monopoly art? To be good at them requires skills, but art? Then compare them to the "art" of swordfighting, then Chinese martial arts that are realistically only meant for performances. The artistic elements relate to dancing and expressiveness. Hollywood swordfighting has expressive elements, but fencing, not so much. Coming back to Chess or Monopoly, there's little expressiveness, so they aren't arts, and neither is Tetris.
Not anymore. In FF2 I got to a cave with a poisonous floor and had to run in circles for 3 or 4 levels to gain "levitate." Turns out I'd been too speedy and hadn't been killing as many baddies as the designers expected.
Not as long as the art is spoiled by running around in circles to level up, or figuring out which repetitive combo of spells is the most effective.
Grim Fandango had an excellent story and characters. Remove the puzzles and it would be a great interactive movie where the player felt like he was moving things along, and clicking on objects to hear the inner monologue of Manny Calavera's thoughts. But it's the puzzles that detract from the art. One definition of art is that it explores the human condition. That is why great movies like Casablanca or The Godfather are considered art. By some in the art world, any game that includes puzzles or other distractions from what makes the piece meaningful, will never be art.
There have already been art installations with computer generated projections and videos. The next step is to really make them interactive where the art responds to the people, or leads them to discoveries. But puzzles and gunfights in games will probably never be art.
People decide who the cameras watch, unless there's been a technology shift.
Most people are lousy and pretending to browse, their body language gives them away, including not spending enough time reading the text on the back of the product, or glancing around too often.
Do you want to leave getting caught to dumb luck? One of the biggest reasons why people get caught is the security recognizes them because once the cross the ethical barrier, they keep shoplifting, then they get noticed and eventually arrested.
Your xbox trick will guarantee AP remembers what you look like, and like I said, most theives can't stop themselves from trying again.
If any of those criminals looked distinctive enough, eventually the AP team might've kept an eye out for him or her and one day caught them with the APS watching through the shelving, then instructing the cashier to process the transaction normally before making the apprehension.
Except that the eyes in the sky watch for stuff like that, and how is a non-employee going to know if the APS (plainclothes guy) is watching the cameras, which happen to watch the electronics quite well.