Elysian Shadows

dandymcgee wrote:Please link me to the page on Newegg selling PS3 RAM.

Ho ho, I c wut u did thar.

The point is that you've been living in an artificially constrained box with no hope of upgrading until Sony finally gets around to it. The console needs features to set it apart. Otherwise, it will always be an outdated gaming PC.

TheBuzzSaw wrote:

dandymcgee wrote:Please link me to the page on Newegg selling PS3 RAM.

Ho ho, I c wut u did thar.

The point is that you've been living in an artificially constrained box with no hope of upgrading until Sony finally gets around to it. The console needs features to set it apart. Otherwise, it will always be an outdated gaming PC.

I completely agree, but now you're arbitrarily tossing gaming PCs into the mix. I was talking strictly about consoles, and what console isn't an "artificially constrained box with no hope of upgrading"? This is one of the main reasons I don't own many consoles and prefer a having a PC I can upgrade whenever I want and use for infinitely many other things aside from gaming.

The downside is obviously that developing technically advanced games for "the PC" is far more difficult due to the enormous variety of hardware configurations. Aside from the game library (which is biased toward consoles due to that very issue), this is really the only true advantage that game consoles have over PCs. I don't foresee that changing in the near future.

dandymcgee wrote:and what console isn't an "artificially constrained box with no hope of upgrading"?

The ones that actually do something different: Nintendo Wii. I don't need a powerful console because I have a PC. I get plenty of eye candy there. I own a Wii because it is the only console that offered a unique experience at the time it released. The specs suck, but the console is affordable, and ALL games are built around the control scheme. This is a bad thing for some games, but it was great for many others. Metroid Prime is my favorite console series still. I own Metroid Prime Trilogy, and it is fantastic playing with the Wii remote and nunchuk. I own good USB controllers, so I have the PS3/360 experience completely covered on my PC.

Is it good that PS4 has more RAM/power? Sure. I would expect no less for a next-gen console. I'm just saying they cannot RIDE on that alone, which is what Sony seems to do now. So yes, the SHARE button is one of the more exciting developments for the console.

Now this just took a really wild an insensible turn.

The PS3 in particular doesn't really present itself as anything even remotely considered similar to a PC.

Developing something technically advanced for PC is *LIGHT YEARS* easier than something like the PS3 simply because the architectures are so wildly different. The API's available for PC architectures are also much much more streamlined and predictable. They are very "feature complete". The PC is usually the baseline platform there. Yes there are cross-vendor and cross-platform issues there of which I am no stranger, but even in my limited time w/ the PS2, I can attest to the fact that this is absolutely nothing compared to a port to an architecture like that.

With the RAM, it comes down to one thing: resolution. This is simply what makes optimized PC games look much much much better. We have 2GB of video memory to throw around, and if it comes down to it, 8GB+ of system memory. Egregiously large HD textures. That's where it's at. You can't fake resolution. Even a highly compressed format and natively supported compression like the S3TC varieties cannot overcome the ridiculously small memory real estate on the current generation consoles.

The compute cores on consoles are exceptionally powerful so that T&L is not such a big deal, but they are encumbered by resolution in terms of what we can actually fit into memory.

Wow. I was just expecting "oh look, more polygons."

I thought Sony did an excellent job. The "innovation" jump from PS3 to PS4 is way bigger than PS2 to PS3...

Honestly, if I were Microsoft, I would have been shitting my pants after that press release.

Funny, that's how most "announcements" look like to me.