[theverge] AMD won the next-gen console war, and PC gamers could reap the reward

[Final8ty]

http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/21/4452488/amd-sparks-x86-transition-for-next-gen-game-consoles

 

[Keysplayr]

Also looking forward to seeing what Valve's "Steam Box" is going to offer in comparison. My son seems to want the Wii-U for Christmas, and I asked him, "Are you SURE you want that thing? It's a very strange setup with the handheld controller screen." I'll look into it more, but also mentioned in this article is that PS4 and XBox One will not be backward compatible with PS3/PS2, XBox, XBox360 games due to the x86 arch of PS4 and XBox One.
That in itself is a HUGE letdown as people generally do not wish to have multiple Playstations or XBox's hooked up to play old and new games alike.
Don't know what to do at this point.

 

[sontin]

Why would pc gamers get rewared? The Xbox 1 was a pc, too and MS bought Bungie...

Splinter Cell: Blacklist and the new Batman come to the pc. Both are this gen titles.

Sound more like the author has no clue what he is writing about...

 

[Zanovar]

Steam box is interesting indeed.

Just buy him a ps4 keys

 

[Durvelle27]

Also looking forward to seeing what Valve's "Steam Box" is going to offer in comparison. My son seems to want the Wii-U for Christmas, and I asked him, "Are you SURE you want that thing? It's a very strange setup with the handheld controller screen." I'll look into it more, but also mentioned in this article is that PS4 and XBox One will not be backward compatible with PS3/PS2, XBox, XBox360 games due to the x86 arch of PS4 and XBox One.
That in itself is a HUGE letdown as people generally do not wish to have multiple Playstations or XBox's hooked up to play old and new games alike.
Don't know what to do at this point.

Digital PS3 Games will be backward compatible but disc won't

 

[sontin]

Has Sony showed a demo of the PS3 cloud gaming? I mean they need to emulate Cell and RSX to get that working...

 

[HurleyBird]

Has Sony showed a demo of the PS3 cloud gaming? I mean they need to emulate Cell and RSX to get that working...

No they don't. They could run in on a special version of the PS3 and stream that.

 

[Grooveriding]

Gaming is going to be awesome for a few years once the XBOne and PS4 are out. No more ports, x86 to x86. Games should scale better to take better advantage of the hardware in PCs, not have the issues games ported from 360 and PS3 did as well as for the first few years; deliver powerful visuals.

Pros or cons of the new consoles themselves are irrelevant to me as I game on PC. It's what it means for PC gaming that is what is important. Multi-threaded goodness and better graphics with much larger game worlds than we've had for years now due to the limited memory on the old consoles. :thumbsup:

I can tell you from BF4 Alpha that the game is already pushing my CPU more than any other game I have played yet. Gaming is going to be good on PC due to the new consoles going x86, nothing wrong with that.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

I would think that they could gain backwards compatibility with a lot of titles by just using the PC ports they already made.

 

[Carfax83]

I can tell you from BF4 Alpha that the game is already pushing my CPU more than any other game I have played yet. Gaming is going to be good on PC due to the new consoles going x86, nothing wrong with that.

What about memory usage?

 

[bryanW1995]

Also looking forward to seeing what Valve's "Steam Box" is going to offer in comparison. My son seems to want the Wii-U for Christmas, and I asked him, "Are you SURE you want that thing? It's a very strange setup with the handheld controller screen." I'll look into it more, but also mentioned in this article is that PS4 and XBox One will not be backward compatible with PS3/PS2, XBox, XBox360 games due to the x86 arch of PS4 and XBox One.
That in itself is a HUGE letdown as people generally do not wish to have multiple Playstations or XBox's hooked up to play old and new games alike.
Don't know what to do at this point.

I haven't used a console since my SNES, other than about 2 hrs total play time on the gamecube I bought a decade ago. That is, until my wife bought me a wii-U 2 wks ago. Here's a list of some of my pros/cons for it:

PROS:

1. Virtual console offers some older nintendo/sega/other games. Only decent one out right now is Super Metroid, but there are more in the planning stages.
2. The handheld gaming pad is ridiculously cool. I often sit in the living room with my headphones in and play the wii u on the gamepad while my wife is watching (insert name of soap opera of choice here).
3. Streaming on hulu/amazon/netflicks/etc is similarly great. Yes, I know that it's about time that I joined the 21st century, but I had been watching all of my amazon movies/series on my computer monitor before. Now I just hit a button and watch them on the 60" plasma. Winning.
4. Backward compatible with Wii games.

CONS:

1. Virtual console is VERY limited at present, with only 15-20 older games available. The old Wii VC has about 400 games. If you have an old Wii then you can transfer any VC games over, but if, like me, you don't, then you are SOL. There are 5 zelda games and a couple of others that I would like to download onto the VC, but I don't want to have to buy an old skool Wii to do so. I could be the only person in the universe with this problem, however, and it seems highly likely that games like zelda, zelda2, ff3, etc etc will end up on the Wii u VC as well eventually.
2. Even if I do break down and buy a Wii to download the older games onto the VC and then transfer them to my Wii u, I won't be able to play the old Wii VC games on the game pad screen (ie, I'm screwed if wife is watching "As the World turns around the Bachelor's General Hospital").
3. Very very limited library of games right now. No wii sports, which was uber-popular on the wii. No zelda game. No donkey kong. No metroid game even in the works. However, there are lots of games like Zelda and Wii sports coming in the next few months, and by xmas this issue should be quite a bit improved.
4. Not any more powerful than current edition PS3 and xbox360. EA recently announced that they are not working on a single game for Wii U.


Generally, I'd say that I'm satisfied with this, but at least in part that's because I can catch back up on my older nes/snes games, and, eventually, get a bunch of those more recent zelda/metroid/etc games from more recent consoles that I missed. Also, when I want "real games", I can just jump on my PC.

Feel free to pm me if you have any other questions about it that I didn't address.

 

[scooterlibby]

Kinda bummed about being frozen out of sports this generation as well. I understand the benefits of a unified memory pool, but does anyone truly believe a decent gaming PC couldn't handle the sports titles?

 

[bystander36]

Gaming is going to be awesome for a few years once the XBOne and PS4 are out. No more ports, x86 to x86. Games should scale better to take better advantage of the hardware in PCs, not have the issues games ported from 360 and PS3 did as well as for the first few years; deliver powerful visuals.

Pros or cons of the new consoles themselves are irrelevant to me as I game on PC. It's what it means for PC gaming that is what is important. Multi-threaded goodness and better graphics with much larger game worlds than we've had for years now due to the limited memory on the old consoles. :thumbsup:

I can tell you from BF4 Alpha that the game is already pushing my CPU more than any other game I have played yet. Gaming is going to be good on PC due to the new consoles going x86, nothing wrong with that.

I'm pretty certain they will all be ports still. There may be less work to be done, but there is still work to be done. Consoles have very specific hardware, and a different OS. When porting them to the PC, they have to account for countless configurations, and write it for a new OS.

The work needing to be done may be less than in the past, but it will still require porting.

 

[blackened23]

I'm pretty certain they will all be ports still. There may be less work to be done, but there is still work to be done. Consoles have very specific hardware, and a different OS. When porting them to the PC, they have to account for countless configurations, and write it for a new OS.

The work needing to be done may be less than in the past, but it will still require porting.

What you're speaking of is absolutely trivial in comparison to current ports. The biggest task will be to cater to the control scheme, FOV, and visual fidelity adjustment settings which is a complete joke in comparison to porting a current PS3 game to the PC (a MUCH more difficult task) - The most important stuff related to visual fidelity will be high resolution textures, large assets, big worlds (thanks to more RAM), etc. Those are generally not manipulated when doing a cross platform port. If they are, it adds significant development time where the PC version is released 3-5 months after the console version. Most PC ports leave textures and game assets alone, and worlds are currently ridiculously small due to RAM limitations on current consoles. Map size and game assets never change with ports, because the world present in a console will be present in a PC port of the same game. Everything will be on a grander, larger scale with PC ports of the next-generation, so this is just good for PC gaming in every way.

The added VRAM and system RAM alone for next generation ports will create game worlds over 100 times larger than current games without excessive caching or loading time - fewer games with lame "checkpoint" save systems, and true save games again. And the PC versions will be even better with higher resolutions, surround support, etc. Even if AMD got the contracts, it definitely is good for PC gaming overall......

 

[blackened23]

Kinda bummed about being frozen out of sports this generation as well. I understand the benefits of a unified memory pool, but does anyone truly believe a decent gaming PC couldn't handle the sports titles?

The problem is , hardly anyone buys sports titles on the PC. I personally hate playing sports games on the PC, because the PC has a much smaller playerbase and doing any type of multiplayer over the internet is a joke in comparison to consoles. Just as an example (it's not a sports game) but you can log into xbox 360 black ops 2 and see something like 300,000-400,000 online for play. I logged on the PC version this morning and through the US region of steam there were 4,000 people online for play. This is also applicable to all sports titles on XBLG - there are just way more people to enjoy a game with, in terms of sports games, on consoles. Also, keyboard and mouse just don't feel "right" when playing a sports game.....I prefer most genres on the PC but when it comes to sports? I'll pass on PC.

 

[bystander36]

What you're speaking of is absolutely trivial in comparison to current ports. The biggest task will be to cater to the control scheme, FOV, and visual fidelity adjustment settings which is a complete joke in comparison to porting a current PS3 game to the PC (a MUCH more difficult task) - The most important stuff related to visual fidelity will be high resolution textures, large assets, big worlds (thanks to more RAM), etc. Those are generally not manipulated when doing a cross platform port. If they are, it adds significant development time where the PC version is released 3-5 months after the console version. Most PC ports leave textures and game assets alone, and worlds are currently ridiculously small due to RAM limitations on current consoles. Map size and game assets never change with ports, because the world present in a console will be present in a PC port of the same game. Everything will be on a grander, larger scale with PC ports of the next-generation, so this is just good for PC gaming in every way.

The added VRAM and system RAM alone for next generation ports will create game worlds over 100 times larger than current games without excessive caching or loading time - fewer games with lame "checkpoint" save systems, and true save games again. And the PC versions will be even better with higher resolutions, surround support, etc. Even if AMD got the contracts, it definitely is good for PC gaming overall......

Like I said, there is less work to be done in the port, but there will still be porting required.

 

[blackened23]

Like I said, there is less work to be done in the port, but there will still be porting required.

Right. But the biggest issue is that game development budgets have literally went up by a factor of 10 in the past 7 years, so any type of feasible AAA title will need to be multi platform to recover the investment. The days of creating a top notch AAA title with the best graphics possible - like DOOM II - on a shoestring budget are *done*. AAA titles with top notch graphics aren't possible because costs are really prohibitive right now. Of course, as a developer, you can create an indie title with significantly less investment - but without exception the graphics will be exceptionally worse and the game will definitely *look* like an indie game. Graphical quality is commensurate with development costs.

So with that being the situation, this is nothing *but* good for PC gamers. Ports are much much easier to create, game worlds will be 100x larger, textures will be HD by default, every game will have tessellation, etc. It's just a good situation all around IMHO. Port work is much more trivial now than it has been in the past, consider that Microsoft is making their in house Xbox one exclusive games also available for the PC - this was not the case with the 360. It's because development and porting is a lot easier.

 

[bystander36]

I never said it wasn't. Why are you going on some tirade because I said they are still going to be ports?

 

[Grooveriding]

No one cares about the effort to bring the new games to PC but the game devs. It is irrelevant. It's what it means for the quality of the games being able to provide much better experiences because of the native x86 platform and the vastly improved hardware of consoles setting the bar much higher.

 

[Zanovar]

I think(and hoping) gaming is going to be great the next 12 months and onwards for the pc gamer,i dont think my wallet will like it as much though

 

[bystander36]

I do hope things are as great as we imagine. I however am not going to be surprised if things aren't as great as we expect. It could end up being a curse that there is far less work to be done in order to properly port a game over. Dev's could get lazy and figure that it works good enough as is, and not put in the time to make it work right.

 

[blackened23]

I never said it wasn't. Why are you going on some tirade because I said they are still going to be ports?

I didn't intend to come across like that, but I do feel really enthusiastic about upcoming PC games this fall. Heck, even nvidia representatives feel the same way - despite not having the console contracts, nvidia considers next-gen consoles *good* for PC gaming. While there may be the occasional outlier in terms of a bad PC port, I think they will be far fewer than the current situation.

Aside from this, several next-gen games look pretty amazing as is - I was really impressed by Killzone and Destiny. Even if those games were straight ports to PC, they would look fantastic I do believe.

 

[bystander36]

Yeah, I'm hoping for the best too. Things sounds promising, but not everything works out as planned, though it should work out better than the previous gen of consoles. I'm trying not to get overly hyped about it, as that often leads to disappointment.

 

[sontin]

Porting is still a problem. Especially from the PS4 with the OpenGL renderer. So i dont see that it would be so easy. I mean how many games today have a DX and OpenGL renderer?!

 

[Skurge]

Porting is still a problem. Especially from the PS4 with the OpenGL renderer. So i dont see that it would be so easy. I mean how many games today have a DX and OpenGL renderer?!

I don't know if this is a serious post.