The Next-gen Situation discussion *spawn
- Thread starter gongo
- Start date
But, 360 and PS3 still sell right now, and they're destroyed by PC's.
PS4 and 720 will be at least, much less destroyed by PC's initially, than 360 and PS3 are right now.
And 360's best sales year was 2011, for that matter.
What AlphaWolf said. Basically power. Sure the new consoles will have unique setups that make them more effective than a straight CPU+GPU+RAM setup as seen in a PC. But so did the last generation consoles. The only differences this time are a lower relative power budget and market conditions which are more bent towards casual / social gaming than high power AAA gaming. Under those circumstances I find it extremely unlikely that the new consoles could fair as well performance wise as the last generation did.
That's a fairly unrealistic expectation, mainly due to the amount of RAM these consoles will have which will probably require GPU's sporting 8GB of fast GDDR5/6 to match. Having said that though it's likely fewer upgrades will be needed over the course of the next generation than were needed this generation to keep up as the starting point is quite a bit higher.
For example, if you started with an X1800XT last gen when the X360 launched (the most powerful ATI GPU of the day) you would struggle to run even launch games and you would have to buy the next 4 successively powerful ATI GPU's before you were guaranteed performance to carry you through to the end of the generation with at least equal to console performance (X18000XT -> X1900XTX -> HD2900 -> HD 3870 -> 4870).
However on the assumption that the 8970 will be available when the next generation consoles launch. And also assuming that the 8970 will be equivalent to the HD2900 in the example above, that means at most you will likely only need to upgrade to a GPU 2 successive generations ahead to guarantee greater than console performance throughout that consoles lifespan. That's 1 upgrade over the course of 8 years for most people. Compared with 2 last generation (assuming you upgrade every 2 generations).
Inuhanyou
Veteran
Makes sense. Yearli did say that the next consoles would not be "massively more powerful than high end PC's like 360 and PS3 were". Although he did say they(or durango atleast) would be comparable to today's high end PC's in real world performance. Which is pretty much as good as we can hope for ^^
I'm not sure what you're getting at there. No-ones saying the next gen consoles will not sell because they are not as powerful as PC's. Clearly the market will shift more towards consoles when the new generation launches as is the case every generation. The point is that the 'reset' will be less severe than it was in previous generations (in terms of relative power). Or in other words, PC's start this generation in a more favourable position than they did last generation (from a pure power stand point).
PC's have advantages in other areas this generation as well such as a thinner API and a greater tenancy towards multiplatform games due to development costs. On the other hand consoles have their own relative advantages this time as well. For example a stronger online multiplayer presence and unique control interfaces.
Indeed, and using the same logic (consoles having more real world performance than PC's for a given spec) then you could argue that the 360 in 2005 was really comparable to 2006 PC's in real world performance. A far cry from a 2013 console being equivalent to a 2012 PC in real world performance.
Inuhanyou
Veteran
True..but atleast it will give devs much more room to work with now. The best part is games will be looking amazing regardless of what platform you choose now. Tech has just seemed to evolve to that level, although PC ports will probably still look better still due to the nature of their evolving hardware against a console's fixed specs.
Well I'm just saying (hardcore no Wii ) consoles sold gangbusters in 2011, very recently, and certainly in 2013 PS4/720 will be a whole lot closer to PC's than PS360 are today.
The point of the greatest current gen "market shift" towards consoles was 2011, not 2005/6 (when they sold comparatively little for lots of reasons, low supply, high price etc).
I agree it sucks the consoles will not be as close to high end PC's as last gen, and I agree that's bad on a personal level, but I dont think it will affect sales much. Consoles sell for reasons other than power relative to PC's. They sell because of simplicity, low price, etc. The average joe will think the upcoming 1.5 teraflop consoles are mind blowing, because the average joe's frame of reference is only call of duty on xbox 360, and he thinks that looks fine.
By the same token I'd wager the PC and console markets are fairly static across time. I havent necessarily seen a notable shift either way in a long long time. If anything, probably PC's have declined imo over the last decade. When I was a kid, I was playing awesome exclusives like Unreal Tournament, Half Life 1, and Baldurs Gate on PC. I dont see the PC equivalent of those today. my (CONTROVERSIAL) opinion is sadly, piracy destroyed the single player pc experience. mostly anything on pc now must have a heavy online component to defend piracy (eg, WoW), or must be affordable to develop enough that low sales numbers justify it (eg, endless lame console ports, where selling a paltry couple hundred thousand copies is profitable because little dev money went into the port).
RancidLunchmeat
Veteran
So now you've got me confused, Liverpool.
I thought you did a very good job of breaking down my previous post and showing how my timelines were off and that the 360 wasn't the most powerful gaming system available at launch.
Now, you seem to be agreeing with the the statement that the 360 "blew everything else away" when it launched. And yes, of course, we all agree it only had that lead for a restricted amount of time., I said 1 year, it might have only been 6 months, but at the moment it was released, it was the most powerful.
So, I'd like you to clarify your position on that for starters.
Then, I'd like to really get down to the nuts and bolts of why it is the next consoles can't replicate that situation.
It seems like everybody is resigned to the fact that these next gen consoles can't arrive as the best possible gaming solution, and not only that, it seems like most are saying they wont even compete with low range PCs.
AmIright? Didn't somebody say that there's no way these next consoles will be able to match my $300 core i5?
Why would I pay $3 or $4 or $5 hundred for a console that can't show me better visuals than what I get on my $300 PC that I bought 2 years ago? (Didn't buy it two years ago, adding in the launch window as late 2013 would make it 2 years.)
The consoles dont have to be the best thing ever when they launch, but they'd better be far and obviously superior to anything you can buy on the market unless you are going very very high end. These consoles need to be better than anything you can get PC wise unless you are buying some hypercharged system from Alienware or some other customized PC place. Which means you need to be comparing a $500 console to a $3,000 gaming PC. Because anything under that range, the console will kick its ass.
If not, this will be the last generation for consoles, period.
My posts were a bit confusing. The original post was talking about theoretical peak power. i.e. the most powerful PC setups in late 2005 had more theoratical peak power than the 360 and had all that power been used, say in a console environment, you likely would have seen better results.
My more recent post talked about real world performance. I.e. what you will actually see on screen after taking into account the advantages of consoles being a fixed platform. In first generation games that console advantage may not be very apparent and thus a similarly powerful PC can achieve similar results. However a year or two into a consoles life the fixed platform advantage will assert itself and thus you may need twice the power in a PC to produce the same real world results.
Hence you could argue that the real world performance of the 360 was equivalent to top end PC's of 2006 when their theoretical performance was twice that of the 360.
While the new generation of consoles are predicted to have roughly half the performance of the top end PC's from 2012 and thus similar real world performance - but they don't launch until 2013. That's assuming the rumour are correct of course. There have been hints of special sauce (specialised hardware, powerful memory configurations etc...) which might change the overall power balance but it's highly unlikely they would make up for the power deficit in relation to last generation. Afterall, PS360 also had their own special sauce (edram, unified shaders, Cell etc...)
A lot of it is down to power budget. As a few people have mentioned, the power draw of PC GPU's has gone up considerably since last generation while the power budget of consoles has not. Put simply, lets say a console has 200w to spend on performance. In 2005, the highest end PC performance would cost ~80-90w. Today it costs between 200-250w. So it's obvious that consoles can no longer afford the highest end PC performance.
Other factors like Sony's financial position and the markets re-positioning towards more casual/social gaming will also have an impact.
If you're referring back to my post I was saying that the consoles won't be able to compete with the CPU in that PC - this is simply because it's an Intel i5 and Intel are so far ahead of everyone else in performance right now that it's unreal. If the new consoles were sporting Intel CPU's then they may well be faster than your $300 PC.
However in terms of the GPU the consoles should be far faster than a $300 HTPC and thus will be much better for running games.
Hopefully based on their more conservative approach to the performance the new consoles will be close to $300 than to $500. But expecting them to perform at the level of a $2000 PC isn't realistic. I'd say it's a near certainty that you could pick up a PC for $800 or less on the day then next gen consoles launch that will be quite a lot more powerful in most respects.
Why is this controversial?
For whatever reason on the interweb people tend to refuse to believe piracy has any effect on sales of digital products. So while it's patently obvious to me that piracy has a devastating effect, to others it's "controversial".
anexanhume
Veteran
While piracy has a measurable and destructive effect, I would argue pricing and delivery model have a greater effect when all 3 are considered. Those 2 things are the reasons the cheap sub $10 games exist in the first place.
Not sure if this belongs in this thread, but I'll take a stab. One thing that can't be denied with PC gaming is within a certain budget, the less you have to spend on games, the more money you have left for better hardware. But I also agree with you, selling $60 PC games with DRM and other annoyances is not a recipe for success. Some may say "well console gamers pay $60", but they don't. Most console gamers I know beat the game or play it until they are bored and trade it in or sell it for ~50% of what they paid while my steam account is full of games I bought and don't play anymore that have no value at all now.
I would be very surprised to see used game resale locked out next gen.
True, but the platform holders and publishers could extract the same value that GameStop is taking, feeding it back into game development next gen. If the platform holders went the Steam route, they could in theory extract the greatest possible value for themselves and the publishers through variable pricing over time, without having to pull retail margins along for the brick and mortar stores.
anexanhume
Veteran
I agree because that's exactly what I do. If a game is worth buying, it's worth keeping to me. Thus, I rarely pay retail for a game. I usually pay half or less.
Next gen I'll go with whoever has:
1) Dedicated servers (for at least some games)
2) Subscription free matchmaking, parties and online play
Paying for the appalling matching in Halo 4 (frequently worse gaming than on a 56k modem back in 1999) is like being made to thank a bully for kicking you in the nuts.
1) Dedicated servers (for at least some games)
2) Subscription free matchmaking, parties and online play
Paying for the appalling matching in Halo 4 (frequently worse gaming than on a 56k modem back in 1999) is like being made to thank a bully for kicking you in the nuts.