Decline PS4 wins the console war against XboxONE, yet it is a hollow victory as Consolesdämmerung is upon us

[sea]

There is enough headroom in these new generation consoles to last even longer than the previous cycle. Gameplay should see great boons in that technical limitations don't hinder possibilities anymore. I know we say this every generation, but this generation really does make the ultimate stride to better gameplay. Graphics will become a lot easier, gameplay is what it's going to take to sell this generation. Odd shift, I know. But, this is a fact!

I'm excited about what this means for PC gaming. No more pop-in, weird loading schemes, and strange limitations. It's looking good.

"I can't wait to play Gears of War 4 on my always-online DRM-infested Xbox 720 PS4 PC! Who needs config files, options, mods, or gameplay that appeals to anyone over the age of 10? My textures don't pop in anymore!"

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Fast RAM and a lot of it is vital, that's the key to this system and decent pc ports going forward. i have zero faith that developers will use the CPU in creative ways or gameplay to even make it relevant outside of "phsyics .ini PS4: 5000 objects, PC: 40000"

 

[deuxhero]

It's not feasible to emulate such powerful CPUs or GPUs, especially something like Cell, which will probably never be done within our lifetimes.

Then unless you are a 90 year old man you are retarded. I can't even think up a comparison, a lifetime ago in history we ago didn't have PCs, we had nothing in space, we hadn't broken the sound barrier, you name it.

PS3 is probably emulate-able on present-day consumer technology given a reasonably large amount of coder-hours. If not that, surely in the next decade.

The problem is that these systems are more and more complex, and more and more protected by numerous patents, and offer less and less documentation. You get increasingly diminishing returns.

The original Xbox, for example, still has no community emulator at all 12 years later, mostly because NVIDIA is very protective of its IP. It was "emulated" on 360, and what happens was that a custom program and hacks were written for every game, which required considerable time, manpower and money, and ultimately produced pitiful results shockful of glitches, crashes and performance problems, so much that Microsoft completely gave up early on on the whole thing.

I thought the reason the Xbox emulator can't do anything but play the first level of Halo with no textures is no really gave a damn about making an Xbox emulator as 99% of the library was on one of the other 2 systems or the PC and thus no one really worked on it.

Of course, it could be a combination of the two down the line.

The N64 hardware isn't really understood and so for many n64 games you are literally better off emulating Nintendo's N64 emulator for the Wii in Dolphin than any of the 3 N64 emulators, but devs who programed for the N64 have mentioned how the hardware wasn't understood by them either.

 

[Xi]

There are enough resources that any specific aspect of gameplay could be targeted without major limitations to other areas. Graphics resources don't have to suck away the possibilities from other aspects of design.

That's entirely new. Something to look forward to, imho.

 

[felipepepe]

The original Xbox, for example, still has no community emulator at all 12 years later, mostly because NVIDIA is very protective of its IP.

Let's be fair, de Xbox doens't even have exclusive games worthy of emulating... every decent "exclusive" game was released on another platforms since the original Xbox died...

 

[Average Manatee]

It's not feasible to emulate such powerful CPUs or GPUs, especially something like Cell, which will probably never be done within our lifetimes.

Then unless you are a 90 year old man you are retarded. I can't even think up a comparison, a lifetime ago in history we ago didn't have PCs, we had nothing in space, we hadn't broken the sound barrier, you name it.

PS3 is probably emulate-able on present-day consumer technology given a reasonably large amount of coder-hours. If not that, surely in the next decade.

The problem is that these systems are more and more complex, and more and more protected by numerous patents, and offer less and less documentation. You get increasingly diminishing returns.

The original Xbox, for example, still has no community emulator at all 12 years later, mostly because NVIDIA is very protective of its IP. It was "emulated" on 360, and what happens was that a custom program and hacks were written for every game, which required considerable time, manpower and money, and ultimately produced pitiful results shockful of glitches, crashes and performance problems, so much that Microsoft completely gave up early on on the whole thing.

No, they are getting less and less complex. Even the PS3, for all it's weird cell-ness, is still 100x more similar to a standard x86 architecture than the... thing that was the PS2. And now the new PS4 is apparently x86.

The Xbox has no emulator because no one wants to make an emulator. That's all there is to it. BTW there is one in development now for PS3. It's getting about 2 FPS, but that's par for the course for all emulators at the beginning.

 

[deuxhero]

Link to this PS3 emulator?

I know there is a 360 emulator, but it's just proof of concept cycle emulation (and not that accurate at it) that can't run anything yet.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

It's not feasible to emulate such powerful CPUs or GPUs, especially something like Cell, which will probably never be done within our lifetimes.

Then unless you are a 90 year old man you are retarded. I can't even think up a comparison, a lifetime ago in history we ago didn't have PCs, we had nothing in space, we hadn't broken the sound barrier, you name it.

PS3 is probably emulate-able on present-day consumer technology given a reasonably large amount of coder-hours. If not that, surely in the next decade.

The problem is that these systems are more and more complex, and more and more protected by numerous patents, and offer less and less documentation. You get increasingly diminishing returns.

The original Xbox, for example, still has no community emulator at all 12 years later, mostly because NVIDIA is very protective of its IP. It was "emulated" on 360, and what happens was that a custom program and hacks were written for every game, which required considerable time, manpower and money, and ultimately produced pitiful results shockful of glitches, crashes and performance problems, so much that Microsoft completely gave up early on on the whole thing.

No, they are getting less and less complex. Even the PS3, for all it's weird cell-ness, is still 100x more similar to a standard x86 architecture than the... thing that was the PS2. And now the new PS4 is apparently x86.

The Xbox has no emulator because no one wants to make an emulator. That's all there is to it. BTW there is one in development now for PS3. It's getting about 2 FPS, but that's par for the course for all emulators at the beginning.

Actually no, it does have some unique games that are sought after, like Gun Valkyrie and Panzer Dragoon Orta. And lots of people want to make one, it's just that the NVIDIA GPU in impregnable. I remember reading comments attesting to this by someone very involved in this scene.

 

[DalekFlay]

There is literally nothing on Xbox worth building an emulator for, everything good was on the PC or PS2 as well.

The Xbox 360 is very different, though honestly the number of games not on PC or PS3 worth preserving can probably be counted on two hands.

 

[deuxhero]

Well there have always been the oddballs that are really hard to emulate even though the others in their generation have every game playable (N64 emulation is deeply flawed and Saturn emulation is a joke, yet almost every PS1 game is fully playable. Only 1 closed source emulator figured out how to get the Genesis/MegaDrive's sound working right while the SNES is literally as close to perfect emulation as technically possible)

 

[Average Manatee]

Link to this PS3 emulator?

I know there is a 360 emulator, but it's just proof of concept cycle emulation (and not that accurate at it) that can't run anything yet.

http://code.google.com/p/rpcs3/

The same proof of concept thing at this point, but in every case the only obstacle to getting it done is dedication.

Unfortunately there's a lot less reason to really dedicate the time these days, since there's simply not a ton to preserve. You see things like

honestly the number of games not on PC or PS3 worth preserving can probably be counted on two hands.

and you realize there simply isn't a ton of demand for a PS3 emulator like there was a PS2 emulator or gamecube emulator. Let along earlier consoles. Used to be consoles were an entirely separate kind of game and losing a console meant losing an entire generation of good games. Now that consoles are just shitty PCs, all you lose are a bunch of shitty PC games without proper controls and a select few gems that will be ported anyway.

 

[RK47]

There is literally nothing on Xbox worth building an emulator for, everything good was on the PC or PS2 as well.

Record of Agarest War isn't.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Well there have always been the oddballs that are really hard to emulate even though the others in their generation have every game playable (N64 emulation is deeply flawed and Saturn emulation is a joke, yet almost every PS1 game is fully playable. Only 1 closed source emulator figured out how to get the Genesis/MegaDrive's sound working right while the SNES is literally as close to perfect emulation as technically possible)

This.

I mean, there are people who spend tons of time making emulators for stillborn, obscure projects like the 3DO and the Jaguar. You really believe there isn't a demand for this, and people in the know haven't tried painstakingly?

 

[sea]

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/EricSchwarz/20130220/187032/PlayStation_4_Here_We_Go_Again.php

Guess I won't be getting any Mountain Dew or Doritos this year.

 

[RK47]

Who is this Eric Schwarz - hmm. He seems rather well informed yet he doesn't care about his livelihood and publisher's meddling? Seems a rather incline fellow.

 

[Excidium]

share button lol

 

[Cassidy]

I bought my last PC in 2009.

Looks like there is no reason to buy a new one unless that Star Citizen space sim project gets done and ends as an incredible game.

I strongly doubt there will be any multiplatform game worth a damn, and most importantly, one not plagued by the shittiest possible always online and cloudshit DRMs like Diablo 3. The decline of console games is more total and absolute than it has ever been. There will be nothing worth salvaging outside of PC gaming at worst, and at best, one or two exceptions to the rule.

tl;dr Trying to find a good game released for these new consoles will be like searching for a jewel in the sewers.

 

[Dexter]

lol http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/02/21/new-ps4-a-pc-rps-declares-victory/

http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/pdf/130221a_e.pdf
http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/pdf/130221b_e.pdf
http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/pdf/130221c_e.pdf

 

[RK47]

yeah that article is just horrible.
streaming live = PC ... ffs.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Believe it or not, Kotaku is most of all angry not with any aspects of the console, but rather at the patriarchy

Today we got a healthy dose of next-gen information, delivered to us by a bevy of excited, breathless developers and publishers. Here's the thing: not a single one of the presenters at the PlayStation 4 event were women, and people noticed.

It's not something folks are happy about, either.

This is a french Vita ad, which we covered before.

To contextualize the next couple of tweets: Elizabeth retweeted Leena's tweet about no women presenters, and because of that, started talking about what she was going to do in response to the event.

Getting women in games development is a noted problem in the industry, but the last year has seen a rise in conversation when it comes to gender and sexism in this industry. People will notice if, like today, there are no women presenters at your event.

The question is whether or not that will change. I admittedly didn't even notice there weren't women presenters until someone else mentioned it, which probably says something about how used to situations like this we all are. Some won't even bat an eyelash.

As a side note: the picture above shows some guys from Bungie, who you might remember because they looked super uncomfortable as they refused to raise their hands during their presentation (or because of Destiny, sure!)

Gaming journalism blogging becoming more irrelevant by the day

Oh, and Rex Exitium is smoldering in rage over this too

https://twitter.com/stillgray

 

[Whisky]

Psst! It's generally considered good form on the internet to Pastebin Kotaku articles so that they don't get hits. They live off of hit-baiting.

 

[Dexter]

Thank you for removing your offensive link, other than that only one thing remains to be said: Patricia Hernandez.

Spoiler

 

[tuluse]

Yeah but DDR5 with VRAM architecture? That's what I am worried about. Ports to PC for a long time were CPU limited when the 360 came out because that was where they focused last time. If memory is the new focus we might be memory limited until the PC retail stuff catches up.

I'm a layman though, so if someone wants to tell me DDR3 isn't much different or DDR5 is coming next month for the same price then I'll shut up.

I believe GDDR5 is faster than DDR3, but it has much more latency. This isn't an issue with rendering graphics and it's actually latency insensitive. I know this seems counter-intuitive, but GPUs know what they'll be drawing before they draw it, so they can request the data in advance. Also, they don't need to request data, send it back to ram, and then ask for it again, which is common with normal general computing.

On the other hand, I don't think RAM latency or bandwidth has been a problem for game code since about 2002, so they could use DDR1 and it would be fine as long as there is a lot of it.

On advantage a console could have over PCs, that I haven't heard talked about, is that they could have more channels of RAM. PCs are mostly dual channel so a person can upgrade 2 sticks at a time. Though there are quad channel chips, and some rare tri-channel ones you can get (or could, I think Intel only briefly did the tri-channel thing). With a specific target system you could have 8 channels, 1 gig on each, and each CPU core would have a preferred channel it would access. Idk if they'll do that though. It would make optimization more complicated.

So few games use more than 2 GB of memory on PC these days.

For the most part 32bit applications are limited to 2gigs of RAM due to how Windows allocates memory.

 

[CrustyBot]

Rex sure is moving up in the world, being quoted in a Kotaku article. Good for him.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Patricia Hernandez

Indeed, nothing else needs to be said.

It's silly, trying to push this as a major front page issue, when it's the unveiling of a brand new console full of interesting technology.

I wonder if 1.6 ghz per core isn't too low and couldn't cause problems, especially since developers still have problems programming to multiple core systmems.

 

[tuluse]

They have a point, what's a video game launch without tits?