tsd16 :
I notice A trend in consoles witht he exception of the wii (which from my perspective is more of"just a console)
I've actually come to doubt that; though it lacks DVD-playback capabilities, it can play audio CDs, and effectively has every other non-gaming feature that the Xbox 360 and PS3 have.
Plus, as I've noticed, they SOMEHOW managed to succeed where Microsoft had failed years ago: get people to love WebTV, albeit without actually implying anything of the like. Nintendo's a slippery one, I tell you.
tsd16 :
With increasing price tags, again aside fromt he wii, and increasing variation of models and upgradeabilty of the console systems, in my opinion its just a matter of time for Console gaming to become as expensive as PC gaming. just look at the launch price of the ps3, I could have built a budget gaming machine for that price, especially now for PS3's original price tag. In my opinion its only a matter of time until Consoles start allowing easy access for hardware changes and you will see system requirements on the back of console games only coming out with new consoles when there is a major technology shift. IMO decent gaming computers are getting cheaper and cheaper to build whereas consoles are going up in price. i.e the first computer I built cost me 1700 dollars ( I think I was rockin a voodoo 3 600mhz athlon), and was hardly top of the line, If I spent that much this go round I would be running dual 8800GT's or a 8800 Ultra right now instead of one 8800gt(which is serving me quite well so far!).
What does anyone else think?
I'd doubt that consoles will start allowing access to change out their hardware. Once they do, they lose their advantage in being so ridiculously easy to program for, which will start to chase away developers. And once you start cutting down the game flow, the consoles would crash; this is what brought down, for instance, the Nintendo64; it had several hardware quirks that put off developers, particularly the fact that it used cartridges rather than CDs. While the cartriges were, on average, 6-8x as fast as the CDs in the Playstation, allowed for built-in saves, were practically impossible to pirate, (at least to make copies of) were far more durable, and in MOST cases, thanks to the hardware-based .MP3 audio support, at 16 or 32MB had plenty enough space for almost any developer, it just happened to COST far more, which meant that publishers had to ACCURATELY predict a game's sales level, else wind up losing money.
By alienating the developers in such a way, Nintendo lost what they hadn't realized what was their biggest strength with the NES and SNES. And because the Playstation wound up having so many developers backing it heavily with their flagship titles, it wound up vastly out-selling the Nintendo64, in spite of the fact that the N64 was perhaps 2-4 times as powerful; a gap about as wide as the one between the Wii and the PS3.
At any rate, I doubt that consoles will continue to take a steep incline in prices. Historically, a grand total of 3 consoles had an MSRP lower than their manufacturing price at launch: the Xbox, the Xbox 360, and the PS3. Both the Xbox and Xbox 360 dropped in cost to lower than their MSRP. However, none of those three consoles managed to capture the market.
I'm predicting that for the 8th generation, both Sony and Microsoft will think long and hard before putting so much expensive hardware in their machines. I'd expect that we'll see a far more modest increase in power over the current generation, than we saw this generation over the last one. Part of it will be due, of course, to a lack of necessity: from the 6th to 7th we saw a transition from standard-definition TV output being the norm to support of enhanced-definition and high-definition being the norm. They aren't going to be putting out a new standard anytime soon, since I noted that what we call 480i today has been mostly unchanged since around 1953, 55 years ago.
perzy :
Well imagine the grinding teeth of all PS3-owners in a year or two when all games look better on the PC...
Well,
don't they already look better?
perzy :
But the consoles sell anyway and I guess it's because the social dimension.
The PC is a single-player machine. The console is more a family/friends toy.
Very true; PCs tend to not be readily available as multiplayer machines. It can take quite a bit of effort to do so, even IF the game you're running allows for one-machine multiplayer. That's a big difference from just plunking down with some friends to play a quick round of
Super Smash Brothers or
Halo. (I will admit to spending an inordinate amount of time for this sort of thing, particularly SSB)
KingLoftusXII :
With the advent of 1080p HD, and consoles now with the power to take advantage of it, this will hurt PC gaming.
I have my doubts here; it's been pretty well-documented that people really can't tell the difference between resolutions on a TV, especially seeing as how very few realized that most of the games they like to play at 1080p are, in fact, rendering at 720p at best; only some sports titles are really handling 1080p.
KingLoftusXII :
Yes PC's have always had better graphics, and most likely always will, my point was consoles have gotten close enough to at least make them semi-comparable.
Technically, they've not been continually trying to close the gap; it's widened and shortened over the years. I'd actually say there was ONE point where the consoles actually passed the PC: namely in 1996, with the release of the Nintendo64, where that console suddenly had support for year-2000-esque technology like bilinear filtering and hardware Transform & lighting. Of course, the machine was bottlenecked by having only 4MB of total RAM, (and also bottlenecked by having a texture cache large enough to only support 64x64 textures) though the results could be clearly seen; it looked better than
Quake.
stemnin :
http://www.gamebrink.com/blog/2007/11/15/most-hd-game-resolutions-not-even-720p-let-alone-1080p
Rather interesting to see... Though I'd been fairly certain that
Oblivion was full 720p, albeit at a 30fps cap. Though that might explain why
all these screenshots are at 1024x576.
And
Halo 3 at 600p?! What could they be doing to drag down performance on a game that looks not much better than
Halo 2?
I suppose that the resolutions used are lower than I thought.