10 ms·

The forced obsolescence of consoles is amazing. Now the new generation is advertising as one of their major achievements the retro-compatibility with the previo

by kuu 6y ago

The forced obsolescence of consoles is amazing. Now the new generation is advertising as one of their major achievements the retro-compatibility with the previous generation games, but what about PS3 or 360 games? Don't worry, you will have the option to pay again for the same game, maybe with new textures (but maybe not). At the same time, on PC I can play almost any game it has existed in PC history.

mnd999 6y ago
The PS3 has an incredibly powerful CPU that is a a real pain to emulate. Modernretrogamer did quite an interesting Youtube piece on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLebZyha74o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLebZyha74o
- NullPrefix 6y ago
  They don't make them like this anymore
  - rusk 6y ago
    Every Game Dev: Thank God
    - mnd999 6y ago
      I know it was a pain to code for initially but once the tooling got better was it really that bad? The Cell still seems like an awesome piece of kit. Had the PS4 been a PS3 with a new GPU and a clocked up Cell with an extra PPE would that have been a bad thing?
      - rusk 6y ago
        I “loved” the idea of the cell when I heard about it, but the development community’s struggle with it should be a salutary lesson to us all!
        csharptwdec19 6y ago
        It's a challenge game companies have had for a long time. Sometimes, being bold means trying new architectures... But the important thing is making sure they are easy to adopt. That's the irony of the 'lesson' of the PS3 being hard to develop for; Sega learned that one the hard way with the Saturn.
        mnd999 6y ago
        I guess that’s my question, was the Cell fundamentally bad or was it just too new, different and hard to adopt? If it’s the latter then building the PS4 on the cell as well should have been fine as by that point it’s a well-known and well-understood architecture.
        detaro 6y ago
        Even if it's well-understood, being fundamentally different than the other platforms is still a cost for anyone not exclusively making Playstation titles.
        ascagnel_ 6y ago
        The Cell was poorly suited for video games — video games don’t have much in the way of highly parallelizable, discrete tasks. Games, even modern ones, generally want fewer, higher-clocked cores — something like Threadripper would be of little benefit.
      - w0utert 6y ago
        >> Had the PS4 been a PS3 with a new GPU and a clocked up Cell with an extra PPE would that have been a bad thing? Probably, if only because non-exclusive AAA games already cost tens of millions of $$$ to develop, and no other consoles or PC's show any similarity with the Cell architecture. So you would either end up with really crappy PS versions of multi-platform games, or they would not be made for PS at all.
      - rhinoceraptor 6y ago
        Johnathan Blow had an interesting view on it [1], he talks about the idea of the Cell being you somehow refactor your game to be parallelized across the SPEs. But the whole point of a game is that you're simulating a cohesive little world, and anything that is easily separable from the global view of the world is probably not core to the gameplay. One example is sound effects, if you're generating sound effects, you can't do a good job of that without the context of the environment and what is making the noise, so you necessarily have very deep data dependencies. [1]: (at about 22 minutes onward) https://oxide.computer/podcast/on-the-metal-9-jonathan-blow/ https://oxide.computer/podcast/on-the-metal-9-jonathan-blow/
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  It's surprising to me that PS3 emulation (RPCS3) is so much further along than Xbox360 emulation (Xenia). Is it just a matter of one platform getting more attention?
  - SpaceManNabs 6y ago
    Complete guess: I think part of the issue is that a lot of Xbox games that aren't exclusive to Sony or Switch are also on Windows. So maybe there is a slightly smaller incentive?
  - jgoyvaerts 6y ago
    It's a combination of various factors. The games definitely play a role (PS3 has more exclusives, Xbox360 is mainly Halo and even that has been remastered on PC now). Another factor is how the projects are maintained and managed. The maintainers of RPCS3 are more active and pull requests get feedback and merged relatively quickly. On Xenia side, pull requests can remain open for months even though they should be merged, and this has caused multiple (potential) contributors to stop making pull requests. Source: I'm a contributor on Xenia
  - sumtechguy 6y ago
    It is also interesting that the orig xbox is not further along.
- jokowueu 6y ago
  I keep reading that it's difficult to emulate but the current Rpcs3 is doing great work at such a high pace https://youtu.be/MhLteF_xVi0 https://youtu.be/MhLteF_xVi0
  - rusk 6y ago
    OMG how have I not played this game!
  - w0utert 6y ago
    Rpcs3 is extremely impressive, but remember it took 9 years to get to the point where it is now, and still many games break or have unplayable performance even on the highest-end PC's you can buy today. So it kind of proves the point how ridiculously difficult it is to emulate that machine.
  - Narann 6y ago
    > I keep reading that it's difficult to emulate but the current Rpcs3 is doing great work at such a high pace The fact a 9 year old emulator with talented devs with successful patreon is doing great work at such a high pace doesn't invalidate the fact PS3 is a nightmare to emulate.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      I generally agree, but it’s worth noting that rpcs3 has to reverse engineer everything. Any developer team working within Sony would likely have a much easier time.
mschuetz 6y ago
It's also why I didn't by consoles anymore since the PS2. The PS2 was awesome and the backwards compatibility to PS1 games got me hooked. However, I have no desire to buy 3 new consoles every 6-7 years that don't support my previous collection of old games. If the PS5 had backwards compatibility all the way to the PS1, I'd buy it in a heartbeat, but since it doesn't, I won't buy it.
- silon42 6y ago
  How usable is PS4 without internet connection? I'd buy one (maybe used) if it is.
  - als0 6y ago
    You put discs in and play games. From that perspective you don’t need an internet connection. However, if you want to play blu ray movies, you need to connect it to the internet to download a license. Sadly.
    - maccard 6y ago
      > However, if you want to play blu ray movies, you need to connect it to the internet to download a license. Sadly. Just once.
      - als0 6y ago
        Yes. Also this license is needed for DVD playback too.
    - deergomoo 6y ago
      It's worth noting that with the prevalence of day-one patches these days, it's entirely possible that the code on the disk is a barely playable mess. It raises big concerns for archival—we'll eventually have high quality emulators for all of these systems, but to properly archive the games requires also archiving patches, which is difficult from both a logistical and copyright standpoint.
AmericanChopper 6y ago
I can’t see any rationale for how it’s forced obsolescence. New consoles offer very obvious improvements over previous consoles, and they don’t prevent old consoles from working. Not offering infinite backwards compatibility with new hardware isn’t forced obsolescence.
- gambiting 6y ago
  Yeah it's like saying that Apple is doing forced obsolescence because modern Macs can't run PowerPC Mac software. PCs can run even very very old software because at least the architecture is the same. There is no good way to emulate the CELL cpu of the PS3 on modern x86 architecture, and even emulating PS2 architecture is very very difficult and full of caveats. That's not forced obscolescence, like you said - it's just obsolescence.
- Dirlewanger 6y ago
  Well, some parts are forced anyway e.g. you can't play original Xbox games on Xbox Live anymore.
fiskfiskfisk 6y ago
There's a pretty good list of backwards compatible 360 games that can be played on the modern Xbox consoles. Microsoft did the work in this case. Since it's different architectures there's a bit of work involved in making sure the compatibility layer works as expected. It's a technical achievement that they've been able to do it as good as this. There's also OG Xbox games available with a compatibility layer as well. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/xbox-backwards-compatibility-list-xbox-360-games-series-x-6400 https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/xbox-backwards-compatibil...
- bartread 6y ago
  For supported games this works incredibly well, and I imagine there's probably no technical reason it couldn't be made to work for all 360 and Xbox OG games. However, it doesn't appear to come for free in terms of effort: I don't believe there's a kind of universal emulation layer that supports every game. When you put in a game disc for a support Xbox or 360 game the console doesn't install the game direct from the disc but rather downloads a compatible version from Microsoft. The disc simply proves that you own the game (and you still have to insert it every time you want to play the game). This has some advantages and disadvantages. The obvious advantage is that the downloaded version could include enhancements like better visuals, sound effects, bug fixes, etc., and plenty of games on the backwards compatibility list do include some level of enhancement. The obvious disadvantage is that you can't just play any old game you might own. I don't know why Microsoft haven't implemented some sort of universal backwards compatibility directly into the consoles but obviously they have their reasons. The fact that the games are downloaded rather than installed from disc throws up another issue: licensing. It will never be the case that all games are supported through backwards compatibility due to content licensing issues (effectively Microsoft are redistributing content because of the way compatibility works). Similarly, some games ship with altered content due to licensing issues. One fairly well know example here is GTA: San Andreas, where the soundtrack differs quite significantly from the version on the disc. The best way to play GTA: San Andreas on a console if you want to experience it as originally intended still remains original PS2 or Xbox hardware or, if you have one that works still, earlier models of PS3 that included PS2 backwards compatibility (this was removed in later revisions).
AussieWog93 6y ago
I wouldn't exactly call it "forced obsolescence". Backwards compatibility is a niche feature used by a tiny fraction of the customer base very occasionally (who invariably still have the old hardware), and console manufacturers dump millions into added BOM cost/engineering time to get it working despite the economics making almost zero sense.
- kuu 6y ago
  Seen how it's announced as a key feature of this generation as long as many remakes they're making, I wouldn't call it a niche feature...
  - ascagnel_ 6y ago
    This generation is somewhat weird. It seems like the bulk of the launch titles have been pushed into 2021 or beyond, so the new consoles are somewhat akin to PC upgrades: play the same games, but at a better frame rate and higher resolution.
blackoil 6y ago
This isn't forced or planned obsolescence, just plain obsolescence. Because not enough people care enough about it.
pjmlp 6y ago
> At the same time, on PC I can play almost any game it has existed in PC history. Only thanks to emulation or the fact that modern hardware is still able to boot into some flavour of DOS. Plenty of people buy their movies multiple times, Betamax, VHS, LaserDisc, CD-ROM, DVD, BlueRay, HiDef BluRay, streaming service,... Or their music, tape, cassette, LP, CD, mini-disc, mp3, streaming,....
vultour 6y ago
I don’t think I’ll ever understand people that buy consoles, especially for FPS games. The controls are terrible, the FPS is terrible, the display is probably terrible if they’re using a TV, and the number one reason I will never understand: paying money if you want to play multiplayer. So you’ve already paid money for the console, you paid an exorbitant price for a game that is rarely on sale, and now you have to pay _more_ money to Sony/Microsoft so that you can use the internet? What the actual fuck? I can’t understand how console players aren’t rioting about this. Imagine the outrage if Microsoft prevented you from playing an online game on PC saying “Please buy a Windows+ subscription for online features”. I bought a PS4 to play Crash Bandicoot when I wasn’t sure it will ever come out on PC (also fuck exclusives - a whole another debate), but since I bought it on Steam the console is a glorified HBO player. I don’t even use it for Netflix because using my fire TV stick is faster.
- epanchin 6y ago
  A PlayStation 5 is £450 and will smoothly play any game I buy for it. PlayStation+ for 7 years is £350. Total cost excluding games is £800 for 7 years of smooth gameplay. An £800 PC wouldn’t even play current games smoothly, never mind releases in 7 years.
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    >An £800 PC wouldn’t even play current games smoothly Why do people assume you need a million $ PC to play current games smoothly? Is it the tech youtubers/influencers like Linus to blame for this madness where everything needs to be run at 4k 300Hz ULTRA settings to count as PC gaming? PC gaming hardware for a good experience is more affordable than people think. A 850-900 Euro PC (for us over the channel) with an RTX 2060 will definitely play all AAA titles very smoothly. Sure, not in native 4K, but consoles games(even next gen) are also not native 4K/ultra settings but rendered in lower fidelity then upscaled to whatever your TV output is. >never mind releases in 7 years. That PC will most definitely play games 7 years from now but on lower settings which will still match the visual fidelity of the 7 year old console as the game developers will have to lower game details to make the game playable on the then outdated console hardware.
victords 6y ago
> what about PS3 or 360 games? That's only true for PS3 tho. Microsoft has been doing quite a good job regarding backwards compatibility, and you can still play 360 games in the new Series X.
- cheschire 6y ago
  PS3 was a completely different CPU architecture than PS4. That's why sony implemented a streaming library for older games instead. Emulation alone wouldn't have worked because some folks more knowledgeable than I am have said that the PS3 chip was more powerful than even some modern CPUs. Streaming is really the only relatively universal and financially viable solution for that older library of games. > VAN DER LEEUW: Even desktop chips nowadays, the fastest Intel stuff you can buy is not by far as powerful as the Cell CPU, but it’s very difficult to get power out of the Cell. I think it was ahead of its age, because it was a little bit more like how GPUs work nowadays, but it was maybe not balanced nicely and it was too hard to use. It overshot a little bit in power and undershot in usability, but it was definitely visionary. https://www.gameinformer.com/feature/2019/12/03/the-first-25-years https://www.gameinformer.com/feature/2019/12/03/the-first-25...
jackpeterfletch 6y ago
This is a bit tangental, but. While I agree the backwards compatability on PC is nice. The new M1 MBP Pro benchmarks quite clearly show, in my opinion, that the hell bent persuit of backwards compatability, on a _40 Year Old_ instruction set, may have significantly held computing back. They've produced a chip that goes toe to toe with the fastest x86s parts, but does it in 10W instead of 65W. And this is their first shot at it. I think we may need to recalibrate our expectations for long term software support, for both PCs and Consoles, if we want the most out of our hardware.
Dahoon 6y ago
>At the same time, on PC I can play almost any game it has existed in PC history. What you are saying is really: >At the same time, on X86 I can play almost any game it has existed in X86 history. What you could compare to if you want apples to apples could be how many old ARM games you can play on X86 or how many old X86 games you can play on ARM.
dangus 6y ago
Nobody’s going into your home and taking away your PS4. Nobody’s forcing you to buy a PS5. You can still buy digital titles on the PS3, which came out 16 years ago! Backwards compatibility was basically not even a thing until the 2000s. Now you’ve got the PS5 and Xbox Series sharing essentially the same underlying x86 architecture of the PS4 and Xbox One...kind of like a PC.
fomine3 6y ago
I can't blame SIE for not able to compatible with weird arch old hardwares (PS2,PS3). BTW Microsoft is excellent to make old Xbox games compatible, as wellas they does in Windows. (but not too weird like PS2/PS3)

by kuu 6y ago

mnd999 6y ago

The PS3 has an incredibly powerful CPU that is a a real pain to emulate. Modernretrogamer did quite an interesting Youtube piece on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLebZyha74o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLebZyha74o

NullPrefix 6y ago
They don't make them like this anymore
- rusk 6y ago
  Every Game Dev: Thank God
  - mnd999 6y ago
    I know it was a pain to code for initially but once the tooling got better was it really that bad? The Cell still seems like an awesome piece of kit. Had the PS4 been a PS3 with a new GPU and a clocked up Cell with an extra PPE would that have been a bad thing?
    - rusk 6y ago
      I “loved” the idea of the cell when I heard about it, but the development community’s struggle with it should be a salutary lesson to us all!
      - csharptwdec19 6y ago
        It's a challenge game companies have had for a long time. Sometimes, being bold means trying new architectures... But the important thing is making sure they are easy to adopt. That's the irony of the 'lesson' of the PS3 being hard to develop for; Sega learned that one the hard way with the Saturn.
        mnd999 6y ago
        I guess that’s my question, was the Cell fundamentally bad or was it just too new, different and hard to adopt? If it’s the latter then building the PS4 on the cell as well should have been fine as by that point it’s a well-known and well-understood architecture.
        detaro 6y ago
        Even if it's well-understood, being fundamentally different than the other platforms is still a cost for anyone not exclusively making Playstation titles.
        ascagnel_ 6y ago
        The Cell was poorly suited for video games — video games don’t have much in the way of highly parallelizable, discrete tasks. Games, even modern ones, generally want fewer, higher-clocked cores — something like Threadripper would be of little benefit.
    - w0utert 6y ago
      >> Had the PS4 been a PS3 with a new GPU and a clocked up Cell with an extra PPE would that have been a bad thing? Probably, if only because non-exclusive AAA games already cost tens of millions of $$$ to develop, and no other consoles or PC's show any similarity with the Cell architecture. So you would either end up with really crappy PS versions of multi-platform games, or they would not be made for PS at all.
    - rhinoceraptor 6y ago
      Johnathan Blow had an interesting view on it [1], he talks about the idea of the Cell being you somehow refactor your game to be parallelized across the SPEs. But the whole point of a game is that you're simulating a cohesive little world, and anything that is easily separable from the global view of the world is probably not core to the gameplay. One example is sound effects, if you're generating sound effects, you can't do a good job of that without the context of the environment and what is making the noise, so you necessarily have very deep data dependencies. [1]: (at about 22 minutes onward) https://oxide.computer/podcast/on-the-metal-9-jonathan-blow/ https://oxide.computer/podcast/on-the-metal-9-jonathan-blow/
Rebelgecko 6y ago
It's surprising to me that PS3 emulation (RPCS3) is so much further along than Xbox360 emulation (Xenia). Is it just a matter of one platform getting more attention?
- SpaceManNabs 6y ago
  Complete guess: I think part of the issue is that a lot of Xbox games that aren't exclusive to Sony or Switch are also on Windows. So maybe there is a slightly smaller incentive?
- jgoyvaerts 6y ago
  It's a combination of various factors. The games definitely play a role (PS3 has more exclusives, Xbox360 is mainly Halo and even that has been remastered on PC now). Another factor is how the projects are maintained and managed. The maintainers of RPCS3 are more active and pull requests get feedback and merged relatively quickly. On Xenia side, pull requests can remain open for months even though they should be merged, and this has caused multiple (potential) contributors to stop making pull requests. Source: I'm a contributor on Xenia
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  It is also interesting that the orig xbox is not further along.
jokowueu 6y ago
I keep reading that it's difficult to emulate but the current Rpcs3 is doing great work at such a high pace https://youtu.be/MhLteF_xVi0 https://youtu.be/MhLteF_xVi0
- rusk 6y ago
  OMG how have I not played this game!
- w0utert 6y ago
  Rpcs3 is extremely impressive, but remember it took 9 years to get to the point where it is now, and still many games break or have unplayable performance even on the highest-end PC's you can buy today. So it kind of proves the point how ridiculously difficult it is to emulate that machine.
- Narann 6y ago
  > I keep reading that it's difficult to emulate but the current Rpcs3 is doing great work at such a high pace The fact a 9 year old emulator with talented devs with successful patreon is doing great work at such a high pace doesn't invalidate the fact PS3 is a nightmare to emulate.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    I generally agree, but it’s worth noting that rpcs3 has to reverse engineer everything. Any developer team working within Sony would likely have a much easier time.

mschuetz 6y ago

It's also why I didn't by consoles anymore since the PS2. The PS2 was awesome and the backwards compatibility to PS1 games got me hooked. However, I have no desire to buy 3 new consoles every 6-7 years that don't support my previous collection of old games. If the PS5 had backwards compatibility all the way to the PS1, I'd buy it in a heartbeat, but since it doesn't, I won't buy it.

silon42 6y ago
How usable is PS4 without internet connection? I'd buy one (maybe used) if it is.
- als0 6y ago
  You put discs in and play games. From that perspective you don’t need an internet connection. However, if you want to play blu ray movies, you need to connect it to the internet to download a license. Sadly.
  - maccard 6y ago
    > However, if you want to play blu ray movies, you need to connect it to the internet to download a license. Sadly. Just once.
    - als0 6y ago
      Yes. Also this license is needed for DVD playback too.
  - deergomoo 6y ago
    It's worth noting that with the prevalence of day-one patches these days, it's entirely possible that the code on the disk is a barely playable mess. It raises big concerns for archival—we'll eventually have high quality emulators for all of these systems, but to properly archive the games requires also archiving patches, which is difficult from both a logistical and copyright standpoint.

AmericanChopper 6y ago

I can’t see any rationale for how it’s forced obsolescence. New consoles offer very obvious improvements over previous consoles, and they don’t prevent old consoles from working. Not offering infinite backwards compatibility with new hardware isn’t forced obsolescence.

gambiting 6y ago
Yeah it's like saying that Apple is doing forced obsolescence because modern Macs can't run PowerPC Mac software. PCs can run even very very old software because at least the architecture is the same. There is no good way to emulate the CELL cpu of the PS3 on modern x86 architecture, and even emulating PS2 architecture is very very difficult and full of caveats. That's not forced obscolescence, like you said - it's just obsolescence.
Dirlewanger 6y ago
Well, some parts are forced anyway e.g. you can't play original Xbox games on Xbox Live anymore.

fiskfiskfisk 6y ago

There's a pretty good list of backwards compatible 360 games that can be played on the modern Xbox consoles. Microsoft did the work in this case. Since it's different architectures there's a bit of work involved in making sure the compatibility layer works as expected. It's a technical achievement that they've been able to do it as good as this. There's also OG Xbox games available with a compatibility layer as well. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/xbox-backwards-compatibility-list-xbox-360-games-series-x-6400 https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/xbox-backwards-compatibil...

bartread 6y ago
For supported games this works incredibly well, and I imagine there's probably no technical reason it couldn't be made to work for all 360 and Xbox OG games. However, it doesn't appear to come for free in terms of effort: I don't believe there's a kind of universal emulation layer that supports every game. When you put in a game disc for a support Xbox or 360 game the console doesn't install the game direct from the disc but rather downloads a compatible version from Microsoft. The disc simply proves that you own the game (and you still have to insert it every time you want to play the game). This has some advantages and disadvantages. The obvious advantage is that the downloaded version could include enhancements like better visuals, sound effects, bug fixes, etc., and plenty of games on the backwards compatibility list do include some level of enhancement. The obvious disadvantage is that you can't just play any old game you might own. I don't know why Microsoft haven't implemented some sort of universal backwards compatibility directly into the consoles but obviously they have their reasons. The fact that the games are downloaded rather than installed from disc throws up another issue: licensing. It will never be the case that all games are supported through backwards compatibility due to content licensing issues (effectively Microsoft are redistributing content because of the way compatibility works). Similarly, some games ship with altered content due to licensing issues. One fairly well know example here is GTA: San Andreas, where the soundtrack differs quite significantly from the version on the disc. The best way to play GTA: San Andreas on a console if you want to experience it as originally intended still remains original PS2 or Xbox hardware or, if you have one that works still, earlier models of PS3 that included PS2 backwards compatibility (this was removed in later revisions).

AussieWog93 6y ago

I wouldn't exactly call it "forced obsolescence". Backwards compatibility is a niche feature used by a tiny fraction of the customer base very occasionally (who invariably still have the old hardware), and console manufacturers dump millions into added BOM cost/engineering time to get it working despite the economics making almost zero sense.

kuu 6y ago
Seen how it's announced as a key feature of this generation as long as many remakes they're making, I wouldn't call it a niche feature...
- ascagnel_ 6y ago
  This generation is somewhat weird. It seems like the bulk of the launch titles have been pushed into 2021 or beyond, so the new consoles are somewhat akin to PC upgrades: play the same games, but at a better frame rate and higher resolution.

blackoil 6y ago

This isn't forced or planned obsolescence, just plain obsolescence. Because not enough people care enough about it.

pjmlp 6y ago

> At the same time, on PC I can play almost any game it has existed in PC history. Only thanks to emulation or the fact that modern hardware is still able to boot into some flavour of DOS. Plenty of people buy their movies multiple times, Betamax, VHS, LaserDisc, CD-ROM, DVD, BlueRay, HiDef BluRay, streaming service,... Or their music, tape, cassette, LP, CD, mini-disc, mp3, streaming,....

vultour 6y ago

I don’t think I’ll ever understand people that buy consoles, especially for FPS games. The controls are terrible, the FPS is terrible, the display is probably terrible if they’re using a TV, and the number one reason I will never understand: paying money if you want to play multiplayer. So you’ve already paid money for the console, you paid an exorbitant price for a game that is rarely on sale, and now you have to pay _more_ money to Sony/Microsoft so that you can use the internet? What the actual fuck? I can’t understand how console players aren’t rioting about this. Imagine the outrage if Microsoft prevented you from playing an online game on PC saying “Please buy a Windows+ subscription for online features”. I bought a PS4 to play Crash Bandicoot when I wasn’t sure it will ever come out on PC (also fuck exclusives - a whole another debate), but since I bought it on Steam the console is a glorified HBO player. I don’t even use it for Netflix because using my fire TV stick is faster.

epanchin 6y ago
A PlayStation 5 is £450 and will smoothly play any game I buy for it. PlayStation+ for 7 years is £350. Total cost excluding games is £800 for 7 years of smooth gameplay. An £800 PC wouldn’t even play current games smoothly, never mind releases in 7 years.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  >An £800 PC wouldn’t even play current games smoothly Why do people assume you need a million $ PC to play current games smoothly? Is it the tech youtubers/influencers like Linus to blame for this madness where everything needs to be run at 4k 300Hz ULTRA settings to count as PC gaming? PC gaming hardware for a good experience is more affordable than people think. A 850-900 Euro PC (for us over the channel) with an RTX 2060 will definitely play all AAA titles very smoothly. Sure, not in native 4K, but consoles games(even next gen) are also not native 4K/ultra settings but rendered in lower fidelity then upscaled to whatever your TV output is. >never mind releases in 7 years. That PC will most definitely play games 7 years from now but on lower settings which will still match the visual fidelity of the 7 year old console as the game developers will have to lower game details to make the game playable on the then outdated console hardware.

victords 6y ago

> what about PS3 or 360 games? That's only true for PS3 tho. Microsoft has been doing quite a good job regarding backwards compatibility, and you can still play 360 games in the new Series X.

cheschire 6y ago
PS3 was a completely different CPU architecture than PS4. That's why sony implemented a streaming library for older games instead. Emulation alone wouldn't have worked because some folks more knowledgeable than I am have said that the PS3 chip was more powerful than even some modern CPUs. Streaming is really the only relatively universal and financially viable solution for that older library of games. > VAN DER LEEUW: Even desktop chips nowadays, the fastest Intel stuff you can buy is not by far as powerful as the Cell CPU, but it’s very difficult to get power out of the Cell. I think it was ahead of its age, because it was a little bit more like how GPUs work nowadays, but it was maybe not balanced nicely and it was too hard to use. It overshot a little bit in power and undershot in usability, but it was definitely visionary. https://www.gameinformer.com/feature/2019/12/03/the-first-25-years https://www.gameinformer.com/feature/2019/12/03/the-first-25...

jackpeterfletch 6y ago

This is a bit tangental, but. While I agree the backwards compatability on PC is nice. The new M1 MBP Pro benchmarks quite clearly show, in my opinion, that the hell bent persuit of backwards compatability, on a _40 Year Old_ instruction set, may have significantly held computing back. They've produced a chip that goes toe to toe with the fastest x86s parts, but does it in 10W instead of 65W. And this is their first shot at it. I think we may need to recalibrate our expectations for long term software support, for both PCs and Consoles, if we want the most out of our hardware.

Dahoon 6y ago

>At the same time, on PC I can play almost any game it has existed in PC history. What you are saying is really: >At the same time, on X86 I can play almost any game it has existed in X86 history. What you could compare to if you want apples to apples could be how many old ARM games you can play on X86 or how many old X86 games you can play on ARM.

dangus 6y ago

Nobody’s going into your home and taking away your PS4. Nobody’s forcing you to buy a PS5. You can still buy digital titles on the PS3, which came out 16 years ago! Backwards compatibility was basically not even a thing until the 2000s. Now you’ve got the PS5 and Xbox Series sharing essentially the same underlying x86 architecture of the PS4 and Xbox One...kind of like a PC.

fomine3 6y ago

I can't blame SIE for not able to compatible with weird arch old hardwares (PS2,PS3). BTW Microsoft is excellent to make old Xbox games compatible, as wellas they does in Windows. (but not too weird like PS2/PS3)