13 ms·

The x86 PlayStation 4 could signal a sea-change in the console industry

130 points by zoowar 15y ago

pagekalisedown 15y ago
Sony has always had terrible developer tools and developer support. Hopefully this might enable some of the tools available on PCs to become available on the Playstation.
- TwoBit 15y ago
  Huh? Maybe you're thinking of PS2 days or earlier. I'm a PS3 developer and Sony's tools and developer support is better than Microsoft's or Nintendo's. Enough so that we have asked Microsoft if they could replicate some aspects of what Sony does for the next generation.
  - hythloday 15y ago
    Sony's tools support got a lot better after they bought SN in 2005, but it wasn't that long ago that you couldn't do things like source-level debugging on an SPU (I assume you can now). Compare that to something like Pix/remote source-level debugging, which the 360 has had since day 1, and the difference is quite clear.
    - maximilianburke 15y ago
      SPU debugging has been available since at least 2007 going by archived email conversations I have on the topic, and I recall it working even before that. Sony's tools stopped being annoying around 2007 and have been excellent the last few years. In some ways they surpass what's available on the Xbox 360 -- Tuner and GPAD are more flexible than PIX and the debugger isn't tied to the massive anchor that is Visual Studio.
gfodor 15y ago
The article fails to mention the audience this is good news for: PC gamers. If next generation consoles are x86 based, expect to see future games being more widely available on PC, and, better yet, expect the "best" versions of those games (in terms of graphics, features, etc.) to be the PC versions. The only catch is if the game developers hold back on PC releases due to fears of piracy, but on the whole this probably will still mean many more releases on PC. That said, most flagship titles (Halo, Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, etc.) will probably stick to a single console due to contractual obligations.
- FooBarWidget 15y ago
  What? The instruction set matters very little. Pretty much all games are written in C++ and last time I checked there are C++ compilers targeting pretty much any architecture in existence. The graphics API is more important than the instruction set.
  - willvarfar 15y ago
    Apart from the 1st April angle, lets take your point seriously: Actually, toolchain for the PS3 with its Cell processors and unconventional memory / processing model was a major, major pain. Elsewhere, EPIC Itanium failed for the lack of sufficiently smart compilers.
  - Arelius 15y ago
    Additionally, current generation console hardware have a big-endian byte order, which can make dealing with importing of resources a pain at times.
    - figglesonrails 15y ago
      Surely, /surely/ this is the least of their concerns. Since when did we get so sloppy as to assume byte ordering in files? When was the last time your PNG loader failed on x86 because the file has big-endian fields?
      - 15y ago
willvarfar 15y ago
Classic 1st April :)
Osiris 15y ago
The rumor that they are attempting to block the used game market through a sort of DRM scheme is disappointing. While I've only ever bought 1 or 2 used games in the past, the act itself is a huge "F* YOU" to consumers and leaves a bad taste in the mouth. No one likes to feel controller or compelled to act in a certain way, which is why pretty much all DRM schemes have been broken and why the MP3 became so incredibly popular. I feel like game producers are making the same argument for the second-hand game market as the MPAA makes for pirating movies: Every used game sale is a lost new game sale and blocking used games is better than innovating or changing the pricing/sales structure.
- sjtgraham 15y ago
  The MP3 format became popular because it offers a good balance between audio quality and file size, which allowed people to share them easily on P2P networks back when broadband internet was more a novelty than the norm. WAV files have been around forever without DRM.
  - caf 15y ago
    The MP3 format became popular before P2P networks - they were being shared on FTP sites first.
    - sjtgraham 15y ago
      There are different degrees of popularity. The amount of people that shared files using FTP and usenet pales in comparison to the amount of users of P2P networks. I think it's fair to say that Napster and then P2P made MP3 ubiquitous.
      - caf 15y ago
        I think Winamp, which predated Napster by a couple of years, was really the turning point that made MP3 popular. Really MP3 made P2P networks popular, rather than the other way around.
      - 15y ago
jessriedel 15y ago
Will next generation consoles still use optical disks, or will games be delivered by flash?
- Osiris 15y ago
  The rumors that I've seen suggest that they will support optical disks with an emphasis on on-demand downloads. A disk is a lot cheaper to stamp and print than flash or some type of ROM would be.
  - CraigRood 15y ago
    Disk drives are dirt cheap, and a single blu ray can hold 25+ GB of data. Try putting that down a 1mb home connection.
  - jessriedel 15y ago
    Disks are cheap, but disk drives are ~$80. (Consoles are sold at a loss, so this comes directly out of profits.) I don't know how big PS4 games will be, but flash storage could cost 25 cents per GB. But yea, I think you're right that the optical disks will still end up being cheaper.
- vetler 15y ago
  Why do we need physical media? I'd prefer to download them myself. I usually buy games in the Playstation store if they are available there. Yes, of course, this would mean that you probably can't sell your games after you're done with them, but that's not a big issue for me personally.
  - patrickk 15y ago
    If the new games were made available at a cheaper price up front, I could live without the ability to trade in (at a price point of say €30 vs €50 currently). It might be viable as they aren't sharing a slice with the high street retailers.
  - pyre 15y ago
    You're making several anecdotal assumptions based on your personal situation and extrapolating it to the entire target market for the Playstation 4: 1. Everyone has a fast internet connection to the point where downloading a full BluRay disc of content (~25GB) is a non-issue. 2. Everyone has an Internet connection where downloading up to 25GB of content for a single game will not go over their transfer caps, possibly incurring usurious overage charges. 3. Everyone that will buy a Playstation 4 will be well-off enough that they don't need to resell their games after they have played them in order to afford the next game that they want to play (effectively only paying the difference between the original cost and the resale amount).
dustin 15y ago
Wonder what this means for a Steam console, particularly if PC games get more love as a result of consoles being x86. I suppose it's good news in the end, with less time wasted on cross-platform shenanigans and more time spent on making games.
- noobface 15y ago
  I wonder if Sony is basing this decision on negotiations with Valve. Think about that possibility for a second. What would be the motivating factors? Sony has gotten the shit beat out of them relentlessly in terms of multiplayer/online gaming. PSN has been shuddered for weeks at a time. Partially outsourcing this component to groups like Valve will fix many of their problems, but in return Valve probably would like their whole portfolio of content to be accessible. If Sony goes x86, it'd be a shame to make such a dramatic shift and not capitalize on a content neutral platform.
  - apowers 15y ago
    Sony's already been dabbling in Steam support. This move would not surprise me.
- marshray 15y ago
  Wouldn't it have to have extensive support Win32 and DirectX APIs? That would mean support from Microsoft (which would make it basically an Xbox) or Transgaming.
nextparadigms 15y ago
The article fails to mention that the graphics quality of the games made for these consoles could be a lot more advanced than what's available for the PC then, because developers get to write games directly for that specific hardware. John Carmack has said that the DirectX/OpenGL layers can slow down performance by 4x-10x, for example.
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
  Is it really that much? I guess abstraction comes at a big performance cost.
- intsunny 15y ago
  You'll have to forgive my skepticism, but can you link to where John Carmack has ever made such a statement? What I don't understand is, if the performance is being slowed by 4x to 10x, what is it being compared to? I doubt anyone is actually coding GPU assembler for complex 3D scenes all the big games require. If there are no alternatives to these API's for allowing game devs to create the results they need, then its a lot like comparing apples to oranges.
  - AndrewDucker 15y ago
    John Carmack: So we don't work directly with DX 11 but from the people that I talk with that are working with that, they (say) it might [have] some improvements, but it is still quite a thick layer of stuff between you and the hardware. NVIDIA has done some direct hardware address implementations where you can bypass most of the OpenGL overhead, and other ways to bypass some of the hidden state of OpenGL. Those things are good and useful, but what I most want to see is direct surfacing of the memory. It’s all memory there at some point, and the worst thing that kills Rage on the PC is texture updates. Where on the consoles we just say “we are going to update this one pixel here,” we just store it there as a pointer. On the PC it has to go through the massive texture update routine, and it takes tens of thousands of times [longer] if you just want to update one little piece. You start to advertise that overhead when you start to update larger blocks of textures, and AMD actually went and implemented a multi-texture update specifically for id Tech 5 so you can bash up and eliminate some of the overhead by saying “I need to update these 50 small things here,” but still it’s very inefficient. So I’m hoping that as we look forward, especially with Intel integrated graphics [where] it is the main memory, there is no reason we shouldn't be looking at that. With AMD and NVIDIA there's still issues of different memory banking arrangements and complicated things that they hide in their drivers, but we are moving towards integrated memory on a lot of things. I hope we wind up being able to say "give me a pointer, give me a pitch, give me a swizzle format," and let me do things managing it with fences myself and we'll be able to do a better job. http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Editorial/John-Carmack-Interview-GPU-Race-Intel-Graphics-Ray-Tracing-Voxels-and-more/Intervi http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Editorial/John-Carmack-Intervie...
julianpye 15y ago
This is a clear departure from the old Sony. Sony used to be all about locking developers and content providers into proprietary platforms, raising platform value through exclusives and lowering cross-platform development. They started off with cash-cows based on standards such as Trinitron and the Walkman and went cocky after the big success of going it all alone with the 'PS1' and 'PS2'. However where they were only looking at professional content, Apple one-upped them by lowering barriers for developers, opening the floodgates and lowering content prices. Is this the next step of Sony to reinvent themselves under Hirai-san? Whereas other Japanese CE companies are exiting the consumer business rapidly, Sony certainly is putting up a fight.
lancewiggs 15y ago
Where are the pixels? TV manufacturers are currently delivering 1080P sets in volume and at low prices. Nobody can really get out of a commodity play, and the future of bigger HDTVs is kind of pointless. Apple is delivering up 1080P content already, and the iPad 3 delivers better in our hands. (3D is a red herring.) So what's next? Higher resolution TV screens. IMAX in the home. iPad functionality on the walls. We are, in my opinion, going to continue to see a steady rise in the resolution of our TV screens (and change in what they do), and the content resolution will need to increase to match. That content will increasingly be delivered over IP. Apple is rumoured to be entering the TV market, and we know it won't be with a me-too commodity product. So why wouldn't they launch with a higher resolution screen, just as they did with the iPhone and iPad 3? They can control the delivery of media through the Apple TV, and with the iPad already in the lounge gaming on the higher resolution TV is essentially ready to go. So for me the NextGen gaming devices better launch alongside new TVs (Sony can do this), and with stunningly detailed graphics, or we will rightly yawn at their arrival and stick with our computers, iPads and iPhones. Heck - if Sony, Nintendo & Microsoft continue with their very slow release cycles for the gaming machines, then the next generation may well be the last - and we'll be driving big screen games using iPads and other tablets.
- padobson 15y ago
  The future of the living room is absolutely rooted in some form of forthcoming disruption. However, no one has meaningfully disrupted TV since the 80s when cable, video tapes and game consoles all hit mass market appeal at the same time. If the rumors here are to be believed, innovation among console makers is waning, so you're right in assuming the inevitable TV disruption is coming from elsewhere. It could come from Apple, but my money is on a startup. TVs, ultimately, are just monitors. They process a signal that comes from an external source. The first product that meaningfully augments the signal, regardless of source (antenna, cable, satellite, streaming, game console) is the true disruptor. Tayloring your TV watching experience to your web browsing, social, taste, and purchase histories is where TV will ultimately be disrupted. When you walk into the living room to watch Mad Men, the TV should know it and adjust the in-screen Twitter feed accordingly. It should hear you laughing at Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia and provide suggestions to other shows people laughed at who laughed at the same joke. No man should ever watch a commercial for feminine hygiene again. No woman should watch a beer commercial that objectifies women again. And when I see Don Draper wearing a slick hat, I should be able to pause the show so I can buy it. As far as I can tell, the only thing stopping this gazillion dollar disruption is that we can't get signal providers to play well with device makers. Apple has made this work with cell phones, so there's every reason to believe they could do it to TV, but I think a startup that figures out how to augment the signal without the provider detecting and blocking it has a chance to become the next Apple.
hef19898 15y ago
Seems like good news for PC gamers, bad news for nVidia, so. I don't even see the risk of having that fast moving hardware development cycles like we had in the past when PC don't need to catch up on concoles in terms of performance. The only hope I have now is PC gamers don't have to cope with PC adapted console titles affecting game play. But maybe that's more due to market share and not architecture, but hope dies last!
rkalla 15y ago
From the business perspective, we all understand the rumored incremental hardware updates here from Microsoft and Sony; Nintendo ate everyone's lunch for 5 years with last-gen, 3-year old tech[1] that cost little to make while Microsoft and Sony hemorrhaged money until what seems like last year... not to mention the huge technical hurdle for devs and middleware companies trying to reach parity on each platform. WIN: If Microsoft goes the incremental route with the same Xbox OS a-la Apple's iOS evolution, they keep middleware compatibility with larger graphical budgets for teams to play with... EVERYONE likes this and every dev team that has shipped an Xbox 360 game hits the ground running immediately -- possibly opening up the doors to dual Xbox 360 and Xbox 720 releases of their games (one with lower quality textures and rougher geometric assets and the other with higher-end business) -- I am sweeping my hands across a fairly complex problem here, but you get the point. With compatibility intact, there are interesting things that can happen here that we've seen work on the iOS ecosystem. (maybe not for Triple-A devs, but for budget minded games, this could work wonderfully especially as digital-downloads and indie devs grow). LOSS: Sony has to make a clean cut and scuttle the last 8 years moving onto an x86 design, new OS, new middleware all new QA cycles and retraining all the PS3 devs. WIN: Sony now matches the same arch as the Xbox-next (same CPU optimizations apply and same GPU family) and we can stop getting these damn port-style games that never take advantage of the extra Blu-ray room or cell processing power. LOSS: No revolutionary boost in performance if the hardware rumors are true. I have no doubt the bump in specialized/tuned hardware will give us real-time versions of the Unreal Engine 4 demos (of that smoking guy that beats up mechs) BUT, at 4k resolution and 120hz for 3D? Not for every game. I imagine we will see something akin to what we have now with most games running at 720p with the few rare tuned ones actually running at 1080p resolutions. I would guess next-gen will offer 4k resolution on some titles and 3D on others while running at 1080p or some such combination. Obviously if it is a simpler game like a Wave Racer, we'll get both, but for Gears of War 15 and Mass Effect 32, I doubt it. WIN: Faster game dev cycles means we get some more impressive titles on the improved hardware/experience sooner. Don't have to wait 2 years post-launch for the first real good game. LOSS: Next-generation consoles are going to be engineered to be all-in-one entertainment hubs... TV cable tuning, DVR, streaming, apps, social, games, mobile-tie-in, etc. etc... this will make jumping between consoles harder as you stake your claim in the Microsoft or Sony (or possibly Nintendo -- yet to be seen if they can pull off a Network) camp and build up your life/existence within their walled garden. This generation it was nothing more than rep points, next-generation (especially Microsoft) will be throwing every Facebook-esque psychologically engineered trick in the book to keep you ON their platform, consuming content through their channel with your credit card en-tow, sharing your pictures with friends and building your character's rep from game to game to game, movie to movie and app to app. I sincerely doubt we (the harder-core folks) will all have all 3 next-gen systems this next time around and will most likely have 1 (probably Xbox-next) as the cost of flipping between them will be bigger than just powering on Console X to play game Y for a few hours. LOSS x2: Double the resolution on the Kinect-next, rumored eye-tracking, multi-person tracking and more accurate voice controls? I can't even imagine what is in store (e.g. "You don't seem to be enjoying this episode of Lost, would you like to skip to the next episode or can we recommend Battlestar Galactica?" -- say "Start Mass Effect, invite Scotty32, Soldier load-out" -- experience {episode of Law and Order, McDonald's Billboard in background... notification popup...} "Just emailed you a buy-1-get-1-free BigMac coupon for McDonalds! The nearest one is 2 blocks from you... yummy! Say 'Pause' to pause what you are watching and go grab lunch!") You get the idea... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii#Technical_specifications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii#Technical_specifications
InclinedPlane 15y ago
I have to say I'm rather disappointed in arstechnica right now. This article is nothing more than a riff on a rumor (read the first 2 paragraphs carefully). I think that's wholly irresponsible on their part.

130 points by zoowar 15y ago

Sony has always had terrible developer tools and developer support. Hopefully this might enable some of the tools available on PCs to become available on the Playstation.

TwoBit 15y ago
Huh? Maybe you're thinking of PS2 days or earlier. I'm a PS3 developer and Sony's tools and developer support is better than Microsoft's or Nintendo's. Enough so that we have asked Microsoft if they could replicate some aspects of what Sony does for the next generation.
- hythloday 15y ago
  Sony's tools support got a lot better after they bought SN in 2005, but it wasn't that long ago that you couldn't do things like source-level debugging on an SPU (I assume you can now). Compare that to something like Pix/remote source-level debugging, which the 360 has had since day 1, and the difference is quite clear.
  - maximilianburke 15y ago
    SPU debugging has been available since at least 2007 going by archived email conversations I have on the topic, and I recall it working even before that. Sony's tools stopped being annoying around 2007 and have been excellent the last few years. In some ways they surpass what's available on the Xbox 360 -- Tuner and GPAD are more flexible than PIX and the debugger isn't tied to the massive anchor that is Visual Studio.

gfodor 15y ago

The article fails to mention the audience this is good news for: PC gamers. If next generation consoles are x86 based, expect to see future games being more widely available on PC, and, better yet, expect the "best" versions of those games (in terms of graphics, features, etc.) to be the PC versions. The only catch is if the game developers hold back on PC releases due to fears of piracy, but on the whole this probably will still mean many more releases on PC. That said, most flagship titles (Halo, Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, etc.) will probably stick to a single console due to contractual obligations.

FooBarWidget 15y ago
What? The instruction set matters very little. Pretty much all games are written in C++ and last time I checked there are C++ compilers targeting pretty much any architecture in existence. The graphics API is more important than the instruction set.
- willvarfar 15y ago
  Apart from the 1st April angle, lets take your point seriously: Actually, toolchain for the PS3 with its Cell processors and unconventional memory / processing model was a major, major pain. Elsewhere, EPIC Itanium failed for the lack of sufficiently smart compilers.
- Arelius 15y ago
  Additionally, current generation console hardware have a big-endian byte order, which can make dealing with importing of resources a pain at times.
  - figglesonrails 15y ago
    Surely, /surely/ this is the least of their concerns. Since when did we get so sloppy as to assume byte ordering in files? When was the last time your PNG loader failed on x86 because the file has big-endian fields?
    - 15y ago

willvarfar 15y ago

Classic 1st April :)

Osiris 15y ago

The rumor that they are attempting to block the used game market through a sort of DRM scheme is disappointing. While I've only ever bought 1 or 2 used games in the past, the act itself is a huge "F* YOU" to consumers and leaves a bad taste in the mouth. No one likes to feel controller or compelled to act in a certain way, which is why pretty much all DRM schemes have been broken and why the MP3 became so incredibly popular. I feel like game producers are making the same argument for the second-hand game market as the MPAA makes for pirating movies: Every used game sale is a lost new game sale and blocking used games is better than innovating or changing the pricing/sales structure.

sjtgraham 15y ago
The MP3 format became popular because it offers a good balance between audio quality and file size, which allowed people to share them easily on P2P networks back when broadband internet was more a novelty than the norm. WAV files have been around forever without DRM.
- caf 15y ago
  The MP3 format became popular before P2P networks - they were being shared on FTP sites first.
  - sjtgraham 15y ago
    There are different degrees of popularity. The amount of people that shared files using FTP and usenet pales in comparison to the amount of users of P2P networks. I think it's fair to say that Napster and then P2P made MP3 ubiquitous.
    - caf 15y ago
      I think Winamp, which predated Napster by a couple of years, was really the turning point that made MP3 popular. Really MP3 made P2P networks popular, rather than the other way around.
    - 15y ago

jessriedel 15y ago

Will next generation consoles still use optical disks, or will games be delivered by flash?

Osiris 15y ago
The rumors that I've seen suggest that they will support optical disks with an emphasis on on-demand downloads. A disk is a lot cheaper to stamp and print than flash or some type of ROM would be.
- CraigRood 15y ago
  Disk drives are dirt cheap, and a single blu ray can hold 25+ GB of data. Try putting that down a 1mb home connection.
- jessriedel 15y ago
  Disks are cheap, but disk drives are ~$80. (Consoles are sold at a loss, so this comes directly out of profits.) I don't know how big PS4 games will be, but flash storage could cost 25 cents per GB. But yea, I think you're right that the optical disks will still end up being cheaper.
vetler 15y ago
Why do we need physical media? I'd prefer to download them myself. I usually buy games in the Playstation store if they are available there. Yes, of course, this would mean that you probably can't sell your games after you're done with them, but that's not a big issue for me personally.
- patrickk 15y ago
  If the new games were made available at a cheaper price up front, I could live without the ability to trade in (at a price point of say €30 vs €50 currently). It might be viable as they aren't sharing a slice with the high street retailers.
- pyre 15y ago
  You're making several anecdotal assumptions based on your personal situation and extrapolating it to the entire target market for the Playstation 4: 1. Everyone has a fast internet connection to the point where downloading a full BluRay disc of content (~25GB) is a non-issue. 2. Everyone has an Internet connection where downloading up to 25GB of content for a single game will not go over their transfer caps, possibly incurring usurious overage charges. 3. Everyone that will buy a Playstation 4 will be well-off enough that they don't need to resell their games after they have played them in order to afford the next game that they want to play (effectively only paying the difference between the original cost and the resale amount).

dustin 15y ago

Wonder what this means for a Steam console, particularly if PC games get more love as a result of consoles being x86. I suppose it's good news in the end, with less time wasted on cross-platform shenanigans and more time spent on making games.

noobface 15y ago
I wonder if Sony is basing this decision on negotiations with Valve. Think about that possibility for a second. What would be the motivating factors? Sony has gotten the shit beat out of them relentlessly in terms of multiplayer/online gaming. PSN has been shuddered for weeks at a time. Partially outsourcing this component to groups like Valve will fix many of their problems, but in return Valve probably would like their whole portfolio of content to be accessible. If Sony goes x86, it'd be a shame to make such a dramatic shift and not capitalize on a content neutral platform.
- apowers 15y ago
  Sony's already been dabbling in Steam support. This move would not surprise me.
marshray 15y ago
Wouldn't it have to have extensive support Win32 and DirectX APIs? That would mean support from Microsoft (which would make it basically an Xbox) or Transgaming.

nextparadigms 15y ago

The article fails to mention that the graphics quality of the games made for these consoles could be a lot more advanced than what's available for the PC then, because developers get to write games directly for that specific hardware. John Carmack has said that the DirectX/OpenGL layers can slow down performance by 4x-10x, for example.

TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
Is it really that much? I guess abstraction comes at a big performance cost.
intsunny 15y ago
You'll have to forgive my skepticism, but can you link to where John Carmack has ever made such a statement? What I don't understand is, if the performance is being slowed by 4x to 10x, what is it being compared to? I doubt anyone is actually coding GPU assembler for complex 3D scenes all the big games require. If there are no alternatives to these API's for allowing game devs to create the results they need, then its a lot like comparing apples to oranges.
- AndrewDucker 15y ago
  John Carmack: So we don't work directly with DX 11 but from the people that I talk with that are working with that, they (say) it might [have] some improvements, but it is still quite a thick layer of stuff between you and the hardware. NVIDIA has done some direct hardware address implementations where you can bypass most of the OpenGL overhead, and other ways to bypass some of the hidden state of OpenGL. Those things are good and useful, but what I most want to see is direct surfacing of the memory. It’s all memory there at some point, and the worst thing that kills Rage on the PC is texture updates. Where on the consoles we just say “we are going to update this one pixel here,” we just store it there as a pointer. On the PC it has to go through the massive texture update routine, and it takes tens of thousands of times [longer] if you just want to update one little piece. You start to advertise that overhead when you start to update larger blocks of textures, and AMD actually went and implemented a multi-texture update specifically for id Tech 5 so you can bash up and eliminate some of the overhead by saying “I need to update these 50 small things here,” but still it’s very inefficient. So I’m hoping that as we look forward, especially with Intel integrated graphics [where] it is the main memory, there is no reason we shouldn't be looking at that. With AMD and NVIDIA there's still issues of different memory banking arrangements and complicated things that they hide in their drivers, but we are moving towards integrated memory on a lot of things. I hope we wind up being able to say "give me a pointer, give me a pitch, give me a swizzle format," and let me do things managing it with fences myself and we'll be able to do a better job. http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Editorial/John-Carmack-Interview-GPU-Race-Intel-Graphics-Ray-Tracing-Voxels-and-more/Intervi http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Editorial/John-Carmack-Intervie...

julianpye 15y ago

This is a clear departure from the old Sony. Sony used to be all about locking developers and content providers into proprietary platforms, raising platform value through exclusives and lowering cross-platform development. They started off with cash-cows based on standards such as Trinitron and the Walkman and went cocky after the big success of going it all alone with the 'PS1' and 'PS2'. However where they were only looking at professional content, Apple one-upped them by lowering barriers for developers, opening the floodgates and lowering content prices. Is this the next step of Sony to reinvent themselves under Hirai-san? Whereas other Japanese CE companies are exiting the consumer business rapidly, Sony certainly is putting up a fight.

lancewiggs 15y ago

Where are the pixels? TV manufacturers are currently delivering 1080P sets in volume and at low prices. Nobody can really get out of a commodity play, and the future of bigger HDTVs is kind of pointless. Apple is delivering up 1080P content already, and the iPad 3 delivers better in our hands. (3D is a red herring.) So what's next? Higher resolution TV screens. IMAX in the home. iPad functionality on the walls. We are, in my opinion, going to continue to see a steady rise in the resolution of our TV screens (and change in what they do), and the content resolution will need to increase to match. That content will increasingly be delivered over IP. Apple is rumoured to be entering the TV market, and we know it won't be with a me-too commodity product. So why wouldn't they launch with a higher resolution screen, just as they did with the iPhone and iPad 3? They can control the delivery of media through the Apple TV, and with the iPad already in the lounge gaming on the higher resolution TV is essentially ready to go. So for me the NextGen gaming devices better launch alongside new TVs (Sony can do this), and with stunningly detailed graphics, or we will rightly yawn at their arrival and stick with our computers, iPads and iPhones. Heck - if Sony, Nintendo & Microsoft continue with their very slow release cycles for the gaming machines, then the next generation may well be the last - and we'll be driving big screen games using iPads and other tablets.

padobson 15y ago
The future of the living room is absolutely rooted in some form of forthcoming disruption. However, no one has meaningfully disrupted TV since the 80s when cable, video tapes and game consoles all hit mass market appeal at the same time. If the rumors here are to be believed, innovation among console makers is waning, so you're right in assuming the inevitable TV disruption is coming from elsewhere. It could come from Apple, but my money is on a startup. TVs, ultimately, are just monitors. They process a signal that comes from an external source. The first product that meaningfully augments the signal, regardless of source (antenna, cable, satellite, streaming, game console) is the true disruptor. Tayloring your TV watching experience to your web browsing, social, taste, and purchase histories is where TV will ultimately be disrupted. When you walk into the living room to watch Mad Men, the TV should know it and adjust the in-screen Twitter feed accordingly. It should hear you laughing at Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia and provide suggestions to other shows people laughed at who laughed at the same joke. No man should ever watch a commercial for feminine hygiene again. No woman should watch a beer commercial that objectifies women again. And when I see Don Draper wearing a slick hat, I should be able to pause the show so I can buy it. As far as I can tell, the only thing stopping this gazillion dollar disruption is that we can't get signal providers to play well with device makers. Apple has made this work with cell phones, so there's every reason to believe they could do it to TV, but I think a startup that figures out how to augment the signal without the provider detecting and blocking it has a chance to become the next Apple.

hef19898 15y ago

Seems like good news for PC gamers, bad news for nVidia, so. I don't even see the risk of having that fast moving hardware development cycles like we had in the past when PC don't need to catch up on concoles in terms of performance. The only hope I have now is PC gamers don't have to cope with PC adapted console titles affecting game play. But maybe that's more due to market share and not architecture, but hope dies last!

rkalla 15y ago

From the business perspective, we all understand the rumored incremental hardware updates here from Microsoft and Sony; Nintendo ate everyone's lunch for 5 years with last-gen, 3-year old tech[1] that cost little to make while Microsoft and Sony hemorrhaged money until what seems like last year... not to mention the huge technical hurdle for devs and middleware companies trying to reach parity on each platform. WIN: If Microsoft goes the incremental route with the same Xbox OS a-la Apple's iOS evolution, they keep middleware compatibility with larger graphical budgets for teams to play with... EVERYONE likes this and every dev team that has shipped an Xbox 360 game hits the ground running immediately -- possibly opening up the doors to dual Xbox 360 and Xbox 720 releases of their games (one with lower quality textures and rougher geometric assets and the other with higher-end business) -- I am sweeping my hands across a fairly complex problem here, but you get the point. With compatibility intact, there are interesting things that can happen here that we've seen work on the iOS ecosystem. (maybe not for Triple-A devs, but for budget minded games, this could work wonderfully especially as digital-downloads and indie devs grow). LOSS: Sony has to make a clean cut and scuttle the last 8 years moving onto an x86 design, new OS, new middleware all new QA cycles and retraining all the PS3 devs. WIN: Sony now matches the same arch as the Xbox-next (same CPU optimizations apply and same GPU family) and we can stop getting these damn port-style games that never take advantage of the extra Blu-ray room or cell processing power. LOSS: No revolutionary boost in performance if the hardware rumors are true. I have no doubt the bump in specialized/tuned hardware will give us real-time versions of the Unreal Engine 4 demos (of that smoking guy that beats up mechs) BUT, at 4k resolution and 120hz for 3D? Not for every game. I imagine we will see something akin to what we have now with most games running at 720p with the few rare tuned ones actually running at 1080p resolutions. I would guess next-gen will offer 4k resolution on some titles and 3D on others while running at 1080p or some such combination. Obviously if it is a simpler game like a Wave Racer, we'll get both, but for Gears of War 15 and Mass Effect 32, I doubt it. WIN: Faster game dev cycles means we get some more impressive titles on the improved hardware/experience sooner. Don't have to wait 2 years post-launch for the first real good game. LOSS: Next-generation consoles are going to be engineered to be all-in-one entertainment hubs... TV cable tuning, DVR, streaming, apps, social, games, mobile-tie-in, etc. etc... this will make jumping between consoles harder as you stake your claim in the Microsoft or Sony (or possibly Nintendo -- yet to be seen if they can pull off a Network) camp and build up your life/existence within their walled garden. This generation it was nothing more than rep points, next-generation (especially Microsoft) will be throwing every Facebook-esque psychologically engineered trick in the book to keep you ON their platform, consuming content through their channel with your credit card en-tow, sharing your pictures with friends and building your character's rep from game to game to game, movie to movie and app to app. I sincerely doubt we (the harder-core folks) will all have all 3 next-gen systems this next time around and will most likely have 1 (probably Xbox-next) as the cost of flipping between them will be bigger than just powering on Console X to play game Y for a few hours. LOSS x2: Double the resolution on the Kinect-next, rumored eye-tracking, multi-person tracking and more accurate voice controls? I can't even imagine what is in store (e.g. "You don't seem to be enjoying this episode of Lost, would you like to skip to the next episode or can we recommend Battlestar Galactica?" -- say "Start Mass Effect, invite Scotty32, Soldier load-out" -- experience {episode of Law and Order, McDonald's Billboard in background... notification popup...} "Just emailed you a buy-1-get-1-free BigMac coupon for McDonalds! The nearest one is 2 blocks from you... yummy! Say 'Pause' to pause what you are watching and go grab lunch!") You get the idea... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii#Technical_specifications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii#Technical_specifications

InclinedPlane 15y ago

I have to say I'm rather disappointed in arstechnica right now. This article is nothing more than a riff on a rumor (read the first 2 paragraphs carefully). I think that's wholly irresponsible on their part.