Remedy: Next-Gen is a "Quantum Leap"

[soldierk3]

Why does no one understand that a "quantum leap" is not a significant measurement?

Quantum means "as small as physically possible"

A "quantum leap" in video game technology would make it completely unnoticeably better.

It DOES NOT mean huge, or large, or gigantic, or anything even remotely larger than things we cannot see with a microscope. It is a discrete, tiny tiny difference.

/end phyiscs rage

I was going to mention this in the article, but it's actually a completely legitimate use of the phrase. [http://www.thefreedictionary.com/quantum+leap]

If that is in fact the case, that means that very recently popular culture has taken the term and twisted it to suit their definition. It is not the original definition of the phrase, nor will I ever be able to see it that way due to the contradiction that it inherently creates.

Quantum leaps are discrete jumps in energy from one energy level to the next, we're talking about the smallest possible movement in energy already measured in eV's, which are incredibly small. If it has changed, I guarantee that it changed due to people misusing the term so much it became accepted. It will never stop bothering me

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

Every single time. Every single time there's a thread concerning a next generation of consoles there's a bunch of people who jump in with their "graphics are almost as good as they'll ever get" shtick. Well, first, this is far from the truth - there's still a shit-ton [http://i.imgur.com/g0TTc.jpg] to be improved [http://i.imgur.com/zDHZ0.jpg] without even approaching any advanced technology like tesselation, displacement mapping, subsurface scattering, or better, more dynamic lighting.

And second, I don't get this tunnel-vision like fixation on graphics. Do you honestly not get that with better hardware you can get bigger scale games to run? From the little absurd things like there not being a holster animation in Mass Effect 3 because it takes up too much RAM for the piece of shit hardware to handle it, or Bethesda cutting down on armor slots in Skyrim for much the same reason, to bigger things like games generally being obnoxiously small-scale, this set of hardware some of you people cling to is extremely limiting.

Speaking of games that are large-scale that mostly ignore graphical quality and could never be made to run on current consoles, there's always stuff like AI War [http://www.arcengames.com/w/index.php/aiwar-features]. It's not particularly pretty (and usually less so than the screenshots because it's most effective to play it zoomed out far enough that everything becomes icons), but it's a great example of what you can pull off when you have a bunch of CPU and RAM to throw around.

In a normal game, there are tens of thousands of units at a time, all of which have their AI simulated and everything. Depending on the settings you use and how long the game goes on, it's not unrealistic to end up with a couple hundred thousand total simultaneous units (but last time I checked the memory manager/garbage collector tends to choke around a million). And it keeps happily chugging along at 60fps while doing full pathfinding and weapon targeting and everything for all of them. It's the kind of game where two thousand units can be a diversion, as opposed to twice the total unit cap.

And that's just one piece of it. There are just so many crazy things you can do with more CPU and RAM even with the exact same graphics hardware. It makes me a little sad when people like that have no imagination or understanding of how anything works.