I will admit, my memory is foggy. I recalled there were better, granted more expensive, video cards available. Don't recall either the PS3 nor 360 launching with top of the line GPU cores - maybe from same "tech linage" yes, R520 and GF7 series; but not top of the line, Sony and MS would go broke.Kumagawa Misogi said:
Man, if game prices really do go up to $70-$80 per game, I almost definitely will be dropping out of the main part of the hobby. I'll wind up just sticking with a PC and the consoles I already have, playing old classics, new indie games, and F2P titles. I'm hoping "affordable at launch" means "will actually be affordable at some point before the hardware is completely obsolete," because I love Sony's consoles and their exclusives, and they really screwed the pooch this gen with the $600 launch price that was somehow still a loss leader for them. But if the game price goes up another $10, they'll have completely driven me out of the console market and into the PC and smart phone market, regardless of what the system itself costs.Beautiful End said:
I would think so too, but when looking at manufacturing costs and suggesting two different ram allocations, which seems more likely, making two different versions of the same hardware for each allocation, Or making one version with an empty RAM DIMM?deadish said:
The thing about smart phones, assuming you're talking about Apple's tiered model, is that that's not system ram. It's storage memory. As far as I know, a given generation of Apple hardware is going to to have the same amount of ram, processor speed, and so on regardless of model, with the amount of storage memory being the only thing that changes. This is already analagous to how consoles have different models with different sized hard drives. The only real difference is that Apple's stuff has a fixed memory size. Most of their competitors' hardware has a micro-SD slot for expansion, which is one of the many reasons that I'm not a fan of Apple's stuff.viranimus said:
There was too much stuff in it. Remember the plan was for the Cell to do *everything* pulling double duty as CPU and GPU but that didn't work out, so they slapped a (what was it, like a half-generation??) Geforce in there to handle graphics, then there was the Emotion Engine for PS2 compatibility, and lets not forget the BD-ROM drive (which was horribly expensive at the time).Fappy said:
Yeah, I confess I ended up doing a complete end around within the course of one post. And yes, I was referring to apples storage capacity as analogy for Ram capacity suggestion here. Hence why I suggested one base model with empty slots for core usage, And allow that to represent two models, Core, and multi tasking models. More I think on it, the more it makes sense to me.Owyn_Merrilin said:
It won't happen. It will split the install base, bad idea as one of the strengths of a console is that the hardware is uniform across the board - excluding things like secondary storage that doesn't really impact the way a program is written (unless it uses a crazy amount of secondary storage when executing).viranimus said:
Keep in mind that the R520 architecture used in the 360 was replaced in the Radeon HD 2000 series, and PC's can't play Skyrim at console resolution with less than a Radeon HD 4890 (R700) (skyrim's minimum PC specs called for a 3600 series), the A10 APU's use AMD HD 6000 series GPUs.deadish said:
It's a completely different architecture. Very unlikely that it could run PS3 games, and PS2 only through software emulation like PCSX2 (so possible).SupahGamuh said:
That's true. I love my PS consoles and I don't really wanna have to give them up. PC gaming is just as expensive because you gotta have a top notch computer to play properly and those can be $1000. And you also might wanna update them every so often because computers turn obsolete way faster than systems.Owyn_Merrilin said:
If they're really switching from a RISC based CPU architecture to a CISC based CPU architecture then they won't be able to offer backward compatability without using some heavy weight emulation software... and an AMD APU isn't something I'd want to try running that on.newwiseman said:
Yeah but if you look at what's been happening with 'improvements and added features' in the console ecologies, it's pretty clear that neither Sony nor Microsoft have any interested in keeping that sort of limited task environment. They want their consoles to be a household's single sourcepoint/gateway for entertainment and social media and to compete against other platforms/devices, especially when it comes to interoperability, it's going to require a serious investment in expanding the potential available resources.
