The Big Bad Console Thread - Sway your Station with an Xboner !
- Thread starter Xexx
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Being okay with shit watching you and targeted advertising from watching you is pretty fucked up. Being okay with having to accept shit that says it's okay to sell everything about you to everyone is also pretty fucked up. Joking about the NSA stuff is also retarded, there's nothing funny about their blatant violations of civil rights and privacy.
We do not have to accept advertisements being thrown in our faces. The PS3 dashboard isn't riddled with ads like the X360 and the PS4's OS doesn't look to be either. Building a fucking camera system for a video game console to scan and monitor how people react to shit for targeted advertising is really prettyfucked up. Building a console with ads in mind is really fucked up.
The X360's shit is absurd and it looks like Microsoft is just going further and further and now they are building crap to specifically farm and sell advertising data out to people. That isreallynot cool to me.
Maybe I'm just getting too old for this shit where we're okay with corporations selling every little thing we do to each other. I grew up on stuff that just played video games and didn't shove a bunch of shit in your face or farm your data to homogenize gameplay and people just fucking made games.
We do not have to accept advertisements being thrown in our faces. The PS3 dashboard isn't riddled with ads like the X360 and the PS4's OS doesn't look to be either. Building a fucking camera system for a video game console to scan and monitor how people react to shit for targeted advertising is really prettyfucked up. Building a console with ads in mind is really fucked up.
The X360's shit is absurd and it looks like Microsoft is just going further and further and now they are building crap to specifically farm and sell advertising data out to people. That isreallynot cool to me.
Maybe I'm just getting too old for this shit where we're okay with corporations selling every little thing we do to each other. I grew up on stuff that just played video games and didn't shove a bunch of shit in your face or farm your data to homogenize gameplay and people just fucking made games.
meStevo
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Because that's what we need, politics-style advertising in our console wars. Sony's own catch-all privacy policy right now says they share anon behavioral data as well as game session data to third parties that have ads in games and they hope those third parties don't do anything bad with it. They go on to say to not give them any information if they don't want it shared - no opting out.
You don't even need the PS Eye for voice commands now, if that was an XBOne feature the headline would be 'No Kinect, no problem, still eavesdropping'
You don't even need the PS Eye for voice commands now, if that was an XBOne feature the headline would be 'No Kinect, no problem, still eavesdropping'
Sony sharing that shit with people irks me too. Microsoft *selling* it though is what really riles me up, plus the camera bullshit.
The PS4 voice commands require the headset/mic thing to be plugged into the controller, I think.
Tuco
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I know I'm like the biggest PS4 fanboy here now, but you guys gotta remember that I was the biggest X360 fanboy back on FoH and before the MS press conference happened. I loved Microsoft, loved Windows (still do), and loved the X360 to death. The X360 controller was by far the best controller in the world and I bought every single cross-platform game on the X360. I have 113 X360 game discs and 29 digital games. That's a lot.
After the Sony conference I was positive that Microsoft would at least match what they were offering. And then the Microsoft press conference happened.
And then the specs came out and E3 happened. More than anything I have felt just massive fucking *Disappointment* towards Microsoft. I truly thought that they were better than this bullshit and believed in them.
I am really glad that Sony has such a solid machine and a good philosophy and a strong message this generation, because otherwise it would be some really terrifyingly bad shit between the 3 of them. I am so fuckingsadthat Microsoft has gone to such lengths in fucking up and I pray that Microsoft and Nintendo will get their shit together, because 3 strong competitors is much better for the industry. I do not think that this is going to be the last generation of consoles (I really hope it isn't) and it's not good if one person just dominates and Sony very well could do so.
After the Sony conference I was positive that Microsoft would at least match what they were offering. And then the Microsoft press conference happened.
And then the specs came out and E3 happened. More than anything I have felt just massive fucking *Disappointment* towards Microsoft. I truly thought that they were better than this bullshit and believed in them.
I am really glad that Sony has such a solid machine and a good philosophy and a strong message this generation, because otherwise it would be some really terrifyingly bad shit between the 3 of them. I am so fuckingsadthat Microsoft has gone to such lengths in fucking up and I pray that Microsoft and Nintendo will get their shit together, because 3 strong competitors is much better for the industry. I do not think that this is going to be the last generation of consoles (I really hope it isn't) and it's not good if one person just dominates and Sony very well could do so.
Have a question here.
In the 360 / PS3 generation, the consoles have been fairly close in terms of power, so the differences have been small between the consoles. Mostly the differences have been boiled down to a few FPS changes here and there, and perhaps slightly less blurry textures on one console or the other. I remember Red Dead Redemption as the only shared game I got for the 360 due to it being slightly better on that platform. However, the similarities between consoles also seems to have been done intentionally by developers.
Take GTA 4, Rockstar said that they had to lower the amount of NPCs and cars on that game due to at the time of release, there were still a lot of 360s in circulation without a HDD. This led the developers to make both the PS3 and 360 version not require an install, and as such, could not develop the game with an install in mind (buffering from both HDD and DVD). They could have made the PS3 version superior, and probably made the game better/more alive, but didn't. I can only assume this is due to contractual obligations.
So, when we have what you said above, one console that apparently has superior hardware compared to the others, will that really be taken advantage of except for first party / exclusive titles? I doubt there will be any change in what the different companies want from their shared titles, and I do not think that MS will allow severely gimped versions on their console compared to the PS4, however, I also assume there is a point to where the developers will not accept lowering their product simply to appease one side. If this is the case, then I would (I certainly would as a developer) think that they would rather make full use of one specific console instead of lowering the total quality of their game, and develop exclusively for the best one (if one is clearly better than the other).
Or is this not a thing at all? Because I can only recall Rockstar actually making a statement that their game could have featured more stuff if they could develop with a HDD in mind (they didn't talk negatively of the 360 hardware, other than the limitations created by the non HDD version of the 360). However, the fact that the limitations was made on both consoles, even though all PS3s came with a HDD, seems to indicate a need to make them similar that superseded them wanting to make the best game possible.
What power do Microsoft or Sony have over third party developers making shared games for the consoles?
X360/PS3 games being so close in visual fidelity is more of a happy coincidence than a purposeful thing. There are no such contractual obligations for parity. There are a lot of examples of games with very different frame rates and resolutions, especially early titles. There's also more recent disasters like Skyrim. People do take advantage of each console's hardware, that's actually pretty obvious if you look at early games from this generation and compare them to the latest games. The difference is night and day and you can't have that kind of massive quality jump on those two platforms without really specific optimizations for each one. They just happen to have come out very similarly.
I don't know what specifically was up with Rockstar on GTA4, but the majority of PS3/X360 games are very different when it comes to installs. With X360 games you can fully install *any* game to the hard drive. It basically copies the entirety of the data over and the disc is just for authentication. You cannot do that with PS3 games. PS3 games on the other hand almost always have a mandatory data install that they pull from to increase performance.
People misuse the whole "Lowest Common Denominator" thing a bit. It has very little to do with pure visual fidelity and mostly to do with core game design. AI, set pieces, level size, encounter design, how many things you can have and do, stuff like that. How many NPCs and Cars you can have definitely *can* fall under that. Though as seen in the leaked GTAV files, that doesn't have to be the case since the PC version is set to spawn a much higher level of objects than the PS3/X360 versions. At the time with GTA4 it was likely a design/engine limitation that did not let them set different object count rates.
The times when visual fidelity clashes with the "LCD" is stuff like Texture resolutions and people lazily reusing Art Asset Builds instead of making separate, higher resolution ones. Extra effects like grass, draw distance, reflections, shadows, etc, are all things that can easily be adjusted in scalable engines. Same goes for Resolution, Anti-aliasing, and AF for the most part. That's why all of that stuff is almost always very easily adjustable on the PC. If a console can take advantage of those "sliders" it will, they won't purposely hold it back for parity. At worst you'll see lower resolution textures than you should have because someone was being cheap or lazy and didn't want to do a separate asset build.
I don't know what specifically was up with Rockstar on GTA4, but the majority of PS3/X360 games are very different when it comes to installs. With X360 games you can fully install *any* game to the hard drive. It basically copies the entirety of the data over and the disc is just for authentication. You cannot do that with PS3 games. PS3 games on the other hand almost always have a mandatory data install that they pull from to increase performance.
People misuse the whole "Lowest Common Denominator" thing a bit. It has very little to do with pure visual fidelity and mostly to do with core game design. AI, set pieces, level size, encounter design, how many things you can have and do, stuff like that. How many NPCs and Cars you can have definitely *can* fall under that. Though as seen in the leaked GTAV files, that doesn't have to be the case since the PC version is set to spawn a much higher level of objects than the PS3/X360 versions. At the time with GTA4 it was likely a design/engine limitation that did not let them set different object count rates.
The times when visual fidelity clashes with the "LCD" is stuff like Texture resolutions and people lazily reusing Art Asset Builds instead of making separate, higher resolution ones. Extra effects like grass, draw distance, reflections, shadows, etc, are all things that can easily be adjusted in scalable engines. Same goes for Resolution, Anti-aliasing, and AF for the most part. That's why all of that stuff is almost always very easily adjustable on the PC. If a console can take advantage of those "sliders" it will, they won't purposely hold it back for parity. At worst you'll see lower resolution textures than you should have because someone was being cheap or lazy and didn't want to do a separate asset build.
Well that's good then. The problem with the GTA 4 stuff was way back when there was talk of it having a required install, not what you "could" do if you had a HDD. This was back when mandatory installs was not a common thing. In this thread, we have seen leaked images of the back of covers with a HDD marker and X amount of gigs required as an install. With GTA 4 I believe there were faked images showing a potential back cover with a HDD marked on it, which would indicate a mandatory install. This caused several gaming sites (even Norwegian ones) to pick up the story, since it would exclude every single person who had the 360 version without a hard drive (or require them to purchase one). Rockstar made mention of this, but said that they would not require it, but that it also affected their entire game, and that they had to lower the NPC/cars available, due to not being able to take full advantage of the combination of running the game from both HDD and DVD. It didn't matter if you installed it or not, because they never made the engine to be optimized with an install in mind. I remember thinking it was very odd that they limited both for a problem only affecting one console.
But good to hear it is not really an issue.
Btw, GTA4 on the PS3 does in fact have a mandatory PS3 HDD install:Grand Theft Auto IV: PS3 vs. Xbox 360 Special Article Eurogamer.net
There's also some quite significant differences to each version.
Same goes for RDR:Face-Off: Red Dead Redemption Face-off Eurogamer.net
There's also some quite significant differences to each version.
Same goes for RDR:Face-Off: Red Dead Redemption Face-off Eurogamer.net
Tuco
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Sean thinks that they'll take full advantage of both platform's capabilities. I think the difference will be much more modest but we'll see. Just rendering the same everything at 720p vs 1080p is a huge difference, so maybe we'll see a lot along those lines. One of the biggest differences between the consoles is ram, and rendering at 720vs1080 shouldn't be impacted by that. What size textures you load, however, will.
This exactly. I spend 90% of my time gaming on a PC, and have a PC that will put both of the upcoming consoles to shame. I'm a big PC gamer here, but I don't see the point of having to chime in on a console discussion every time to restate the obvious about the PC.
Especially in a thread titled: "Next Gen Consoles: PS4 vs XBone".
Resolution is impacted by the RAM quite a bit. You can't really do 1080p and MSAA with the 32MB of ESRAM and you're more limited to shader AA like FXAA. They'll definitely take full advantage of the "basic" hardware on the PS4 before too long, that's relatively easy to work with. Whether they take advantage of the PS4's GPGPU compute abilities is another story and not something we'll see for quite a while and probably only heavily from First Party studios, Exclusive Games, or more Adventerous People like the Witcher devs.
Tuco
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Framebuffer size and 32mb is, iirc, not quite enough when you start piling on AA and shit.
Also not sure if this matters, but the 32mb of ESRAM is actually 4x 8mb.
Also not sure if this matters, but the 32mb of ESRAM is actually 4x 8mb.
That's not what I meant. Here's a piece on the ESRAM:Digital Foundry vs. the Xbox One architects Eurogamer.net
And here's some stuff on a different note:Xbox One memory performance improved for production console Eurogamer.net
Developers just being able to dump huge stuff into the PS4's RAM is a pretty big performance advantage there.
I could be off on how much framebuffer 1080p+MSAA stuff takes up, it's been a while since I saw the maths.Pretty surethere's issues with it and the ESRAM though. You can definitely do 1080p games, but you forgo anti-aliasing like in Forza 5 which has some rather bad jaggies.
