The lesson to take from the past two console generations is simple-- price matters. Console purchasers are price-sensitive, particularly in this generation when exclusives are quite rare. XboneX needed to be $399.
Good luck building a PC that can do what the X can do for that price. It’s nice you guys have got a powerful 4K capable PC, but it isn’t necessarily representative of the whole gamer base.
Wendelius
PS3 was more expensive than the 360 throughout its life yet ended up coming out on top.
Wii U was cheapest and that didn’t help.
Xbox One X is not intended to be a mass market device. Xbox One S is $200 right now. That sounds good to me.
PS4 Pro looks great and costs $399. Sure it isn’t real 4k, but price is much more important.
PS3 dropped in price, and had exclusives to boot.
“Not a mass market device” is bullshit marketing speak that right-thinking people like myself ignore completely.
4K is the problem IMO. Average Joes can’t tell the difference between that and 1080p. Hell, I can’t really tell what I’m supposed to get excited about? Image quality is great, but it’s not worth the premium it currently commands. This is especially notable if you have a competent PC, and that really can be something like an ancient Core i7 860 with a GTX970 like I’m running at home on my “old” box.
So yeah, I agree with stusser that price sensitivity is a big thing now, and it’s bigger because you’re not able to see the difference so easily.
At the distance we sit from our TVs, and the size of those displays, it’s very difficult to tell the difference between 1080p and 4k in moving content like games and movies. Of course YEMV (your eyes may vary), but it isn’t an immediately noticeable improvement like the jump from 480p->720p->1080p.
Hell, I’m sitting maybe 2 feet from two 27" monitors right now, one 5k and one 1440p, looking at text on a webpage. If I look closely, I can indeed tell the difference. No jaggies on text. But it isn’t immediately apparent if you walk into my office that my center monitor is dramatically superior to my right one.
Yeahhhh. . . I can’t envision buying a 4K TV, err, ever. The cheapo 1080P RCA rectangle I ordered from Walmart when we moved to Raleigh 6 years ago continues to be entirely sufficient for my gf and I in every respect but sound.
Then again we generally don’t watch movies and mostly just watch Netflix TV shows and Youtube via the Roku. Plus she’s half blind anyway :P
Of course the extra juice in these console refreshes gives you more than just raw resolution. Image quality and framerates should greatly improve as well, and that stuff is noticeable at any resolution.
It sounds like it’s not a mass-market device then!
The good news about the negligible difference in resolution is that maybe we can stay here for a bit and finally work on something the matters: framerate and frame pacing.
And load times.
Dude, get yourself a 5.1 sound bar for that TV. It’s the single greatest upgrade you can give to any TV for a very reasonable price. I have a 2014 Vizio setup that completely changed my living room. seriously, especially if the ladyfriend is half blind!
Don’t see why load times would improve with a GPU boost. The console refreshes still use magnetic hard drives and while their CPUs are a bit faster they’re still not actually fast compared to desktop computers. Actually higher-resolution textures and whatnot should have a detrimental effect, all things being equal.
Agreed on this. Adding a GSync monitor to my top end PC was transcendental. It was a far better way to spend my money than to get say a GTX1080 over a GTX1070. Framerate is KING!
Well if load times aren’t improved then I may not be interested in upgrading after all.
They might get worse with higher texture quality and more available RAM to fill to hold them…
That would suck. How do load times work between the PS4 and the Pro? Anybody owned both and tried comparing? This is a pretty big deal to me, since I don’t have and don’t plan to buy a 4K tv.
On Xbone, you can buy any SSD you want, slot it into a USB3 enclosure, and plug it into the back of the console for a great speed boost. On PS4, you replace the internal drive.
MS is also selling the Xbone with a hybrid drive, which is basically a magnetic hard drive with a small SSD strapped on the back for caching purposes, which offers maybe 75% of the benefit of a normal SSD with a ton more capacity, assuming you play the same game frequently.
Load times for all existing games will be improved, since the Xbox One X uses the extra unused ram as a RAM disk automatically. So today’s Xbox One games which use only 5GB will have 4GB extra to use to improve loading times.
For “enhanced” games which use all 9GB available to developers, it’s up to those developers to decide what to do with it.
You can use an external HD for games on the PS4 as well, even move it between different consoles if you log in with the same account.
Ahh, was not aware of that. Even better.