So why is every site going nuts with this news? I don’t get it.
stusser
3408
You’re a part of the media now, man, you should know. Gotta chase that dragon!
Good point. 3-part front page article coming with Youtube video explaining how this will doom the PS4.
Seriously though, I just kind of laughed and thought the furor over this “news” was kind of goofball. A 53MHz increase!? Who cares?
This. Unless the PS4 sells Wii-like numbers and the XBone crashes, game development for this coming generation is way too expensive for most third-party publishers to ride the exclusivity bandwagon.
stusser
3411
Lots of people care, console fanboys exist and weren’t created by the media, although the media is responsible for fanning those flames.
I never said they were rational people.
For the same reason we cared when they announced DRM and then always on and then the no packed-in headset… the narrative then was that Microsoft couldn’t get anything right.
Now, we’re interested in what they’re changing. Because… well, they keep changing stuff. Germany will be interesting. Major Nelson has already indicated that other announcements are coming.
Nah. That stuff is newsworthy. DRM, headset pack-ins, Kinect, all that stuff impacts the gamer in very direct and obvious ways. The fact that Microsoft completely fumbled the launch message is newsworthy because it’s a multi-billion dollar corporation screwing up what should be an easy thing since they owned this gen in North America.
A teeny-weeny increase in MHz? Get out of here.
stusser
3414
No, the DRM, always-on, and headset actually matter. They impact how you use the system. This minor speed bump does not.
Edit: Dangit, foiled by a new page.
Well, in some ways this is moot. This is getting significant coverage already. You might disagree and if you have editorial control over a gaming publication, you can tell your journalists to stand down. Otherwise, we’re past the rubicon - GameSpot, Kotaku, Joystiq, Game Informer, etc. have all decided that changing the previously announced GPU speed is newsworthy.
My two cents: of course it’s newsworthy! Any changes from what was previously announced is by definition news. Think of it this way: if Sony announced tomorrow that they are upping their speed, dropping a feature, adding an extra… they would of course get coverage.
More importantly, like I said, this got coverage in large part because we have one player still making changes, additions to their console. In the last month, the Xbox One has changed SIGNIFICANTLY. No DRM, no always on requirement, indie friendly policy, reversal on there being an attachment for your old headsets, faster GPU, etc. The PS4 has not made any changes or made any major announcements (I’m NOT suggesting that they need to) so there hasn’t been much to cover.
By the way, if you didn’t catch Carmack’s QuakeCon keynote yesterday, he said the hardware configurations of the PS4 and XBONE are very similar and about on par with one another.
He is NOT a fan of the Kinect. Old or new.
"I think Kinect still has some fundamental limitations with the latency and frame rate on it. Interacting with it is still … when you interact with Kinect, some of the standard interactions - position and hold, waiting for different things - it’s fundamentally a poor interaction.
“One way that I look at it is - I used to give Apple a lot of grief about the one button mouse. Anybody working with a mouse really wants more buttons - helpful there. Kinect is sort of like a zero button mouse with a lot of latency on it.”
Yeah, I did see that. Now, I would agree with you that THAT shouldn’t have received the coverage it did. That was also was every where.
Though, I think that’s more because he’s still seen as a programming luminary.
Moore
3418
That is my main remaining niggle, but that is a silly small increase in clock that does nothing. It is still a full ‘PC part generation’ behind the ps4’s as far as I can tell.
the 10 years on is also super weird statement that is a bold faced lie until they show me a 10 year warranty on every unit. If there isn’t one, they are liars, because if it is really built to go ten years, that is a safe enough warranty to offer.
The speed increase is just dishonest, that is nothing.
‘Can we get even a tiny meaningless speed increase? It’d be our first good press that doesn’t involve a policy backtrack, and the only good news about the hardware at all to date other than the swanky controller? Someone talk to engineering. It doesnt matter if it is a real performance increase, whatever they can do, we just need a tiny truth kernel in our shitlog to release it’
Oh dear lord. Plenty of TV manufacturers - Sony included - will say that the average TV will last well past 10 years since the date of purchase (My Sony set is going strong!). But they don’t offer 10 year warranties. I wouldn’t recommend that you hold your breath
Moore
3420
Right, but TV makers are known lying shits about almost everything.
TVs can be used for all sorts of stuff, and I do not need to have any trust in the maker, so long as it displays video, we’re good. Console makers are asking to get a chunk of a major investment - hundreds of games and thousands of my dollars. That requires a level of trust since I do need the machine for 10 years. I tend to grab a TV every 4 or 5 years, usually due to some menu annoyance that I eventually have a rage moment with and decide enough is enough. TVs are cheap for what they do, and generally well made, IMO, so I dont mind too much. I’ve only ever had a single one die in my lifetime, and I threw it at someone, so that was expected.
It is just dishonest of them to claim it will last for 10 years straight, 24/7. Not putting their money where their mouth is is proof that they are well aware a significant number of units will not last that long under the conditions they are claiming. If the claim was true why on earth would they not offer a crazy, industry-first, super long warranty? It would cost nothing outside of the ink cost for the extra zero. I’m just pointing out that they are aware it is a bullshit statement.
Cyrano
3422
That’s how games were done this generation, but in the coming one, the consoles are so PC-like that the PC may be the lead platform, with the console versions scaled down. That’s how at least one PS4 game is being done (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-how-the-crew-was-ported-to-playstation-4). So, the PS4 may get better looking PC ports than the One. Or not – another Eurogamer article (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-can-xbox-one-multi-platform-games-compete-with-ps4) seems to think that there are diminishing returns to adding more cores to the graphics chip in the PS4.
We watch Lost tonight or we watching nothing at all!
Moore
3424
It was in college, roomate kept throwing fabric softner sheets at me while I was trying to sleep. Like a million times - seriously, we’d fight back and forth and ‘sorry dude, just kidding’ and then 5 minutes later one comes floating down on me. Repated 40x over 3 hours, say 2am-5am, with class at 8. So I threw a tv at him, it went to a zillion pieces, he said some expletives, and stopped.
LOL, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. I’ve flipped out in anger when I’m really sleep deprived. It’s very difficult for me to make level-headed decisions if I’m super tired. I don’t think that’s a unique thing.
Back to the TV thing. When I was little, it seemed like everyone had a stack of TVs in their living room. Like one would go bad, you just get a smaller one, and you set it right on top of the broken ones. I remember families that had like little towers with an 8" B&W on top. I know my family had a tower once or twice.
It’s newsworthy in that the clockspeed of the GPU was not officially known before, and the confirmation of a slight increase is good considering there have been rumors of production pro less, yield issues and a potential down clock for months. Any performance gains are meaningless, though. The PS4 still handily outclasses it, and ironically, if Sony is able to provide the same clock increase on heir smaller, less complicated chip, it would actually increase the gap in processing power.
All the talk of the “mono” driver is complete marketing horseshit, though . That’s just industry standard. It not an achievement to simply match how everyone else’s device drivers always are in a closed system. Talking about it at all is a completely calculated PR move to give the impression this will help close the gap with the PS4. In reality, the libgcm driver most devs will use on the PS4 is still thinner with lower level access to hardware features.
