Xbox 720

[SiN]

Carmack was talking about TVs in particular, not monitors. TVs do all this awful image post-processing that can sometimes take up to 100ms to complete. The money quote though, is that he said an Internet packet can get across the Atlantic faster than some TVs can display a frame from your wired console.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I think you'll have to create one: Erkki's Law?

Cloud gaming... What's the Moore's law equivalent for bandwidth? Bandwidth usage has been growning exponentially, and from watching that video I guess the US is in trouble soon for mobile bandwidth, but what about landlines?

Also, however low the added network latency can be, it's slightly funny to compare this with... if you follow John Carmack on Twitter and see him complaining about the latency of monitors being bad e.g. even just for the visuals a PC has already rendered to reach your eyes might be happening much slower than ideal.

[Frenetic Pony]

Cost to the consumer is one thing because that's affected by a lot of other factors, but purely on the service provider side, the hardware is still a lot cheaper than it would otherwise be because they don't need a discrete machine for each user. The company is also buying in volume. Similarly, colocation is cheaper than running a server yourself.

Oh certainly there are some ways that it could be reduced in cost, but consoles are already sold at cost and get progressively cheaper as time goes on thanks to economies of scale and progressively cheaper silicon (thanks Moore's law!)

As for games being able to use ever more power, in a way that's always true. It would always be better to have more power, you can always just crank up resolution and polycount and etc. Besides, I can easily imagine games that would need more than today's fastest supercomputers to run even just per person. I mean the dream is the Holodeck or the Matrix or etc.

It'll just be interesting to see what's actually needed versus what it costs. A decade from now phones will be 32 times faster than they are today (if Moore's law holds). Meaning they'll have enough RAM and processors to essentially run Avatar in realtime, streaming to your glasses-less 3d 8k TV with full 16bit color (fun fact: actual monitors today only use 8bit color!) and full humanly visible color gamut. They'll also cost just the same as today's phones, but then again co-located servers will also be pretty cheap...

Hmmm, I guess that's the problem with predicting the future right now, it's just coming on too damned fast

[Ben X]

I mean the dream is the Holodeck or the Matrix

Depending on if you're a human or Big Dog.

[toblix]

Everything will be revealed May 21st. Glad to hear the rumours say it will be relatively expensive, i.e. powerful, since that will mean another burst of graphics awesomeness in all games. Next year, we'll all be able to cut off individual fingers with our chainsaw-gun, and all the tendons will be all sweet.

[Sno]

If the Durango reveal is a disappointment, i'm probably going all-in on Steam for my cross-platform fun times.

[tegan]

I'm more interested in this:

 

The other machine is a new budget-priced Xbox 360 model, code-named "Stingray". Due for release later this year, the device will cost just $99 (£65). Thurrot suggested this may mean Microsoft's new Xbox would not play Xbox 360 games.

I would probably finally buy a 360 if it were $100.

 

Also, if it's true, do you realize what this means? It means this past generation will have had three visually distinct models of Xbox 360, three PS3s if you ignore backwards compatibility junk, 3 Wiis, four DS variants, and five PSPs. Truly we were spoiled for choice.

[Roderick]

To be fair, it was a very long generation. I'm glad they upgraded the hardware every couple of years, it was a smart move.

[tegan]

Oh, so am I! And it's not without precedent, it's just funny to me that we got so many options this gen when the only redesigns last gen were a second model of the PS2 and three variants on the GBA.

[Sno]

If you count the Elite as distinct from the original models, and there's a reasonable argument for that, there will have been four 360's.

[melmer]

Today, Microsoft and Ericsson announced a definitive agreement for Ericsson to acquire Mediaroom, the number one IPTV platform deployed by TV operators around the world.

 

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2013/04/08/mediaroom-and-our-tv-journey.aspx

 

But what does it meeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnnn??????????? I assume it doesn't mean a damn thing for anyone outside of the US of A

[Frenetic Pony]

Everything will be revealed May 21st. Glad to hear the rumours say it will be relatively expensive, i.e. powerful, since that will mean another burst of graphics awesomeness in all games. Next year, we'll all be able to cut off individual fingers with our chainsaw-gun, and all the tendons will be all sweet.

 

Sony has the Durango specs beat hands down, it's not going to be the same "almost equal enough that there's not going to be a real difference" as the PS3/360. I wonder how third party devs will go around handling that.

 

I also wonder if MS will make it super expensive just because they can and are overconfident from the 360's success. They should be taking notes on how bad the PS3's "$599" launch went. I guess we'll see soon enough if they have. WAS hoping for a launch at $369 or there abouts. But with Sony bumping their ram from 4 to 8 gigs and MS seemingly not interested I'm not sure what to think. Maybe TWO over expensive console launches will both fail, causing the entire industry to drown into another crash.

[Thrik]

Aren't we still awaiting final specifications? After all the rumours and usual hype I've kind of last track of where we got to.

[melmer]

Xbox is going to save America