melmer

PL4YST4TION 4

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It'll be interesting to see how the bigger game payloads will be handled during the next 5+ years. It'd only take me 1.5 hours to download 45GB assuming optimal speeds, but that would take me over my daily download limit like a million times over and result in me getting hugely deteriorated speeds for the rest of the day (something ISPs seem to be favouring over hard caps). With that said, the limit only affects daytime hours so I could download overnight with no penalty.

 

Clearly if people are going to start doing this across the country, a serious amount of extra strain is going to be put on ISPs and download providers alike. I'm sure they'll adapt and invest as needed, but this will inevitably result in higher prices appearing somewhere. Also I guess things like the PS4's 'play while it downloads' feature will become less of a luxury that developers might occasionally implement, and more of an absolute necessity that developers will be compelled to support.

 

I guess it's a good job that a lot of countries have been investing in internet infrastructure recently. At the beginning of this generation you were lucky to get 5mb/s in a lot of UK households, whereas now 50–100mb/s is quite easily attainable.

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Diminishing returns of graphics:

 

2486940-0248877224-ChsSw.png

 

Of course, there's more to it that that, but this definitely illustrates why the jump seems so much smaller this generation than the last.

 

That's really dumb. The model doesn't have detail for 60,000 triangles, so there's no way to show off the extra detail. If they used a box as an example, there would be no advantage beyond twelve triangles. Also, the image is very small, so we don't see how much better it looks close up.

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Well it does the install bit in the background whilist you're playing. Doesn't kill zone only take something like 2minutes before you're in the game. Do you really need to have 20 games installed on you ps at anyone time?

I read this yesterday, maybe they've got a trick up their sleeve

Future PS4 games may install to "cloud" and stream to console.

http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=710947

 

I guess the answer to that first question depends on how long it takes to install. If it's going to take an hour to install, I'll want to keep all my multi-player games installed because I don't want the delay to cause me to miss playing with friends. If it's 10 minutes, no big deal. 

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Big non-SSD drives aren't very expensive and they're constantly becoming less so. I don't think space is going to be that big an issue during the next generation.

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I know a lot of people who are buying 1TB drives for $70 or something and upgrading day 1. I'll probably end up doing that myself, I imagine.

 

I recently threw a 1TB 7200RPM drive into my PS3 and it's made a lot of difference. I also have pretty much every single PS+ game installed since the program started with plenty of space to spare.

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Yeah, one of the first things I did when I bought a PS3 was grab a big-ass Samsung laptop drive for less than £100. To this day I still have 100GB+ spare on my PS3 despite having never uninstalled anything ever and having literally 150+ music albums and hundreds of video files/trailers on it.

 

Storage just hasn't been on my mind at all with the PS3, because once you replace the internal drive it's something you can just forget about. Conversely, with my 360 I'm always having to clear shit off because there's no way I'm buying one of Microsoft's drives and having it sat on my TV stand looking like a mess.

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I recently brought up on Twitter the dumb idea of buying a 1TB SSD and throwing it in a PS4. It really didn't make a whole lot of sense to throw an SSD into a PS3 due to the SATA 1.5GBps port that limited access speed (plus, only games like RAGE and Elder Scrolls/Fallout saw noticeable benefits from faster access to cache), but I assume the PS4 has either SATA 3.0GBps or SATA 6.0GBps, which would make an SSD a less ridiculous choice. Of course, a 1TB drive would effectively make the cost of a PS4 $1000, but if you're going all-digital the benefits might actually be worth the initial price long-term.

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Yeah, one of the first things I did when I bought a PS3 was grab a big-ass Samsung laptop drive for less than £100. To this day I still have 100GB+ spare on my PS3 despite having never uninstalled anything ever and having literally 150+ music albums and hundreds of video files/trailers on it.

 

Storage just hasn't been on my mind at all with the PS3, because once you replace the internal drive it's something you can just forget about. Conversely, with my 360 I'm always having to clear shit off because there's no way I'm buying one of Microsoft's drives and having it sat on my TV stand looking like a mess.

 

I guess I just don't get why they couldn't have gone with at least 1TB to begin with. It would have only been marginally more expensive than the 500GB they went with. I would rather not have to drop another $70 on top of the initial price of the console.

 

Basically, I'm just a baby complaining.

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I'm guessing they did a lot of research into what kind of capacity would be the sweet spot. It was uncharted territory with the last generation, but this time around the manufacturers should be able to make pretty accurate usage estimates based upon the last seven years. There's not much point in inflating costs and muddying the market when they can just make changing the hard drive a cinch and let people decide what's best themselves and/or upgrade as necessary (it's extremely easy to transfer from one disk to another).

 

After all, for every person saying 500GB should be 1TB, there'll be someone saying 1TB should be 2TB. I imagine that 500GB will be just fine for the majority of people — just not people like me who store their entire music and video collections on their console. Which brings me to a fun fact: the PS3 chokes if you try and have more than 512 items in a playlist. They'd better have that shit sorted out.

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Since you can download the multiplayer and singleplayer portions of, say, Killzone separately, I wonder if they can also be deleted selectively. I'll probably play through the campaign only once (if that), so it would be nice to be able to delete it but keep the multiplayer client around for online teabagging.

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I'm guessing they did a lot of research into what kind of capacity would be the sweet spot. It was uncharted territory with the last generation, but this time around the manufacturers should be able to make pretty accurate usage estimates based upon the last seven years. There's not much point in inflating costs and muddying the market when they can just make changing the hard drive a cinch and let people decide what's best themselves and/or upgrade as necessary (it's extremely easy to transfer from one disk to another).

 

After all, for every person saying 500GB should be 1TB, there'll be someone saying 1TB should be 2TB. I imagine that 500GB will be just fine for the majority of people — just not people like me who store their entire music and video collections on their console. Which brings me to a fun fact: the PS3 chokes if you try and have more than 512 items in a playlist. They'd better have that shit sorted out.

 

Fair point. But it is my job as a nerd baby to moan and complain about this kind of stuff. 

 

Also, I wouldn't worry about having more than 512 items in a playlist anyways since you are limited by their Unlimited music service (see what I did there?); that is, assuming they don't change course.

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Fair point. But it is my job as a nerd baby to moan and complain about this kind of stuff. 

 

Also, I wouldn't worry about having more than 512 items in a playlist anyways since you are limited by their Unlimited music service (see what I did there?); that is, assuming they don't change course.

 

No, they fixed the problem because now you can have UNLIMITED MUSIC YEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH

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Well, they'll probably make a larger capacity PS4 in a couple of years like the 500 GB PS3. You could always wait for that and by then there will probably have been a price drop and/or a redesigned slim model. WIN WIN!

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Wow, so I was talking to a bunch of my friends today and someone said something about needing to get around to buying the new FIFA and I jokingly asked why they weren't just going to wait a week and get it on the PS4 and I found out that out of everyone in that group (5-6 people in their early 20's who play a fair amount of games, but pretty much just all the EA Sports games, CoD, and like GTA) no one had any interest in getting a new console because they all currently own working consoles.  The thing that blew my mind is that someone said they wanted a Wii U and it turns out that pretty much everyone was planning on buying a Wii U at some point in the near future.  I don't know what's hip with young people anymore.

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Not really, most developers liked the 360 a bit more. I too blame Obama for this.

Yeah, but that was more due to tools and ease of development. Ease of development is a significant factor in what console developers prefer. The only exception that comes to mind was the PS2, which had a very dodgy architecture but because Sony was seen as far more stable than Sega, it was a safer bet, even if their hardware took some finessing to work with. By the time the Xbox and Gamecube came out, Sony's first-party developers were freely sharing code with other PS2 developers, which reduced the burden significantly. It's also one of the reasons why developers tend to avoid Nintendo home consoles but will embrace handheld consoles - Nintendo's home consoles have amazing architecture and fairly poor tools and APIs. A lot of middleware didn't support the Wii because they don't see a lot of demand, and nearly every Western game uses some form of middleware these days, so if it doesn't work on a platform, they won't port it. For some reason, though, there's lots of middleware available for the DS line, and most developers use it - even Japanese devs, where code reuse is not nearly as common.

 

Until recently, Microsoft had the best tools in the tech industry - as it stands Visual Studio is still an amazing piece of software - but in my estimation it's been superseded by the Mac development environment.

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Yeah, but that was more due to tools and ease of development. Ease of development is a significant factor in what console developers prefer. The only exception that comes to mind was the PS2, which had a very dodgy architecture but because Sony was seen as far more stable than Sega, it was a safer bet, even if their hardware took some finessing to work with. By the time the Xbox and Gamecube came out, Sony's first-party developers were freely sharing code with other PS2 developers, which reduced the burden significantly. It's also one of the reasons why developers tend to avoid Nintendo home consoles but will embrace handheld consoles - Nintendo's home consoles have amazing architecture and fairly poor tools and APIs. A lot of middleware didn't support the Wii because they don't see a lot of demand, and nearly every Western game uses some form of middleware these days, so if it doesn't work on a platform, they won't port it. For some reason, though, there's lots of middleware available for the DS line, and most developers use it - even Japanese devs, where code reuse is not nearly as common.

 

Until recently, Microsoft had the best tools in the tech industry - as it stands Visual Studio is still an amazing piece of software - but in my estimation it's been superseded by the Mac development environment.

 

Nope, most developers thought the 360's 10mb of embedded ram made up for any disparity in the 360's CPU power vs the PS3's. I could even point to John Carmack saying so.

 

As for this "generation". Yeah as a stand alone machine the PS4 is measurably better. But it will be interesting to see what devs get up to with cloud computing, which Microsoft is supporting heavily out the gate. You can't reasonably stream the entire game yet, or for years to come. But there are latency insensitive, or relatively insensitive things that can be done "in the cloud" without noticeable lag in the game.

 

But you'd still need to have AN internet connection of course, and a decent one at that. It will be interesting to see how devs use it, I suspect we'll see more and more games require an internet connection as times go on just because they're using the "cloud". At least for the consoles.

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I think games like Battlefield 4 and Planetside 2 are already giving a taste of what kinds of things cloud computing will bring. They're not truly using 'the cloud', but they do a lot of server-side processing of water wave physics, vehicle physics, etc.

Granted, it's mostly out of necessity because they're multiplayer games and you can't have each player seeing totally different tidal waves, but it's an example of something that is only practical in today's age because EA and Sony run all the beefy servers for those games — servers which, incidentally, probably run in Microsoft Azure or Amazon cloud farms.

As the cloud is just lots of virtual servers, we'll probably see similar things being implemented. But then, a lot of incredibly sophisticated stuff can be done without it and there's always the latency penalty, so I'm very sceptical it's going to be as big a deal as Microsoft is implying. Requiring an internet connection is one thing, but a persistently fast and stable one?

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I guess it's a good job that a lot of countries have been investing in internet infrastructure recently. At the beginning of this generation you were lucky to get 5mb/s in a lot of UK households, whereas now 50–100mb/s is quite easily attainable.

 

Sorry but I know no-one with 50 - 100 mb/s connections, I get 12 and that is very good for my area. But I don't mind waiting while steam downloads games.

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Sorry but I know no-one with 50 - 100 mb/s connections, I get 12 and that is very good for my area. But I don't mind waiting while steam downloads games.

 

A lot of the UK is now served by Virgin fibre (30mb/s–100mb/s) or BT Infinity (38mb/s–76mb/s). In such areas it's possible to get 60mb/s like I do for ~£30/month.

 

I'm sure there are plenty of areas stuck on copper, but a huge amount of the country has been covered with fibre during the past five years or so. Most people I know in the Midlands have it (or could have it). This is far better than the universally shit connectivity available in 2006, although even back then I was able to get 20mb/s via copper in a small town so copper isn't all bad — it just loses its speed very quickly over distance, unlike fibre.

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*points to telco exchange for entire city, located about 150 metres from where Thrik lives* :P

 

It is true though: broadband providers are rolling out fibre far faster than many expected. The house I'm currently in is on the lowest package they could get, and we get about 20Mbps. I got a tenth of that in 2006 and it was considered great.

 

This was laughable in 2009, and now it just looks quaint even if you look at rural connections separately.

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Haha, I'm with Virgin though so I don't think that place affects me. In fact, the ADSL speeds in my block were shit a year ago because they hadn't installed Fibre yet (don't know if they have now) and copper is so bad at retaining speed that by the time it gets to the seventh floor it's down to like 8mb/s.

 

But I work in Grantham and both BT/Virgin have fibre all over the place here, and the same goes for where I used to live in Mansfield. I am very surprised by how fast things are going, I was expecting it to take ages. Having 100mb/s easily accessible in many parts of the country was borderline unimaginable not many years ago. 

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Whichever console has the best online infrastructure will get my money, probably some time in the second quarter next year. At this point, i would guess that would be MS since they have a lot of history with online services, but I really hope that Sony surprises me.

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Question: this commercial hinges on (reverse sexism and) one XBO user being able to take control from another using Kinect voice control. Have Microsoft explained what they are doing to prevent this from happening IRL?

 

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