Was looking at some of the game videos over the weekend..

[Keith Wallace]

This is the cycle of consoles, though. They look great and fairly in-line with PCs at launch, but as you take hardware that came out a year or two after it launched on the PC, then compare it to stuff 5 years later, it's going to look bad.

 

[ncxcstud]

This is the cycle of consoles, though. They look great and fairly in-line with PCs at launch, but as you take hardware that came out a year or two after it launched on the PC, then compare it to stuff 5 years later, it's going to look bad.

It'll look bad regardless - because it'll be 5 years old. Look at the launch XBOX 360 and PS3 games. They look terrible today. Only two games I know of (from the 360) that hold their own still are Kameo and Condemned (and Condemned holds it only mostly because of the atmosphere it creates and not because of how it looks).

 

[Keith Wallace]

I know, it was just my response to people's saying that consoles are "catching up." The cycle of console gaming isn't one where catching up really happens, it just is new. It's not like this will result in some change where they won't fall severely behind in a couple of years all over again.

 

[Coreldan]

I know, it was just my response to people's saying that consoles are "catching up." The cycle of console gaming isn't one where catching up really happens, it just is new. It's not like this will result in some change where they won't fall severely behind in a couple of years all over again.

Well, there is the "open door" of cloud computing. While it's capabilities would still be fairly limited at this time, 5 years from here might be a bit different. I'm not really holding my breath for cloud computing to allow for that much in the future either, but I don't think it should be ignored either. I think it was a great way to at least attempt for some future proofing to put it in from the scratch.

And I think the results were already pretty sweet on what could be done, like that one video showed, lighting and shadows wouldn't look disturbingly off until there was like 400ms and that's a very generous latency "cap" before things start to look off.

But yeah, I don't think even with cloud computing we could even remotely talk about "catching up" even in those 5 years, actual local hardware in PCs will surely trump that, but I'd more so think of it as being.. "a bit less out of date years from here" or just future proofing

 

[Keith Wallace]

There are still limitations with that idea, though. You can't intelligently solve the problem by making the games handled primarily by the servers, IMO. It leaves too many people in the dark with offline play, so you still have that bottleneck of what the console itself can handle, since it has to (for at least one more generation) function offline. If they started making games require online solely in the name of graphical prowess, they'd have a crappy situation on their hands, like before.

 

[Coreldan]

There are still limitations with that idea, though. You can't intelligently solve the problem by making the games handled primarily by the servers, IMO. It leaves too many people in the dark with offline play, so you still have that bottleneck of what the console itself can handle, since it has to (for at least one more generation) function offline. If they started making games require online solely in the name of graphical prowess, they'd have a crappy situation on their hands, like before.

I wasn't really thinking "primarly" anyways, but there are a decent amount of taxing processes that could be offloaded from the console, allowing the console to boost graphics for example.

But yeah, the offline crowd are the problem, I keep forgetting them cos I'm so much always online myself. The times when the power or internet cuts off here longer than a few hours top are so rare that I could just take the always-online requirement without blinking an eye, but I realize the situation is worse elsewhere.

But it makes me wonder if the games could be made more like PC games with several graphic quality options? Online-mode could have a bit nicer graphics when some things are processed serverside and offline-gaming would just tone down the graphics a bit just like you can do on PC. Even outside the online/offline question I guess there could be the option of wanting more frames for less graphics or managing with less frames for prettier graphics, but that idea feels a bit meh for a console..