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Old 05-23-2013, 09:07 PM   #79
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Football is a wonderful thing.

Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: NY
Posts: 3,069

Ryan Clady

My take on the hardware:

For the guys jumping up and down on the PS4 having much better "specs," not everything is in concrete yet, despite what you guys have read in some industry article written by speculating journalists. The architectures are somewhat similar yes, the PS4 does have a 33% or 50% (depending on what you use as the base) lead in "operations per cycle". But we don't know the clocks, or "cycles per second" of these systems. MS might clock the xbox one at 1Ghz and Sony might clock theirs at 800Mhz. The limitation here is power draw and heat. The Xbox one is already very big, and draws a lot of power (150w minimum, 220w powerbrick) - that's a lot more than the old xbox 360 which drew a maximum of 120w under load (ran hot and very loud); so clearly MS is going for something performance competitive. There's also arguments in the game development world that on die ram (the ESRAM) offers a small (15-20%) efficiency gain over GPUs that operate on a traditional cache. Anandtech has plenty of reliable and well written info on this, I'd stick to only information from that website, and avoid other sites that jump to conclusions far too quickly.

My take on the TV stuff:

This isn't just a fight against Sony, clearly, as many have pointed out, MS views itself as a content distributor, they've already turned "xbox" into a distribution brand for entertainment: see "xbox music" as the replacement for the zune music player.

My take on the Games:

Very little until E3, apparently.

My take on the new Kinect:

I saw a demo where they detected motion in a pitch black room with no light, and where they clearly locked in on a single person speaking with tons of intelligible sounds surrounding the speaker. It looks like you can have a loud party and speak to the xbox just fine, with little more than a whisper. Very impressive.

Stuffing it inside every box is the only way they'll get those "hardcore" games like Mass Effect to support motion control all the way through (no install base intersection issues). A great move to make sure home consoles have a differentiating factor besides raw power.

My take on online:

They want to make all games have the "persistence" and online features of MMO's and multiplayer games. 5 years down the road they want to be ready for cloud gaming where your home console is completely irrelevant (like Onlive, or Gaikai).

On what REALLY matters: Timing, pricing, and Content. Content. Content.

I don't own a Xbox 360, but if Microsoft's deal with the NFL is something crazy; where the xbox one has software that auto identifies players with jersey numbers on the field and some overlay comes up illustrating the auto-identified coverage and routes (like its madden)... And I get to draw x's and o's on my TV screen with my I-phone and do instant replay from my couch where i can zoom in on Peyton's signals or draw lines like I'm a TV announcer... Well then, I'm getting a freaking Xbox.

There's a lot of weird flexibility when you make the console a development platform and give it live TV. It's going to be a lot more capable than a DVR, you can't instantly upload DVR clips to youtube, those DVR's are not advanced enough, but a console is. You can take a touchdown pass and instantly encode-upload-play it on facebook if you want.

It all comes down to the content, the timing, and the pricing for most people. Pricing, of course is why people are complaining about used games. Well if they gave you a loyalty program that made game purchases cheaper and resell/trade ins rewarding enough, it won't be much of a problem if both systems banned traditional used game sales...

Last edited by Willynowei; 05-23-2013 at 09:12 PM..
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