teflon

Cougar, on 24 February 2013 - 01:39 PM, said:

It will matter in 2 months or at E3, when Microsoft show their hand. If their unveiling has a price and a case, good for them, but they also need to put together a showing which can match the stuff which Sony showed off, and if they don't surpass it, then the press will be just as gleefully telling everyone that MS missed the ball as they are now, ripping Sony a new one for not showing a box.

But you're right, who is going to care in 11 months? So what does it matter if Sony don't show a box right now?

Well, for one thing, it will double if not triple their presence in the press at a point where they need to start the ball rolling with getting public awareness. February launch, April comparisons with MS' showing, and a big showdown at E3. They have the spotlight to themselves right now, something which MS don't get anymore, and that's something that really does matter.


Comparisons to Apple are moot. The last time Apple unveiled a wholly new platform, which had nothing in common to anything that went before it was with the iPhone. The iPad used the same software libraries and the same chips, and developers could easily react in 2 months, whilst hype was building.

The console business is so utterly different in terms of timescales, that the kinds of rumours, leaks and speculation which build up for Apple would have already been and gone, were Sony to announce hardware in June. We had such a frenzy in the lead up to PSM that there was already almost nothing new to see. Imagine if we had all of that, and then still had 4 months until E3 for an unveiling?

Anyway, if you're talking about it now, and know what it's about, then Sony's PR has done its job.

It allows Sony to keep a hold of the narrative. With dev kits in a very wide range of developers' hands, leaks were inevitable, and already quite rampant before Sony gave us the Feb 20th date. After announcing that, the PS4 leaks utterly dominated the Durango leaks and info, and meant that Sony had total control of the hype in the build up to the show. Now that they've announced what they have, they have also set the agenda for microsoft to match or better.

And if Microsoft include similar streaming heavy tech, then they'll just be "copying" what Sony did. If they add touch to their controller, they'll be mimicking, if they switch to 8GB of GDDR5, have an 8-core AMD "Jaguar" CPU, etc. etc. Sony struck first with setting the vision, and MS will have to do a lot more than match it to avoid being seen as following.

Rumour has it that Microsoft was planning to announce their machine in April, and it seems that this could be most likely to happen now, too. Sony beat them to the punch.


Comparing Apple's business to the console business is completely moot. When they release a product, they can keep it so utterly secret, announce 2 weeks before, and have thousands of developers jumping to their tune with minor software adjustments in time for launch. It's an evolutionary product release each time, where they're not creating a new source of revenue.

Each console generation is almost entirely divorced from the last, and developers regularly need 2 years run up to get their games ready to ship. You have to announce early to get awareness, get partner support and so forth.

I thought it was a good showing. They set out their stall as going after a more social, inter-connected slant to the next generation, and there's a crap load of streaming tech going in every single direction.
Whether you like that thing is another matter.

The only real omission was to not show the console design itself, and that would have really capped off the show, but people are making WAAAAAAAAAY too big a deal out of it. I mean really, it's a box. It might be a nice looking box, but it's still just a box, with the focus being set firmly on what's shown on screen and what you hold in your hands.

As for backward compatibility, there are hurdles for them at every angle.

If they go the route of streaming, then as Frost said, this will add in a bunch of latency to everything that's going on. Gaikai's technology does help this to a certain degree, but I've heard that it's very dependent on them being able to run games at 60Hz, to halve the response time of the system. Since PS3 games generally run at 30Hz, that would mean they have to perform magic on their servers. It's not just a case of hooking up a few thousand PS3s to encode servers, or even putting in Cells on PCIe cards, it requires changing how everything is actually run.

But they're working on it, and it could eventually be a half-decent solution.

The second option would be to put a Cell in the PS4 box, but we know that's simply not going again this time round.

Third would be for the trend of porting games from one generation to the next, whilst also modifying the engine to support higher resolutions. (This would be my preferred option)

Finally, spend years figuring out how to replicate the Cell SPEs on the compute units of the GPU (which isn't a million miles away from a Radeon 7850), and create a clunky software emulator which works for a tiny subset of games which didn't stretch the boundaries of what was possible on the system architecture. You can see what kind of selection you'd get here by looking at the PS2 "classics" releases on PSN. Impressive, but far from flexible enough.

Holding up PCSX2 as a shining example isn't going to help, because it's a labour of love from all involved, backed up by the tip top end PC hardware. There's not enough money in it for Sony or anybody else to go into that level of customisation, they might as well port the games and sell in HD collections.

My best guess is that they'll be doing all but the second option, though. There will be quite a few games which happily work in an emulator, others that can live with a simplistic port, with larger releases getting a better port dedicated to them and spinning money. All backed up by whatever Gaikai can cook up.

M'kay, I found one or two little things which might help.

If a folder called bin32 really isn't in the Crysis folder, then you're absolutely without a 32-bit option, which is just a bit odd really!
So then in bin64, there should be two .exe's one crysis.exe and the other crysis64.exe. My understanding is that they should be the same, but just try running either of them, with the Vista SP2 compatibility mode and Admin privileges turned on.
Also, if you add "-dx9" to the relevant .exe's boot options (I'm sorry, I forget the name, but it's under properties) that might help any issues you're having with DX10... If running it from a desktop shortcut, right click that and, leaving a space after the .exe, add the -dx9 to the target description.

Hope some of that helps. :S

Oh, really?! That's very odd. I played Crysis a couple months back on W7 x64, using the standard 32-bit game from Steam and it was fine...

I'll try to remember to have a look around later on.