Why revise consoles

One is to cut costs. This happened on Wii, where changes to the power supply required changes to the bootloader. Another is to fix known defects but let games slow down and use a workaround on the older silicon. Uniracers, for example, reportedly slows down more on 1/1/1 because it doesn't DMA as much data every frame on the old hardware.


There were two major versions of the PlayStation GPU that changed certain behaviors. Some features were faster or more stable on one, others on the other. Games had to work both on the revision codenamed "blue" and the revision codenamed "green" before Sony would approve them.


Like the upgrade from Game Boy to Game Boy Color, Nintendo GameCube to Wii, DS to DSi, or Nintendo 3DS to New Nintendo 3DS?

See also previous topic on console revisions.

At least in the first two cases the system can know what to do when it start up and don't cause problem (you can set the bit in the header to tell to use Game Boy Color in case it is the color game; you can then either test in the older Game Boy too or you can make the program to display an error message if it isn't a Color Game Boy; in the case of Wii you just use a different disc so it is less problem but I have seen a Wii disc start up in GameCube mode once (and you couldn't proceed past the title screen)). The last two, I don't know about.

Did the Wii game need the 1% extra processing power the Wii provided over the GameCube? The GameCube was really pretty good technical wise when it came out, (It and the original Xbox struggled for first place,) but the Wii was pretty much the exact thing in a different case 5 years latter. I feel like most GameCube games actually look better than a lot of Wii games, probably due to developers trying more with the GameCube, and the GameCube not being a shovel ware magnet.

Oh yeah, out of curiosity, why did Sony develop two different GPUs for the PlayStation?

50% more processing power, and more RAM, and more input devices. It's hard to "Press +" when the PPC can't see the Bluetooth controller.

Oh, I was definitely being serious tepples. Anyway, 50% really isn't anything to brag about. It is kind of funny though, because I think I read somewhere that the PS4 and XBone are only 50% more powerful than their predecessors, despite having something of an 8 year gap... I wonder how long these consoles are going to last. I certainty won't miss them, but I have a feeling the problems presented with the PS4 and XBone are only going to be worse next time around...

By the way, one thing I find ridiculous is the "remasters" of PS3 games on the PS4. It's practically just running a PC game on higher settings.


Next generation graphics right here folks:

...and nothing says "idiot game reviewer" like use of JPEG when comparing screenshots.

I agree with you that that screenshot was compressed at an irresponsible level: 1280x720 at 97,933 bytes is 0.85 bpp. The text at the top shows more compression artifacts than the rest of the picture shows differences, apart from obvious things like the detail on the sword, the wood grain texture, and perhaps the bump maps on the steering wheel. But I also disagree with "PNG or nothing" purists. A high-quality JPEG can be effectively visually transparent, but less than 1 bpp ain't it.

1. We're looking at two stages of compression, not just JPG. The picture is a screenshot of a video comparison. (It's also apparent that it's been nearest-neighbour downsampled, too, further lowering the quality.)
2. The more interesting difference between these two platforms is the framerate / smoothness of animation, which is difficult to convey in a still frame shot like this. It's even difficult to properly convey in the 30fps source video, actually, but it's a rather important difference that a screenshot more or less ignores.

Are you sure that it isn't just a different sword? If you look at the guy's chest, he's also got an extra pouch thing on the PS3.


The wood definitely looks better. I'm not sure about the steering wheel though.


If you compare an N64 to a GC game, you don't even need to see any movement to tell how stronger the GC is. Many GameCube games run at higher framerates and I'm pretty sure higher resolutions than N64 games too. I still find it a bit remarkable how it's been 8 years and it just looks like we've just been able to run the games at a slightly higher setting. Maybe if they used managed their resources better to where they didn't have 8GB of ram, and increased CPU or GPU power... It's not like a computer where you're running multiple applications at once.

Of course, I'm not a hardware designer...

Well, to be honest any graphical progress from here is going to be subtle. Practical normal mapping was the last great leap in visual capability. The direction the hardware will take from now on is better performance, and easier development. We can do more complex scenes too, but the difference is minor unless you're the one making the game.

Think of it like audio, we maxed out what we could do, fidelity wise, a few generations ago. We can do some pretty nifty stuff with sound design (3D spatial effects, dynamic mixing of many layers, etc.) that we couldn't before but they're largely too subtle to really show off the technology to anybody but a developer.

I actually think this is great, we've basically finished trying to figure out what graphics hardware should do, and now it's a matter of refining the known solution, making it cheaper, faster, more powerful, etc. We don't have to worry about architectural game-changers, and it's easier than ever to do cross platform work.

That's what I feared... I guess it's going to take 100 years before we get anything movie CG quality?


Would that be like draw distance? I saw Far Cry 4 on the XBone and it was very apparent that models increased in quality the closer you got to them. The thing is, I imagine it would take more power to push draw distances and other things like that back to where they are unnoticeable.


Which kind of makes you wonder how system A is any different than system B, aside from a different case. Aside from Nintendo games, a lot of the games on systems now are cross platform because they are 3rd party. I just find it silly when people say the PS4 is better in terms of technology than the XBone or the other way around


How long ago was that? Is that like calculating lighting based on pixels instead of vertexes, so you don't get the "disco ball" look on something that's supposed to be a circle?

Yes, higher resolutions. Most N64 games run at 320x240 (or 304x224 or whatever), with some sort of antialiasing. I haven't looked at it in detail, but I remember it resembling either multisample antialiasing (some weighting of the frontmost 2 fragments in a screen pixel) or morphological antialiasing (blending of adjacent pixels by doing hq2x-like processing on edges in the Z buffer). But most GameCube games that I've played that aren't collections of 240p-era classic games run at 640x480 with no antialiasing other than the (optional) deflicker filter. I imagine that some games that run at a guaranteed 60 Hz but really can't spare any frame buffer memory might do the "Tobal trick" (run at 640x240 and shift the camera down a half line every other field).


In-game chat, requests to join a multiplayer game, achievement sharing, video sharing, game updates, and the like are "multiple applications".


Movie CG also has animators applying cheats to individual shots, and these cheats don't need to change based on not-entirely-predictable actions of the characters the way games do. Besides, I think real-time graphics surpassed the first Toy Story long ago.


That's level of detail (LOD) management, and N64 games were already using it. LOD management on a texture, for example, is called "mip-mapping".

"Bump mapping" refers to storing, for each texel in a texture map, the "height" of that texel relative to the polygon behind it. This allows calculating lighting on each texel by the plane formed by differences in height between adjacent texels. It lets an artist add more rough or shiny details to the surface by adding more bumps, and there exist tools to "bake" high-polygon models into bumps on lower-polygon models. "Normal mapping", as I understand it, is a time-memory tradeoff that to speed up the calculation.

Then again, another limiting factor to cross-platform work is getting a pointing device-driven game out the door so that your company can qualify for licenses on other platforms. I'm told most people who play PC and mobile games do not own gamepads.

Well, the progression of practical 3D lighting in games has been something like:

1. Wireframes, no shading.
2. Filled polygons, no shading.
3. Per-face shading. (Flat shading.)
4. Per-vertex shading. (Gouraud shading.)
5. Per-pixel shading. (Phong shading, smooth surfaces,)
6. Per-pixel normals. (Normal mapping, rough surfaces.)

All of these techniques were well understood by the end of the 1970s. Hardware for doing it in real-time came online gradually. Normal mapping was the defining new graphics feature of the XBox 360 and PS3 era, but it could be done previously (just more slowly).

There isn't a defining new graphics feature of the XBone/PS4, as far as I can tell. It's just a scaled up, more powerful version of what we already had. I don't know if there will ever be another paradigm change in graphics as prominent as any of the 6 levels I just mentioned.

If I'm not mistaken though, each of the systems have 256MB dedicated just for that. That leaves about 7.75GB, which is more than enough.


I'd say the GC did. The look of older CG movies is weird, because there is usually not very advanced shading and textures (a lot of the time, it's just flat shading) but there are a ton of polygons.

Task scheduling is more complicated than memory allocation.

What?

I think there's a bit of confusion here.

The PS4, as I understand it, has an auxiliary CPU for OS, video streaming, etc. and it has its own dedicated RAM of 256 MB. I would presume we're trying to talk about this unit as a whole, not just its RAM.

The XBone doesn't have something equivalent, does it?

It wouldn't be the first time I caused it.


Yes.


I don't think so, or at least I haven't found anything. The PS4 seems the best hardware wise in just about every aspect, (The CPU on the XBone is slightly faster, but almost everything on the PS4 is as good if not better) but the amount that it's better in is so little it doesn't really make a difference. Both consoles are about the exact same thing in all but name. Frankly though, I could care less which one is better.

♪ That means you do care, at least a little* ♫

Now I'm confused: Is this about why revise the hardware in a particular platform or why create a successor platform?


* To suppress this warning, write "could hardly care less".