Espozo wrote:
tepples wrote:
Does a friend cease to be a friend if he moves 480 km (300 miles) away?
Well, if you never see or talk to him again.
Fat chance of that happening nowadays. AIM's been around since 1997, and now there are Facebook, Google+, Skype, FaceTime, Hangouts, and more.
Espozo wrote:
tepples wrote:
And there's still the issue of households with more than one gamer. Or is the household expected to buy three PlayStation 4 consoles, three Xbox One consoles, and/or three Wii U consoles?
Wait, isn't this just saying why split screen is still important vs. online play?
Yes. Another forum I'm on has people who lose sight of this use case after years of being single.
Espozo wrote:
tepples wrote:
Imagine a tree with a bunch of leaves, a program running on the GPU that positions all the leaves, and a few sets of parameters that the program uses to place the leaves.
Shouldn't that be handled by the CPU?
Vertex processing is handled by a shader program on the GPU for the same reason that coordinate transforms in Nintendo 64 are handled by a "microcode" (now called a shader program) on the RSP: the GPU is better at doing that kind of math in parallel.
Espozo wrote:
Anyway though, there really isn't such thing as a hard "polygon limit", is there, because couldn't you technically output an infinite number of polygons, but it would take a long time?
There's a deadline for every scene. Usually this is in the neighborhood 15 or 30 ms, depending on whether your engine is locked to 60 or 30 fps. A deadline longer than the time between one power outage and the next (see my previous comment about
Animal Crossing) can't be met.
Quote:
I mean like on the SNES, it's not like you could have 256 sprites if you wait an extra frame.
You can have as many sprites as you damn well please if you soft-composite them to a texture, whether on the CPU or on the GSU. In a proportional font engine, for example, the glyph for each character in the string can be positioned as if it were a sprite.
Count the "sprites"True, the PPUs in the NES, Super NES, and Game Boy line are incapable of rendering to a texture. The Nintendo DS is kind of in the middle, normally rendering the scene to a 48-line circular buffer that gets sent to the screen. But at the cost of half the texture memory, it can also be used with a double frame buffer for 3D on both screens or for a more complex scene.
Espozo wrote:
I've actually heard of many people having a Nintendo console and a PC; Nintendo for exclusives, and PC for anything else.
Which leaves what for
Red Dead Redemption and
Katamari? Both have appeared on PlayStation and Xbox but aren't scheduled to (officially) appear on Nintendo or PC. But then you can't get a
` console on a console, nor install mods.
Espozo wrote:
It's not like this is going to be the Halo you know and love either, unless you're one of the people who actually liked Halo 4.
I've already played through
Halo 5 on my Dreamcast, as well as
Halo 2 on
my PS1.
Espozo wrote:
Most people already have a computer, so why go out and buy a $400 system that will play the exact same games?
[tepples goes to full Slashdot mode]Several reasons:
- If all you want to play are vanilla versions of major-label games, consoles are easier to buy and easier to use.
- You can't use the computer while someone else in the household is playing games on it.
- Intel graphics prior to about Ivy Bridge doesn't even keep pace with the PS3, let alone the PS4.
- Laptop GPUs generally can't be upgraded.
- PC often gets games years later, after the console crowd has already had a chance to practice for two years.
rainwarrior wrote:
These days it seems quite normal for this theoretical household to have three PCs.
Three PCs, or one PC and two iPads? And even if they are all PCs, are they new, or are some of them older PCs whose onboard graphics can't keep up with even last-gen graphics?
rainwarrior wrote:
Especially if they're laptops, this is a pretty good setup for multiplayer gaming. Even low-end onboard GPUs are capable of some pretty decent 3D graphics
Three copies of one $40 PC game are more expensive than one copy of a $60 console game.