What "current gen" consoles do you own?

[Drew Sebastino]

I'm bored today, and this is something I just feel like asking this. How many people actually own a Wii U or a Xbox One (better known as Xbone) or a PS4? Like I said, I've been less than impressed with the Xbone. I just always found it funny how people have criticized the Wii U for days on end for not having any games when really, what do the Xbone and PS4 have? Of the few noteworthy games on the Xbone, two of them, the "critically acclaimed" Titanfall and Destiny where dropped like a rock, and no one gives a sh*t about Halo 5, which Microsoft has yet to learn. The PS4 isn't in a much better situation. This is random, but one thing I feel about the Xbone and the PS4 is realistically, how much different is it than a PC put in a box? I mean, they even have x86 processors unlike how the Xbox 360 and I think the PS3 had Power PC processors like the Wii U, and they have 8 GB of ram, (solely reserved for the games) for some reason, and with the level of hardware they're using, I doubt you'd ever realistically use it all. One thing I've always liked about Nintendo's hardware is how much it gives the other companies' a run for their money, like the Gamecube vs the original Xbox or now the Wii U vs the clunky Xbone and the PS4. Maybe this is my fanboy showing, but I just feel like Nintendo has always made the best hardware, not necessarily the strongest, if that makes sense. It'd be like if you made a car that could go 140mph that had 25mpg, but one that could 160mph, but had 10mpg. I know that's a lame analogy, but do you know what I mean?

[rainwarrior]

The Wii U is underpowered compared to the PS4 or XBone. It's fairly similar in comparison to its contemporaries and previous generation as the Wii was when it came out.

It doesn't really matter, though. Gaming hardware is now a generic problem, and the solution is cheap. PS4 and XBone hardware looks like PC hardware because there's no compelling reason for it to be different anymore. It solves the gaming problem perfectly well. Wii U is an outlier because it's borrowing the previous generation's solution. They might be right to do this, it's not like the extra power PS4/XBone have are making their games more fun. The hardware isn't such a big deal anymore, and I'm happy it's reached this point. Games already look and sound pretty damn good; probably from here on the direction gaming technology will take will be more about becoming cheaper than trying to increase the computational power.

If the hardware isn't really the thing that sells the system anymore, all they've got is exclusivity. Publishers much prefer these locked platforms to PC, even though this is a disadvantage for the actual consumers. I favoured PS3 in the previous generation especially because Sony has better relationships with Japanese developers that I like. (As a developer I loved working with the PS3's hardware, though its time has come and gone.) The only game I really want that's an exclusive right now is Bloodborne, and I'm sure that'll come to PC anyway.

I might get a PS4 eventually if it gets cheap enough, but it's equally possible I'd just upgrade my PC instead when that time comes. PS4 has a lot of cool stuff built in to make streaming easy, which is nice if you wanna do that?

I think it's pretty reasonable to get any of them. All three are good gaming machines. However, the actual hardware differences are becoming less and less important every day (and I think the PC market is starting to attract a lot of new interest during this period of change). Mostly it just becomes important in the price of the machine. More important factors are things like business relationships that get games on the system.

[tepples]

and I think the PC market is starting to attract a lot of new interest during this period of change

Does this include controller-friendly titles designed for couch co-op? Or is PC local multiplayer still something that virtually no users are equipped to do as of mid-2015, despite Valve's best effort at promoting Steam Big Picture?

[Drew Sebastino]

Yeah, the lack of splitscreen multiplayer in a fair number of games now is another thing that really has blurred the lines in how consoles have stood out from PCs.

The Wii U is underpowered compared to the PS4 or XBone. It's fairly similar in comparison to its contemporaries and previous generation as the Wii was when it came out.

It can't be that bad, right? Hopefully? I was lead to believe that it was about directly in between the Xbox 360 and the PS3 to the Xbone and the PS4. Frankly though, I can hardly tell the difference between a PS3 and a PS4 game. One thing that seems kind of silly to me is how they have the HD game pad, when, really though, if you want a game to use the gamepad as like a second screen for multi player, wouldn't that use up twice as much GPU power? I don't think the Wii U was ever really considered a "power house" and if a game where using both screens for something pretty major, I'd imagine you wouldn't be able to do too much on either.

I might get a PS4 eventually if it gets cheap enough, but it's equally possible I'd just upgrade my PC instead when that time comes. PS4 has a lot of cool stuff built in to make streaming easy, which is nice if you wanna do that?

If the PS4 is as mediocre as the Xbone, than I'd advise not getting one.

This is random though, but thinking about hardware, is the lack of splitscreen in many games now attributed to the fact that developers don't want to hold back graphically to allow it, like having the game run at 30fps instead of 60? I imagine it couldn't be too much worse, considering that you aren't actually rendering the 1 player screen twice, as polygons should only be about half as large because you're only using half the screen, but like I was saying with the Wii U having a fullsize second screen, I imagine that it could get pretty taxing on the GPU.

Wait a minute, I'm stupid, I have an Xbone. I'll fill it out on the poll...

[tokumaru]

I think it's pretty reasonable to get any of them.

As long as you don't live in a country fucked up enough to cause the Playstation 4 to have a launch price of US$ 1,300. It's almost half that now, but still way too expensive for anyone who's not a hardcore gamer.

I'm not terribly bothered by this, since very few new games interest me.

[tepples]

One thing that seems kind of silly to me is how they have the HD game pad, when, really though, if you want a game to use the gamepad as like a second screen for multi player, wouldn't that use up twice as much GPU power?

Is the GamePad's screen really HD, or is it just ED like the output of the GameCube and original Wii? Wikipedia says it's ED (854x480). I wonder whether Wii U games are allowed to use the Flipper GPU that's there for Wii mode.

This is random though, but thinking about hardware, is the lack of splitscreen in many games now attributed to the fact that developers don't want to hold back graphically to allow it

Lack of split-screen in City Folk is one-third of why I gave up Animal Crossing. (The other two factors were the fact that it was just Wild World with a strip mall, plus risk of Resetti due to power outages caused by ice storms that hit my city in December 2008.)

I imagine it couldn't be too much worse, considering that you aren't actually rendering the 1 player screen twice

Even if you're not fill-rate bound, rendering two players' views still takes two passes through the geometry.

[rainwarrior]

There's quite a few PC games with local multiplayer, especially in the indie market. I think splitscreen has largely fallen out of favour, even on console versions, as people tend to play online, one-to-a-machine, more than they want to play local multi. (Quicker and easier to find people to play with, I guess?) I don't think it really has to do with PC as a platform, just the rise of internet multiplayer as the primary goal. Supporting online multiplayer and local multiplayer are somewhat different engineering goals. Very often the developer is only interested in spending resource on one of them. It's not like either feature comes "for free". Nobody gets to put every feature they want into a game.

The Wii U is underpowered compared to the PS4 or XBone. It's fairly similar in comparison to its contemporaries and previous generation as the Wii was when it came out.

It can't be that bad, right? Hopefully? I was lead to believe that it was about directly in between the Xbox 360 and the PS3 to the Xbone and the PS4. Frankly though, I can hardly tell the difference between a PS3 and a PS4 game. One thing that seems kind of silly to me is how they have the HD game pad, when, really though, if you want a game to use the gamepad as like a second screen for multi player, wouldn't that use up twice as much GPU power? I don't think the Wii U was ever really considered a "power house" and if a game where using both screens for something pretty major, I'd imagine you wouldn't be able to do too much on either.

I don't think the Wii U is bad at all. Like I said, the hardware hardly matters here. In games that appear on both PS3 and PS4, the biggest different I notice is framerate. It's funny though, because you can't see framerate from screenshots (which look pretty damn close in most comparisons), and 60fps video on the web is still relatively new. I think that extra smoothness is great, but if your game is multi-platform like that anyway the gameplay probably isn't dependent on high framerate so much. Games are generally very playable across all versions, unless the developers didn't do a good job.

The Wii U pad has its own GPU, and it's 480p resolution (i.e. 1/5 the pixels of the TV). It can also stream video from the console (but when it does it's usually degraded by compression, slightly delayed, and the same image that's on the TV anyway).

I don't like playing with the Wii U pad (usually use the "pro" controllers if I can). There are some limited ideas for gameplay here, but I think Nintendo's primary goal with it was trying to make games that are harder to emulate.

This is random though, but thinking about hardware, is the lack of splitscreen in many games now attributed to the fact that developers don't want to hold back graphically to allow it, like having the game run at 30fps instead of 60? I imagine it couldn't be too much worse, considering that you aren't actually rendering the 1 player screen twice, as polygons should only be about half as large because you're only using half the screen, but like I was saying with the Wii U having a fullsize second screen, I imagine that it could get pretty taxing on the GPU.

Pixel fill is one thing a renderer does, but there are other tasks. Every triangle has 3 points, and those 3 points still need to be calculated whether the triangle has 5 pixels in it or 5000. On a higher level, every object has a bunch of state changes as part of its "draw call" (choosing the right textures to use, the right polygon mesh, the right matrix transforms, other shader data, etc.). These are the 3 usual different ways that a renderer can get bottlenecked.
1. Pixel fill
2. Poly count
3. Draw calls

It depends on your engine and game situation, and it could be any of these 3 or all of them at once that limit your performance. If you're doing splitscreen you don't affect pixel fill (1) but you double your polygons (2) and draw calls (3), or quadruple. You can try to cope with (2) by having a dynamic level-of-detail system that uses low-poly meshes when things are smaller onscreen (esp. in splitscreen) but it's a complexity tradeoff.

The hardware limits are kinda soft/vague. Splitscreen is technically feasible. It really comes down to how much time/money the developer wants to spend chasing the unique issues involved in splitscreen, and whether they think it's a feature that's will sell the game.

[rainwarrior]

Is the GamePad's screen really HD, or is it just ED like the output of the GameCube and original Wii? Wikipedia says it's ED (854x480). I wonder whether Wii U games are allowed to use the Flipper GPU that's there for Wii mode.

It's 480p. The pad is not functional in Wii mode (you have to use Wiimotes).

[Drew Sebastino]

As long as you don't live in a country fucked up enough to cause the Playstation 4 to have a launch price of US$ 1,300. It's almost half that now, but still way too expensive for anyone who's not a hardcore gamer.

I wonder how much the Neo Geo had cost in Brazil...

I'm not terribly bothered by this, since very few new games interest me.

Yup.

Even if you're not fill-rate bound, rendering two players' views still takes two passes through the geometry.

I thought fill rate was the main problem now. Really, if there where no fill rate issues, rendering at 4K shouldn't be harder than rendering at 480p, right?

I think splitscreen has largely fallen out of favour, even on console versions, as people tend to play online, one-to-a-machine, more than they want to play local multi. (Quicker and easier to find people to play with, I guess?)

I guess people don't have friend anymore? I imagine splitscreen is harder to pull of though from a programming perspective though.

I don't think the Wii U is bad at all. Like I said, the hardware hardly matters here. In games that appear on both PS3 and PS4, the biggest different I notice is framerate. It's funny though, because you can't see framerate from screenshots (which look pretty damn close in most comparisons), and 60fps video on the web is still relatively new. I think that extra smoothness is great, but if your game is multi-platform like that anyway the gameplay probably isn't dependent on high framerate so much. Games are generally very playable across all versions, unless the developers didn't do a good job.

I can't even tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps for the most part. I remember looking at an article that said that the "highly acclaimed" Destiny was exactly the same between the PS3 and the PS4, but that the PS4 game ran at 1080p instead of 720p or something. It's funny to me how it's almost like running a PC game at high vs. low settings, which is at least easy for developers.

The Wii U pad has its own GPU, and it's 480p resolution (i.e. 1/5 the pixels of the TV). It can also stream video from the console (but when it does it's usually degraded by compression, slightly delayed, and the same image that's on the TV anyway).

Wait a minute, there's an extra GPU in the controller? I thought the entire point of the console was that you where supposed to have the console stream video to the gamepad, so you could get "console quality" (which is a term that actually seems like it's starting to get blurred with the rise of capable portable devices) graphics on a small screen? Is it feasible to have it to where the GPU in the gamepad helps the actual console? I imagine that would look pretty good.

I don't like playing with the Wii U pad (usually use the "pro" controllers if I can). There are some limited ideas for gameplay here, but I think Nintendo's primary goal with it was trying to make games that are harder to emulate.

Yeah, Nintendo never really seemed to focus on the gamepad like they did with motion controls on the Wii. (All the games I can think of don't use the gamepad for anything but a standard controller really) I'm no business executive, but I wonder why they don't just make a "traditional" console like the Gamecube, because it seems the majority of people are, just like you, not interested, and I'd say this strategy has worked just fine with Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo before.

1. Pixel fill2. Poly count3. Draw calls

Wait, how would poly count and draw calls be any differen't really? 1 more draw call would just increase the poly count by 1, wouldn't it? I really didn't think poly count limitations solely based on a poly count number existed, like sprites on a 2D system, but rather fill rate and draw calls like you said.

[lidnariq]

Wait, how would poly count and draw calls be any differen't really? 1 more draw call would just increase the poly count by 1, wouldn't it? I really didn't think poly count limitations solely based on a poly count number existed, like sprites on a 2D system, but rather fill rate and draw calls like you said.

Each draw call usually adds at least one polygon, but could add a whole bunch.

One of the standard stupid ways to run out of CPU→GPU bandwidth (the #3 bottleneck) is by failing to group your calls, and just (e.g.) say "I want a polygon here and ... now I want a polygon here and ... one over there", instead of "here's a big descriptor table that describes the 1M polys I want."

You could also rephrase "pixel fill" as "GPU→GPU RAM bandwidth", and "polygon count" as "GPU internal bandwidth".


( To directly answer the original question : I own nothing newer than a Wii. I also don't have an HDTV. I'll probably give in and get a 3DS&//WiiU at some point because I do really like the LoZ games ... )

[tepples]

I think splitscreen has largely fallen out of favour, even on console versions, as people tend to play online, one-to-a-machine, more than they want to play local multi. (Quicker and easier to find people to play with, I guess?)

I guess people don't have friend anymore?

Does a friend cease to be a friend if he moves 480 km (300 miles) away? 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?

I imagine splitscreen is harder to pull of though from a programming perspective though.

There are still plenty of ways to design a game for a non-split shared screen: Bomberman, Smash TV, Street Fighter, New Super Mario Bros., Secret of Mana, etc.

I'm no business executive, but I wonder why they don't just make a "traditional" console like the Gamecube, because it seems the majority of people are, just like you, not interested

In the previous generation, the novelty of the game designs mediated by the Wii Remote drove early sales. Nintendo had hoped that the VMU-on-steroids would have done the same.

Wait, how would poly count and draw calls be any differen't really?

Because you can draw the same model several times on the screen. After you upload a mesh and a vertex shader that tweaks all of its polygons, it's just one draw call to send a command to draw that mesh in each place. 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. It's a draw call to load the tree, a draw call to load the program, and a draw call to pass each set of parameters and draw another tree.

Or in very rough Super NES terms, "poly count" might be the 128 OAM entries and "draw calls" might be DMAs to the 16K sprite VRAM. If you fail to group your tiles into larger DMAs, you lose valuable vblank time to pushing each tile.

[Drew Sebastino]

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.

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?

There are still plenty of ways to design a game for a non-split shared screen: Bomberman, Smash TV, Street Fighter, New Super Mario Bros., Secret of Mana, etc.

Unfortunately, it seems like many of these types of games (with the exception of fighting games) have become less and less popular. I don't even know they last time a noteworthy space shooter or run and gun where made. (Which, of course, are probably my two favorite types of games.)

In the previous generation, the novelty of the game designs mediated by the Wii Remote drove early sales. Nintendo had hoped that the VMU-on-steroids would have done the same.

I guess that they not notice how much momentum the Wii had lost compared to the Xbox 360 and PS3 by the end of its run?

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? 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? I mean like on the SNES, it's not like you could have 256 sprites if you wait an extra frame.

[Sik]

You must specify an option when voting.

I don't know what else I was expecting...

[Shonumi]

I don't know what it is about this "current generation", but I don't own any consoles. I have my 3DS with 20+ games, but nothing for my loft with my HDTV. The Wii U is suffering from the same problem/meme that plagued the PS3 early in its life ("Wii U haz no gaemz"). At any rate, the Wii U has no games that I'm dying to play, with the exception of Xenoblade Chronicles X. I would buy the Wii U just for that. Of course I want to pick up MK8 and Super Mario 3D World and a couple of other titles (not the new Kirby and Yoshi games, keep those away...) but I'm waiting until there is enough content that interests me.

The PS4 and XBone are more problematic. Literally the only 3 games I can see myself picking up would be Halo 5, Kingdom Hearts 3, and Metal Gear Solid V. MGSV is coming to Steam, so that's one problem solved. I can hold off on Halo 5, since I play enough of the previous Halos anyway. KH3 should be released... eventually... Maybe in my lifetime?

It's not like I don't have a massive SNES/PS1/DS/Wii/PSP backlog, so I'm not exactly starved for games to play

[Zepper]

I bought a PS4 today. Yup, it was a quick but an hard decision against a XBOX ONE, for obvious reasons (see below). I have a Wii U too, but... it misses something that PS4/XBOXONE bring to gamers. Technically, I don't mind. Games are everything. I love Mega Man games, and lacking them in modern consoles (retail) is a shame. On other side, it was a very special gift when Capcom released MM9 and 10 (NES style). ^_^;;

My consoles:
NES 8bit compatible -> Super NES -> Nintendo 64 -> Game Cube -> Playstation 1 -> Playstation 2 -> XBOX360 -> Wii -> Wii U -> PS4.

Portables: Game Boy Advance -> GBA SP -> PSP -> PSP v2 -> Nintendo DS -> 3DS -> PS Vita.