Ok, seriously, who are you marketing these next gen super-consoles to? The current generation, or a bunch of senile 70-year olds living in an old folks home? "Never owned a piece of technology" my ass! I know you're speaking figuratively, but there's so much technology in our day and age that everyone's gotta learn something at some point. Speaking of which:




Does Vista even support Quad cores? How about any games? If Vista doesn't support it and no games support it, you just did a fantastic job throwing out hundreds of dollars for a shiny sticker on your PC.




This is the kicker consideration that both you and Falknir forgot. The 360 and PS3 are both sold at a LOSS to their respective companies. If MS / Sony were to sell their consoles for PROFIT, like PCs, they'd likely cost MORE than your average gaming PC. Add in all the bells and whistles to turn them into "super"-consoles and their price just goes up, essentially defeating the purpose of their entire existence.


Mad Cat

Well for the most part Falknir simply confirmed what I already stated, so I am not really sure of his point. If a console does the same things as a PC then it is a PC, and therefore nearly as complicated in it own right, just a different set of rules. The things it doesn't do though will be the distinction. For example, if programability is limited to just a few highly capitalized firms that can afford the royalties for access to the platform, then the whole reason for a PC-like console will be strangled: the software. It is the software availability that drives hardware sales, and secondarily consumer convenience issues.

Chances are the reason few people care about whether the PS3 is increasingly PC-like is that as long as such consoles automatically exclude smaller producers of content, they will be still be failures among the 25-40% of the population that were the ones who originally popularized the home computing market. Every generation has the same proportion of smart people who could care less about corporate schemes which try to establish their consoles to become the gateholders to software through hardware. It ultimately creates less software diversity, and as a result, less functionality.

Although basic office-types of programs can easily be offered by anyone, it is the whole range of smaller unique utility programs that frequently make or break the utility of those larger programs. Not to mention small useful stand alone programs, freeware or shareware. The word gets around if enough people can't do what they need to on a platform. So the question is, if the PS3 is so much like a PC now, what's the catch? You can be sure it's probably because it really isn't like a PC if you dig deep enough.

I've never heard of a 70-year-old with a console. I do know some others that age who are computer literate.

There isn't really a catch, other than limited space, and a little less customization.

I have a friend whose grandparents bought a Wii for when the grandkids come over. (They don't own a PC - just a typewriter.)

They love it so much they often play it all by themselves, grandkids or no.

It is true that consoles are indeed computers, however the hacking required to install an alternative OS onto a console is not a trivial task, and takes some serious knowledge of the hardware. Very, very few people are going to go to that much trouble to convert their console to use a general purpose OS.



Yes. Both XP Service Pack 2 and Vista have full support for multiple cores. The home editions of XP may only recognize 2 of the cores, however.



The Source engine used by Valve's games was upgraded when the Orange Box was released to perform some tasks such as physics processing using multiple threads if the user has multiple cores, and CryEngine 2 used by Crysis uses multiple cores as well. Some older games may already use multiple threads, although the support will be asymmetric if they are not specifically designed for multiple cores.

Most games that support DirectX 10 also support multiple cores.

Future games using the latest engines will certainly support multiple cores.

In other words, it will be like a Mac.




By "support" I meant "take advantage of". Is there an actual performance gain when using a quad core as opposed to a dual core with Vista / XP?




Again, the question I'm asking is if these games take advantage of the quad core's capabilities and provide a significant performance gain compared to using a dual core. From what little I could find, Crysis doesn't really make use of more than 2 cores when running on a quad core.


Mad Cat

The benefit of a quad core is that you can play games while decompiling.

Now I've heard of 70 year olds with a console.

I'd play one if I had one. And it's not cost limiting me either.

You don't need to decompile anything. If you need the source, it should be available.

Why is pc gaming dying? hmm... not enough people seeding?

Yes. The scheduler will do its best to distribute the threads between the cores equally.



I have not measured the performance of dual vs quad in any of my games. When I get some time, I will take a look.

EDIT: Just tested the Crysis demo. The menus and intro videos seem to be single threaded, but the game itself is multi threaded. It does in fact use all four cores, although not always equally. The CPU usage on all four is increased, although two or three will often be used more than the fourth. It will definitely use more than two cores when it needs to.

But is there a significant performance gain? That's the key issue.


Mad Cat

Piracy won't help anything. Bittorrent is a good tool, but it's only for those who don't steal everything.

Well, given that it needs all four cores, yeah, it'll improve performance.

Hard to say, as none of the cores were maxed out, even with the affinity set to use only two of them. My bottleneck isn't my CPU.

In which case, what good is it?


Mad Cat

Well, for one thing it's ready for future games and future software, which I'm sure will use more of it. Hardware manufacturers have made it very clear that computing is going multicore in the future, rather than cranking up the GHz.

For another, I do a bit of raytracing and photo manipulation as a hobby, and that's where the quad cores will really get maxed out.

Photo manipulation as in Photoshop? Photoshop won't use up four cores.

Raytracing will, however, gladly eat all your CPU power and more. It's pretty at times, though.

Simple to answer, user-friendly and hassle-free. The pre-existing knowledge required to operate a current-generation console isn't much more then knowing to plug-in a few labeled cables, press the power button, and maybe insert a disc. In addition, the utilized operating systems are very-efficent and have interfaces that are very-easy to navigate.

Compare that to what computer users must know and-or eventually know to maintain and operate Windows XP, Windows Vista, or even MAC OS X. For instance, I have known people to obliterate their OS X installation by dragging the wrong icon into the trash. Watched Window users constantly wonder why their machines grow ever slower, because of unused files and registry entries confusing the system. Why devices suddenly stopped working, because a DRM has decided to zero-out registries or simply aggressively block it by all means. The list goes on and on. These problems are practically unknown to console users.

Of course, like any hardware driven device, consoles do have potential hardware life issues, and the XBOX 360 is by far no exception. However, typical users of other consoles enjoy some of the lowest defective unit rates in the industry, and rarely encounter problems (unless you threw your Wii-mote into your TV, or bashed your PS3 in with a flail-like controller).



I wouldn't entirely disagree, but the process isn't that much different then typical computer tasks of formating, insert image, and follow a few steps. The process isn't really difficult and believe most of the current installation procedures for PS3 Linux Distributions are less then twenty-steps now (some far less). Ultimately, it doesn't take a serious amount of knowledge of hardware, and if you learned how to install Windows on your PC, you can probably handle most of them as well.

Now if this was actually a greater focus for Sony and other software groups, we would likely see a much more user-friendly alternative. Where you could purchase a copy, insert the disc (or run downloaded file), it auto-installs, and you are ready to go.




Presently Crysis doesn't benefit in performance from a quad-core or even a seriously over-clocked processor (gains less then one FPS), as its primary bottleneck is on the available video card(s).



The future seems to be shifting to Nvidia's CUDA (Tesla systems), because of it's incredible performance and cost-to-performance ratio, i.e. some big companies are already changing over. Many applications even when they do get their applications properly, but painfully multi-threaded, the gains are sometimes not as great as one would hope. In addition, most people barely find use out of two-cores, four-cores are hard to justify for most, and they want to be at eight-or-more cores before years end. I believe AMD and Intel have to address more fundamental issues, instead of throwing more cores at the problem.



Presently, Photoshop hit the ceiling with what they are going (willing) to accomplish with the current multi-core roadmaps set by AMD/Intel. The next editions of Photoshop will be based around Nvidia's CUDA GPU/GPGPU acceleration, which will bring about mind-boggling performance improvements. I anxiously await that edition, because I'm tired of how slow Photoshop runs without it.

However, didn't know of many people working with Ray-Tracing, and can easily see that taxing the best of systems. Good luck with that.

Most people don't even do that much, as an OS is pre-installed on most PCs.



Indeed, video cards are becoming more like CPUs in that their instruction sets have become Turing complete and they are capable of general purpose computing. CUDA is also massively parallel, as video cards have well over a hundred of stream processors.

However, the Stream processing model makes some sacrifices: All it really does is perform a small set of instructions on a large set of data. Which is great for graphics and large databases, but not so great for a a lot of personal computer software, which will often contain a large number of instructions with a small set of data.

Where multiple processors really shine is when you want a lot of multitasking, especially between different types of code. CPUs don't care if a process loads and unloads code all of the time, or if a bunch of applications run with different code. CUDA, on the other hand, does: Loading a new kernel into a stream processor is very expensive, so you'd better be using it on a lot of data, otherwise the process of loading new code into the kernel will be more expensive than the computations it processes. CUDA is ill suited for when the code is always changing and different.



The fundamental issue is the laws of physics. Every time they create faster chips, they need to remove more heat. Their fastest chips are reaching the point where the heat generated cannot be removed fast enough. Going parallel instead of going faster is one way to address that issue.



Yeah, not all software uses multiple cores, and there are many areas where it's difficult to parallelize. In addition, there's a lot of overhead in creating new threads, and that can offset any gains if the developers aren't careful.



Well, Photoshop can do that, as images are a large set of data, which is well suited for CUDA. In fact, if they take advantage of both multiple cores and CUDA, they will get the benefits of both.



It's just a personal hobby; I don't really know of very many people who do it.

I merely stated how simplistic PS3 console is and how easy it is for someone, anyone, to use this console, unlike a "PC". Yes, there are "senile" 70's out there living in an old folks home. Hey, baby boomers baby! And sure enough, there are folks out there who should be cast in a flick called "Revenge of the 70yr old tech virgins".



You bet. Sure is about games, but Vista 's been known to be a resource hog. I'd rather stick with XP. Vista sure needs an overhaul though (CTD, blue screen, you name it). Not my idea of fun, thus the reason I purchased a PS3 for pure gaming and entertainment with its BR player. Just pure fun and no hassles.



Indeed. I've been told the same thing by a Gamestop rep. However, in the long run, I see more and more console users out there, thus, adding support. We will see more costly consoles for sure, and better games/applications for it, translating to more willing spenders. Look at the gas prices rising everyday. It hasn't killed customers. It's all about supply/demand.

Well, sure, you're using Vista and you need four cores. But what do you use for gaming, four cores just barely runs Vista.:HOT:

 

Back in the '90s, video games were for kids. Now, those kids have grown up and have money and even have their own kids. Add to this Microsoft stepping in with it's Xbox system and the milieu of M rated games and it's easy to see why video games are much more popular today than they were in the past. They've become very much a part of mainstream culture. However, don't think that people are going to pay just any amount for a console; unlike gasoline, consoles are not a necessity.


Mad Cat

From what I can tell, Vista is much more a memory hog (and you can thank SuperFetch for some of that) than it is a CPU hog. When I'm not running anything, my CPU cores are usually pretty quiet.

You're 0/2 on this issue, stick to your day job. Vista uses more memory than XP for rendering all its Aero stuff, but not only is this optional, in practice I haven't found it any worse than XP for gaming or memory usage.

Look at sys-req's for XP vs Vista. 1GB ram, .2 GHz difference. For those of us with a laptop, that's a lot. I have two 1.82 GHz cores, so that's well over 10% of my cores. Granted, they don't like to run much, but that's not their fault.

Well, look at how much hardware has changed since XP's release: What we have today far exceeds the systems we had in 2001. You could run XP comfortably on a machine with about 300 MHz and 256 MB of RAM. Very few people have machines with specs that low anymore. It's much more common today to find machines with at least 2 GHz and with 2 GB of RAM.



Your dual cores perform more than 15 times faster than the absolute minimum system requirements of XP, and 4.5 times faster than the absolute minimum system requirements for Vista. They're totally overkill for the OS.

I've found that, more than anything, it's the RAM that makes a big difference between XP and Vista, not CPU. You can run Vista on 1 GB, but can't do much without a lot of paging. You need at least 2 GB to run it comfortably. With XP, 1 GB is more than enough for most applications.