New XBOX (XBox One)

[karl]

Sleep Tight ;-)

 

[superballs]

Maybe the next Gen of Kinect will actually have it's own CPU like the original was supposed to have so that it could process movement a lot faster than the current one.

4K support would be very forward thinking, however, the wisdom would be questionable unless 4K tv prices drop like rocks.
However, I can't really see the new xbox or PS systems being anything more than glorified sequel machines. God I wish Sega would bring a new system to the market.

 

[Mark W**a]

Well to be fair, many new IP's were brought to the table this gen. It's just unfortunate that Gears was the only successful one.

I miss Sega too.

 

[Worf]

Yeah, I saw his post. I know all about the RED, as I work with it quite often. That's the thing, working in the film industry, I hear a lot of talk about 4K, so my perspective gets kinda warped.

Well, I'd like to get my hands on a RED, but they're out of my affordability (I can *barely* afford the Epic kit - just going by disposable yearly income).

But the big deal is - well, all the TV stations and channels have made huge investments in HD cameras and such, and they're probably going to be REALLY unhappy about tossing it all away and having to get 4K gear. Consumers too - they're seeing 4K TVs at CES this y ear, but they probably will NOT expect them for another few years (better part of a decade), especially given current economic conditions. 4K right now has little content (only movies are 4K), no distribution (neither cable, satellite, fiber, internet, nor disc formats have enough capacity and bandwidth to handle it), nor displays. And only the latter is showing early prototypes that'll be where HD was 10+ years ago.

4k however will probably make an appearance in the generation of consoles AFTER this one. When it's new and getting there. Maybe. When maybe 10% of people have one 4KTV in their living rooms and the rest are all HDTVs. It's why the Wii doesn't have HD - back when it was released, if you had an HDTV, you had ONE HDTV. The kids would at best get what the old living room TV was - the old SD set. When we go 4K, it'll be the generation after (and the Nintendo one will only support HDTV because 4K TVs in homes will be rare, and very few kids will have 'em).

Maybe the next Gen of Kinect will actually have it's own CPU like the original was supposed to have so that it could process movement a lot faster than the current one.

Quite possibly - there are rumors that the next gen Xbox chip is actually sampling and will have Kinect built in. The main reason the original Kinect doesn't is cost - even at $150 it was subsidized (and why the Windows one is $250). This time around, Microsoft can bake it in and optimize the cost because it'll be built into the main CPU.

Hell, there's a rumor that says Microsoft may introduce the next Xbox prior to the Thanksgiving timeframe. Unlikely though - earlier than that and we're talking summer. And summer has traditionally be a very weak game time.

 

[Ark Malmeida]

I have about 75 Xbox arcade games, 5 games on demand purchases, 1 Xbox original, countless DLC, a very good amount of gamerpics, themes going all the way back to the launch days, and 7+ years of game save files. Total is just under 200 gigs of content basically. No way am I transferring all that to the new box.

New machine is new machine if I wanna play 360 stuff ill bust out my 360. That's me though.

Look what happened with Wii U. They decided to go with a rediculous triple broadway core design just to keep BC with Wii. That CPU is such a bottleneck for the entire system. Had they chose something more modern the Wii U would be mopping the floor with ps360. Do you really want to see a similar issue with 720 over something like that?

I'm in the same boat as you with the amount of content purchased, but I'm of the opposite opinion about transferring it all over. I WANT to have it there. In fact I want it on both machines. That way I could move the 360 to a TV in a different room, and get the ability to use that content on both consoles. All of the movie/music content and a good deal of the XBLA games are stylized, meaning that they're not all about graphics as much as games used to be. If I'm playing some triple A title on the new XBox and want to jump over to a quick game of one of my arcade games, I want to be able to seamlessly do it on the new machine, not have to shut it off and power up the 360 (which with my plans would mean going to a whole different room!).

Just seems that it would slow adoption of the new system down and irritate a lot of people who would feel abandoned my Microsoft. Plus, from what I read when the 360 first came out, Microsoft specifically designed their hardware so it was easy to work with and not proprietary because of the issues they had with backwards compatibility for the original XBox. If they did it correctly I don't see why they would need to compromise anything in the new hardware to get backwards compatibility. When someone gets a new, high powered PC they can still pretty much play most of the games from the last 10 years right? Don't see how this wouldn't be possible on the new XBox, especially because those games were written to work on only one set of hardware.

I guess we'll just have to see what happens though!

 

[shutyertrap]

But the big deal is - well, all the TV stations and channels have made huge investments in HD cameras and such, and they're probably going to be REALLY unhappy about tossing it all away and having to get 4K gear. Consumers too - they're seeing 4K TVs at CES this y ear, but they probably will NOT expect them for another few years (better part of a decade), especially given current economic conditions. 4K right now has little content (only movies are 4K), no distribution (neither cable, satellite, fiber, internet, nor disc formats have enough capacity and bandwidth to handle it), nor displays. And only the latter is showing early prototypes that'll be where HD was 10+ years ago.

The local TV stations only own the cameras for their news broadcasts, the networks for sports and late night tv. Everything else comes from rental houses, renting the same camera that can be rented by film makers. That being said, most TV is recorded in 2K since even that is way more than what will be broadcast. Your cable and satellite providers are the ones that don't want to have 4K. Their pipeline is nowhere near large enough to handle it, and it'll cost them an arm and a leg to increase it.

 

[Worf]

The local TV stations only own the cameras for their news broadcasts, the networks for sports and late night tv. Everything else comes from rental houses, renting the same camera that can be rented by film makers. That being said, most TV is recorded in 2K since even that is way more than what will be broadcast. Your cable and satellite providers are the ones that don't want to have 4K. Their pipeline is nowhere near large enough to handle it, and it'll cost them an arm and a leg to increase it.

Does that apply to cable channels as well? I would presume they'd own their own cameras purely out of necessity and just shuffle them around as needed between shows. This is especially important because if you look at the ratings, on a good day, they're lousy compared to about 20 years ago or so. There's been a gradual decline.

And yeah, besides content creation, there is also the issue of distribution, and even media based ones aren't up to the task - BD XL's only 100GB (4 layer Blu-Ray, very few people can read these), and with a common movie being 40-odd GB, going 4K means they'll have to span discs (roughly 160GB - or two BD-XL's, or 4 regular BDs).

And I'm sure the theatre owners will be really happy about 4K reaching the home as well, just a final nail for the cinematic auditorium after spending the quarter-mill upgrading a theatre.

Give it at least 5 years, where movies will be shot in 8K regularly, theatres will upgrade to 8K (much cheaper), and homes will have a 4K TV. Maybe. Then again, the broadcast industry didn't really like going high-def because it exposed more flaws in sets, makeup and a certain "eww" factor in seeing a face blown up in full 1080p and pore closeups.

Though, some people at CES are announcing 8K TVs right now, too.

 

[Carl Spiby]

I hate how Microsoft have shoved the whole media hub concept down our throats.

The dashboard used to be a lovely simple thing, now it's polluted with adverts and multiple sub menu's to find the content you want.

 

[superballs]

I personally think 8K is complete overkill. Are we going to be watching things now with molecular detail?

One of our theaters here has one of those IMAX Branded dual 4k projector theaters. I have to say it's sharp as a tack...but do i need that kind of detail on 50-70 inch screen? Probably not unless I'm planted inches away.

Again i think it comes down to what your movie watching goal is. Are you looking to enjoy a movie/game? Or are you that pre-occupied in playing spot the pixel?

 

[shutyertrap]

Does that apply to cable channels as well? I would presume they'd own their own cameras purely out of necessity and just shuffle them around as needed between shows. This is especially important because if you look at the ratings, on a good day, they're lousy compared to about 20 years ago or so. There's been a gradual decline.

And I'm sure the theatre owners will be really happy about 4K reaching the home as well, just a final nail for the cinematic auditorium after spending the quarter-mill upgrading a theatre.

Give it at least 5 years, where movies will be shot in 8K regularly, theatres will upgrade to 8K (much cheaper), and homes will have a 4K TV. Maybe. Then again, the broadcast industry didn't really like going high-def because it exposed more flaws in sets, makeup and a certain "eww" factor in seeing a face blown up in full 1080p and pore closeups.

Though, some people at CES are announcing 8K TVs right now, too.

Even cable channels, yes. Unless we are talking about a show that airs daily, it doesn't make sense to own the cameras. Any scripted show you see, any reality program, those cameras are rented. There was a time in the industry when studios did own cameras. This was when there were competing formats for widescreen presentation. All those shifting formats and the maintenance on the cameras, as well as the creation of lenses became rather costly. Panavision, who was only making lenses, wound up buying the patents for Mitchell cameras and bought the inventory off a few studios. From there they started building their own cameras, and the rental house model was born. It just makes more sense to have a camera house take the risk of purchasing rather than production. The digital cameras we were using 5 years ago are obsolete and not used, yet they cost more than a traditional film camera, some of which are 30 years old and still being used today.

Your cable news shows, ESPN, they're gonna own cameras, but they are not the same type that would be used by a TV show or movie. You won't find a RED or Alexa anywhere near there, unless they're shooting a special 3D thing. Sony BetaCams were still in use even up to 3 years ago.

Don't even get me started on theater owners, they've been shooting themselves in the foot for years now.

8K cinema, well that'd be Imax essentially. It's costly. Not so much the shooting of it, but the storage of all that data. With film, you just took the negative and put it in a vault a mile underground and voila, it was stored. With digital files, they need to have back ups of backups in case servers crash, and each and every time something changes with the system, all the files have to be migrated over. There's a story out there of how 'Toy Story 2' literally got deleted completely by one accidental button push, except one worker had taken the entire file home to do work on, and so it survived.

 

[Mark W**a]

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=507325

These specs are flat out incredible if true. Holy. ****.

I mean really. Wow. Dude, they can freaking emulate 360 and probably add increased AA, resolution, and framerate to every Xbox 360 game if they wanted to. I'm seriously speechless right now.

 

[Mark W**a]

Let me temper those expectations just a tad. 8 cores are Jaguar cores. Still really good though.

Ram could be DDR3 which would be a huge let down. 4 gigs of DDR5 or GDDR3-5 would be much better.

EDRam is unknown (rumored at 64MB which would be huge).

GPU could be on the low end of the 8K spectrum. But it's saying 88, which would be an equivalent to the 79k AMD chip out now, more or less. That's top of the line PC spec (as of now and not counting SLI setups of course).

At the end of the day. These are strong specs no matter how you slice it.

Your move, Steambox/PS4.

 

[Sinistar]

Kazu Hirai of Sony blogged that E-3 2013 would be PS4 announcement time, so if Sonys' announcing chances are Microsoft is also ready to pounce , these guys wont move without a reason, a reason being to compete with each other .
The Sony camp expects the PS4 to be using more media features than ever before , utilising a new Sony Cable service subscription featuring Gaikai based live game streams , 3D films, and 4K films . all that for what is speculated to be a mandatory subscriber service . Sony's answer to a flagging game economy is to go into cable TV service with the next gen.

 

[Ark Malmeida]

Would be great if those end up being the actual specs. I'd especially be excited about the 8 gigs of RAM!

 

[Mark W**a]

There were rumors of Microsoft going the same route, with the Xbox Slim becoming a cable box. That didn't pan out. I'm not sure if that's such a good idea and how that would work considering how many different companies are out there. Direct TV, Comcast, Dish Network... so many different cable and satalite companies. Not to mention little guys. Out here if you use cable it's called Atlantic Broadband. People have Verizon FIOS it's just a cluster-F. Seems like a bad idea, I mean look at how failed the PSVita/ATT subscription model is.

One thing I'd bank some serious cash on right now. Sony will introduce pay-for-online gaming. Mark my words on that one. PSNLive is coming.

As for what I know about PS4. I fully expect it to be in the same ballpark as Xbox 8. Give or take. BTW I'm more confident in that name. I mean look at these rumors. 8 cores. 8 gigs of ram. 88K GPU. Windows 8 kernel. Lol. Xbox 8 only makes sense now.

I still don't expect PS4 to release in 2013. They'd have to have silicon in production right now like Microsoft does. Steam Box can make 2013 because it's probably just off the shelf components. Like the newly announced Tegra 4 portable Shield, they can pretty much announce and release it within a few months.

 

[Mark W**a]

Would be great if those end up being the actual specs. I'd especially be excited about the 8 gigs of RAM!

I agree that's strong, but keep in mind not all RAM is created equal. Look at the Wii U. It has 2 gigs of RAM, but two major problems. One, it's DDR3 ram (read: cheap, slow ram). 40% slower than the 512MB of ram in the 360. Plus, half of it is reserved for the OS. Instead of an advantage, it's a bottleneck of the system. Just look at how slow/poorly the OS on that system runs (hopefully can be fixed in the future). EDRam can kinda/sorta make up for that, but not really. You want fast ram.

In other words, 4 gigs of say, GDDR3-5 would be much better for a console than 8 gigs of DDR3. All those devs like Crytech, Epic, etc. who demanded more and more RAM for the console, may have actually ended up screwing us and themselves.

Like I said though, we don't know. Hopefully it's split-pool at worst. 4 gigs of slow DDR 3 for the OS, 4 gigs of fast ram for the games. One thing I can say with pretty much certainty it won't be 8 gigs of super fast ram, that would be nearly impossible to pull off in a 200W box all things considered.

 

[Jeff Strong]

I hate how Microsoft have shoved the whole media hub concept down our throats.

The dashboard used to be a lovely simple thing, now it's polluted with adverts and multiple sub menu's to find the content you want.

I also preferred the look of the older dashboards. The current design is just a mess, IMO. While I'm not a big fan of the avatars, I think the update when they added avatars was the best looking dashboard, and it's gone downhill from there. I do like the newer features they've added though, specifically USB drive support.

 

[Mark W**a]

It's a complete storefront now. I do not like turning on my console, and being advertised games like Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13. I own zero sports games, it's just not my thing. I also do not care what's on MSNBC at the moment.

And then when I go to the games section, it's plugging titles that are laughably bad/not what I would ever buy or play. I remember going to the dash and being advertised for some horrible XBLA shooter game from 2007. Meanwhile, I wade through all the crappy advertisements and find Guilty Gear XX Slash is out. THAT would have been a good thing to tell me! Since based off the games I play clearly I am into fighting games! But no, instead advertise me DLC for games I don't own and have zero interest in :rollseyes:

One thing I like about the dash is at least it's quick. Easy to get where I want using the bumper buttons. But that's all I can say that's nice about it.

It's just awful. It needs to be more like Apple. Let me put all the apps and games and stuff I want to see and use on the home page, then have an "Xbox store" and once in there FINE, advertise the crap out of me it's a store, but having that be the first thing I see when I boot up it's just. Unprofessional and awful and really needs to go.

 

[shutyertrap]

One thing I'd bank some serious cash on right now. Sony will introduce pay-for-online gaming. Mark my words on that one. PSNLive is coming.

I and every other Playstation fan will be pissed if they do. They got a lot of flack for introducing PS+, but it's highly regarded now because they've packed added value into it. Discounted and free games, cloud service, things those that choose to pay get rewarded with. Online play though should remain free, just like it is on a PC. I've always hated Xbox's added charge, and if Sony goes that route I will be that much slower to jump into a new console.

 

[Worf]

Well, the Xbox has always justified it because the penalties for misuse were so harsh (you lose your account) that those who paid tended to play fairer and not be griefers and such ruining everyone's play.

There is a website where the Xbox Live team posts responses to complaints from people whose accounts got locked.

With PS3, you just create a new PSN account, go online, grief until you get bored or banned, then make a new account, lather rinse repeat (of course, you don't do this on your main account with all your games).

Then again, free multiplayer has always been the PS3's advantage - PS+ never did give you much other than updates and such. The free games were added later, though really, the Sony PS website is absolutely horrible compared to the Xbox one. Finding information about PS+ like what free games there is is complex (if you're lucky, you'll stumble across the blog entries, IF you can find them), they don't list past historical games (they say they never removed a game from the offering - it's false according to my friends).

Anyhow, the big thing is this will be the generation of consoles able to do full HD. Little secret has always been that most games run at 720p30. PS3 always showed it due to lack of a scaler, but Xbox as well (if the game has it. Some games like Halo 3 were line doubled 540p). Always a bit of irony since Sony kept mocking the HD-DVD crowd for their cheap players only supporting 1080i while their blu-rays always supported 1080p "*FULL* HD!" and you stick in a PS3 game and it only runs at 720p.

At least this time around, we can probably get 1080p30, if not 1080p60 all the time.