[citation][nom]whiteodian[/nom]$500-$800 for a console. Madness. I paid $600 for the original PS3 and have regretted it almost every day. It is an expensive blu-ray/dvd player now. Never again will I pay that much. $400 tops unless it is godly. Hopefully Sony learned from their past mistake with the PS3 and will sell it at a much more reasonable price. I believe the high cost is why they got off to such a slow start with the PS3.[/citation]
The original PlayStation three had a PlayStation two inside of it, it also had a Blu-ray player which was expensive as hell at the time, with a standalone player being at almost the grand. You also have to take into account they just funded the cell, that was what one $2 billion just on the processor alone.
Why say when I say 700 to 800 I'm going with the subsidized price. Really I want them to come on a $500 take a loss and put an extra $2-$300 and that console. I got PlayStation three I think a year after it came out, I honestly don't regret that decision at all. Any game that doesn't come out on the PC I get on the PlayStation three system exclusives I enjoy with the PlayStation three has the offer, I got more than my fair share from the PlayStation three since it launched. If you are like a $500 price point than don't buy a 500.
[citation][nom]CaedenV[/nom]The current 8 core design that they are using currently is horrible, and extremely under utilized. It is hard to program for in the first place, and then on top of that it is really segregated and forces certain types of tasks to run on specific Cells, which often renders CPU usage well below the potential that was boasted at release. This is why the much humbler x360 can keep up (for the most part) while only running 3 cores. With a modern x86 platform they could easily run the same load on a duel core processor. I would love for consoles to utilize more cores just as much as anyone... but at the same time you do not need lots of cores for things like games. I would much rather the next gen consoles have 4 capable cores than for them to have 8 core (4 AMD "modules") that are not taken advantage of. You need 1 for the OS, and then 3 for the game itself and let the GPU take the hard work of making things look nice.I think that 4GB of ram is a given, and while 8GB may be overkill, it is cheap enough where they could do it if they wanted to. RAM is going to be the single overwhelming game changer between current gen vs next gen consoles. I mean lets face it; Graphics, while they give that initial 'wow' factor, are not what makes a game great, immersive, or even memorable. What really matters on the visual end of things is that the graphics are 'good enough' to not be distracting (which consoles will be once they are consistently up to 1080p), and that there is enough stuff in the scene to not look like a series of box rooms and box buildings connected by rectangular corridors. And even if you have a series of boxes you can still dress it up like the recent Batman games where there is enough clutter and junk in the scene to cover it up. Issues of object/itom pop-in, and the frustratingly limited view distance that is the hallmark of console games just goes away. All of this topography, and all of that 'stuff' (rocks, trees, tables, clutter, etc.) is greatly contained by the system and graphics memory, and moving from the very constrained 256MB of extremely fast XDR memory in today's consoles, to 4-8GB of comparatively slow DDR3 memory will make a larger impact on the feel of future games in the way of level design and environment immersion than raw graphics or CPU horsepower ever could.If nothing else, having that mass amount of RAM will allow some really heavy preloading of levels and game elements so that level transition becomes either really fast, or even potentially transparent. You are still constrained on the initial load time from your HDD or BluRay media, but once the game is up and running a well designed game should be able to keep up with you the rest of the way. Coming from the PC gaming arena where monumental skyrim areas load in 10 sec or less, the console takes forever. That may be an extreme case, but that extra time just sitting there waiting for the next area to load (especially when traveling and you are only going to be in the area for a few sec anyways) just takes me out of the game. Getting rid of this problem will go a long way towards converting me over to console gaming.[/citation]
You know you can get away with the excuse that it's hard to program for with the first 2 to 3 years the PlayStation threes life, but at this point it's not hard to program for any more, it's hard to port games to it. You see the problem starts with games that have the lead programming on this 360. If the if the lead platform was the PlayStation three it's easier to port games from PlayStation three to the 360 than it is from the 360 to the PlayStation three.
That's on this for the first some ever heard someone besides me say that the consoles are almost good enough, I'd say to visually while me though they'd have to have a consistent frame rate and the higher than 30 frames per second frame rate, that will make a very big difference for me.
And I've been same that part for while it's why I could see them putting the solid-state drive into the system eat the initial cost of the solid-state drive and hope that over the next two weeks three years the drive comes down the point where they make a profit selling it. But I also like the idea of a RAM driver they put 16-24 GB of RAM into it and it honestly one cost all that much to do either for the benefit that would give. I play gran turismo, and even with the game installed some will load times can take up words a minute, it's a joke having him that long will load time on a game where it's loading every 2 to 5 minutes.