Playstation 5, next Xbox on the way.

[lpetrich]

Exclusive: What to Expect From Sony's Next-Gen PlayStation | WIRED - though its name is unconfirmed, it will be called the Playstation 5 if Sony follows its naming tradition. It should come out in 2020.

It will have an 8-core AMD CPU and an AMD GPU that can do ray tracing. That ability is good for doing realistic refraction and reflection, and it will also be good for doing travels of sounds. The CPU will have a special unit for doing 3D sound. Frequencies of Musical Notes, A4 = 440 Hz gives wavelengths of sounds, and lower pitch means more diffraction, more ability to travel around corners. So I'd like to see how that will be handled.

More compute capability means more ability to do game physics, like clothes and hair and flowing water.

The larger a game gets—last year’s Red Dead Redemption 2 clocked in at a horse-choking 99 gigabytes for the PS4—the longer it takes to do just about everything. Loading screens can last minutes while the game pulls what it needs to from the hard drive. Same goes for “fast travel,” when characters transport between far-flung points within a game world. Even opening a door can take over a minute, depending on what’s on the other side and how much more data the game needs to load. Starting in the fall of 2015, when Cerny first began talking to developers about what they’d want from the next generation, he heard it time and time again: I know it’s impossible, but can we have an SSD?

This upcoming Playstation will apparently have a solid-state drive (SSD). It will not be download-only, however, and it will accept games on physical media.

5 things I want to see in the next-gen Xbox 'Scarlett' consoles | Windows Central -- much less is public about Microsoft's Xbox-successor plans.

Does Cloud Computing Mean GameOver for Xbox and PlayStation? - "Hardware makers must adapt to a world where superfast broadband can stream blockbuster games without the need for a box"

The gaming world is “poised to undergo a transformation not seen since the advent of mobile phone games” 20 years ago, wrote Candice Mudrick, an analyst at industry research group Newzoo, in a report on what has been dubbed “cloud gaming”. The threat to traditional console hardware sales, she told the FT, “is very real”.

Using cloud technology, gamers — anywhere in the world with a strong enough internet connection — could theoretically stream, rather than download, high-end games and play them in real time over the web on any device, as they might a Netflix drama series.

That article also stated

That may be where releases such as Red Dead Redemption 2 help in prolonging the life of consoles, even as streaming chews into the market. The game, for which fans of the original Red Dead game, Red Dead Redemption, have been waiting for almost a decade, is so lavish that at one point during its production it was the largest single employer of actors in New York. When it launched last month, it sold 17m copies in 12 days.

Talk about massive productions.

 

[lpetrich]

I'd brought up the issue two years ago in Game Consoles: What's Next? But much less was publicly available.

From  List of home video game consoles,  Timeline of video game console releases My summary:

1. 1972-1983. Games built in or on circuit-connection cartridges, usually black-and-white (1-bit color), simple geometric shapes, Turing-incomplete discrete components
Magnavox, Epoch Co., Atari, Binatone, Coleco, Nintendo

2. 1976-1992. Game software in ROM cartridges, 1-bit to 4-bit (16) colors, blocky sprites, 8-bit CPU chips
Fairchild, Atari, Bally, Magnavox, Mattel, Emerson, Coleco, Atari, Milton Bradley

3. 1983-2003. Up to 32 colors, background scrolling (one sees a window into a larger game world)
Sega, Nintendo, Atari, etc.

4. 1987-2004. Can attach CD-ROM drives, 64 - 4096 colors, detailed sprites, flat-shaded 3D models, 16-bit CPU chips
NEC, Sega, Nintendo, SNK, etc.

5. 1993-2005. Game software on CD-ROM's, can have truecolor (full range), texture-mapped 3D models, 32-bit CPU chips, very limited online access
3DO, Atari, Sega, Sony, Nintendo

6. 1998-2013. Online access, storage and OSes start to appear
Sega, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft

7. 2005-2017. Storage and OSes included, 64-bit CPU chips, movie and TV access start to appear
Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo

8. 2012-present
Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft

The upcoming Playstation and Xbox will represent a ninth generation, it seems.

ETA: fixed the dates to be like the Wikipedia article, complete with overlaps.

 

[lpetrich]

Google Just Showed Us the Future of Gaming – OneZero - "Data centers could make individual game consoles obsolete"

On Tuesday at GDC 2019, Google announced Stadia, a new game-streaming service that will let you play AAA video games — the industry’s blockbusters — on almost every device you own, including your laptop, phone, TV, or even a Chromecast. If it works as advertised — a big “if” — it could end the gaming hardware market as we know it.

With Stadia, which is slated to launch later this year, Google is aiming for nothing less than entirely detaching video games from the hardware you own. Instead of downloading a game to your computer or putting a disc in your console, the game would be installed on a remote server that Google owns and operates.

My first link in my OP mentioned this new wrinkle on gaming, and it looks like Google has the servers to support it.

In transmitting and displaying, it is likely much like some online movie or TV broadcast, what YouTube and Netflix and Hulu are already doing. But I think that gamers are less likely to be tolerant of Internet hiccups than movie and TV watchers, especially games which involve fast action, like first-person shooters.

 

[lpetrich]

I decided to take a closer look at the specs of the generations of home video-game consoles. That proved to be a rather complicated subject, so I have decided to simplify it.

The first generation used Turing-incomplete discrete components that could only make simple geometric shapes. This kind of console could be programmed with cartridges that closed some circuit connections and left some others open. Its first one was the Magnavox Odyssey, which came out in September 1972.

The first second-generation one, the  Fairchild Channel F, introduced in November 1976, was the first microprocessor-using game console, thus making it the first Turing-complete one.

Its video RAM was 128*64*2 - width = 128 pixels, height = 64 pixels, pixel bit depth = 2 bits

This means only 4 colors, but it was effectively made 8 colors by specifying a color table per lline.

Aside from that, it had only 64 bytes of scratchpad memory (ordinary RAM), and its code and data were supplied on ROM cartridges. It had no hardware sprite support, but its games and apps used sprites, little pictures painted onto the screen.

Its successors were built with more and more video RAM, giving more and more pixels per dimension and greater and greater color depth. Color was typically indexed color, reading off a color table, eventually reaching 8-bit color or 256 colors. With the fifth generation of consoles came 32-bit truecolor, representing the displayed colors directly. Also with the fifth generation came hardware support for 3D-graphics operations.

The  PlayStation (console), released in 3 December 1994, was arguably the flagship console of that generation. It was successful enough for its creator, Sony, to name its successor the Playstation 2.

So the high end of game-console graphics has gone

1972 - simple geometric shapes - 1976 - 2D sprites - 1994 - 3D models - (present)

 

[lpetrich]

Xbox Scarlett: Release Date, Specs, Price, and News | Den of Geek

The rumored specs for Xbox Scarlett suggest that it will boast 12 GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD hard drive, and an 8-core CPU. Looking at the specs of the Xbox One X, the most powerful console in the world at the moment, we'd say that most of those stats make sense, but it's likely that Microsoft will aim for 16GB of RAM if it's cost-efficient. At E3 2019, Microsoft confirmed that Scarlett will have an SSD and will feature a Zen 2 processor from AMD. You can learn more about its capabilities in this E3 2019 trailer:

Xbox Project Scarlett - E3 2019 - Reveal Trailer - YouTube - very disappointing, since it has only short snippets of what the new Xbox will be able to display.

It will be able to do 120 frames per second and have 8K resolution. Seems like overkill, especially the 8K resolution. It will also have raytracing and it will be released in 2020. Much like the Playstation 5. So that year will be the beginning of the ninth generation of game consoles.