In the same vein as the Playstation edits:

 

I'm really tempted to do some photoshop work to turn the kinect into the head of a Microsoft hardware deathbot amalgamation.

 

Disagree with you = dipshits.

Okay. I mean if you have enough expendable money to do whatever you want, 4k is fine to spend on anything. Just the increase of quality of computer to the price of the computer falls so fast at that end and due to the way computers only stay top of the line for 6-9 months. Unless you can piss away money, it is better to buy a slightly cheaper computer that is still top of the line, just not super top of the line and then do it again in a few years. I mean, sure, it is a beast now but unless you don't worry about finances in any manner, it is not worth it.

Also, I never thought I would so clearly prefer the PS4 over the Xbox One.

 

This is the part that I'm not interested in doing. I'd rather spend more money now and have it stay relevant for that much longer, than keep buying new computers every couple of years. I've been told that the payoff in the long run is that you save money.

 

Who told you that, though? That extra $2,000 to $2,500 right now, would likely cost only a few hundred dollars a year or so down the line. Heck, one could simply buy those exact same parts that they were going to buy, in said 'year or so' and save the money that way. Still have a very good computer in the mean time, even if it's not the utmost top-of-the-line.

Of course, if they are the type to then wish they had the newest most expensive parts as of that new time frame, then, well... Can't really help you there. That's a mindset choice more than anything else.

 

Yes and no. A $4000 build would have to last you 4x as long as a $1000 build in order to save you money, and a $1000 build today should be good for at least 2-3 years. That means that your $4000 computer would have to last you 8-12 years in order to save you money, and that's just not going to happen. 8 years ago, Intel was releasing its first dual-core consumer processors. 12 years ago, Pentium 4 was released.

And that's not even getting into graphics processing. An absolute top-of-the-line graphics card will run you around $1000 and last you maybe 5 years at most. And that's optimistic - really the only cards I can think of that have managed to stay relevant so long have been the GTX 295 and HD 4870x2, which were absolute monsters 5 years ago and are still decent (if power-hungry) cards today. More recently, architecture has been advancing more rapidly from generation to generation. My middle-of-the-road $200 card from last year is approximately equivalent to the top-of-the-line $500 card from the year before.

The other thing to consider is that unless you're planning on gaming across multiple (3+) screens, spending more than $1000-$1500 quickly runs into the law of diminishing returns. That top-of-the-line $1000 graphics card won't give you any better performance on a single 1080p screen than a $300-$400 card. Of course, that does mean that it will last you longer, but will it last 2-3x as long? probably not. And if you do use a multi-monitor setup, you're going to have to upgrade more often to keep up with game advances or switch to using a single monitor.

So, all-in-all, it's probably better to spend around $1000 building a new pc every 2-3 years than to spend $4000 once and hope it lasts 8-12. Your initial costs might be a bit more when you count in monitors, but unless you're building some sort of crazy multi-screen setup, you shouldn't need to spend more than another $500ish on peripherals, and most of those can be re-used between builds

 

And just what games do you plan to play with such a system? A 2k system is more than enough to play any game in the next 2-3 years on high resolutions.

 

Hell, the desktop replacement beast laptop I got for graduation for $1100 4 years ago is only just now starting to run into games it can't run at all. And you definitely get a more powerful desktop for the same price than a laptop.

 

I'd like to have what the Xbox design team are drinking/smoking, please.

Also, I'd considered getting the latest Xbox incarnation (rumoured to be the Xbox 720 at the time), but after seeing what this 'One' offers?

I'm looking at the PS4, for sure.

 

I'm not going to buy the xbox one, or the PS4. Why? Because they're on x86 when they really should be on x64. The 32 bit processors are on the way out and they're holding game development back. There isn't going to be any lasting power when it comes to PS4/PC games.

There will be a huge disconnect and that makes me sad.

 

You seem to have missed something here but the new consoles are using AMD Jaguar cores which are x64, a 64bit instruction subset of x86. Would be quite stupid to use 8GB memory configs in 32bit based consoles

 

As coleam said, that's simply not true. High End components are not priced according to their actual performance, but simply as high as people are willing to pay for "the best".

I'd recommend buying a good rig with a reasonable cost/performance, and simply upgrading it bit by bit, i.e. new CPU one year, new graphics the next. That way, you get a good bang for your buck, and rather than your PC getting worse over the years, you keep up with the development. At the end, you'll have a better comp than if you dumped all the money up front.

 

It's like this - things become cheap when they're mass produced. "The best of the best" aren't mass produced because they're the most expensive to be produced. The "best of the best" are more or less luxury items that have an inflated cost through a negative feedback loop - they aren't mass produced because nobody is buying them in droves and nobody is buying them in droves is because they aren't mass produced; they're too expensive. The most expesive parts are hardly better than the mid-line parts, especially when you consider most PC games are ports or using old-hat tech. Top of the line parts are more expensive, but do not follow a linear progression curve in terms of performance. Spending $4000 USD on a computer is ridiculous, you won't spend more than $2000 USD if you try. Just go onto Newegg, pick out a mid line video card ($150-$250 USD), get an i5, 8gb, a decent SSD and motherboard, and you'll be under or at the $1k mark with a computer that will last you at least three years, if not five. You'll run PS4/XB1 ports (probably) on max settings with such a rig, too.

Which does make me a little confused, by the way, since we know the 360 got very few exclusives this generation - how does Microsoft really think the Cloud is going to help strengthen the Xbox's weaker hardware? Does this mean PS4 games will be using Sony's "Cloud" or lackthereof? And what does this mean for PC ports of XB1 games? Will all XB1 ports be accessing Cloud servers even if your PC is perfectly capable of rendering everything on its own? If not, does this mean PS4/PC versions of XB1 games will be written completely differently to simply use the native hardware? When you think about it, it means that the XB1 is either going to have a monpoly on exclusive games, or it won't have any games at all. Are developers going to put in the effort to optimize their games for Microsoft's unique Cloud interface? Or is Microsoft going to "take care of all this" with its devkits? That's highly unlikely, unless Microsoft has managed to be integral in designing the latest Unreal Engine, whatever Bethesda is working on, et cetera?

What we will see, in truth, is that very few developers will take advantage of servers for rendering purposes. Nevermind that such a practice isn't even assured yet (realistically speaking, I don't think it can be. Some Microsoft representative talked about their servers being used to help render lighting - but that's bullshit. Lightning has to be rendered in real time; you can't have 100+ ping determining lightning values. Unless he meant static light maps, but those have been trivial to calculate since before Half Life one), but even if they were, it would mean every Xb1 port would need to have fundamentally different low level code. This isn't like adding Wii Mote controls and calling it a day, anything that effects the way your game renders is costly to build and bug test.

In reality, we'll see Xb1 games sacrificing art, complexity, effects, scope, and size, to accomodate the game's memory and graphics card limitations. Either that, or PS4/PC games won't be advancing quite nearly as much as we'd hope (this is assuming the XB1 becomes a dominating presence in the market).

 

The Xbox One Cloud is the same Cloud used by SimCity.

Just as useful and everything!

 

Didnt exactly wow gamers with the unveiling. All hopes rest with E3.

If they flop there... well... Thats not going to be very good.

Oh boy...

Though to be fair, its probably not going to be the exact same system.

On the other hand cloud saving... So what happens when the cloud goes down?

Guess you're just shit out of luck.

 

I mostly agree. Where I think Azure(MS's cloud service) could improve the experience is allowing big persistent gaming worlds, bot AIs and dynamic background physics which aren't latency sensitive. Think about forests/wind/weather effects. Wouldn't expect it for cross platform titles though.

The XBone will look really pathetic just 6 months after the release when AMD GPUs are produced at 20nm allowing a 2x bigger transistor budget at the same size. Misguided project vision and really bad timing.

 

I'm reluctant to agree that "dyanmic background physics" can be calculated by a server; it'll look choppy and weird in certain circumstances, but maybe I just don't quite get what you mean by that (do you mean what goes on in the background of a street fighter game? Why even bother with 'dynamic background physics' to begin with? Few will care if it's in the background and you're using baked physics calcs); AI I really don't see being controlled by ping. If your internet goes down, your enemies stop coming at you? Good AI needs to be frame by frame too, you can't tell fish to swim away from you every 100 ping; it's going to look jerky as fuck. And if this generation is supposed to advance games in any meaningful way other than graphics, next gen AI is going to need to be much more than we've had in the past; it's going to require a lot of memory. I'm just not buying it.

The problem with "the cloud" is that games are intended to be the fastest and crispest of all computer software, you can't have stuff waiting on the internet, even broadband internet, it's too slow for anything resource intensive. It's almost as bad as accessing the harddrive to calculate something.

And Microsoft did unveil a large amount of servers, but really, if 100 million people buy an XB1 like Microsoft says they expect to (in the long haul), are they really prepared to take on even 1% of that user base concurrently? If they're all playing games using the cloud, it means their servers are going to need to take on a lot of simeltaneous user requests for some pretty resource-heavy calculation. You can't say "the cloud" will magically hold everything the console can't, these servers will need 3 gb of memory per user and an extra 50% tflops in order to "negate" the extra strength of the PS4. I don't really believe their servers will be approximately that useful.

 

Well, I'm not sure if you've played Far Cry 3. IMHO a prime candidate for a persistent simulated sandbox in the cloud. Imagine the weather had some real influence on the sandbox environment like moving the trees, grass, fire, how the animals on a greater scope and a bigger opponent awareness.
Some objects might even switch between cloud and local context depending on some local state when the player might affect it.
It's at least something where I can see their cloud concept could be more than some cheap PR. But it surely won't fix the XBone's GPU performance differential to the PS4 or PCs.

 

As much as I agree with the first part, the second part is patently untrue. Because of this thread, I actually decided to see how much a completely over-the-top outrageous PC would cost, and I had no problem getting up past $4000 without getting into monitors (a 27" high-res screen? ~$800). I mean, a pair of GTX Titans and an i7 Extreme will run you $3000 alone. Not that anyone actually needs that much hardware, but it is possible to spend that much.