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.