Widescreen Gaming Forum

So what's the time frame then? It's estimated that the next Xbox/Playstation will hit the shelves in 2013-2014, with the major possibility that the Xbox will finally move to blu-ray, will that be enough to see the adoption on the PC? Also will the Wii 2 do this? And if so, would that speed up the process?

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They haven't begunto hire to a new system design team yet, that's usually how allot of websites estimate a release date. SONY and MS both want to extend the life of this unit for 10 year total run. so another 4-5 years min before you see a new unit, that is unless Wii-2 comes out and starts to annihilate the 360/PS3, then it would be sooner. By that time of course the PC market will be so far advanced beyond the 360/PS3 that I doubt any port would be purchased for more then the cost of a DLC addon. If right now the disparity is so great thatmost people shudder at the though of a console port, imagine in 3 years time when cards like the 6990 are worthless and my own 1090T x6 core is something found in a $299 blow out special on Tiger Direct..

There is going to come a point where the console game designers just give up any PC ports due to the flak they will take and the LOW sales.

I believe it's not feasible to have BR yet. The cost of a BR-drive is still too much for many. Add the need to support 2 different media for the same platform (DVD and BR), as you would still need DVD to reach the mass population. Also, how many games need more than two dual layer DVDs? Age of Conan or SW - The Force Unleashed (?), I have these on Steam and it doesn't do data compression I guess, so retail might be 2 DVDs.

The only use as I see it would be (leaving out movies of course), say, get a collection of high data games in a single box with a premium price.

The price is not expensive at all. I purchased a HD-DVD/Blu-Ray combo rewritable drive that literally supports all 3.5" optical data discs for $40.00 three years ago. I'm also pretty sure the price of a single disc in now down around $1.25-$1.50. The issue is most people don't see a need for the format yet. Look how long it took for games to come out on DVD for PC. I still have my 5-CD copy of Far Cry and 4-CD copy of Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, and I would say that DVD was pretty mainstream by that time. It takes like a whole hour for Far Cry to install, too, and you have to babysit the installation to change to the next disc. The issue of game consoles, particularly the Xbox 360, I'm sure has a lot to do with it. Developers have to design their games within the space constraints of DVD and therefore there is no demand for a medium that can hold more space on a single disc.

Concerning movies, one of the biggest issues on PC is there are no freely available media players that support Blu-ray, meaning you have to spend an extra $100 for a commercial player on top of the drive. Sure drives come with a player, but they are usually neutered versions of the commercial product. Take the version of PowerDVD that came with my Blu-ray drive: no surround sound or support for the latest Blu-rays. There is actually a decent freeware Blu-ray player for PC out there right now: Digiarty DAPlayer. It has been able to play every Blu-ray I've thrown at it so far, even with great performance on my four-year old PC.

A top of the line Samsung BR/DVD drive is less then $90 now.

Media player classic with the K-lite codex pak will play br/dvd as well GOM player will play them native. both free of course.

with the major possibility that the Xbox will finally move to blu-ray, will that be enough to see the adoption on the PC? Also will the Wii 2 do this? And if so, would that speed up the process?

I am really interested in seeing what happens with the Wii 2. There's a few problems though. First most wii games do not fill up even a single layered DVD. There are only a handful that come on a Dual layered DVD any I don't believe that any of them even come close to filling it up. (I'm completely making this last part up so someone please correct me if you know different!)
So they really probably could get away with DVD's again unfortunately.
The other problem is that Wii games rarely get ported over to anything else because of its unique controls. The Wii 2 is rumored to come with an LCD in the controller which could make game elements non trivial to port or cross develop with the Wii 2.

They haven't begunto hire to a new system design team yet, that's usually how allot of websites estimate a release date.

All 3 companies have been working on their next generation platform before they even launched their last ones. You can be sure that if needed they could have something to launch at the end of this year, of course they would prefer to wait. The Platstation series has always launched 6 years apart (94, 00, 06) I wouldn't be surprised if they were aiming for 6 years once again.

Really though we are less than a month away from seeing what happens with the Wii 2 at E3 this year so fingers crossed that it brings us the Next Generation!
If it doesn't then... uhoh Nintendo could be in trouble. The concept of 'Exclusive' games is going to go away soon in my opinion. It's just not feasible to spend all of this money on 1/5 of the market. The Wii had a metric crap ton of exclusives simply because it was not feasible to cross develop for it due to its graphical capabilities. The number of Wii titles that actually made good money is rather slim once you exclude Nintendo published games and I'm not sure that the publishers are willing to go down that route again. Cross developing is extremely attractive though.

Yeah, there are many sites claiming Rockstar will go to the Wii 2 and lots of other things. Some Nintendo fan sites report that the company is once again searching for it's core audience. With the move to Blu-Ray already complete on Sony's end, I can potentially see Nintendo adopt the format as it has now become the new medium.

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from the specs i've read about it's going to be almost a mirror image of the 360: 3 core IBM CPU / 512 meg DDR combined and a ATI HD 4000 series GPU.. Blu ray.. I really hope that this is wrong and they add in at least a 2gig of DDR2 and a HD5000 series card for dx11 support. this alone would shoot the console well past the level of the PS3 and 360 without any challenge from the other two. not being cutting edge product like the ps3/30 stuff sort of was, the cost per unit should come in where the original Wii price point was.

from the specs i've read about it's going to be almost a mirror image of the 360: 3 core IBM CPU / 512 meg DDR combined and a ATI HD 4000 series GPU.. Blu ray.. I really hope that this is wrong and they add in at least a 2gig of DDR2 and a HD5000 series card for dx11 support. this alone would shoot the console well past the level of the PS3 and 360 without any challenge from the other two. not being cutting edge product like the ps3/30 stuff sort of was, the cost per unit should come in where the original Wii price point was.

Well from what I've seen nintendo do in the past, they tend to stay with "well tested" technologies. That being said, it kinda of make since for them to go with a 4000 series architecture. They are probably going to use a die-shrinked version to dispel heat and other annoying things like that. I'm really hoping that the GPU the pick has a lot of grunt to it though. If it was a 4870 I think that would be good. But consoles need more ram if they ever want to have bigger textures. Another thing I'd like to put out there is the difference in making a game for PC and making a game for a console. On a console they rarely use an API (like DirectX). They normally do lots of low level programing which pull more performance of the system hardware then say PC games using an API. API translates all the high level programing into things that the hardware can understand. On PC you really need that cushion layer because we as a user base have really diverse hardware. Long story short, They are going to see more performance out of that architecture then we ever did. On top of that 1080p really isn't that large of a resolution anyway.

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A top of the line Samsung BR/DVD drive is less then $90 now.

Media player classic with the K-lite codex pak will play br/dvd as well GOM player will play them native. both free of course.

I've read a lot about getting MPC to play Blu-ray movies, but I could never get it to work for myself. The most common thing is to make an image of the disc and play it from your hard drive, but to me that defeats the whole point and the fact that you'll have a 25 or 50 GB file sitting on your computer. I haven't heard of GOM player.

The GPU in the 360 is, what, a unified shader version of the X1800?

Even a 4000 series GPU (presuming die-shrink to keep it cooler) will utterly obliterate the 360 or PS3 GPUs.