They were duking it out for media control of the living room, and they won. Video stores no longer exist, and people don't go to theaters the way they used to. They're at home watching netflix or pirated content on their PS3s and 360s.
"They" won? How could "they" win if you were defining the battle as being about Netflix (not exclusive) and pirated content (not exclusive)? MS and Sony waged a Don Quixote style battle over a whole lot of nothing and lost billions in the process. It's obvious in hindsight that subsidizing the hardware was a blunder that wasn't even necessary.
I think it will be a similar or slightly bigger leap than last time, only, it has been a longer period between generations so the leap has to be bigger to account for this. I'm thinking 10x the potential in most ways, probably not CPU flops, but system flops as a whole 10x is doable in a realistic financial and power budget. The CPU's will both likely be a lot easier for devs to harness the potential of, even if they aren't flop monsters like Cell and Xenos were for their time. The other option is an APU with a smaller GPU for FP operations, possibly even removed of pipelines as it won't be used for rasterization. GPU I can't see why they wouldn't go for a good upper mid range chip like the 7850 currently or something like a 8750 next year. The real wildcard is RAM. 2GB VRAM shared between the GPU and CPU is bare minimum, but that will prove restrictive in a couple of years. 4GB GDDR5 is expensive, but it still might happen. MS may go for DDR4 on a 256-bit bus to get moderate bandwidth at reasonable cost, which will quickly decline as DDR4 becomes mainstream while DDR3 will only go up. If they leave the option open to combine the CPU and GPU into one chip later down the line pad limits for such a bus shouldn't be a problem with further shrinks. This option would have to be coupled with 32-64MB eDRAM for the frame buffer, but the DDR4 will be much cheaper than large quantities of GDDR5, increasingly so further into the life of the console. They could also easily have 6-8GB of main ram for a reasonable cost with this setup, which will surely prove a benefit, even if it is only half the bandwidth.
I actually doubt we'll be experiencing the 2000+ HD resolutions on mainstream (even enthusiast!) TVs for this next gen. I believe Anandtech had it predicted for 2018 or some such. And even than it'd be rather 'enthusiast' and high end. Not like the government will make it law or anything... (/slightly sarcastic smirk)
I think 2K TVs are going to be released within the next year. I'm not sure how quickly they will be adopted, however. I'm thinking about buying one if it impresses me enough and isn't completely ridiculous in the pricing (probably will be for awhile, but once in awhile we can be surprised when a good product is released for a decent price). I didn't care much about the 3D fad, but I would like to upgrade my TV to a higher resolution. I don't care for the multi-monitor in the cubicle setup for PC gaming; everything is set up around my home theater. I use a TV for everything (movies, PC and console gaming, and even typing and web browsing), so I'm likely to be tempted to overpay a bit as an early adopter for a higher resolution TV if it's a high quality product. I won't bother if it a shoddy product, though, as my Panasonic plasma still looks pretty nice.
getting a 2K TV now (or for this coming gen) would be like getting an HDTV to play original Xbox games on. I bought an HDTV way back in 2004 to play Halo and Panzer Dragoon Orta on, and BOY was that a waste of money. I'm skipping on the 2k platform for a while... or maybe I'll just go to some rich doctor's house and play one. I'm done being an early adopter.
It wouldn't be for me. I'd love to be able to output a higher resolution than 1080p for my PC games. But as I said, I won't buy anything unless I'm convinced it's a good product for a somewhat reasonable price. I actually tend to be a notoriously shrewd purchaser with the exception of occasional celebratory impulse purchases after I accomplish something major.
I thought this pic was interesting. Check out the VRAM usage if you think you're going to use a crazy high resolution with the highest settings. Sorry, that's just not going to happen.
Now that's just dumb. How can the frame buffer be THAT big. Surely everything else alone can't use more than 3GB, there's no way in hell a 2560x1600 8xAA frame buffer should account for that much. That's Rockstar these days for ya...
MSAA is very hoggish in Max Payne 3. It takes up around half the VRAM used from my experience. I found the best balance for my card was 2x MSAA and 2x SGSSAA for the transparent textures and everything else at maximum (well, except FXAA, which I turn off). For lower end cards, I'd just use FXAA only for this game. It blurs the image slightly but doesn't cost much and affects the entire image. BTW, I've noticed that Crysis 2 has hit the 2GB range at just 1080p as well. It's typically at around 1.6 to 1.8 GB at max, but I noticed it briefly crept above 2GB once. You'd need well above 2GB I'm sure if you increased the resolution. I can't deny that Crysis 2 looks pretty amazing at max settings. I have a plasma TV, so the blacks are pitch black. I'm usually not the biggest fan of the deferred rendering business in recent games, but it works quite well in Crysis 2. The lighting is really impressive. I just wish they'd chill out with the bloom and hazy look in the brighter areas at times. If only it had Toad Tech.
Well I just went for a Gigabyte 7950 for $299AUD. It's one of those OC ones with the 3 fans, apparently very quiet and great at cooling... looks kinda ugly and OTT to me but I also would never buy a case with a window so looks are moot. With next gen consoles probably delivering hardware almost on par with this card, but much more efficient, I bought it to tie me over the next 2 years until proper next gen games start to show up. No point in blowing excessive money on hardware for next gen games now, even though the hardware will still likely be "better" than next gen consoles any PC will need almost twice the power to run the games at the same settings. 3GB VRAM should do just fine for 1920x1200 with MSAA or even SSAA for less demanding and CPU limited titles for the next 18months to 2 years. Even if I upgrade to a 2560x1440 monitor I doubt anything not made by rockstar will tip the 3GB ceiling. I find it hard to believe anyone is actually buying a 660Ti for $50 more than this deal when the 7950 is so much more future proof and when overclocked, the 7950 is well ahead because it has such a low default clock speed (faster per clock, yet overclocks almost as high generally). The only downside I see is that it uses more power use, but with the way these cards idle (or even better screen off state for radeons which I do a lot when streaming movies or downloading) it's not that big of a deal since I don't spend more than 8hrs a week gaming.