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| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20699 |  RedRay (345) Jul 22, 2008 - 01:16 pm
| | I had hoped that DX11 would have a lot of features to help devs shift to using ray tracing rather than rasterization. If that support occurs only in hardware, or via different types of hardware support between Nvidia and ATI hardware, that could slow down the move to ray tracing. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20689 | RedRay (345) Jul 21, 2008 - 06:31 pm
| I've heard that line of thinking before, but its nonsense frankly. A bad attach rate is simply bad for any third party manufacturer who would like to get involved with a suppposedly hot console. The fact that Ninetendo doesn't care about the attach rate sinply speaks to my point that they are proceeding along a different business model - one that focuses on Nintendo and less on third parties.
As for software sales during the first 18 months of the platform, everyone knows that the ave installed base during those respective time periods is MUCH higher for Wii. If Wii software sales can only match X360's then that AGAIN, simply reiterates my earlier point.
To repeat, I do not claim that Wii is not successful. It is. It is successful for Nintendo. I do not claim that Wii's ecosystem will not work. it does work. It works for casual gamers who do not require tons of third party software t*tles to choose from. The basic t*tles are provided and that suffices for the casual gamers that comprise that ecosystem. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20689 | RedRay (345) Jul 20, 2008 - 09:58 pm
| My family has a X360 and a Wii. My kids wanted a Wii. I refused to pay for it. They paid for it using pooled gift money from birthdays, Xmas, etc. They have Mario and Smash Bros. They paid for that too. They played it heavily for about a week each. Now it sits unused. They fight each other for X360 time though: Halo3, Lego, Oblivion, etc. A mix of t*tles.
So I concur with many in stating that the Wii is a poor relative value choice, i.e. the ratio of hours of gaming divided by $ spent is much lower.
However let's think about this some. If the X360 (or PS3) player base is so much more enthusiastic, then the software market for those consoles must be much larger. I'd like to see some $ market size numbers for each consoles' software. My guess is that X360 software still dominates. On the other hand, Nintendo really could care less about third party software viability. From their standpoint, Nintendo branded hardware and software sales have been a homerun this generation.
So it's entirely possible that Nintendo can be successful, while software sales for the platform could be poor. And yet it's entirely possible Nintendo is happy with that situation... Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20650 | RedRay (345) Jul 10, 2008 - 11:28 pm
| | I put 64bit Vista on my latest PC and it worked well. Note the past tense. Due to no fault of Vista's (at least I think not), but rather due to that unbelievably destructive piece of software known as Mass Effect, my install was badly contaminated. Oddly, when I tried to install Vista a 2nd time, it repeatedly blew up, getting as far as the first reboot and then never getting past that reboot. Oh well, back to XP. It's not as nice IMO. Oh, and Mass Effect blue screens XP consitantly too. Wonderful... Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20648 | RedRay (345) Jul 09, 2008 - 04:37 pm
| | There's also the issue of how much power such a setup would su*k down and how much heat it would generate. Clearly unless significant efficiencies were made in those two areas, simply slapping 32 P54C cores on a die would be grossly power/heat inefficient. Time will tell... Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20643 | RedRay (345) Jul 08, 2008 - 04:16 pm
| | EA needs to plow ahead and name a shareholder dissident slate for TakeTwo's next board election. It will take that long for the institutional investors to get the froth from GTA4 out of their eyes and be able to look at TakeTwo's long run prospects properly. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20623 | RedRay (345) Jul 02, 2008 - 05:36 pm
| | With those specs it should be faster at retrieving small files and slower at writing big ones than a traditional hard drive. However the real benefit of SSDs are how well they scale in a RAID setup. You can get nearly 2x throughput from a SSDs in RAID 0, whereas conventional hard drives might show a 5-10% improvement. If OCZ's SSD's perform well then two of them in a RAID 0 setup should outperform standard hard drives in nearly every type of task. We'll see... Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20605 | RedRay (345) Jun 26, 2008 - 11:50 am
| | I still don't understand why people are wringing their hands over PC gaming. PC gaming is bigger than it ever has been. It's growing faster than it ever has been. It's just that the growth isn't in the EU/North America.... Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20597 | RedRay (345) Jun 26, 2008 - 11:47 am
| | Far from useless. Many people have Media Center PCs and use their 360's as Media Center Extenders that are placed in a different room, connected via the wireless adapter. Now those rooms can get streaming movies via Netflix just like the main family room. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20538 | RedRay (345) Jun 20, 2008 - 06:03 pm
| Personally I also had a love hate relationship with this game. It constantly blue screened my 8800 GTX SLI setup. Even when I set the game to use only a single GPU it still blue screened occasionally.
I didn't however find the load times excessive however. Nor did I think the visuals were poor. This may simply be a case of throwing more computing power/highest setting graphics at the issue. It would have been interesting to see what setup the reviewer used. But few reviewers disclose that these days, even though arguably there is a wider variation in screen resolution, for example, across the user base than ever before.
For myself, I play a LOT of shooters and so this t*tle which focused more on storyline and plot than shooter mechanics was a welcome change of pace. This game has the best storyline in any PC game. Ever. If you thought KoToR had a good storyline (I did), then this game just takes it to the next level. If storyline and plot are less interesting to you, well then perhaps you'll feel the same way the reviewer did. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20482 | RedRay (345) May 23, 2008 - 04:06 pm
| | There's a full picture of the drum kit in the latest GameInformer mag. The drum kit is definitely more complicated than the one in Rock Band. And it's wireless. So the guess on a higher sticker price, looks like a good one to me. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20458 | RedRay (345) May 13, 2008 - 11:50 am
| | Pretty funny how they had to qualify that statement with "in the western world". In Asia they had a MMO surpass 1 million SIMULTANEOUS ONLINE connects about three years ago, and now its commonplace. WoW must be nearing that level as well. Of course those are not in beta. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20446 | RedRay (345) May 07, 2008 - 03:29 pm
| | You hit the nail right on the head. Single player gameplay is always better with a large number of moderately detailed mobs onscreen than with a single super detailed mob. id didn't ration their polygon count appropriately and as a result could only have 1 or 2 mobs. And then they tried to offset that by having the mob spawn behind you in a dark alcove AFTER you pass it. Yeah, that's really good gameplay....ugh. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20352 | RedRay (345) Apr 10, 2008 - 01:54 pm
| | I dunno if this is a good idea for Nvidia. In the short run I can't see this being a successful product given how much obsolescence exists in the Cyrix CPU. And in the long run I think Nvidia needs to be spending its time and money figuring our how discrete GPUs are going to compete with Intel's multi-core CPU strategy for doing ray tracing. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20346 | RedRay (345) Apr 09, 2008 - 02:22 pm
| | DRAM makers have been substantially hurt by the PC users not increasing the amount of DRAM per PC. And that in turn is linked to the 32bit address limit. Until the market moves to 64bit OSes, DRAM makers will be hurting. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20338 | RedRay (345) Apr 08, 2008 - 01:22 pm » Edited on Apr 08, 2008 - 01:24 pm
| Times will remain tough for AMD. Intel will continue to use its by now familiar compet*tive response: lower prices in market segments where AMD is compet*tive and compensate with higher prices on newly introduced technology in market segments where AMD is weak.
AMD made a tremendous strategic error by acquiring ATI. At the time AMD wanted to insure that its fabs would run at full capacity. But all it really wound up doing was acquiring a new compet*tor - nVidia, one just a vicious and deadly as Intel. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20198 | RedRay (345) Mar 28, 2008 - 07:58 am
| | The risks of failure (for a console launch) are indeed much larger given the higher fixed costs. But on the other hand the worldwide game entertainment market has now grown by so much that there are enough customers to support FOUR (4) separate platforms (Wii,X360, PS3, PC). Ten years ago there was really only enough customers to support two (PS2, PC). Thus unless you believe that a single platform will monopolize the global market, I find it unlikely that either consoles or PCs will be eliminated. Flag this | Edit this post |
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