Next Gen gaming systems from Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft

[Chris D]

Since the current/previous editions of gaming systems from those three have been out for some time now, the PS3, XBox 360, and Wii, it's coming to be about the time that we expect the successors of all three will be coming out.

For the Wii, we've (that sounds weird) already seen the release of the Wii U several months ago. To be honest, I'm a bit underwhelmed with Wii U upgrades, but they are definitely good improvements on the Wii system. To me, the Wii has always seemed to be all about the "fun", and often "cutesey", rather than raw performance like the others. Heck, Mario Cart Wii got me through a year in Iraq. I couldn't tell you how many untold hours I logged with that game and my buddies over that year.

Now starting to hear more rumblings about the PS3 and XBox 360 replacements. Saw this today:

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/02/15/leaked-image-ps4-controller-boosts-touchscreen-rumors/

If we do get these later this year, that'll be awesome. Pretty great timing, too. The only thing is, if they come out this year, I highly doubt they'll include next-gen movie disc players, like 4k resolution movies that might be coming out in the next year or two.

[Chris D]

I find my own gaming systems funny--I waste a lot of time as it is on various things, so for years I specifically AVOIDED buying gaming systems, and hadn't owned a gaming console since the original Atari 6400 way back in the day. (Asteroids rules!)

When the PS3 was released, though, I broke down and got one of the very first. One of the biggest reasons I did so, was to get it as a BD player. Almost whatever, like 8 years later, and it's still my only BD player, and performs amazingly. That says something about Sony.

Well, a couple years after that, and my oldest daughter was getting old enough, that I picked up a Wii for family gaming in the family room. They've loved it. (except when I came back from Iraq and now DESTROY everybody on Mario Kart) A few years after that, I bought a Dell laptop for my wife, and they were running a promotion giving away a free XBox 360. Cool. And while I was in Iraq, Wal-Mart was having a dirt-cheap promo on PS3 slims, so a buddy hooked me up and helped me buy one to send over to my unit to use when we weren't in the field. When I came home from Iraq, I was one of the last to leave, so I brought it home with me.

That means that I went from 0 gaming consoles for decades, to now 4 consoles of the current generation, two of them duplicates. (I move my other PS3 between bedroom and RV) Geez. Like I indicated above, I haven't seen enough from the Wii U to upgrade. I'm anticipating that the PS4 will be enough to make me upgrade. Since I don't use our XBox 360 as much, it'll have to be pretty impressive to make me upgrade that, too.

[Hdale85]

We currently only have an Xbox 360 but I played with the Wii U a bit and I think it's quite fun. We will likely pick one up. I've had the PS3 several times in the past 8 years or so and just never got all that into any of the games on it. Most of the games were on the Xbox 360 and I liked them better on the Xbox 360, and the ones that were exclusive just weren't that interesting to me.

There were some rumored leaks for the specs of the next gen PS3 and 360, both being 8 core AMD based CPU's with next gen graphics, PS3 to go with AMD graphics and Xbox to go with Nvidia I believe. Possibly 4k support? Both supposedly having blu-ray drives but with the prices of SD cards and what not getting cheaper and being faster I'd kind of expect them to move to something solid state as I know they are going to be pushing downloadable games more and more as well. But a Blu-ray drive does give some extra functionality.

[impala454]

I used to have pretty much every system except the Sonys, just not as into it anymore. I sold all of my systems except the old ones (Atari/NES/SNES/N64). I'd love to see what the new ones have to offer though. Isn't the new XBox going by the "XBox 720" moniker?

[Hdale85]

That's what the fan base is calling it, personally I hope they go with something else.

[John Holmes]

I am interested to see what the new console bring to the party, because honestly, the current gen are pretty damn good. I've been gaming for decades and still own several platforms from the various eras. I also own PS3 and a couple of 360's. Sadly; I do not play as often as I used to.

So yes-curious to see what can be done to move us forward but, I'm "almost" positive the new consoles will have matured well before I purchase.

[Chris D]

Big announcement regarding the Playstation tomorrow. Wed, 20 Feb, at 6 PM EST.

http://us.playstation.com/

[Chris D]

Cool stuff about the PS4. Lots of details we don't know about it yet, but it will have a pretty nice upgrade to the dualshock controller, will have what looks like AWESOME processors, and perhaps most interestingly, will output 4k. This is not a huge surprise, as Sony is leading the industry push for 4k, and they will definitely want their flagship PS4 to lead the charge on it, just as the PS3 led the push for upgrade to BD. However, we still don't know yet what optical drive it will have, and how that's going to match up with the 4k push. Will the 4k standard be set by the time the PS4 is finalized and released, so it will actually play 4k discs? I hope it will NOT be just 4k streaming. One thing they have said so far is that the first GAMES being developed for the PS4 will not have full 4k resolution, which I'm not to worried about.

Check out the following links:

http://us.playstation.com/

http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/20/sony-ps4-announcement/

http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/21/sony-playstation-4-pricing-specs-not-final/

http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/21/playstation-4-4ktv/

http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/21/yoshida-used-games-caveat/

[Hdale85]

It will output 4k, and likely be one of the first disc devices that will support 4k blu-ray I'm guessing. There is plenty of space on blu-ray disc so this seems like the obvious route to take for 4k disc content. You will need a new player, but it will work with all old blu-ray discs as well.

I'm sure most of the games throughout the life of the PS4 will not be 4k. Just like the current consoles, only a handful of them are even 1080p. Many games are only 720p.

Also I'm going to assume that the new XBox will also do 4k. Kind of funny as Nintendo just got caught up on the resolution things and now it's going to be behind again lol.

[impala454]

As Dougie mentioned, I just read somewhere that although it's designed to be able to output 4K, the games will not be in 4K. That'd really take a smokin machine to run full 4K rendered 3D stuff at the frame rates console gamers demand.

[Hdale85]

Well it's more about video buffer memory. And I think we can render at 4k now days with some of the new cards coming out. The new Geforce GTX Titan is a single GPU card that has 6Gb's of video ram. That thing is amazingly fast too! It should do 4K no problem.

[Chris D]

Huh... one of the places, I read that the PS4 would be backwards compatible for games. (i.e. be able to play PS3 games) This cnn news article says that it won't be, though.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/22/tech/gaming-gadgets/playstation-4-games/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

[maseline_98]

Huh... one of the places, I read that the PS4 would be backwards compatible for games. (i.e. be able to play PS3 games) This cnn news article says that it won't be, though.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/22/tech/g...html?hpt=hp_t3

I don't think it is going to be backwards compatible in the sense of putting in the ps3 discs and being able to play them. I think the games are going to be downloaded via the psn. I don't have a ps3(more of an xbox player myself) so this is not really a big deal to me.....ymmm of course.

[impala454]

Well it's more about video buffer memory. And I think we can render at 4k now days with some of the new cards coming out. The new Geforce GTX Titan is a single GPU card that has 6Gb's of video ram. That thing is amazingly fast too! It should do 4K no problem.

Geez. I had no idea there were cards already out that did 4K.

Man after perusing newegg a bit, there's some insane stuff out there now. I have been totally out of the loop.

[Hdale85]

Yeah just recently some new stuff has come out. That Titan card literally just released like this last week lol. It is amazingly fast! It matches and beats dual GPU cards in some cases.

[impala454]

At $1,000+ I'd hope it could deal cards too

Sure would be fun to have an unlimited budget to build a computer.

Ok sorry I'm getting off topic.

[Chris D]

Ah, build your own next-gen gaming system, Chuck! Call it the Chuck-S5-721, and sell one to each of us.

[Chris D]