If the next-gen console games supported keyboard and mouse, I would have bought one. It's up to the developers to include KM control, but most don't - citing that it would be unfair in online multiplayer. I think just having a flag/tag that users could search for "gamepad only" online servers would solve that problem. I think there were only 2 PS3 titles that supported USB Keyboard+Mouse (Unreal Tournament and something else). Or even if they allowed KM for single-player campaigns, games like Killzone and Resistance would have been much more enjoyable to me.

So I upgraded my PC to an 8-core AMD FX-8320 + 16GB ram + GTX 750 Ti for less than the cost of Xbox One. (my projector's only 720p, so don't need a high-end GPU to get good framerates)

@VoodooV 5 grand? That's just the cost of the gpus! The whole rig came out at over 10k. And yeah, it's ridiculous, but it's meant to be. It's the Bugatti Veyron of gaming pcs, it's more about seeing what's possible than being actually useful.

@lucky760 I still play heaps of TF2 and it's still pretty popular. The CoD MW guys have moved on to whatever the latest CoD is.

@serosmeg, I played the beta. I have an old Amd quad core and a hd6950 gpu. Neither are close to top of the line these days and the game ran fine.

@Trancecoach: We're not going to agree, and that's fine. This'll be my last reply.

Retailer strong-arming: Imagine Apple makes up 95% of Best Buy's tablet sales. Off-brand-X wants to sell tablets at Best Buy. Apple says: If you sell Off-brand-X tablets, we will not let you sell our tablets. Off-brand-X is likely to only provide a tiny profit to Best Buy, compared to Apple, so they comply. (This actually happened, in a different form, with Intel paying computer manufacturers to not use AMD processors. See here). Also see price-fixing.

Widget-distribution-prevention: This is just an extension of the previous point.

Buying up all of the competitors: Ma Bell. Old AT&T. That should be enough said. But, if that's not enough, now Ma Bell is nearly entirely re-formed. The US was one government approval away from having cell carriers limited to Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T. That's been spoiled, now, but I don't think it's hard to imagine that future continuing on to two carriers colluding and price-fixing (as Verizon and AT&T pretty much have freedom to do anyway). This is another quasi-natural-monopoly situation (or at least a tragedy of the commons situation), in that the radio spectrum is not infinite. To keep the spectrum usable at all, blocks of frequencies are doled out to radio/TV/cellular/military/etc. etc. with stiff penalties for interference.

Patents: Patents present a litany of problems, but the world without them is even worse. You have two things happen, both of which are bad:
1) New technology remains veiled in secrecy indefinitely; no one else can riff on it even after patents would normally have expired
2) My previous point. The marginal utility of R&D decreases drastically based on the likelihood of a competitor being able to get hold of your secrets before you can profit on them sufficiently.
This is exactly why patents were created. It's a temporary monopoly granted by the government in exchange for the promise that the knowledge will be released to the universe after X years.

Predatory pricing: If excessive, it's illegal. That's why it doesn't happen very often. In a country with anti-trust laws, you just want to hurt your competitor, you don't want to drive them out of the market.

Natural monopolies: Since you brought this one up, you can choose your energy service because the government forces the utility to lease its lines and to decouple distribution from production. That is to say, you have a free market in production because the distribution is not free. See here. My state is the same way.

Misinformation: Who vets marketing claims in a free market? My competitor says that their food is organic. Well--hell, so is mine! They're environmentally conscientious? So am I! Their drug cures cancer? Mine cures it even better!

Oh, shit. Someone caught me in a lie! Well, I'll just force the media to ignore it and ramp up my disinformation campaign.

I'd love to know how Intel/AMD design new architecture, and specifically what degree of abstraction they have, because its difficult to imagine how anybody can get their heads around all the intricacies of modern multicore chip.

Are you an AMD CPU guy with a Radeon then....

or.... an Intel CPU with a GeForce....

choose wisely....

@radx / @RFlagg

Agree the difference is hard to notice if you're not directly comparing, and that building for cross-gen compatibility is probably a big limiting factor.

I'm almost a bit concerned (because I have AMD shares) that this will hit console sales once the initial pre-order fervour dies down. Not from these kind of comparisons but from in-store demos being underwhelming.

The 360/PS3 jump seemed much more noticeable. It might take 4K and widespread adoption of larger TVs, assuming the next-gen can even pump this out at 30 FPS, to really validate it. The fact that neither can do BF4 above 900p isn't exactly promising ...

I had the AMD 386DX-40 which was cool at the time, but don't forget that having enough RAM was also crucial. A minimum of 4 megabytes. I seem to remember RAM being rather expensive.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by oritteropo.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by oritteropo.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by oritteropo.

In reply to this comment by moodonia:
Sorry about the duping of the red bull jump/fall video. I assure you I feel like a petty wretch at this moment!


No, no worries, you got it first, and the video was so funny! I am not very good at findind dupes in the first place when submitting, and this week I have had my friend from Finland staying over at my house, so I have minimal time to sift amd browse. So I am kinda just posting and running until Monday afternoon, and hoping not everything is a dupe

The first ball, and my jaw hit the floor.

Then he picked up the second ball, and my jaw hit the floor and I chipped a tooth.

Then he picked up the third ball amd mff blrgl mm grb blm

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by ReverendTed.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by ReverendTed.

Hm, I'm cautious yet optimistic about this. If Nvidia and AMD could shoehorn support with their current 3D drivers this could really take off.