Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Whoop

From Forbes:
[AMD] alleges that the next generation Xbox, whenever it does decide to make its debut, will be capable of rendering graphics on par with James Cameron’s CGI epic Avatar.

...Furthermore, AMD claims the tech will also allow each pedestrian in Grand Theft Auto, for example, to have their own distinct personality and react a different way to a variety of circumstances.

WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP. BULLSHIT ALERT. BULLSHIT ALERT.

Yes, the Xandians are bringing this technology from the goddamn future, people, from the 23rd motherf-ing century. It will reassemble your DNA.

Look, don't think for a minute that the reason A.I. isn't already better in games is some kind of hardware limitation. It's not. It's just that nobody gives a shit.

Does anyone think a Grand Theft Auto game would sell another five million copies if they had twice as many A.I. routines for pedestrians? Or ten times as many?

Ten times as many would be fifty. I kid.

I've said this before, but the Front Page Sports Football series in the early 90s had better A.I. than Madden or NCAA do now. Those games came on 3.5" floppies. But A.I. was a priority for those games, and it's not for EA, at least in their football games.

It's not a hardware issue. It's a will issue.

As for the Avatar graphics, um, sure. Certainly, though, the graphics will at least take a major step forward. Hell, they better, given how long it's been since the 360 was launched. Given that it will probably be close to eight years from system to system, that should mean the next Xbox will have at least 8X (following Moore's law, it would be 16X, but I'm being conservative) the raw "power" of the 360.

With all that power, I expect to see this in the feature list for NCAA 14:
--NEW. Eight models of shoelaces!
--NEW. Shoelaces have aglets!

Then, there will be a giant thread over at Operation Sports with a project to correctly assign shoelace types to every college player.

And the pursuit angles will still be wrong.

The one good thing about this ridiculous PR dump is that at least hints about the next-gen are being dropped now. Nintendo actually has a console launching in less than a year, and there are hints about Microsoft and Sony's next consoles.

Finally!

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