{"id":35604,"date":"2013-06-16T06:47:40","date_gmt":"2013-06-16T05:47:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/?p=35604"},"modified":"2014-01-21T05:57:17","modified_gmt":"2014-01-21T05:57:17","slug":"e3-2013-wrap-up-the-next-gen-consoles-catch-up-with-pc-graphics-as-it-gets-its-own-console","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/e3-2013-wrap-up-the-next-gen-consoles-catch-up-with-pc-graphics-as-it-gets-its-own-console\/","title":{"rendered":"E3 2013 Wrap-up"},"content":{"rendered":"

2013 was ABT’s first year at E3.\u00a0 Electronic Entertainment Expo 2013 just completed its 19th year and it was big in every way this year.\u00a0 Although E3 lasts for 3 days, we drove to the Los Angeles Convention Center on Tuesday for the opening day and had a very quick whirlwind tour for just a few hours.\u00a0\u00a0 It is similar to CES superficially as it is huge trade show, but it is made up of attendees that are mostly core gamers who are affiliated with the gaming industry.\"E3-outside-1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The main attraction of E3 are the games, and just like at Disneyland, gamers stand in long lines for a very brief hands on with the unreleased games.\u00a0 \"Square-enix\"<\/a>This year’s E3 was particularly exciting as the new next generation consoles, the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, and their new games were featured.\u00a0 The LA Convention Center is huge and there are two main exhibit halls that stretch over a long city block.\"E3-outside-block\"<\/a> Surrounding hotels also host some of the press events and ABT also attended Nvidia’s 2-1\/2 hour invitation-only event on E3’s opening day evening.\u00a0 It was mostly about PC gaming which has recently enjoyed a renaissance as the current generation of consoles is quite old.<\/p>\n

PC Gaming<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although the press focus is mostly on the PS4 and the Xbox One, and will be covered by Mario along with general E3 news in this article, this editor is focusing on PC gaming.\u00a0 We will look briefly at AMD and turn the spotlight on Nvidia and its new console, the Shield. With the Shield, PC gaming now has a first – its own dedicated handheld.\u00a0 Surprisingly, it has potential to be disruptive to the entire gaming industry.\"\"<\/p>\n

The Shield will allow a gamer full access to Android games and it can also wirelessly stream games from the user’s own GeForce-powered PC to any large screen HDTV in the house.\u00a0 The Shield as a Tegra 4 device is getting dangerously close to the power of an Xbox 360 and it is easy to see that further refreshes of it may get visuals comparable to the next generation consoles.\"\"<\/p>\n

The new games for the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 are quite impressive visually, yet they are not able to deliver anything new that has not been seen on the PC since DX11.\u00a0 From Nvidia’s slide which only looks at GFLOPS as a measure of performance, the new consoles have only narrowed the graphics gap, not surpassed PC gaming.<\/p>\n

This E3 turned out to be more smoke and mirrors than usual as it was observed that some of the Xbox One games demos at E3 were evidently running on Windows 7 and GeForce, not on the Xbox One at all, nor even on “equivalent HW”.\"ConsolevPC\"<\/a><\/p>\n

AMD – “Your CORE of Gaming”<\/strong><\/p>\n

AMD was also present at E3 as their new APUs power both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, and their motto is, “AMD the CORE of Gaming” as their booth stressed using AMD hardware to be ready for “combat” and war.\"AMD-core\"<\/a><\/p>\n

AMD is currently focusing on their strong points which includes the very flexible Eyefinity which can be extended to using 5×1 displays.\"eyefinity\"<\/a>AMD is also focusing on cloud gaming.\"AMD's-cloud\"<\/a>AMD is a partner with many of the same cloud gaming services that Nvidia uses although Nvidia is much further along by offering Nvidia hardware that supports their own GRID ecosystem.\u00a0 Here is a large stack of their pre-built GRID servers.\"Grid-1\"<\/a>Each one of these server boxes contains four Kepler GPUs and each one of these GPUs provide 4 virtualized GPUs, each of which can handle 4 gamers simultaneously, or 16 gamers per box.\u00a0 This provides great cost effectiveness for these gaming cloud companies as they can deliver games much as Netflix delivers movies on a inexpensive monthly subscription basis.<\/p>\n

\"Grid-4x4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Both AMD and Nvidia believe that the cloud will play a big part in the future of gaming as they believe they have each solved the latency issues associated with cloud gaming.\u00a0 This means that soon – “maybe this month, maybe next year, or the year after” – a subscriber will be able to play graphically demanding games on their tablet or on just about any device on any platform with lower latency than playing on an Xbox 360, and with graphical fidelity mostly equivalent to the new consoles!<\/p>\n

Nvidia is all about “cross platform” which includes PC as well as Android gaming.\u00a0 Steam as well as Ouya’s little console which is based on Tegra 3 was featured at Nvidia’s booth:\"ouya\"<\/a><\/p>\n

One is immediately struck by Ouya’s tiny size.\u00a0 The graphics are powered by Tegra 3 and it is a very inexpensive console.<\/p>\n

Nvidia<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nvidia doesn’t have any hardware inside the next generation consoles.\u00a0 However, they do appear pleased that the new consoles have finally mostly moved from Dx9 to DX11, catching up with PC gaming feature-wise and making it easier to port games with higher quality visuals from the PC to the console platforms and vice versa.<\/p>\n

The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 have narrowed the gap between PC and console.\u00a0 This means the least common denominator has gone up by nearly a factor of ten.\u00a0 Devs build a game that can scale to a variety of machines to maximize their profits. Now devs can build features and levels of detail so resource-intensive they could formerly (now) only be experienced on PC as the new Xbox and PlayStation will be able to run them in some capacity almost as well.<\/p>\n

Nvidia has a definite gaming strategy.\"GamingStrategy\"<\/a> Nvidia is looking to simplify PC gaming for users automatically with their GeForce Experience; they have developed their own Shield console, and they emphasize cross-platform gaming.\u00a0 Nvidia employs hundreds of software engineers who make sure that games work well on Nvidia video cards and devices.<\/p>\n

One of the big hurdles that many other developers find is fragmentation of the mobile market between a host of incompatible devices running many different versions of operating systems.\u00a0 Nvidia believes that this is not such an issue if games are developed originally with cross-platform in mind.<\/p>\n

Nvidia believes that the PC is the most important platform for developing games and they show the research by DFC and a GDC 2013 survey in this chart:\"PC-platform\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Nvidia believes that making their extensive library of cross-platform tools available to all developers regardless of branding, will make more fully-featured games run better on all hardware.\u00a0 They emphasized the many game engines that Nvidia works with which goes far beyond working with individual games.\u00a0 This was covered in Nvidia’s 2-hour presentation to the press on opening day at the Mariott Hotel up the street from E3.\u00a0 Here is the meeting agenda.\"Agenda\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Tony Tamasi, a Senior Vice President for Nvidia took the first half hour to present Nvidia’s multi-faceted approach.\u00a0 They target PC with their GeForce Experience which looks to simplify PC gaming; mobile with their own console, the Shield; TV with cross-platform development for consoles; and with GRID for future cloud gaming.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The Witcher 3 “FurFX” Demo<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the highlights was a video of the Witcher 3 which now features PhysX and many other enhancements which Nvidia helped them with.\u00a0 They showed off their Fur Rendering which seems to be a step beyond their competitor’s TressFX.\u00a0 Here is a somewhat shaky video we took during the presentation.<\/p>\n