AMD, the company behind the Xbox 360’s GPU, has said this week that the upcoming next-gen Xbox model will offer graphics on par with those seen in the blockbuster film “Avatar.”
The company says the Xbox will launch with those graphic capabilities, making it much more powerful and advanced than current gaming consoles and PCs, even those with the most expensive video cards.
Director of ISV relationships at AMD Neal Robison would not confirm that the company is working on the hardware for the Xbox, but it would make sense for Microsoft to keep their existing relationships in tact.
Furthermore, Robison says AI in games like Grand Theft Auto will be given individual mentalities, removing them from the unrealistic “mob mentality” of current games.
For example, Robison notes (via Examiner), that in current games, if someone is shot, the entire group around will likely run away and yell in a mob. In the future, each pedestrian will have their own mindset and perform their own action.
Result for: xbox 360
Ubisoft, the game developer behind blockbuster franchises like Splinter Cell and Assassin’s Creed has said this week that its creativity is now being limited by the PS3 and Xbox 360’s hardware.
Says Yves Jacquier, Ubisoft’s executive director of production services at Ubisoft Montreal:
Our challenge with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox [360] is that we’re extremely limited in what we can do.
It’s a challenge for the engineers to provide nice graphics and nice AI and nice sound with a very small amount of memory and computation time.
Ubi hopes that they will be able to significantly improve on AI with the next-generation Xbox and PS4:
The challenge is that, if you see an AI coming, you’ve failed. And that’s a problem we have to overcome as we create the impression of flawless, seamless worlds. In general the industry expects that graphics will not be a strong feature any more… Obviously, graphics are better for marketing purposes because you can show things. AI you can’t show.
We think that the next generation of consoles won’t have these limits any more. Games might have more realistic graphics and more on-screen, but what’s the value of making something more realistic and better animated if you have poor AI?
Although unconfirmed, reports have stated that Sony is already preparing to launch the PS4 in early 2012.
Result for: xbox 360
Edge is reporting today that retailers are starting to see the effects of the over 3-week-long PSN outage, with an influx of consumers trading their PS3s in for cash or Xbox 360s.
Furthermore, sales of PSN points cards are almost non-existent and the ratio has begun to shift for multi-platform games, with Xbox taking the lion’s share.
One manager at a UK retailer had this to say:
In the first week of downtime we did not really see any major change in sales or trades. However from the second week onwards we have seen an increase of over 200 per cent on PS3 consoles being traded in, split almost 50/50 between those trading for cash and those taking a 360 instead.
A different retailer said most of those trading in their systems are from the “hardcore online shooter crowd,” gamers that spend many hours online looking to level up. Black Ops and/or Modern Warfare 2 were cited in many cases.
PS3 sales have also taken a hit (says independent retailer in Germany):
We’re just ten days into the month and already we have an increase of 200 per cent in PS3s coming into the store compared to all of March. Normally we sell them really fast, but not this time. We’ve only sold 30 to 40 per cent of our inventory right now.
For software sales, gamers buying Black Ops have split 66 percent to 34 percent in favor of the 360, although the numbers were 52/48 during the first week of the outage.
Not all retailers said trade-ins were growing but one retailer in the UK did say the satisfaction rate for Sony was falling:
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