| KBG29 said: It would be an industry rocking move if they did this. I actually think this would be a great move, and I would get behind it without a second thought. Like you said, RAM is the place to hit. What I wolud do is bump up the Xenos on chip RAM to 24MB so it can do its job at 1080p without any fallbacks. Then add another 512MB of memory to the main pool, and through in 256MB of SSD for the OS. With these minor upgrades they would see major performance improvments. Launch Xbox Natal at $399, and I think MS would have a winner on their hands. Oh, but one thing they have to think of. May not be that big of a deal, but they have to make sure that the Zune market place is offering 3D versions of the same movies Blu-ray is offering. I don't see why they couldn't, but you know if they don't Sony will be shouting only game console with 3D movies |
"DVD, and developer support.
Right now Sony has the advatnage with Cell, and Blu-ray, but devs are not taking advantage of them. This leads me to believe that the same would happen with the extra memory added to the Natal. Also as of right now MS is already battling despratly over disc space. Doubling the assets would mean every game on multiple discs, or very small games.
So I think if this happed, only MS games would see the benefit, and unless it started selling like the Wii that would not change.
I think it may be wiser just to stick to the 2013 - 14 for new consoles."
I didn't want to deal with the optical drive in the original post because it would have made it too long. In every change they would make to the hardware they have to consider it from a cost and revenue perspective. I.E. Does this change give them more revenue OR does this change reduce the cost of the console OR both. Anything which doesn't meet this criteria cannot be considered as a plausible change to the hardware.
Now in regards to the optical drive they do have two options they can implement either at the same time or either/or.
1. Implement Blu Ray in the console.
They would do this only if they could off-set the cost of this change with additional revenue. Implementing Blu Ray for the Xbox 360 doesn't make sense because it would be an identical implementation to the PS3. The Xbox 360 could not benefit from this but improved Xbox hardware would. They can implement hybrid DVD/Blu Ray discs as the technology is maturing and the Natal hardware makes sense for Blu Ray as the Natal hardware can be used as a media centre interface. So rather than paying for the cost of the Drive + $10 per console for a royalty they can charge the end user $30-50 to implement Blu Ray movie playback and turn it into a profit centre/break even proposition and give the end user one more good reason to purchase an Xbox Natal.
2. They can use the reserve space on their DVD discs. Xbox 360 discs are 6.8GB, Dual layer DVD discs are 8.5GB. They have 1.7GB of space spare. This is the cheaper option of the two to implement as it doesn't require any changes to the discs at all. They lose 1GB of space to the DVD movie that plays when you put it into a DVD player and if they used that they could put all the Natal upgraded console specific code and data in there like more advanced assets, game engines etc so the same disc put into a Natal console could display in full 1080P with 3D if desired.
As for the Ram. Theres a dual purpose which I feel justifies the increase. The current Xbox 360 devotes 32MB of ram to the OS functions, if they increased that to 100-200MB they could implement advanced Natal features like having a visual display of your team-mates using the Natal camera in game rather than audio only, improved audio quality etc. However the real reason to do this is so they can implement advanced services such as a form of Natal Windows for those who wish for it. They have no reason to not allow people to browse away from Xbox Live if they earn a subscription for ceding that right. They don't need a full 1GB of ram for 1080P assets, a simple doubling of Ram allocated to video memory would be enough.
Tease.
Essay Pro