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S.Peelman on 01 February 2025
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Jumpin said:
S.Peelman said:

I’d say 7th Gen was “all about” HD output, if you’d boil it down to one arbitrary feature. But that’s why such a take is nonsense if you’d ask me. It can only be about timing, and what comes after something that came before. It’s basically the definition of the word.

I wouldn't say that was the most important feature of the generation - especially since only 2 of the 3 consoles of that generation had HD graphics - the second and third ranked home consoles. But all three had motion controls, and featured them fairly extensively in their promotional material and press events.

E3 2006 showed what it was all about.

(..)

I know. But then you could say that PS3 and XBox 360 only had motion control the way they did later on because Wii was so successful and that generation didn’t start as being “all about” motion control. It was what Wii was “all about”. So what did PS360 start out as 6th Gen consoles but then evolved themselves into 7th Gen? That doesn’t make any sense. Are we going to count the Sixaxis controller in the same vein as the Wiimote? But then, motion control already existed in some fashion before anyway! That’s why I said it’s nonsense to define generations by arbitrary hardware features. It’s just not the definition of the word.

Pemalite said:

I would argue a massive percentage of Xbox 360 games and Playstation 3 games were sub-720P anyway.

I.E. PS3: Bioshock was 680P , Call of Duty was 1024x600, Crysis was 1024x720, Diablo 3 was 1120x584.
Xbox 360: Halo 3 was 1152x640, Fable 2 was 1120x720.

The thing is... Resolution isn't really a feature of the silicon, it's not a feature, it's completely up to developers.
It's a by-product of processing headroom and IO. - If you have a large enough frame buffer consoles like the Nintendo 64 and Playstation 1 could "technically" do 720P just fine. - But when the frambuffer is about 7MB for 720P, it doesn't really fit well with the N64's 4/8MB Ram pool when you need to include things like textures etc'.

Wii was a "DVD" quality console in terms of resolution output for the most part, like the OG Xbox and Playstation 2... Ignoring the fact the OG Xbox had 720P games and the PS2 had 1080i games.

Okay so you why couldn’t you say “Well, SNES and Mega Drive were still part of the ‘cartridge generation’, but PS1 and Saturn is when it was all about CD’s. Then, PS2 was part of the DVD generation. That means N64 was actually 4th gen”. It’s just picking a random thing.