New Xbox out by the end of the year

motorguy

donnajunkie wrote: »

I will never buy downloads whether that's music or film.

Me neither. I've a few nice Blu Ray box sets, but i've no urge to pay for downloads of specific films. Theres enough digitially to entertain me on Netflix or Amazon Prime. Or all the other services out there, without having to buy.

Same with music. I'm a big fan of Amazon Prime Music (or whatever its called). I can stream stations, playlists, pretty much anything from my phone to my car via bluetooth so its like radio but without the !!!!!! DJs or adverts interrupting.

motorguy

donnajunkie wrote: »

Well I am being fair here. It does need to have the wow factor in other areas too. It needs to come down in price too. Some of the TVs have, don't know about the players. The Blu-ray Discs haven't.

It does yes. It will over time, economies of scale and all that.

Having said that, i bought this box set of 6 4K Blu Ray movies for £39.99 last November off Amazon, which i thought was pretty good value.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01LB9LU5C/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

donnajunkie

motorguy wrote: »

It does yes. It will over time, economies of scale and all that.

Having said that, i bought this box set of 6 4K Blu Ray movies for £39.99 last November off Amazon, which i thought was pretty good value.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01LB9LU5C/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I'm annoyed how pricey the star wars box set still is on bluray.

Johnmcl7

donnajunkie wrote: »

Haven't Microsoft claimed some games will be 4k native for the updated console.

Yes, the 720p/1080p was in reference to the standard consoles. Although I suspect the new Xbox will not be rendering natively 4k in most cases (despite what MS claim), it will still be a good bit higher than the standard Xbox.

John

donnajunkie

Johnmcl7 wrote: »

Yes, the 720p/1080p was in reference to the standard consoles. Although I suspect the new Xbox will not be rendering natively 4k in most cases (despite what MS claim), it will still be a good bit higher than the standard Xbox.

John

I suspect multi platform games are unlikely to be 4k. Some xbox exclusives might be.

Johnmcl7

donnajunkie wrote: »

I suspect multi platform games are unlikely to be 4k. Some xbox exclusives might be.

Many of the 4k games announced so far are multiplatform, because the console has the same architecture but just a lot more GPU power it should be reasonably straightforward to add 4k capability. Also both the PC and PS4 pro platforms offer higher resolution and with game development the assets are developed at a high resolution then conventionally the challenge is shrinking them down to fit in the limited GPU resources consoles usually have.

John

motorguy

donnajunkie wrote: »

I'm annoyed how pricey the star wars box set still is on bluray.

+1

I'm a bit jumpy about even getting it as its a moving target because of new movies coming out. I'll probably order them as the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy and then see what happens from there

donnajunkie

Johnmcl7 wrote: »

Many of the 4k games announced so far are multiplatform, because the console has the same architecture but just a lot more GPU power it should be reasonably straightforward to add 4k capability. Also both the PC and PS4 pro platforms offer higher resolution and with game development the assets are developed at a high resolution then conventionally the challenge is shrinking them down to fit in the limited GPU resources consoles usually have.

John

I am quite surprised at that with the majority of gamers still being with a console limited to 1080p I didn't think most of them would think it worth making them native 4k, upscalable to 4k maybe.

donnajunkie

motorguy wrote: »

+1

I'm a bit jumpy about even getting it as its a moving target because of new movies coming out. I'll probably order them as the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy and then see what happens from there

The box set has the first 6 films but considering how many times people have bought them before and their age it still seems over priced. Especially when the box set was released ages ago and all new releases eventually come down in price usually. This hasn't though.
I have gotten the movies made since then on bluray.

Johnmcl7

donnajunkie wrote: »

I am quite surprised at that with the majority of gamers still being with a console limited to 1080p I didn't think most of them would think it worth making them native 4k, upscalable to 4k maybe.

It's the other way round - they have to downscale the assets to work at 720p/1080p, they're generated by the artists at a high resolution then they have to be downsampled and compressed to be able to run on the limited hardware of a console. It's common to see screenshots and videos from games early in development that look much better than the released game as they've have to sacrifice the image quality to get the final game running smoothly.

Also you don't even need specific 4k assets to run at 4k, it's different to running at 1080p blu-ray at 4k by upscaling - there's no extra information so the player is simply quadrupling the number of pixels so there's no real improvement in quality. When you take a 720p or 1080p game then run it at 4k or other higher resolution, you're not just upscaling - the hardware renders the game at a higher resolution so you do get genuine benefits like less aliasing and you can apply anisotropic filtering to tidy up the textures to give you a much cleaner and improved look.

The PC has generally always run multiplatform games at much higher resolution even though in many cases they didn't have high resolution texture sets, you can play older PC games at 4K long before there were any thoughts of 4k consoles. Once you get to really old games the textures and artwork are often too basic to work at ultra high resolutions but for more recent titles, you can simply change the slider to 4k, crank up the eye candy and have it look much prettier.

Note that when developers are talking about upscaling to 4k on the PS4 Pro/Xbox One X that's something different, that's when they're working at some resolution above 1080p but not native 4k then upscaling to the final 4k image. Similar to the Xbox One working at above 720p but not quite 1080p then taking the intermediate render and upscaling it to 1080p.

John