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xbox not-announced their lineup for next year as a part of a FTC lawsuit and I like Game Tube design as much as the next gal but bruhhhhhhhhhhh discless console
it's not even that i'm like "argh!! i only want physical media!!!" (i do) but just that it means that console is now no longer a bluray player. which sucks because it's better at playing blurays than the PS5 is.
they're definitely doubling down on game-streaming stuff, a technology that is acceptable at best and literally unplayable at worst, and that's from them with the best tech around. idk.
i want that new controller though.
Up top: I think streaming is dumb and wasteful but to some degree latency can be mostly solved, or at least heavily mitigated. And it's through a technology foolishly called "time traveling" -- but not in the way you might think.
It is, essentially, the same technology that powers emulators having a "zero latency" toggle. Rather than just "emulate better," what this actually does is simulate multiple instances of the same game, but in each instance, you're pushing one of the controller's buttons. Think of it like different timelines, with a dedicated timeline for each button (and button combination) on your controller.
Now let's say your emulator of choice has a delay of 2 frames. You push a button on your controller, and two frames later, the game executes its chosen action. With zero latency/time travel enabled, what actually happens is the emulator detects your button and switches you to the timeline where you already pushed that button two frames ago.
To your perception, the game is just functioning normally with no latency, but under the hood, massive CPU and RAM requirements are needed to generate what is effectively dozens of savestates every single frame -- one for each possible future. And the more frames you need to predict in advance, the higher the system requirements are, exponentially.
I think something like this is how these streaming services can even work at all. It is in theory possible to play a streamed game with little-to-no perceptible latency, but that will still require a constant connection of 50-100gb/s+ in addition some server data center somewhere burning massive wattage to power something that really doesn't need to be remote.
Again: functional, but an unnecessarily massive waste of resources, just because some suit somewhere doesn't like the concept of "ownership" and would rather bleed you for a subscription fee from birth to death.
The only game streaming I can tolerate is Streaming from my bigass desktop to my laptop in the other room.
God, I'm glad i got one before this refresh. Why the fucking circle?
Also just
this is so much nonsense based on the idea that 4k gaming is Doable right now and it's just... not