Microsoft job postings hint at Xbox 360 successor

Jos

Jos

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The current generation of gaming consoles seems to be enjoying a longer life cycle than usual, with peripherals like Microsoft's Kinect and Sony's Move effectively delaying the launch of next-gen systems by at least a few years. Unfortunately this is also holding back PC gaming, according to some industry players, as many developers focus their efforts on consoles' five-year-old DX 9 hardware rather than the latest graphics monsters from Nvidia or AMD.

That's not to say Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo aren't preparing for the next generation, however, and the latest hint comes from a recent job posting from the software giant. The posting spotted on LinkedIn indicates that Microsoft wants to hire "a graphics hardware architect" for the company's Xbox Console Architecture group, which is "responsible for defining and delivering next-generation console architectures from conception through implementation."

Microsoft says it's looking for someone who has a "solid understand of graphics hardware implementation, including design methodologies and production yield and cost analysis." A handful more postings reveal the company is also looking to hire an audio/video hardware architect, an audio architect, and a wireless DV engineer.

While the above-mentioned ads are not a confirmation of an Xbox 360 successor it's a likely scenario. We just don't expect it to arrive anytime soon considering Microsoft has said in the past that the Xbox 360 was designed for longevity, with software upgrades or hardware upgrades like Kinect possibly extending its life through 2015.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/42732-microsoft-job-postings-hint-at-xbox-360-successor.html

 
when xbox 360 and ps3 was launched they were much better than that generation pc so i think that xbox 720 and ps4 will also be better than present pc so i am thinking to buy them if they support keyboard and mouse since buying a console is cheaper than building a gaming pc and i also have a full hd 40 inch bravia so its good
 
A console with a keyboard and a mouse? Its possible but not very probable... A console is just for gaming and lately media-oriented... Adding a full size keyboard and a mouse would just make it an unupgradable PC from my perspective. If that does happen, what would stop MS from adding the Office 2015 suite into xbox live LOL :)
 
A 360 better then a pc? PC graphics are way beyond that of the 512mb ATI graphics in a 360. The new Unreal 3 game engine takes 4 Gtx 580's to run at max settings at the engines full capabilities. There is no way consoles can keep up simply because of there size just like laptops. Now I see a use for both as I have a 360 and a 3K gaming rig, but when I want a good mmo or to see a game in its full graphic settings then its to the pc.
 
GUEST "when xbox 360 and ps3 was launched they were much better than that generation pc" WHAT! YOUR JOKING RIGHT! You dont know nothing about computers. The PS3 was released in November 11 2006. Gess what! the Geforce 8800 series was released in November 8, 2006 3 days before! (8800 series supported directx 10! Not 9 like the xbox and PS3. Also computers were able to do 1080p long before TV's even were able to do 1080p. Its like today 1080p is not the best... you can get a 2560 x 1600 monitor that's 30", that's 1600p! AND were on Directx11 now...

AND.. Cueto_99 "A console with a keyboard and a mouse? Its possible but not very probable... A console is just for gaming and lately media-oriented... Adding a full size keyboard and a mouse would just make it an unupgradable PC from my perspective." Did you know you can hook up any usb keyboard to a PS3? so all they would need to do is add mouse support... I'm just saying its possible... But I'm a PC gamer for life! Both Xbox and PS3's cant afford to put a $500 graphic card in their products not including SSD making games load SUPPER FAST... I'm sorry to burst your bubble but counsels will never be as good as a high end PC...
And most people have a computer with a PCIE card so they can buy a GTX 570 for $330 instead of $300 for an xbox and get 10x the graphics of ps3 or the xbox. and If you like the controllers you can hook up any xbox or PS3 controller to a PC. PC games are also cheaper so the money you save will pay for the $330 graphics card. (So really I don't see why everyone is not a PC gamer) Its cheaper, can use the same controllers, has better graphics... ect... So whats your excuse of NOT being a PC gamer?
 
Guest said:
when xbox 360 and ps3 was launched they were much better than that generation pc so i think that xbox 720 and ps4 will also be better than present pc so i am thinking to buy them if they support keyboard and mouse since buying a console is cheaper than building a gaming pc and i also have a full hd 40 inch bravia so its good
Click to expand...

You've got to be kidding. My 128mb X1900XT got better frames than the 360 and it has an almost identical GPU architecture . I remember oblivion looking MUCH better on my X1900XT than the 360, same with CoD2.

Anyway, I think that consoles will be the demise of PC gaming. If they could add mouse and keyboard support I'd be all for it, but I just hate using a controller. I think that the next gen consoles will have graphics good enough to stop any incentive someone might have to go PC. Consoles are almost always connected to a TV so it makes it the Ideal media device. I really can't think of a place other than a TV that someone would have a console unless they had a capture card or monitor with HDMI.

Most of the fun of PC gaming for me is lusting after new parts and building my rig. Most people simply don't have the knowledge to either build their own or know what to look for in a gaming PC. I find building a PC is very rewarding and a valuable learning experience every time. Only thing I need some practice on now is cable management. Most gamers wouldn't want to bother with that kind of work and unless they had someone with some technical know-how to help, it could be an expensive disaster.
 
dcrosenthal, I would like to clarify my stance. When I said "A console with a keyboard and a mouse? Its possible but not very probable..." I meant that I know you can hook up peripherals to consoles through USB, I just don't see in the future a Sony or MS bundle with such items... It would make the console an unupgradable PC, maybe not even PC, more of an HTPC... So you see, I'm with you, I'm a PC gamer, and I don't think consoles will ever replace our beloved PCs, they are just way ahead...
 
Well I finally have my PS3 and HDTV setup so it sounds about the right time for talk of the next gen on consoles :p.
 
Cueto_99 said:
dcrosenthal, I would like to clarify my stance. When I said "A console with a keyboard and a mouse? Its possible but not very probable..." I meant that I know you can hook up peripherals to consoles through USB, I just don't see in the future a Sony or MS bundle with such items... It would make the console an unupgradable PC, maybe not even PC, more of an HTPC... So you see, I'm with you, I'm a PC gamer, and I don't think consoles will ever replace our beloved PCs, they are just way ahead...
Click to expand...

Ya I know I just know how Xbox and Sony are a war with each other and PC gaming has increased at a steady 3% each year where both Xbox and Sony have gone down. I just think Sony could easily implement a mouse to be hooked up to it, to compete with Xbox. I mean seriously it shouldn't be that hard... What I dont get is how there are so many councel gamers out their that think xbox and ps3 are better and cheaper when its really the opposite.... I wish their was more ways to get PC gaming up faster. You go to walmart and there are huge signs for PS3 and Xbox ( but PC games are stuck in a corner and you have to search for them.) I have my PC hooked up to my 55" TV and when people come over they are blown away by the differance between it and xbox and ps3... I think if more people knew the differances more people would be PC gamers....
 
The first dude said 'at launch' not 'currently'. While I find even the former dubious, it's not fair to comment how the latest ATI or NVIDIA is really shiny (and they are... really... really shiny) compared to the xbox. Some of the more pertinent comparisons between oblivion and pc 'at launch' are eye of the beholder. That said-

PC pros- Indefinitely upgradeable, and with emulators and etc your PC library doesn't fall out of date. Upgradeable includes often new USER generated content for games. I am/was a long time gamer... and would never give up at least having a mid-grade PC rig. The mouse and keyboard is also a far superior interface for many game types. You also tend to get more detailed (in design and depth of control) games. Compare NWN to fable for example. (There's a more fair to consoles comparison but I'm pointing out the lay of the land.

That said, PC gaming can be a horrendous pain in the booty. Hardware keys, system requirements, driver errors. I bought Half Life 2 brand new in store right after release went home to play... and found someone had hacked my keycode and was playing 'my' copy. There is advantages to standard interface controllers (strain among other things and 'level playing field). My surround sound setup is also much more practical for my console (although I could play PC on it, I think my hizzy is the exception). While cheating happens on all 'platforms' I'd be willing to place bets it happens more on the PC side per average.
Some of the advantages and disadvantages are certainly artificial. Why CAN'T we have more user content on consoles? Why can't we have some of the more detailed RPG's on a console? Sacred 2 (with one platform specific glitch I know of) worked pretty well on both... and that was as complex as the numbers come (IMO). Why are there so few PC 'wow!' games? It's MMO's or games I can get on the console... Why can't I use a mouse and keyb? (XBox supports keyboards as well although only when the default keyboard interface pops up... so you can enter names and such with it, I believe PS3 also supports mouse, but neither support them for gameplay). Solve the plug and play issue and security on PC's and you go a LONG way towards bettering it as a platform. Solve the user content and interface problems (and over-simplifying game types IMO) on consoles and you bring it a lot closer to PC level. There's other problems certainly (the 512 memory in the 360 makes me wince, especially since to do a 720 or 1080 screen you eat up a BIG chunk of that... my VIDEO card has 1gb much less my main system. I think we should be impressed when we see what CAN be done with that relatively low available memory).

Too long, didn't read :D
 
Uh, are you sure on the 'declining' part? I could believe percentage decline in 'share' but raw users would be increasing in all places I'm sure.
 
PCs will always be more powerful than consoles no matter what they release and put into it. On topic tho, I don't own a 360 (don't want to pay for internet/deal with kids yelling in the mic) Im glad to hear 360 is moving towards the future and will hopefully make a good console with the quality the ps3 had.(10% failure rate) Maybe this will not hold PC gaming back so much. The next next generation of consoles will be more computer and media originated than ever before I can assume. Most people including me probably expect a PC with a controller really, I wouldn't be surprised if it had Microsoft word on it with the ability to plug in a keyboard. They should put 2 560GTX running in sli with 16Gb ram and duel i7s running 8 core each, 1Tb drive and add in a small air conditioner inside it. Now that will be a next gen console!
 
Guest said:
when xbox 360 and ps3 was launched they were much better than that generation pc so i think that xbox 720 and ps4 will also be better than present pc so i am thinking to buy them if they support keyboard and mouse since buying a console is cheaper than building a gaming pc and i also have a full hd 40 inch bravia so its good
Click to expand...

Uhhh..lol.. Its impossible for a console to be released with better hardware and/or performance. This is because when they design a console they use the best technology available at the time. Unfortunately they have to perform tests, QA and many other steps before releasing it to the public. So by the time its released computer technology has already advanced into something better.
 
Guest said:
The first dude said 'at launch' not 'currently'. While I find even the former dubious, it's not fair to comment how the latest ATI or NVIDIA is really shiny (and they are... really... really shiny) compared to the xbox. Some of the more pertinent comparisons between oblivion and pc 'at launch' are eye of the beholder. That said-
Click to expand...

How is it in the eye of the beholder? you're saying that higher texture size, better shaders, shadows, view distance, and foliage quality is just a matter of opinion? There is no argument that people think oblivion graphics are better on 360 than PC unless they are a blind fool. At launch the 360 was obsolete, that's a fact.
 
Well after reading everyones comments its time for my own. First off PC's will always be more powerful its just a fact and if you cant figure that one out read up on Moore's Law. You need to remember when they are developing these consoles they start with a current technology that is available from either nvidia, ati, sometimes powerVR but its a current technology. Then they design the console around that and it takes a year or years to bring a product out by then that technology is old and nvidia or ati with there 6 month cycle is now 2-3 generations ahead as far as video cards go.

Now for the PS3 Lovers, there are readily available a large selection of blue-tooth mice and keyboards to purchase that work on your PS3. I know you PS3 lovers will hate to hear this but Xbox 360 actually looks better and im not being biased I own a PS3 for my blue-ray movies but any 3rd party game thats on both consoles 99% of the time looks better on xbox. The reason for that is Xbox games dont need to have anti aliasing programmed into the game the onboard gpu just does it automatically yet on PS3 the game developer needs to program that in, also the PSN network though free is not even in the same league as any internet experience on pc or xbox360.

Games: Well most games on pc are about $10 cheaper then the console version, most DLC's on PC are free compared to your consoles and you are able to download alot of free mods and maps on pc vs console. Now free games is a whole new ball game. PC has alot of good quality free games, there are alot of free MMORPG's available on pc which are excellent, and one of my favorite and best free games currently out is League of Legends. Now bring in steam to the equation, people talking about cd keys, and wrong drivers and such. Well steam eliminates all of that for you, it auto installs the game for you and usually they have what you want on sale at a vastly reduced price compared to a console. If you want a console game cheap you can goto gamestop and get a game with covered with 8 used game stickers, the manual is missing, and the disc looks like someone chewed on it.

Im sure there is plenty more for me to think about but if it wasnt for the PC you console gamers wouldn't have your Call of Dutys and Battlefield games, DOOM started it all on pc, pc started the internet, pc started online gaming, pc started using polygons in quake the first game with polygons long before SEGA came out with virtua fighter and virtua racer, showing how old I am here =)

End RANT
 
Performance maybe, hardware no. When you can clean a lot of the 'general'ness out of you're 'os' and can code for the maximum potential of the machine. You will also find different processor types in a console that would be somewhat impractical for a general purpose PC. .

Dev's are generally a generation behind as well, although you can purposely go beyond the limits in some ways. I might make the particle slider go to 15000 even though my dev machine can only handle 5000, but thats 'thin' future-proofing for a year.

It seems we see some pretty awesome looking console games not within the first 6 months, but within the year after that, then the PC curve catches up.

What messes with my head is at this moment, we are WELL past the PC control of the curve. I can't for a second believe that Killzone 3 or Halo: Reach could hold a candle with a well executed PC game... but where are the games?

I'm believe a combination of economics- both user spending and dev 'going where the money is', lack of will on people to push the upgrade and perhaps some erosion by consoles into PC's strong points (although not enough yet... I want ALL the advantages of both pleeeease) as well as some other this or that is in play... I wonder if the lack of 'pc version' differentiating (ugh word) is in play? If COD-BO has double map sizes or some extra flashy-ness would it get gamers to start pushing for an upgrade? We may also be hitting some sort of saturation point with what we expect. We'll constantly want photo realistic, but we seem to be pretty good at 'making do' with what we have now. The hard core are, by definition, the minority, this may be one of the effects of now being in the minority in what 'used to be' hard core games.
 
In reply to yRaz.
Just before Oblivion came out I built my new PC, I spent more building it than I ever have on a PC before or since... AT LAUNCH it was pretty unplayable to play it at the settings you describe. You definitely brush an advantage of the PC- any PC I spent even just 300 on will run it full spec with quite a few mods (which was why I bought the PC edition... who the hell buys TES on a console? MODS MODS!) Of course on the PC you could also choose which settings did matter to you.

But the graphic quality? Really didn't work out that much better, I certainly didn't run at 720 with max et al. I certainly did get slowdown, and AA was nightmarish on playability. At a sticker price of 1300, 550 for the vid card alone... we run into WAY too many this and that comparisons. You could have quad SLI'd the cards I had, but if I recall correctly Oblivion had to be patched for SLI at all. You could have gone intel instead of AMD as I did, and I'm sure that would have made... some difference, assuming I was processor bound which seems unlikely. I'm not a master builder/tweaker but I think AT LAUNCH it's hard to F* up what I did or achieving a much better result without jumping thru hoops. I'll admit it does contradict what I said about future proofing now that I think about it- you could test individual settings at max crank with the others down.

The whole thing points out some advantages of both, I've mention the PC, for the console- the same console you owned would still be 'relevant'. You could just pop the disk in and play. If I wanted to play Oblivion again I'd get to sit thru the install process and worry about win 7 capatibility among other things. (And search for Mods, but thats a plus....)

As the other guy above said- moore's law favors PC's certainly... but the advantages of a closed platform (picture designing a pure linux kernal to run just games) are definitely there.
Also-steam has show itself to be a helluva service, I wish I'd trusted it at the time HL2 came out and I wouldn't have had my key problem. There's still something about owning a disk though. I especially like their 'buy back' program, it shows they care a lot about their users I think.
 
Guest said:
when xbox 360 and ps3 was launched they were much better than that generation pc so i think that xbox 720 and ps4 will also be better than present pc so i am thinking to buy them if they support keyboard and mouse since buying a console is cheaper than building a gaming pc and i also have a full hd 40 inch bravia so its good
Click to expand...
Ugh. You can always identify console fanboys by their obtuseness and lack of sentences.
 
Hard to imagine the 360 or PS3 consoles being extended to 2015, there's been too much progress in the graphics arena to think you could sit on these architectures for another four years.
 
The Next-Gen systems aren't coming out until something else "big" develops. I believe they'll wait and see how "tangible discs vs. downloaded content" develops. Then there's the ports issue. Every year it seems the ports are upgraded. I'm guessing they may want to wait on USB 3.0 or even 4G becoming more popular.

There's always more to gaming than graphics. I wouldn't buy a new console if it's only upgrade were graphics. Isn't that why you upgrade PCs instead of buying new ones?

Would you go out and buy a new PC if they came out with a much more powerful video card with a different port interface, or would you upgrade your current PC specs?

I'm not sure about the Xbox 360, but the PS3 is quite modern. If they do decide to replace it, it'll still be worth the money as a Blu-Ray player that plays games online and [surfs the web (lol)]. It also plays and converts CDs to music files.

The next PS4 might well be $1000 if they intend to make it that much more superior to the PS3 and release it within the next 5 years.

Finally, I don't think they want to outpace the market like they did last time, either, and I believe Micrsoft learned to avoid this mistake from Sony.
 
the PS3 is no more modern than the xbox , think they have both reached there limit now , that limit was very high considering the hardware they have , i enjoy both consoles . I think when most people upgrade its a full machine , as if you buy your PC correctly theres no bottlenecks but as soon as you buy a next gen card your hitting a bottleneck. I know i prefer to just buy a new desktop each time . No way a new PS would cost $1000 to be better than PS3 , hardware is miles ahead of PS3 now and much cheaper than when the PS3 came out , theres 4 generations of video card more , and to go 2-3 ahead of PS3 wouldnt cost anymore than the PS3 did then.
 
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