A lot of people think that the year 2012 is significant. Some think the world's going to end by then. People in the games industry, on the other hand, think that it will be a beginning instead of an end: the beginning of the next console cycle. Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli is one of those who believe that 2012 is when the next generation of game consoles will start showing up. *UPDATE* Two demo videos have surfaced from GamesCom 2009.

Thanks, Peter Bauer!

Naughty Dog has done some great work with their action-adventure PlayStation 3 exclusive Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. The game's co-lead designer Richard Lemarchand, however, told ThreeSpeech that we ain't seen nothing yet because what their game gave us was just 30 to 40 percent of the console's total power. More after the jump.

Epic Games CEO and founder Tim Sweeney expressed his opinion on the flagging state of the PC gaming industry. In an interview conducted by TG Daily, he pointed out the different problems the PC marke t is facing as well as some possible solutions the industry can take if it wants to make some headway against its rivals. You can check out the rest of the interview by reading our full article, accessible through the "read more" link below.

Are you closely monitoring the homebrew and hack scene for the Sony PlayStation 3? There might be some bad news from the people over at PS2Dev. It seems that the PS3 Firmware update 2.10 blocks access of the RSX GPU on the console via Linux. If this is true, those trying to break the system open may have more work on their hands.

Check out the full article for more details.

Croteam, developers of the Serious Sam series, has given word that they have teamed up with Gamecock Media Group for their next project. Gamecock will be publishing the next Croteam game which is being developed on the Serious Engine 3.

Croteam's CEO Roman Ribaric spoke on their choice of publisher and why they decided to go with Gamecock.

The Gamecock team includes some of the best people we've worked with in our 14 years of game development.We had a great time and learned a lot when we worked together to produce the first Serious Sam and we are confident that we will achieve similar success this time around.

The company's next venture looks really good based on their background and the engine that they'll be using for the game. The Serious Engine 3 is the proprietary "game creation system" of Croteam and was billed to be designed for next-generation consoles and state-of-the art PC hardware.

The system is said to be able to take advantage of multi-core HDR-rendering graphics systems complete with full per-pixel lighting, shadowing, and shadowbuffers. It also has a custom GPU-accelerated baker for GI lightmaps, multi-threaded physics solver for multicore CPUs, and even built-in support for action-game models.

CEO and Head of Marketing for Gamecock Media Group Mike Wilson commented about the Serious Engine 3 and Croteam's prospective future in the gaming industry saying that "now, with its next-gen engine pushing the latest gaming hardware to the limits of its potential, Croteam is producing a game that will confirm its position among the world's game development elite".

This new game is slated to be released this 2009 on the PC and next-gen consoles. This may be something to look out for, considering the lovely screenshot demos they've produced with the said engine. Be sure to check back for more details on this game.

  

 

The Inquirer reports that during an interview with San Jose Mercury News, Microsoft's Peter Moore admitted that Microsoft was somewhat left out by Sony's PS3 Folding@Home initiative. However, he does take a jab at Sony and says: "I’m not quite sure yet whether we’re seeing real tangible results from the PlayStation 3 Folding@Home initiative."

What's interesting about the Inquirer report is that they speculate that the Xbox 360 could possibly beat the PS3 when it comes to folding. Here's their words:

The Geforce 7900 inside the PS3 is no match for Xenos in the Xbox. Even the Sony Cell would probably end beaten by 48 vec4+scalar units hidden inside Xbox's 360 graphics chip. Folding@Home is Stream Computing at its finest, and six/seven/eight SPE units can flourish in the CPU. But when compared to the GPU, the Xbox 360 GPU would probably run in circles around Cell CPU.

And then Microsoft's marketing machine might get interested in touting Folding@Home for the Xbox 360 console, since it would no longer be a race between a snail and a rabbit, as far as protein folding performance is concerned.

Well, we're pretty sure that a lot of you PSP homebrew-making devs are leagues and leagues more "1337" than us when it comes to technical stuff like this, so what's you're take on this? Can the Xbox 360 "out fold" the PS3? Let is know in the comments.

Everyone knows that the CELL BE-powered PlayStation 3 can run a couple of Linux distros already, but it comes at a severe hindrance: the Hypervisor chip. This little culprit ensures that the Linux distros will never be able to access the RSX GPU core by NVIDIA, and it's made many Penguin-heads mad. Oh yes, us too.

Because of the huge hardware dead-end, Linux graphics capabilities are dead-awful even at the bearable performance points. Ubuntu, Yellow Dog, Fedora Cores (5 and 6) and Gentoo have all been unable to run Linux gamers' favorite games on Linux, which also includes WinE games and open-source titles.

So it comes to no suprise that Linux users have set up an online petition asking Sony to open up access to the RSX GPU core, or else. Will Sony even care? That depends. After a huge financial fallout from the PlayStation 3's lackluster beginnings, the giant may not be opening a window for open-source programmers to creating 3D games for the PlayStation 3 - unless they pay for the licenses.

Many geeks, however, disagreed that open-source games could undermine the "mountains of wonga" that the electronics giant can earn from the next-gen console - at least not yet. One Linux geek said, "Do they think people will code Gears of War 2 at home?" All they want to do is turn the PlayStation 3 to an experimental living room Linux PC...and play Pong.

So in an effort to fuel this petition and to sound the rally cry for the PlayStation 3 geeks out there, we're posting this up for the world to hear and for Sony to see. Whether they listen or not is really up to them. Hop on over to the petition site over via the "Read" link below.

 

The PS3's launch in Europe has been hailed by Gamestation as a "success", and although eBay sales aren't going down amazingly well at the moment, what Sony's PS3 lacks in auction fever it makes up in curing diseases all over the world. That's right, we aren't talking about a game like Call of Duty - we're talking about the PS3's involvement in curing Alzheimer's disease with Stanford University's Folding@Home project.

You've probably seen our call for PS3 users to unite and join the QJ.Net Folding@Home Team, but basically what it does is use your PS3's idle CPU while investigating protein folding which has been thought to be the root of diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, cystic fibrosis, Huntington's Disease, and some types of cancer. You may ask why we're posting this once again, but this isn't just an appeal to ask you to join.

The PS3 has already made a significant impact on the Folding@Home, with PS3s providing 346 Teraflops of their CPU power, close to triple of what all Windows PCs running the program and 100 more TFLOPs than Windows, Mac, Linux, GPU, and other Operating Systems put together. We would like to thank everyone on the QJ.Net Folding@Home team who have joined since our last post and have helped the PS3 achieve this great feat. QJ's Folding@Home team stats can be viewed here.

 

So as you can see, the PS3 really is making a difference. You may think that your PS3 won't be responsible for curing a disease, but think about it: your PS3 has over 10 times the TFLOPS (processing power) of the average computer - put it to good use. Who knows, the PS3 could be the thing that cures a disease such as Alzheimer’s once and for all. Even if you don't have a PS3 yet, it's quite cool to know that a console you support is giving something back to the world.

If you have just got a PS3 from Europe or another part of the world and would like to donate your processing power to a good cause, click here to learn more about how to join the QJ.Net Folding@Home team. Even if you don't have your PS3 yet, you can download the Folding@Home application to your PC too, it just won't be as effective as the Cell-powered PS3. But you're still helping.

The whole videogame industry is currently in the middle of the transition to high-definition next gen visuals with the introduction of DirectX 10, and to make the transition an easier process, here comes Nvidia with the "definitive" game development platform, Nvidia SDK 10.

The core of Nvidia's new platform is the new NVIDIA Developer Toolkit. It promises to "save developers time and money in creating games that deliver almost lifelike graphics and physics realism." The platform consists of Nvidia GeForce(R) 8 Series graphics cards, Nvidia nForce(R) 680 motherboards, and DirectX 10.

The new NVIDIA Developer Toolkit also includes instructive code samples, advanced shaders, performance tuning, and more, all in a bid to make the creation of Microsoft DirectX 10-compatible games easier.

The Nvidia Developer Toolkit also includes the following:

• SDK 10: all-new DirectX 10, OpenGL, and CUDA code samples for the latest GPUs
• Texture Tools: Powerful libraries and plug-ins for working with textures - now with DirectX 10 support and approximately 10x faster due to GPU acceleration via CUDA
• PerfKit 5: powerful tools for debugging and profiling GPU applications for Windows Vista and DirectX 10 -- now with shader edit-and-continue, render state modification, customizable graphs and counters, and more
• ShaderPerf 2: detailed shader performance information with support for new drivers
• FX Composer 2: a world-class development environment for cross-platform shader authoring; DirectX and OpenGL support with HLSL, Cg, and COLLADA FX
• Shader Library: the world's largest collection of GPU shaders featuring more than 100 different shader effects and support for external submissions

Nvidia is currently demonstrating the entire development platform and distributing some of its components free of charge at the Game Developers Conference (GDC).

It's kind of weird how this PS3-dedicated QJ blog has been lately filled with news and speculations regarding the PlayStation 4. While we agree that Sony will come up with a new console someday, we'd like to remind everyone that the PS3 has just arrived. As it is, the end consumers have barely scratched the surface of this next-gen baby.

However, we can't help but share with you the predictions made by gaming site GamePro. Not that we are fond of nonsense talk but according to them, these are "educated guesses" and so we proceeded and read the article. They mentioned that judging from the gap between all released PS systems, the PS4 will be arriving some time in 2012.

Also, GamePro reiterated that they don't think the PS4 will be name as such. They explained that in Japan, the number 4 has the exact same meaning as death. And we agree that Sony isn't crazy enough to call its product PSDeath. Anyway, they decided to call the next console, for reasons we don't know what, the Sony Galaxy (ROTFL LQTO: Laugh Quietly To Ouselves).

The Sony Galaxy, GamePro dreamed, is going to be designed as "a perfect sphere swirled with star-like patterns." Well as it is, we're having hard time finishing this post because we are AFK LOAO, if you know what we mean. At any rate, here's a summary of the specs for The Sony Galaxy:

• Four dedicated Cell processors each running at 3.8 Ghz
• 4 GB of unified system/video RAM
• A native resolution of 1920 x 1080p
• Multi-GPU technology
• Anti-aliasing filter
• Integrated digital distribution
• High-density flash RAM-based game cards
• Controller known as Galaxis (with features offset analog stick configuration and biometric login feature)