EDIT: the article was taken down. new link is for an article summary.
EDIT #2: the reason the article was taklen down?
10 - Posted on Jun 29, 2005 at 10:04 PM by KristopherKubicki Reply
Ecmaster76: Eh, something was messed up with the content management system. PS3 article is pulled for now because Anand is worried about MS tracing his anonymous insider.
Fuck that's a lot of words, many of which I didn't understand.
This is what I got from it:
In a single thread environment a Desktop PC will kick the new consoles to a bloody, messy death. When everyone eventually gets their heads around multi-threading, things will get quicker but more complicted to make.
Specialised cores are the future (ie Cell, but better).
Porting Xbox360 games may be a piece of piss.
Porting PS3 games may be contravened by health and safety and/or human rights laws.
I'm probably wrong about all that, but it's late. Good find.
the basic gist of the article was: The CPUs in the Xbox 360 and PS3 are not the great performers Microsoft and Sony would have you believe, especially considering the current and near (4 years-ish) development technology. With the current development techniques, AnandTech claimed that the Xenon Xbox360 CPU will only offer double the performance as the original Xbox CPU, because the coders aren't ready to write the multi-threaded code. Basically, two of the Xbox360's CPU cores will just sit around most of the time, making them pretty useless.
The article also addresses the marketing ploy that MS and Sony are using, advertising their CPU's abilities to acheive 1 TFLOP and 2 TFLOPs, respectively. These numbers basically mean nothing about actual performance. The fact still remains that a current gen Athlon 64 or Pentium 4 would outperform both Xenon (xbox306) and Cell (PS3) in pretty much every game that will be developed in the next 4 years or so.
Of course, this is all speculation about the actual state of things, but I trust AnandTech. They have a lot of insider sources and apparantly talked with a lot of game developers for the article.
In any case, both consoles will sell like hotcakes because you have A) fanboys B) casual gamers, C) franchise fans, and D) the hardcore types who buy everything...
FatherJack wrote:Doesn't matter that much though, does it?
All the games that come out for them will run just fine, which is more than can be said for a lot of PC games.
I think the point is that the actual ability of the consoles has been seriously over-hyped by sony/microsoft and that they havn't listened to what the games developers want in terms of hardware.
Although as you say the games that come out on it will run fine, and will be better looking than the previous generation games, although the claims that they'll be better/match the current high end PC's appear to be false.
Not that i'm bothered really, when the xbox was released it wasn't up to the same quality as a high end PC of the same era, but then they never claimed it was at the time (did they?!?) I mean to buy a tip top graphics card alone costs the same as a console so how can people expect the same performance?
/ranting babble mode off
Note abscence of Revolution in this debate, probably cos no-one cares what the tech specs are cos you don't need a fancy machine to play all those awesome old school freebies you get with it
mrbobbins wrote:Note abscence of Revolution in this debate, probably cos no-one cares what the tech specs are cos you don't need a fancy machine to play all those awesome old school freebies you get with it
And also noone knows what it will be able to do. I really hope the Revolution gets the support it needs- a console industry with just Sony and Microsoft is just too scary to think about.
Me too, although I only had a borrowed one, it means I've had to buy two copies of a few games: Skies of Arcadia (DC & GCN), Shenmue II, PSO (DC & XBox), Grandia II, Silver (DC & PC) because I missed them.
It surprises me if the hype is claiming these new consoles approach PCs graphically - they never have before and are unlikely to ever do so(1), but it hasn't hurt the quality of the games much, which I think have got better as time goes on, plus they will have a major game released almost every month.
(1) A TV isn't as high-res, and you (typically) sit further away if nothing else
Both the PS1 and PS2 were tricky to develop for apparently, so no, this is not a new thing and it certainly wont effect sales.
Father Jack wrote:All the games that come out for them will run just fine, which is more than can be said for a lot of PC games.
The reason why I ditched PC gaming a few years back, to re-join last christmas. The whole drivers and patching stuff got the better of me. Things seem to be much better now.
Nickface wrote:What the hell is a Terraflop anyway?
"teraflops" is two parts: the tera and the flops. tera is the SI prefix for trillions and FLOPS stands for Floating Point Operations Per Second. This is a general measure of the decimal math a CPU (or in the case of supercomputers, the thousands of CPUs) can do in a second.
So, a 2 TFLOPS CPU can perform 2,000,000,000,000 addition operations in one second.
meh theres prob not much point getting the xbox 360 as all the good games, and most of the crap ones, come out on pc at the same time as the console or a few months later and there ussualy better on the pc, and most things that come out on ps3 that are good will prob be released on the 360 6 months later if its good cos microsoft will find a way to buy it so them games will prob come out on pc, so nintendo revolution hopefully win and make a zelda game better than ocarina of time hence forth being the most amazing zelda game ever and probably being named the best game ever by lots of magazines etc etc
The teraflops figure contains the processing power of the whole machine and everything in it, from processor speed to graphics speed to, well, everything else! On a whole, the XB360 and PS3 are pretty much equal but you can bet publishers and developers go for PlayStation as it is a more established name. How many times have you heard a parent or non-gamer refer to an Xbox as "the PlayStation"? I for one have heard it many times.
spoodie wrote:
The reason why I ditched PC gaming a few years back, to re-join last christmas. The whole drivers and patching stuff got the better of me. Things seem to be much better now.
spoodie wrote:
The reason why I ditched PC gaming a few years back, to re-join last christmas. The whole drivers and patching stuff got the better of me. Things seem to be much better now.
*cough*battlefield2*cough*
you've got a point there but the game is so fookin great I can put up with it. I was thinking more along the lines of Steam with it's auto-updates.
