Getting a PS3 game to simply match the performance of a 360 takes months and months and months of additional work.
I'm not referring solely to the act of getting a game to have some ascribed level of performance. I'm referring to the potential as a platform, which it has plenty of. That said, tools for programming the Cell will improve, especially as the PS3 seems to be continually improving its place in the market.
The 360 is a fine product, but it's unfortunately attached to a marketing department that doesn't know how to win in a hostile market. In the end, this may make the difference.
Which is amazing when you consider the vast graphical power advantage the PS3 has over the 360.
(grin)
It's amazing that years after Sony put out some hyped-up nonsense about the "power advantage of the PS3". Years later, people still belive it to be true, despite all evidence to the contrary.
It's amazing that years after Sony put out some hyped-up nonsense about the "power advantage of the PS3". Years later, people still belive it to be true, despite all evidence to the contrary.
C.
Well, is the power there and people can't program for it efficiently enough? Or was the power never really there? How come the Xbox360 which is older than the PS3 has better graphics, and isn't the Xbox360 based off a PowerPC G5 in some way?
What is remarkable about this gen is we have seen the most enormous graphical power advantage one console has had over its competitors with the PS3.
It is understandable when you look back at what went wrong at Microsoft and led them to being forced to release such a poorly designed console. Back in 2005 the losses from the Xbox fiasco were up in the 4 billion plus range. The console had been on the brink of cancelation at least once and promises were made that if they were given a second chance they would get things right.
So manufacturing was halted around the middle of 2005 and the Xbox team scrambled to throw together something to get out the door as a replacement. Intel obviously had to be dumped if they were going to have something that wouldn't get humiliated by Sony,IBM,and Toshiba's upcoming Cell chips. IBM was their only real option and they basically just slapped a third core onto existing chip tech and made some tweaks to the vector stuff. A half-assed chip where all three cores are fighting over a single cache but certainly better than anything Intel had to offer and a large enough performance win over Intel that would be worth throwing away easy backwards compatibility.
But it was the ATI hardware where things went terribly wrong with the 360. It is graphics hardware that is essentially made for 480p being forced to try to handle 720p. The 360 was gimped with only 10 megs of EDRAM for frame buffer rendering. That is exactly enough memory for a 480p 4xAA framebuffer. To support anything larger than 480p with decent AA you are forced to waste time and performance breaking up your scene into tiles that fit sequentially into the small EDRAM. Many devs just didn't bother with AA and just added in for marketing bullshots. Amazingly stupid when there was so much bragging about 'free AA' on the system when in reality that was only for Nintendo Wii sized resolutions.
It was no surprise that given the rushed and botched hardware design on the 360 that it became to be known as the Xbox 1.5. It wasn't until Epic started putting out their laughably fake Unreal Engine marketing shots for Gears of War that the system had anything that wasn't a graphical embarrassment. There was such a desperate need for something to shed the Xbox 1.5 label that people didn't care that Epic was trying to pass off 5k by 5k marketing renders with massive AA and detail on models and world geometry ramped up as 'in game'.
What was even more embarrassing for the 360 was even when you got past the massively downgraded actual in game graphics for the flagship graphics title for the console, the game had been so massively gimped to allow the weak 360 graphics hardware to put those shiny normal maps on everything that the game ended up being an essentially claustrophobic on the rails shooter with levels designed to be tiny rooms and corridors with tiny numbers of objects on the screen at once or absurdly short draw distances with everything outside of the immediate foreground blurred out to try to hide the limited draw distance.
It?s now been three years since the 360 was released and it is shocking that the same outdated Unreal Engine is the ?graphical showpiece? for the console. There never has been another console that didn?t have a single first party game running a custom engine but instead had to rely on a third party crossplatform engine.
What is remarkable about this gen is we have seen the most enormous graphical power advantage one console has had over its competitors with the PS3.
I find it hard to understand why you think this - when there are good resources like this available, populated by authoritative and unbiased game developers.
This is a good analysis. Unreal got away with some evildoing with their super good looking renders that varied a lot on the actual game. On PC however, I must say to this date, Unreal is a beautiful, evocative game engine (as in UT3 and Bioshock). Technically the engine may make some shortcuts, but in frenzied gameplay, the engine, well, I like it.
So anyways why in titles such as Fallout3, Dead Space, the PS3 graphics are worse than the Xbox360? Not sufficiently good coding of the PS3 titles?
The Transformers game graphics on the PS3 are quite average, is this because this game title is generally a just average movie game anyway?
Are our standards too high now because PC hardware lends itself to now almost monthly updates to peak graphical processing power?
Metal Gear Solid 4 (IIRC) as I have played it briefly on a PS3, the graphics, engine and playability, dare I say, are thoroughly beaten by the latest Ghost Recon, Valve's HL2: Episode2, latest Call of Duty and even in some ways, FEAR Extraction Point. FEAR: Project Origin: will the PC version play, look and feel better than the PS3 version?
I'm really curious because I'm at the stage of deciding between PS3, XBOX360, and going back to PC gaming.
Quote:
Originally Posted by WaitNextEvent
What is remarkable about this gen is we have seen the most enormous graphical power advantage one console has had over its competitors with the PS3.
It is understandable when you look back at what went wrong at Microsoft and led them to being forced to release such a poorly designed console. Back in 2005 the losses from the Xbox fiasco were up in the 4 billion plus range. The console had been on the brink of cancelation at least once and promises were made that if they were given a second chance they would get things right.
So manufacturing was halted around the middle of 2005 and the Xbox team scrambled to throw together something to get out the door as a replacement. Intel obviously had to be dumped if they were going to have something that wouldn't get humiliated by Sony,IBM,and Toshiba's upcoming Cell chips. IBM was their only real option and they basically just slapped a third core onto existing chip tech and made some tweaks to the vector stuff. A half-assed chip where all three cores are fighting over a single cache but certainly better than anything Intel had to offer and a large enough performance win over Intel that would be worth throwing away easy backwards compatibility.
But it was the ATI hardware where things went terribly wrong with the 360. It is graphics hardware that is essentially made for 480p being forced to try to handle 720p. The 360 was gimped with only 10 megs of EDRAM for frame buffer rendering. That is exactly enough memory for a 480p 4xAA framebuffer. To support anything larger than 480p with decent AA you are forced to waste time and performance breaking up your scene into tiles that fit sequentially into the small EDRAM. Many devs just didn't bother with AA and just added in for marketing bullshots. Amazingly stupid when there was so much bragging about 'free AA' on the system when in reality that was only for Nintendo Wii sized resolutions.
It was no surprise that given the rushed and botched hardware design on the 360 that it became to be known as the Xbox 1.5. It wasn't until Epic started putting out their laughably fake Unreal Engine marketing shots for Gears of War that the system had anything that wasn't a graphical embarrassment. There was such a desperate need for something to shed the Xbox 1.5 label that people didn't care that Epic was trying to pass off 5k by 5k marketing renders with massive AA and detail on models and world geometry ramped up as 'in game'.
What was even more embarrassing for the 360 was even when you got past the massively downgraded actual in game graphics for the flagship graphics title for the console, the game had been so massively gimped to allow the weak 360 graphics hardware to put those shiny normal maps on everything that the game ended up being an essentially claustrophobic on the rails shooter with levels designed to be tiny rooms and corridors with tiny numbers of objects on the screen at once or absurdly short draw distances with everything outside of the immediate foreground blurred out to try to hide the limited draw distance.
It’s now been three years since the 360 was released and it is shocking that the same outdated Unreal Engine is the ‘graphical showpiece’ for the console. There never has been another console that didn’t have a single first party game running a custom engine but instead had to rely on a third party crossplatform engine.
I find it hard to understand why you think this - when there are good resources like this available, populated by authoritative and unbiased game developers.
As a consumer, you can argue endlessly about the merits of one platform over another.
But as a businessman what actually matters is one thing only: How does our investment in the device get turned into a profit.
C.
That's probably one of the worst threads for anyone to discern which platform is better. In any case B3D does have *some* devs but the discussions are dominated by folks that aren't or not involved with the game and is trying to guess at what might have been done. The place is interesting and sometimes informative but there are a good number of posers there.
Authoritative and UNBIASED? Since when the hell has any dev ever been "unbiased"? Devs fight over figging which editor is best much less tool chain and hardware.
Nice try though. How's the profit from the games you worked on?
So anyways why in titles such as Fallout3, Dead Space, the PS3 graphics are worse than the Xbox360? Not sufficiently good coding of the PS3 titles?
Say what you want about MS but they DO know how to support developers. Far more than Sony does anyway.
Quote:
I'm really curious because I'm at the stage of deciding between PS3, XBOX360, and going back to PC gaming.
I would say that it will wax and wane as time goes on. Of course PC gaming will be better as the years progress with respect to eye candy. The bottom line is still excellent gameplay. With so few exclusives it's simply a matter of preference and how often you update your PC.
If you're cash strapped and don't care beyond say 3 years the 360 is a no brainer.
But mostly there's no real reason to lock yourself into one platform. Even the PS3 isn't all THAT expensive if gaming is your thing.
[QUOTE=Carniphage;1359502But as a businessman what actually matters is one thing only: How does our investment in the device get turned into a profit. [/QUOTE]
The PS3, in all likelihood, won Sony the Bluray battle. That's bigger money than the game industry is. The PS3 is already a win for Sony.
That's probably one of the worst threads for anyone to discern which platform is better. In any case B3D does have *some* devs but the discussions are dominated by folks that aren't or not involved with the game and is trying to guess at what might have been done. The place is interesting and sometimes informative but there are a good number of posers there.
Authoritative and UNBIASED? Since when the hell has any dev ever been "unbiased"? Devs fight over figging which editor is best much less tool chain and hardware.
Still, it's hard to read that thread and come away with the conclusion that the PS3 is in any way a vastly superior technology. (As WaitNext would have us believe). Looking at tens of titles and hundreds of screen shots - the PS3 and 360 are virtually indistinguishable. In some titles the PS3 is slightly worse. In a few the PS3 is slightly better.
So where is the crushing defeat? What evidence is there for WaitNext's "enormous graphical power advantage" ? It isn't there. For every example there's a counter example.
If Sony put as much effort into its console design as it did into its hype engine. We might see some advantage.
1.7M The Dark Knight sold on Blu-Ray. By the way, that 4c goes to AACS...not Sony. Sony DADC makes money in replication and charges 1c if you want it to send the fee to AACS for you.
So most of the revenue stream is licensing and replication business. For DVD that was what? $10 per DVD player? Call it 140M DVD players in the US alone and that's $1.4B as licensing to whomever the license holders are. More than just Sony but it does show why winning the next gen format was important to both Sony and Toshiba.
Still, it's hard to read that thread and come away with the conclusion that the PS3 is in any way a vastly superior technology. (As WaitNext would have us believe).
The PS3 isn't vastly superior from a rendering perspective. Overall the platform is superior technology. Vastly? Depends on what is important to you I guess. Machines that don't simply die from heat is "vastly superior" to me from a consumer perspective.
Quote:
Looking at tens of titles and hundreds of screen shots - the PS3 and 360 are virtually indistinguishable. In some titles the PS3 is slightly worse. In a few the PS3 is slightly better.
So where is the crushing defeat? What evidence is there for WaitNext's "enormous graphical power advantage" ? It isn't there. For every example there's a counter example.
If Sony put as much effort into its console design as it did into its hype engine. We might see some advantage.
C.
/shrug
You'd have hoped that Sony titles would have gotten better than they have but 2nd year in the consoles life with some major titles still being worked on it's hard to say. Plus there is 3D in the future. There may or may not be some advantages there for either console.
"The point is you're not going to get to see the PlayStation 3 for probably a couple of years, and then you're going to go, 'Wow, that's incredible.'" Dave Perry - GDC 2007
Microsoft has mostly got their act together again with the XBox 360. The original hardware was wrought with problems, from the red ring of death to overheating, to loud noises to scratched disks. Still, they've slowly resolved these problems and stabilized the hardware. I bought the latest model in September, and so far, I've had no problems other than a few freezes/crashes. Still, I'm concerned enough that I always eject the disk when I'm done with the game, and turn off the console when I'm not using it. The power supply is still massive, and I occasionally get noisy DVDs, though not often.
The game selection is better than either the PS3 or Wii, with must-have exclusives like Fable 2 and Mass Effect. Also, they make it easy for devs to port games from Windows and the other way around with Direct X. From what I hear, the PS3 versions of some non-exclusives like Fallout 3 are inferior to the 360 versions. The new system software is a huge improvement, and it's much easier to shop for games, game demos, and movies.
What really burns me is the lack of a wireless network card. The PS3 has it. The Wii has it. Everybody has a wirless router nowadays, and you need to be online in order to get achievements or system updates. I live in an apartment, but I'd have to run a 30 foot network cable from my living room to my bedroom. They're still charging $90 CAD at Future Shop for the wireless network adapter, and don't include it even with the Elite. Also, they haven't implemented WPA2 yet, so I had to change my entire wireless network from WPA2 to WPA, despite WPA2 being supported by my iMac, Wii, and iPod touch, as well as my girlfriend's Windows XP laptop.
If Microsoft wants to increase their market share, they could take the $10 or so hit on their costs and include a cheap wireless card with every XBox.
Machines that don't simply die from heat is "vastly superior" to me from a consumer perspective.
I have always agreed that Sony did a much better job of putting together a box full of electronic. The 360 fan noise is so bad. I won't use the console as a media player. And the RROD has cost Microsoft a fortune in cash and good will.
but...
It's the sales of game titles that matters.
Quote:
Originally Posted by vinea
"The point is you're not going to get to see the PlayStation 3 for probably a couple of years, and then you're going to go, 'Wow, that's incredible.'" Dave Perry - GDC 2007
It *is* incredible.
What's incredible is Killzone 2 is still not finished.
What's incredible is Gran Turismo 5 is still not finished.
(from Wikipedia)
In an April 2008 interview, Kazunori Yamauchi revealed that 150 people had worked on Gran Turismo 5 for four years, with all of Polyphony Digital's 120 employees working on GT5, and the game costing 50 times more to develop than 1997's Gran Turismo. He also confessed that GT5 might not be released until after 2009. In a July 2008 interview with IGN, Yamauchi mentioned that at the moment, Polyphony Digital is focused on updates for Gran Turismo 5 Prologue and that Gran Turismo 5 may not be released until 2010.
Do I see the little red-laser-dot of Howard Stringers sacred-cow-cannon being pointed at Polyphony?
Sony's total victory with BluRay over Microsoft and Toshiba's is yet another perfect example of the collossal failure the Xbox 360 fiasco has turned out to be.
As the Xbox fiasco unfolded and the billions in losses racked up and the Xbox was at least once one meeting away from being completely shut down and put out of its misery there was always the inane hand waving about 'owning the living room' and that the obscene losses were 'worth it'.
Fast forward to the Xbox 360 and some eight billion or so in losses over seven years and in the only major market, the US, where the 360 was still a viable product it couldn't do anything to stop Sony from easily establishing BluRay as the next gen movie format for consumer 'living rooms'.
Found another Dave Perry quote. The tall guy is certainly a source of great quotes.
""Speaking at the Games Convention Developers Conference this afternoon, industry veteran Dave Perry (most known for his studio Shiny Entertainment and its games Enter the Matrix and Earthworm Jim), gave an overview of the games industry as he sees it today. When discussing the current console race, he brought up some interesting statistics that he obtained from research firm DFC Intelligence. According to Perry, Sony has lost more money selling PlayStation 3s than it made selling PlayStation 2s during the entire five years of its peak. So basically, all of the money Sony made on hardware last generation -- it's already spent more to sell the PS3 at a loss so far. Some estimates put that loss at $3 billion. ""
Comments
It really doesn't.
Getting a PS3 game to simply match the performance of a 360 takes months and months and months of additional work.
I'm not referring solely to the act of getting a game to have some ascribed level of performance. I'm referring to the potential as a platform, which it has plenty of. That said, tools for programming the Cell will improve, especially as the PS3 seems to be continually improving its place in the market.
The 360 is a fine product, but it's unfortunately attached to a marketing department that doesn't know how to win in a hostile market. In the end, this may make the difference.
Which is amazing when you consider the vast graphical power advantage the PS3 has over the 360.
(grin)
It's amazing that years after Sony put out some hyped-up nonsense about the "power advantage of the PS3". Years later, people still belive it to be true, despite all evidence to the contrary.
C.
(grin)
It's amazing that years after Sony put out some hyped-up nonsense about the "power advantage of the PS3". Years later, people still belive it to be true, despite all evidence to the contrary.
C.
Well, is the power there and people can't program for it efficiently enough? Or was the power never really there? How come the Xbox360 which is older than the PS3 has better graphics, and isn't the Xbox360 based off a PowerPC G5 in some way?
It is understandable when you look back at what went wrong at Microsoft and led them to being forced to release such a poorly designed console. Back in 2005 the losses from the Xbox fiasco were up in the 4 billion plus range. The console had been on the brink of cancelation at least once and promises were made that if they were given a second chance they would get things right.
So manufacturing was halted around the middle of 2005 and the Xbox team scrambled to throw together something to get out the door as a replacement. Intel obviously had to be dumped if they were going to have something that wouldn't get humiliated by Sony,IBM,and Toshiba's upcoming Cell chips. IBM was their only real option and they basically just slapped a third core onto existing chip tech and made some tweaks to the vector stuff. A half-assed chip where all three cores are fighting over a single cache but certainly better than anything Intel had to offer and a large enough performance win over Intel that would be worth throwing away easy backwards compatibility.
But it was the ATI hardware where things went terribly wrong with the 360. It is graphics hardware that is essentially made for 480p being forced to try to handle 720p. The 360 was gimped with only 10 megs of EDRAM for frame buffer rendering. That is exactly enough memory for a 480p 4xAA framebuffer. To support anything larger than 480p with decent AA you are forced to waste time and performance breaking up your scene into tiles that fit sequentially into the small EDRAM. Many devs just didn't bother with AA and just added in for marketing bullshots. Amazingly stupid when there was so much bragging about 'free AA' on the system when in reality that was only for Nintendo Wii sized resolutions.
It was no surprise that given the rushed and botched hardware design on the 360 that it became to be known as the Xbox 1.5. It wasn't until Epic started putting out their laughably fake Unreal Engine marketing shots for Gears of War that the system had anything that wasn't a graphical embarrassment. There was such a desperate need for something to shed the Xbox 1.5 label that people didn't care that Epic was trying to pass off 5k by 5k marketing renders with massive AA and detail on models and world geometry ramped up as 'in game'.
What was even more embarrassing for the 360 was even when you got past the massively downgraded actual in game graphics for the flagship graphics title for the console, the game had been so massively gimped to allow the weak 360 graphics hardware to put those shiny normal maps on everything that the game ended up being an essentially claustrophobic on the rails shooter with levels designed to be tiny rooms and corridors with tiny numbers of objects on the screen at once or absurdly short draw distances with everything outside of the immediate foreground blurred out to try to hide the limited draw distance.
It?s now been three years since the 360 was released and it is shocking that the same outdated Unreal Engine is the ?graphical showpiece? for the console. There never has been another console that didn?t have a single first party game running a custom engine but instead had to rely on a third party crossplatform engine.
What is remarkable about this gen is we have seen the most enormous graphical power advantage one console has had over its competitors with the PS3.
I find it hard to understand why you think this - when there are good resources like this available, populated by authoritative and unbiased game developers.
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=50674
As a consumer, you can argue endlessly about the merits of one platform over another.
But as a businessman what actually matters is one thing only: How does our investment in the device get turned into a profit.
C.
So anyways why in titles such as Fallout3, Dead Space, the PS3 graphics are worse than the Xbox360? Not sufficiently good coding of the PS3 titles?
The Transformers game graphics on the PS3 are quite average, is this because this game title is generally a just average movie game anyway?
Are our standards too high now because PC hardware lends itself to now almost monthly updates to peak graphical processing power?
Metal Gear Solid 4 (IIRC) as I have played it briefly on a PS3, the graphics, engine and playability, dare I say, are thoroughly beaten by the latest Ghost Recon, Valve's HL2: Episode2, latest Call of Duty and even in some ways, FEAR Extraction Point. FEAR: Project Origin: will the PC version play, look and feel better than the PS3 version?
I'm really curious because I'm at the stage of deciding between PS3, XBOX360, and going back to PC gaming.
What is remarkable about this gen is we have seen the most enormous graphical power advantage one console has had over its competitors with the PS3.
It is understandable when you look back at what went wrong at Microsoft and led them to being forced to release such a poorly designed console. Back in 2005 the losses from the Xbox fiasco were up in the 4 billion plus range. The console had been on the brink of cancelation at least once and promises were made that if they were given a second chance they would get things right.
So manufacturing was halted around the middle of 2005 and the Xbox team scrambled to throw together something to get out the door as a replacement. Intel obviously had to be dumped if they were going to have something that wouldn't get humiliated by Sony,IBM,and Toshiba's upcoming Cell chips. IBM was their only real option and they basically just slapped a third core onto existing chip tech and made some tweaks to the vector stuff. A half-assed chip where all three cores are fighting over a single cache but certainly better than anything Intel had to offer and a large enough performance win over Intel that would be worth throwing away easy backwards compatibility.
But it was the ATI hardware where things went terribly wrong with the 360. It is graphics hardware that is essentially made for 480p being forced to try to handle 720p. The 360 was gimped with only 10 megs of EDRAM for frame buffer rendering. That is exactly enough memory for a 480p 4xAA framebuffer. To support anything larger than 480p with decent AA you are forced to waste time and performance breaking up your scene into tiles that fit sequentially into the small EDRAM. Many devs just didn't bother with AA and just added in for marketing bullshots. Amazingly stupid when there was so much bragging about 'free AA' on the system when in reality that was only for Nintendo Wii sized resolutions.
It was no surprise that given the rushed and botched hardware design on the 360 that it became to be known as the Xbox 1.5. It wasn't until Epic started putting out their laughably fake Unreal Engine marketing shots for Gears of War that the system had anything that wasn't a graphical embarrassment. There was such a desperate need for something to shed the Xbox 1.5 label that people didn't care that Epic was trying to pass off 5k by 5k marketing renders with massive AA and detail on models and world geometry ramped up as 'in game'.
What was even more embarrassing for the 360 was even when you got past the massively downgraded actual in game graphics for the flagship graphics title for the console, the game had been so massively gimped to allow the weak 360 graphics hardware to put those shiny normal maps on everything that the game ended up being an essentially claustrophobic on the rails shooter with levels designed to be tiny rooms and corridors with tiny numbers of objects on the screen at once or absurdly short draw distances with everything outside of the immediate foreground blurred out to try to hide the limited draw distance.
It’s now been three years since the 360 was released and it is shocking that the same outdated Unreal Engine is the ‘graphical showpiece’ for the console. There never has been another console that didn’t have a single first party game running a custom engine but instead had to rely on a third party crossplatform engine.
I find it hard to understand why you think this - when there are good resources like this available, populated by authoritative and unbiased game developers.
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=50674
As a consumer, you can argue endlessly about the merits of one platform over another.
But as a businessman what actually matters is one thing only: How does our investment in the device get turned into a profit.
C.
That's probably one of the worst threads for anyone to discern which platform is better. In any case B3D does have *some* devs but the discussions are dominated by folks that aren't or not involved with the game and is trying to guess at what might have been done. The place is interesting and sometimes informative but there are a good number of posers there.
Authoritative and UNBIASED? Since when the hell has any dev ever been "unbiased"? Devs fight over figging which editor is best much less tool chain and hardware.
Nice try though. How's the profit from the games you worked on?
So anyways why in titles such as Fallout3, Dead Space, the PS3 graphics are worse than the Xbox360? Not sufficiently good coding of the PS3 titles?
Say what you want about MS but they DO know how to support developers. Far more than Sony does anyway.
I'm really curious because I'm at the stage of deciding between PS3, XBOX360, and going back to PC gaming.
I would say that it will wax and wane as time goes on. Of course PC gaming will be better as the years progress with respect to eye candy. The bottom line is still excellent gameplay. With so few exclusives it's simply a matter of preference and how often you update your PC.
If you're cash strapped and don't care beyond say 3 years the 360 is a no brainer.
But mostly there's no real reason to lock yourself into one platform. Even the PS3 isn't all THAT expensive if gaming is your thing.
The PS3, in all likelihood, won Sony the Bluray battle. That's bigger money than the game industry is. The PS3 is already a win for Sony.
How's the profit from the games you worked on?
Thankfully, I now make a profit from every game I work on.
Whether the game goes into profit or not! :-)
C.
That's probably one of the worst threads for anyone to discern which platform is better. In any case B3D does have *some* devs but the discussions are dominated by folks that aren't or not involved with the game and is trying to guess at what might have been done. The place is interesting and sometimes informative but there are a good number of posers there.
Authoritative and UNBIASED? Since when the hell has any dev ever been "unbiased"? Devs fight over figging which editor is best much less tool chain and hardware.
Still, it's hard to read that thread and come away with the conclusion that the PS3 is in any way a vastly superior technology. (As WaitNext would have us believe). Looking at tens of titles and hundreds of screen shots - the PS3 and 360 are virtually indistinguishable. In some titles the PS3 is slightly worse. In a few the PS3 is slightly better.
So where is the crushing defeat? What evidence is there for WaitNext's "enormous graphical power advantage" ? It isn't there. For every example there's a counter example.
If Sony put as much effort into its console design as it did into its hype engine. We might see some advantage.
C.
The PS3, in all likelihood, won Sony the Bluray battle. That's bigger money than the game industry is. The PS3 is already a win for Sony.
You might want to check the numbers.
Sony makes 4c per Blu Ray disk - plus licencing fees.
On a game Sony / MS make $15
A Blu Ray buying PS3 owner has to buy an awful lot of disks to pay back that PS3 loan.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=365&tag=nl.e539
C.
You might want to check the numbers.
Sony makes 4c per Blu Ray disk - plus licencing fees.
On a game Sony / MS make $15
A Blu Ray buying PS3 owner has to buy an awful lot of disks to pay back that PS3 loan.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=365&tag=nl.e539
C.
1.7M The Dark Knight sold on Blu-Ray. By the way, that 4c goes to AACS...not Sony. Sony DADC makes money in replication and charges 1c if you want it to send the fee to AACS for you.
So most of the revenue stream is licensing and replication business. For DVD that was what? $10 per DVD player? Call it 140M DVD players in the US alone and that's $1.4B as licensing to whomever the license holders are. More than just Sony but it does show why winning the next gen format was important to both Sony and Toshiba.
Still, it's hard to read that thread and come away with the conclusion that the PS3 is in any way a vastly superior technology. (As WaitNext would have us believe).
The PS3 isn't vastly superior from a rendering perspective. Overall the platform is superior technology. Vastly? Depends on what is important to you I guess. Machines that don't simply die from heat is "vastly superior" to me from a consumer perspective.
Looking at tens of titles and hundreds of screen shots - the PS3 and 360 are virtually indistinguishable. In some titles the PS3 is slightly worse. In a few the PS3 is slightly better.
So where is the crushing defeat? What evidence is there for WaitNext's "enormous graphical power advantage" ? It isn't there. For every example there's a counter example.
If Sony put as much effort into its console design as it did into its hype engine. We might see some advantage.
C.
/shrug
You'd have hoped that Sony titles would have gotten better than they have but 2nd year in the consoles life with some major titles still being worked on it's hard to say. Plus there is 3D in the future. There may or may not be some advantages there for either console.
"The point is you're not going to get to see the PlayStation 3 for probably a couple of years, and then you're going to go, 'Wow, that's incredible.'" Dave Perry - GDC 2007
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...s-next-for-ps3
Couple years is this year I guess. 5 years between PS2 launch and God of War so I guess 2009 isn't that long to wait.
1.7M The Dark Knight sold on Blu-Ray. By the way, that 4c goes to AACS...not Sony.
You are right. Although Sony probably are probably the single largest beneficiary.
Sony made a big bet, and spent a lot of money on PS3 so that they would "win" the console war and "win" the next gen DVD war.
Commercially Sony have lost the console war. (Lost to Nintendo more than Microsoft.)
And although the enemy; HD DVD has been comprehensively vanquished, they won control over a territory that really isn't worth much.
1.7M Dark Knight Blu Ray sales nets them how much cash exactly?
There's not enough Batman movies in the world to turn Sony's gigantic wager into a win.
C.
The game selection is better than either the PS3 or Wii, with must-have exclusives like Fable 2 and Mass Effect. Also, they make it easy for devs to port games from Windows and the other way around with Direct X. From what I hear, the PS3 versions of some non-exclusives like Fallout 3 are inferior to the 360 versions. The new system software is a huge improvement, and it's much easier to shop for games, game demos, and movies.
What really burns me is the lack of a wireless network card. The PS3 has it. The Wii has it. Everybody has a wirless router nowadays, and you need to be online in order to get achievements or system updates. I live in an apartment, but I'd have to run a 30 foot network cable from my living room to my bedroom. They're still charging $90 CAD at Future Shop for the wireless network adapter, and don't include it even with the Elite. Also, they haven't implemented WPA2 yet, so I had to change my entire wireless network from WPA2 to WPA, despite WPA2 being supported by my iMac, Wii, and iPod touch, as well as my girlfriend's Windows XP laptop.
If Microsoft wants to increase their market share, they could take the $10 or so hit on their costs and include a cheap wireless card with every XBox.
Machines that don't simply die from heat is "vastly superior" to me from a consumer perspective.
I have always agreed that Sony did a much better job of putting together a box full of electronic. The 360 fan noise is so bad. I won't use the console as a media player. And the RROD has cost Microsoft a fortune in cash and good will.
but...
It's the sales of game titles that matters.
"The point is you're not going to get to see the PlayStation 3 for probably a couple of years, and then you're going to go, 'Wow, that's incredible.'" Dave Perry - GDC 2007
It *is* incredible.
What's incredible is Killzone 2 is still not finished.
What's incredible is Gran Turismo 5 is still not finished.
(from Wikipedia)
In an April 2008 interview, Kazunori Yamauchi revealed that 150 people had worked on Gran Turismo 5 for four years, with all of Polyphony Digital's 120 employees working on GT5, and the game costing 50 times more to develop than 1997's Gran Turismo. He also confessed that GT5 might not be released until after 2009. In a July 2008 interview with IGN, Yamauchi mentioned that at the moment, Polyphony Digital is focused on updates for Gran Turismo 5 Prologue and that Gran Turismo 5 may not be released until 2010.
Do I see the little red-laser-dot of Howard Stringers sacred-cow-cannon being pointed at Polyphony?
C.
If Microsoft wants to increase their market share, they could take the $10 or so hit on their costs and include a cheap wireless card with every XBox.
Yeah, it's a total rip-off.
But think about this.
Sony loses at least $50 per console.
MS makes $50 on each WiFi adaptor.
Who is smarter?
C.
As the Xbox fiasco unfolded and the billions in losses racked up and the Xbox was at least once one meeting away from being completely shut down and put out of its misery there was always the inane hand waving about 'owning the living room' and that the obscene losses were 'worth it'.
Fast forward to the Xbox 360 and some eight billion or so in losses over seven years and in the only major market, the US, where the 360 was still a viable product it couldn't do anything to stop Sony from easily establishing BluRay as the next gen movie format for consumer 'living rooms'.
""Speaking at the Games Convention Developers Conference this afternoon, industry veteran Dave Perry (most known for his studio Shiny Entertainment and its games Enter the Matrix and Earthworm Jim), gave an overview of the games industry as he sees it today. When discussing the current console race, he brought up some interesting statistics that he obtained from research firm DFC Intelligence. According to Perry, Sony has lost more money selling PlayStation 3s than it made selling PlayStation 2s during the entire five years of its peak. So basically, all of the money Sony made on hardware last generation -- it's already spent more to sell the PS3 at a loss so far. Some estimates put that loss at $3 billion. ""
C.