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The Battle Of The Consoles: From Atari To The Xbox
msolnik writes: "There's been a lot of talk about Xbox, and GameCube, and even more speculation about the technology inside the box. However, the console wars are not going to be won based purely on technology. There's a long history of cyclical win and lose peaks and troughs for companies that have tried to stay the course in this business. Nintendo stands alone in having survived a number of generations of innovation and still managed to remain a contender in the market. Tom's Hardware has delivered this unique assessment of The Console Wars." Update: 12/06 16:28 GMT by M : Note that Tom's has updated some of the charts in the article - they note that there was a misunderstanding between Tom's and the article's author as to which version of the charts to post.
The quality at THG has dropped amazingly low in the past 6 months. Poor grammar, low quality research and half-finished articles all contribute. This is a shame to be honest. Still, there are plenty of other places to visit that do a much better job.
The GameCube vs XBox analysis on ExtremeTech is a lot better than the THG one. It is a lot more in depth, well researched, with their reasonings shown.
- R3000A 32bit RISC chip @ 33.8mhz - Manufactured by LSI Logic Corp.
- Clearing capacity: 30 MIPS
- Bus bandwidth: 132 Mb/sec
personally i thought the article was badly put together. like other people have mentioned, skimming over some very important landmarks (hello, where was the zx spectrum and manic miner).They might be lost though. If it turns out to be really easy to modify an X-Box enough to run Linux and play your MP3's, DIV-X movies, do email, etc, then people might buy an X-Box and never spend a penny on an X-Box game.
Look mate - in your peer group, and on this website, maybe there is a relatatively high percentage minority of people who are going to do this - but in the real world, normal everyday people do not do this. Wake up!!
As an example - how much money do you think MS 'lose' on computers sold on which people solely install linux? It's really not that great a percentage of total pc's...
The history was superficial, and the information on the current consoles was wrong in respect to the Game Cube.
First, he makes the common mistake of giving the polygon/sec counts. MS and Sony have theoretical maximum counts while Nintendo's count is real-world with all of the eye candy turned on. He then uses this comparison to show the inferiority of the Cube hardware when the framerate of Cube games could be higher given the same games with complex action.
Look at the columns of features. See "N/A" next to most of the Cube's fetures? It makes it look like there's nothing there, yet the Cube has good marks in most of these rows, such as audio, HDTV, broadband and 56K modem.
I gave up on the article before the middle - Doom creating the market for "add-in sound and graphics cards" was the final straw. If only there were some people over the age of 16 with half a brain writing for these hardware sites .....
the turbografx made the list, yet the SNES and the gameboy didn't? hello? the gameboy has been the hottest selling console and i still see myself playing one in 10 years. i thought the jaguar was 64bit? it got listed as 32! and the psx which is 32 got listed as 64.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
> Consoles have NEVER, EVER, featured backwards
> compatibility as a selling feature; the PS2 is
> anomaly.
Wrong! You can start back in the Atari days and see this sort of thing. The Colecovision, Intellivision, *and* the Atari 5200 had "expansion modules" allowing you to play Atari 2600 games on each console. Mind you, these were Atari 2600s in little cases that just used the video outputs of the consoles, but this *was* a selling point.
Fast forward to the Atari 7800 - which was truly backwards-compatible with the 2600. No "expansion modules" required. In fact, 2600 and 7800 carts plugged into the same slot! (In case you say my other examples were iffy, this one is functionally equivalent to what the PS2 does)
The TurboDuo could play TG-16 Hucard games as well. (Yes, a Duo is basically an expanded TG-16, but you could buy a duo in one piece.)
Note that not all of these consoles were terribly successful, but that's another story altogether.
I think it was the old Sierra Space/Police/Hero's Quest games that finally made me break down and buy a sound card.
I absolutely had to hear those little tunes and sound effects on something better than a PC speaker.
I can't see how Doom could have increased demand for add-in graphics cards, though. It used no 3D acceleration and any computer bought anywhere near the time it came out had a VGA card more than capable of handling the game's 2D-3D graphics anyway.
Doom 2 kicked my little 486dx33's ass, and even then the thing I upgraded was the CPU and not the video card.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
Sort of. The graphics processor (part of "Tom") had a hybrid 32/64 bit architecture, but the majority of the system was indeed the full 64 bits (including the object processor, blitter and memory controller). The DSP was 32 bit though.
Saying it was a 32bit+32bit system is a bit disingenuous, although I remember it's what people used to say at the time. 8)
Also, I seem to remember reading somewhere that there was a 16 bit controller chip somewhere in the mix, so by your logic they should have called it an 80 bit system!
Read my online journal: http://chris.carline.org
Here's what Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO has to say about it:
.Net connection and you have invented the Bizbox, a $300 appliance that will bring the latest Office applications (by subscription of course) to the corporate desktop with zero admin needed. I think Xbox is just the tip of the iceberg for what MS has planned for these little console systems.
"We know we have to succeed but there is a broader concept there that we will pursue at some point," Ballmer said, "You can say, is it the of the road or is there a bigger play? And the answer is yeah, there's a bigger play we hope to get over time." (Source: Reuters)
If I were Dell, HP or Gateway (or a corporate PC support technician) this statement would send a chill up my spine. Take the basic Xbox, add a keyboard and a
There are three types of problems in this chart. In many places the authors put "N/A" because they were simply too lazy to find out the correct specifications. Uninformed readers might get the impression this means the console lacked any features in that category. Secondly, some of the numbers are just wrong. Finally, many of these numbers are comparing apples to oranges. Since the errors seem to be concentrated on the Gamecube, and that's the console I know the most about, I'll just stick to correcting their mistakes on that column in the table.
Graphics Processing Unit_____162.5 MHz, not 200 .5 meg and up cards, an
+____________________________adapter will allow the use of flash
+____________________________cards up to 64 megs in size
Memory Bandwidth_____________2.6 GB/s, not 3.2
Simultaneous Texture Fills___8
Compressed Textures__________6:1 (S3TC)
Storage______________________Standard
Maximum Resolution___________1920x1080
Many of these categories aren't directly comparable. Even the RAM comparison is misleading, because Nintendo decided to use several different types of RAM. There are 24 MBs of so-called "1T-SRAM," which is actually a new type of DRAM offering improved and more consistent access times and transfer rates. There are also 16 megs of 83 MHz SDRAM, for sound and (speculatively) "other" unspecified purposes. Flipper has 3MB of embedded memory in the form of 2MB frame buffer and a 1MB texture cache. This totals 43 megs. On the other hand, the Xbox is a UMA machine with 64 MB of 200 MHz DDR-Dram. It has more memory and memory bandwidth, but actual performance is further from the peak numbers listed, in comparison to the Gamecube, and UMA designs are less bandwidth efficient. Therefore the memory bandwidth numbers aren't comparable either. The Gamecube is really the most bandwidth efficient of all 3 consoles, for a handful of reasons.
The polygon performance numbers given are meaningless, and clearly whoever posted those numbers has no idea what they mean. "6-12M/s" is Nintendo's conservative estimate of what developers would achieve in game. The PS2 and Xbox numbers are probably for flat-shaded triangle meshes - a number which is nearly useless in revealing what the hardware can do in a real game. Unless, of course, I, Robot becomes popular again.
Pardon my shitty chart, but the <pre> tag isn't allowed anymore, and the lameness filter was driving me nuts.
--
Ikaruga scoreboard (supports netranking)
I just read that piece last night because I stay about 6 months behind in all my magazine reading. I would like to say I do it deliberately to keep things "in perspective," but its more like I've got too many classes and too much work and too much web site to read the things when they first come in.
One more moderation and I'll hit the karma ceiling...
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
The demo scene is alive and well
http://www.pouet.net/
The last ASM '01 conference had some incredible demos.