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Playstation 3 Already Won the Next Gen Battle?
damyan writes "The BBC are running an article that claims that the Playstation 3 has already won the next-gen battle, since 'The Informa Media Group predicts that Sony will sell more than 30 million PlayStation 3s in Europe by 2010. It puts Microsoft in second place with 10 million sales and Nintendo trailing in third with five million.' If only everyone could see that well into the future."
I'm curious: what are you basing that statement on? You're claiming that MS doesn't focus on the game developer, I'd like to know why you say that.
Granted, MSFT keeps the XDK under tight wraps, but it's no big secret that it's a very close relative of DirectX 7. And there's libraries of information on programming DX7 out there.
Last time I checked it was the best platform for online console games. With everything moving to broadband, I think the established network will be a giant foothold into the market that Sony will have to work hard to match. Microsoft and Sony have almpost the same hardware, the battle will be won with exclusive titles and features.
When you pay your 100 pounds (which doesn't seem too much to me, I have to say!), you get a 40G hard-drive, a 100-base-T ethernet network adapter, and Sony send you an online id so you can play networked games when you're not coding.
As for outdated, well it only runs kernel 2.2 but, frankly, who cares ? The "cool" bits are the vector units (which you have to code in assembly anyway) and the DMA engine.
I've posted about this before, but the PS2 is (when coded properly) a dataflow architecture. It has massive internal bandwidth, relatively little RAM, and 3 processors (Mips R3K, 2 vector units). The idea is to pull data from the RAM into the processors using DMA, work on the data, and DMA it to the rendering engine. You can chain DMA transactions, and the combination of the flexible DMA, the 3 processors, and the bandwidth is what makes the PS2. None of this is in any way dependent on the Linux kernel - all it's really there for is to create a self-hosting environment...
Simon.
The PS2 Linux kit includes a hard drive, that is part of the big price. Also a network adaptor (without modem), a keyboard and mouse, and a VGA output (that requires a sync on green monitor).
Nintendo's big problem is a series of bad business decisions they made back in the N64 generation
While Nintendo has made many bad decisions, it was in no means restricted to the N64 generation.
Before PlayStation, Nintendo (in North America) was king, and they told developers what they could and couldn't do. You want religious references? Not in America! Gory, bloody games? Tone it down, or you want have access to our machine! You say you would like Nintendo to have an optical drive? Come on, you can do it better with a cartridge!
Granted, they had good reasons for many of these decisions, but you can see from a Developers perspective how this can get tiring, when you can do almost whatever you want on this new PlayStation-thingy! The customer followed the developers, because we all know its the games that make the system.
How about another example? On the release of the GameCube, there was only one official Memory Card, with 59 'blocks' of memory. So these sports games (read: easy money) games come along with their stats and seasons modes, requiring upwards of 100 blocks! So what now, you have to buy a 3rd-party one? Or wait a year after the console's release to buy the 251-block card for only 25% more money? Someone from NOA mentioned that the memory card situation was a major factor driving people away from the GameCube.
However, not everyone (Nintendo included) sees this all as bad decisions. Nintendo now has quite a reputation built up as being easy to use, friendly enough so that anyone in the family can play, and with a high quality level, as well as a low price. Bring this up in an electronics showcase, and this seems like a bad business decision. But any toymaker would kill for the reputation and brand loyalty Nintendo still has.
However, things could change again just as easily for Nintendo, for the better or for the worse.
It's actually a 487Mhz PPC. The real keys are that clock-for-clock the PPC is better than the EE (MIPS R5900 as you mention), the CPU cache is much bigger (256k) on the PPC than the EE (8k), the system bus bandwidth is lower - EE is 128bit but only 150Mhz and RDRAM has a long setup time vs the 1T-SRAM used with the PPC - and core floating point performence is much better on the PPC than the EE (eg. physics, AI).
Most PS2 games are EE-limited. The VUs are great for medium (eg. skinning) and low (eg. transform, clipping, lighting) level vertex processing but that's only a relatively small piece of the total work done by a modern game. They have so little integer and flow control support that you can't do much higher level work on them even if you wanted to deal with writing such things in dual-issue microcode.
Graham