Slashdot Mirror
Next-Gen Console CPUs Not Up to Hype
rAiNsT0rm writes "Anandtech follows up their initial in-depth coverage of the Xbox 360 and PS3 CPU with the real truth about the next-gen consoles' Poor CPU Performance. From the article: "Speaking under conditions of anonymity with real world game developers who have had first hand experience writing code for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 hardware (and dev kits where applicable), we asked them for nothing more than their brutal honesty. What did they think of these new consoles? Are they really outfitted with the PC-eclipsing performance we've been lead to believe they have? The answer is actually quite frequently found in history; as with anything, you get what you pay for."" Update: 06/30 21:11 GMT by Z : The original article disappeared from Anandtech, so I've changed the link to point to the story as hosted by Google Groups.
Oh man, why not just kick them in the balls too while you're at it!
Can that really be true?
1. With the next generation of consoles becoming nothing more than computers, what becomes the purpose of having two separate machines? Or perhaps the real point is, why use your computer for gaming?
2. What will the next generation of consoles actually do to improve the quality of games? Polygon technology has reached an apex whereby increases in graphical quality are hardly noticable in most cases. What about the *fun* factor? Early generation consoles used increases in technology to give us better gameplay than before. This is easily visible in going from Atari 2600 -> NES -> SNES -> N64. The Atari was actually capable of very little (but was fun), while the NES had full graphics capabilities, but low color support. Jumping to the SNES provided tons of color, scaling, rotation, and other features that made games more fun. The N64 proved that 3D environments didn't have to be boring, linear, or only for shooting zombies (or demons as your preference may be). For example:
Zelda -> Zelda III: A Link to the Past -> Zelda 64
Contra -> Contra III
Super Mario Bros. (I-III) -> Super Mario World -> Mario 64
StarFox -> StarFox 64
Today's games, OTOH, are mostly just regurgitations of the FPS. Doom was a lot of fun when it came out, Quake was a hackers dream, and Quake III made blasting your buddies the best thing since sliced bread. (Unreal Tournament wasn't bad either.) But it really gets old after awhile. How many times can you run around shooting the same bad guys with the same tired weapons? Where's the new game play frontiers? While consoles were screwing around, I had fun playing RTSes on my computer. Or flying a starship in Bridge Commander. Or driving mechs around. i.e. Varied and interesting game play. Sadly, even that has disappeared on the PC.
Where's the gaming goodness? Where's the pointy sticks? Where is the Coconut Monkey!?!
While I realize that the gaming industry thinks that games are Hollywood productions, I honestly think fun games require nothing of the sort. Sure, I'd love to see another Wing Commander game with Mark Hammil and Tom Wilson, but that's not what the gaming industry is producing. What we need is for games to again break out of the mold and try new things. Keep riding the bleeding edge of gaming. It doesn't have to be an expensive game, just a *fun* one.
Tell me something: Why do games today *have* to be something I can't let my 5 year old son play? He still plays the old Nintendo games I used to play as a kid. He thinks they're a lot of fun. Yet do you think there's a chance in hell that I'm going to sit him in front of Doom III or an X-Box? No way! Why have we eschewed Gaming Goodness(TM) for violence and call it fun?
Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm getting old.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I just want a lazy-susan thingie on the bottom of my new XBOX360 so I can rotate it the promised 360 degrees...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Say it isn't so!
"If you hype it, they will come."
That's unpossible!
But... but... we all can turn to NINTENDO to be that savior we needed!
Steve Jobs reportedly met with Sony prior to the Intel switch and came to the same conclusion. I'm curious what techniques Apple used to quantify the Cell's CPU performance?
This just in: PC Hardware site blasts consoles while citing anonymous "sources" and blatant factually incorrect claims (for instance, PPE core = Xenon core).
Developers atuned to developing for PCs with their out of order execution and high general-purpose performance port their code quickly to these in-order CPUs that rely on multiple threads for performance, and find that the performance isn't blistering!
It turns out they'll need to make more efficient code, as Xenon/Cell forgo lots of transistors that make horrible code perform better.
Gag me...
And this is news? The console makers have been doing this for years. Remember when the PS2 was announced and we were told of its "Toy Story Quality Graphics Rendering"? Same thing with the infamous "Mode 7" in the Super NES system. Who can forget the So called 16 bit TurboGrafix 16? As I stated above, the console makers have hyped up every system that has ever been released and all have failed to meet the hype that preceeded them...
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
Physics processors came too late for this generation of consoles. This will really put PCs over the top. This should be coming out by the end of the year.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Are the cpus that are going to be in the final box (not the dev kits) even out yet? Even so, it's obvious that they're overhyped. The only quote I'm inclined to believe is nintendo's (2-3 times faster overall).
And posted anonymously so as not to karma whore
Mirror
Slashdot needs emoticons, if just so we can pretend to be shocked.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
I keep reading that PC gaming will die sooner rather than later. What this article says to me is that even a dedicated console will be roughly as powerful as high-end PCs in a year or so. In two years, most average PCs will have the same power as a next-gen console.
Now, the matter is far more complicated than simple CPU/GPU power. What it says to me is that there's plenty of room for PCs to continue to drive innovation in the world of gaming.
Sony was hyping up the Cell so much it was almost guarenteed to suck.
It's almost like the Cell architecture was designed to score the highest possible score on trivial benchmarks (like the ones that give you FLOPS) without worrying about real world performance. Where have we seen this before? Oh yeah, the Emotion Engine (PS2)!
Wasn't Sony saying that we'd be sticking Cell processers in everything because they were going to be so great? I seem to recall talk about personal computers switching over to Cell because it was going to blow regular processors away. In a way, it does (FLOPS), but in practice it's way slower than even processers from last year.
I read the internet for the articles.
We don't know what any system will cost.
Well, was it not discussed somewhere on here that the new PS3 core was designed to be more "pretty" and not so much "smarter"? Seems like these days, people are more for the look of the game than the thought process required to play it. Well, I do enjoy the occasional FPS and such... but I'd also like a game to challenge my mind a bit. Not sure I liked the Link to the Past -> Zelda64 progression. :|
But these days, games just... do it less and less for me. I enjoyed a game where I could not only fly ships, but my conversations changed outcomes. Games where I could drive the outcome in a game based on my skill and precision as a player.
And when Wing Commander Online was right on the cuff of development... Origin canned it in favor of Ultima(te Disappointment) Online.
Oh where have the cowboys gone indeed. :D
You can't build a faster processor than a graphics gpu for graphics.
What the console makers should be doing is bundling TWO graphics cards in their systems so you can double the polygons of a regular high end computer.
But that would cost $$$.
I don't know what happens in soviet russia.
CPUs hype YOU! HTH. HAND.
Slashdot needs emoticons, if just so we can pretend to be shocked.
You mean like this... =8-o
Of course this isn't surprising to any of us slashdotters, we all recall the massive amounts of hype surrounding the PS2 for example. There was everything from "X times as fast as PS1" to "will improve viewing quality on PS1 Cds" etc.
One of the major reasons not to believe the hype is that legally Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft may test their new processors on ANY machine they wish, including an extremely expensive, painstakingly built device in a lab somewhere. Then, after acheiving an astoundingly high speed from it, may publish the info legally, all thats required is that the processor actually produced the speed results in something.
But once the processor makes it into your PS3 or 360 the speed is considerably impaired. What was 3.8 teraflops will decrease to around half a teraflop, perhaps less, simply due to the build quality of the device...its simply nowhere near cost effective to produce something on a mass scale capable of 5 or 10 teraflops yet. Also theres marketing statistic-inflation to take into account too of course.
Microsoft, Sony Promise Sun, Moon, Failt to Deliver! Film at 11!
We saw this with the Xbox and the PS2, we saw it to an extent with the PSX. This shouldn't surprise anybody at this point.
Really, I've gotten over looking at tech specs and I'm simply waiting to hear about the titles each will have. So far, FFXI for Xbox 360 is vaguely interesting, but I already have the PS2 version (and could probably install it on the PS3 if I really, really wanted to). Beyond that, I'm not sure S-E is even going to be playing the "exclusive title" game any more (after all, XI is canon Final Fantasy and will be appearing on two different consoles now. XII seems locked in for PS2, but beyond that... and let alone any future DQ games...)
PS3 might get my interest if they up-scan the resolution on PSX polygons (like Bleem!), but I doubt they will and I already have hardware to play PSX games at their original resolution.
So far, the only system that has games for it I know I will like is the Revolution, if only for the "download old ROMs" aspect. Especially if Sega gets in on the act as they've been hinting.
Well I don't. I opted not to hurt my eyes with the "awesomeness" of it. At any rate, with situations such as these, I'm surprised that there is a move away from the powerhouse desktop computers and towards the gaming consoles. It just seems like things are getting more and more disappointing as time progresses... why not write up a game that can fully utilize your computer, slap it on a Linux platform, and call it a day? :D
I should start a software company... :o
We need a 'Duh.' rating.
You people do realize that the current PS3 and 360 dev kits are not the finished version of the hardware right? The xbox 360 hardware available at E3 was about 50 percent less powerful than the final system is supposed to have.
Of course it's not as good as the hype. Hype=false advertising. False advertising=how to get money. Getting money=goal of every corporation of any kind. It's really not a difficult concept, here.
Whatever you think of FPS, nobody can deny that racing games are consistently improving from version to version. Anybody who's tried Burnout 3 or Midnight Club 3 can tell you it's some of the most intense gameplay out there. Especially MC3. The graphics, the music, the customization of the cars, and the action are all impressive. Most importantly of all, it's something you can do safely behind a console rather than doing it for real in the streets and kill somebody as occurred in Sacramento recently. Now compare these games to Pole Position from the old days.
Wow, every genertoin of consoles, people forget there is no magic inside. The very point of a console is the dedicated nature of the guts, not "hardware from the future." You don't need the fastest processor to provide superior performance. When developers can focus their development efforts on a single, stationary target, they can optimize the engine in ways that are either prohibitively costly or simply not possible when targeting the ludicrously disparate and constantly changing environment of multipurpose PCs.
At the planning stages, the hardware in a console is ahead of the status quo, but by release time, the hardware is merely state of the art at best. Fanbois brag about their chosen console's "superior tech," but more informed folks appreciate the benefits of a stable platform allowing developers to push the limits of the hardware and find untapped potential in otherwise standard hardware. Compare the first games on any console to the last releases to see the great improvements possible through experience.
" The Xbox 360's Xenon CPU features more general purpose cores than the PlayStation 3 (3 vs. 1), however game developers will most likely only be using one of those cores for the majority of their calculations..." Why on God's green earth would a programmer not use all of the processor(s)? Just to be lazy? Absolutely not! Games cost too much to develop not to take advantage of the hardware. Performance sells games these days. For a sony programmer to stay alive he'll have to use the machine to its fullest extent.
The article said that most developers would be using only one of the PS3's processors for most operations. Well, when you're used to designing for one processor, you tend to continue designing for one processor.
/.; I forget where I first saw it).
Not really surprising; at any rate, it may be essential to get used to this type of architecture/programming, as The Free Lunch Is Over, if this article is to be believed. (This may have featured in
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
It's not about power. Not only do most people not care what's in their PS2/XBox, most people don't even realize that they're essentially just super-optimized tiny PC's. It's about putting a shiny silver disk in the slot, and pushing the power button. PC games would have to be *significantly* better to make me (or anybody else I know) go through the *huge* pain in the ass of dealing with games on even modern Windows boxes.
Case in point... I've been trying to get the Sims 2 working on my GF's new, fast PC. It's been more than 2 weeks of tech support, and it's still not fixed. On top of that, she doesn't like me fucking with her work machine *that* much. She said that she doesn't care if the PC version is better. She's fed up with it (as am I), and she's returning it for a PS2 version.
In fact, when *I'm* looking at modern consoles, I can't figure out why in the hell anybody would want a hard drive in their console. That just adds a shitload of unnecessary complexity that I'm trying to get away from by turning on my PS2 and turning my computer off.
I don't respond to AC's.
is games. If the game you want exists only on a particular console, that's the console you will buy. Everything else is marketing mumbo-jumbo.
How do you get the good games? Be very good to the developers. Have a good enough market share so the developers think it is worthwhile to develop on your console. Hearing that Microsoft is becoming less developer friendly is bad news for Microsoft. They are coming into a market full of entrenched players. They should be very very developer friendly. That's the only way they will get the next great game.
We mentioned before that collision detection is able to be accelerated on the SPEs of Cell, despite being fairly branch heavy. The lack of a branch predictor in the SPEs apparently isn't that big of a deal, since most collision detection branches are basically random and can't be predicted even with the best branch predictor. So not having a branch predictor doesn't hurt, what does hurt however is the very small amount of local memory available to each SPE. In order to access main memory, the SPE places a DMA request on the bus (or the PPE can initiate the DMA request) and waits for it to be fulfilled. From those that have had experience with the PS3 development kits, this access takes far too long to be used in many real world scenarios. It is the small amount of local memory that each SPE has access to that limits the SPEs from being able to work on more than a handful of tasks. While physics acceleration is an important one, there are many more tasks that can't be accelerated by the SPEs because of the memory limitation.,
.. at the risk of being a bit fan-boix, what about throwing Judy arrays at the problem .. ermm .. i mean, put Judy on Cell .. and use a combination of edge-detection and fast count by value ...
.. so please point out my idiocy freely, at will, and as great a length as you can muster..)
well
i mean, its not like vector can't function as simple hash. or am i missing out something important about this 'collision detection business' that can't be parallelized?
(i wouldn't know, incidentally, i don't do 3d/gaming
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
In the article they state "every developer we talked to thought this was the wrong decision." Throughout the article they invoke "developers" to validate their case. Yet they never name them.
Now compare these games to Pole Position from the old days.
:-)
;-)
:-D
Funny you should mention Pole Position. My brother-in-law and I had tons of fun competing with each other on one of those PacMan joystick things they sell these days.
The graphics, the music, the customization of the cars, and the action are all impressive. Most importantly of all, it's something you can do safely behind a console rather than doing it for real in the streets and kill somebody as occurred in Sacramento recently.
Bah. Forget that. No console game will EVER beat the experience of San Francisco Rush! You can feel the car beneath you as the chair rumbles, the car responds nicely to the gear shift, and you slide around that corner just in time to go right under the truck, up the ramp, and over the building!
Betcha can't do THAT on your X-Box!
Seriously, the last arcade game I think I played was the SF:Rush ripoff with boats. The name escapes me at the moment, but grabing turbo boosts, knocking over tourist boats, falling down volcanos, and hitting all the right jumps was a lot of fun!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
To summarize the article, it looks like the Xbox 360 and PS3 will actually be as powerful as the Nintendo Revolution is promised to be (and not 30 times more "powerful" like Sony and MS claimed at E3).
Duh.
I know some people who run current-gen consoles thru scalers (or use their HD set's scaler) have issues with lag: microseconds between when a controller is actuated and when the effect is displayed onscreen.
Scaler folks have had issues with HD upconversion lag when it comes to, say, DVDs. However, many HT receivers will let you customize your audio delay to compensate since lag should be fairly consistent. There's really no compensation for gaming, unless you're psychic.
Presumably, the next gen of consoles (along with decent GPUs in general purpose computers) will not have this issue since their output resolutions bypass scalers. However, some of the upcoming 1080p sets (Samsung at least) will not take 1080p via their HDMI inputs, so they'll deinterlace 1080i internally, and beyond picture quality concerns this may impact when it comes to lag. Or, use their RGB ins and suffer from D->A->D conversion.
And who is the audience? Not the slashdot community or the geeks and nerds who know how this stuff actually works.
They are working the mindless zombies who are going on specifications they really don't understand.
"10 times faster"!!!
Who gives a fuck about the numbers when you see '10 times faster' on the box. Right?
ogg
Black cat, searing pain, flames...? I must be in Heaven! - Homer Simpson
I feel it might take a "special" kind of person to really appreciate a racing game, but that's one genre I can still see a lot of improvement to make, and a lot being made right now in the genre. One cool thing about racing games, especially those like Forza Motorsports, GT4, and others, are that the content will always be there-- year after year, there will be new, exciting cars to include in your racing game.
I don't moderate anymore. Karma penalty for 90% fair mods? Can I mod that unfair?
Super. Monkey. Ball.
All I got to say.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
But not real often. Especially because you're either talking to the developers during the death march to get the game out the door by pre-Christmas rush time or just post-shipping when they're detoxing from months of caffeine abuse but definitely before the profit-sharing checks from any successful games have gotten there. So of course they'll be grouchy. And that's what you want, because it's fun to write that stuff.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The only purpose I can see would be to make PC Gamers (the lifeblood of sites like Anandtech) feel better about dumping $$$ into PC hardware. The cold-cathode, lexan window crowd, pc-specs-in-my-signature crowd can rest assured that they will, *technically* have the baddest boxes around sitting on their desks.
Comparing $300 consoles to PCs with $300+ video cards is just dumb. This is particularly when the gaming experience provided by each would be considered comparable by most people.
Hydro Thunder?
SF:Rush doesn't have feedback on the chair. Not unless there is a high end version of it I haven't seen. SF:Rush will be included in Midway Arcade Treasures 3, which is coming out this fall for all the consoles.
There is a high end version of Daytona with lots of chair feedback. Very cool.
A few weeks ago I was at a D&B and played a really cool new shooter called Ghost Squad. Very cool.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
However, take the Anandtech article with a smaller grain of salt, too. I'm not sure which quotes from the article were attributed to final hardware and which were talking about the development kits (we already know that the Powermac xbox devstation is slower... or at least that's what one of the EA guys told me at E3). There was this quote: My guess is same can be said for CPU as well as GPU but that's a hunch.
Besides that, realize that the developers get much, much better at maximizing the hardware over time. When the SNES came out, developers complained that the extra colors and memory were pointles because the cpu was too damn slow (3.5 mhz, right?). 1st wave games had smallish sprites, tons of slowdown when things got busy, and many arcade ports only had a single-player option because 2-player bogged the hardware). Towards the end you had near-perfect ports of streetfighter 2, and full-color, parallax scrolling games with several large sprites like Donkey Kong Country. My hunch is that the 2nd wave games for 360 and ps3 will have similar gains.
It's still a really good article and worth checking out, but I'm not surprised in either direction.
Nope, no rumble seat with the XBox, but still you need to try MC3 before you dismiss it. The adrenalin rush alone is worth it moving at intense speeds through the city, down expressways, making some of the craziest jumps ever seen in a game and even taking a leisurely (or not so leisurely) drive across the deck of an aircraft carrier. Some of the races have your nerves stretched taut and when the race is finally over, you almost have to pry your fingers off the controller. San Diego's pretty easy, Atlanta is tougher and Detroit gets positively insane. Best of all, you have such wide variety of cars to pick from...even some real classics like the 1949 Fleetline. Seriously. Try it.
Seems to me like all the games that were first out of the gate for the PS2 and XBOX were designed to wow with graphics. Great visuals, but weak and one-dimensional gaming.
Problem is, it seems to have shifted the whole mentality of game developers. Games seem to look good first, but play good second. On a whim i put away some of my PS2 titles and dug out the old PS1 stalwarts. The original Driver was still a kick in the ass. Breath of Fire III was amazing. FF7 was good, Grandia was good. For kicks i fired up my old K6-II and played older versions of Sim City (2K and 3K), Stronghold, Age of Empires, C&C were all so much more fun. It wasn't nostalgia either.
Paper Mario seemed like a great game too. The graphics were nice and clean, but not overly extravagant. But it was still a great game build up from many simple concepts. Just like the old days.
I hope that the hardware *does* stagnate, and maybe devs will stop writing 500 lines of code to control breast jiggle in the next Dead On Arrival and instead brainstorm some ingenuity into the games instead.
It doesn't have to wow me with graphics. Wow me with fun!
</rant>
do() || do_not();
Not so much because of its average-case power, but because of what happens when you pull out all the stops and optimize some game like crazy for it. Look at the PS2-- really weak machine in a lot of ways, but when someone who knows how to really harness the hardware makes a game for it you periodically get an Ico or Metal Gear Solid 3 or something where the graphics just absolutely blow you away. The Cell looks to have the same tweakability features of the Emotion Engine, only times like a thousand.
:P
I also want a Cell just, like, to play around with. They say Linux is running on this thing? Awesome. I just want to play with the microchip and see what I can get it to do. OK, yeah, I'm something of a compiler junkie. Blah
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
for the lazy:
d =140
http://www.pcper.com.nyud.net:8090/article.php?ai
From the link:
---
What AGEIA and even game developers envision a PPU will enable for a gamer is a world with physics unlike anything we have seen in a real time game before. We are talking about thousands of rigid bodies, real flowing water, hair simulation, avalanches of rock, clothing simulations and more. Even more impressive is the idea of a universal collision detection system that allows you to interact with absolutely ANYTHING in a game world. All of it calculated in real time with nothing scripted in the game engine.
Sure you might have seen some explosions in a game you have played before, ones that might destroy an entire building. In nearly all cases, those have been scripted, meaning the debris and fire and dust were all created specifically for that explosion scene. Their motions and reactions were probably all scripted so that they went in a particular direction at a particular time and a particular speed. But what if you could have the option of changing that? What if you could have the explostion of a dam on a river be changed in real time depending on YOUR placement of the explosives? You might place them on the very center of the dam, creating a big hole that water rushes through, or instead you might only use a small amount of explosives to destory a small side portion and let water move out more slowly and let the water pressure be the force that eventually destroys the entire dam.
Damn. That would be a cool scene, and I didn't even see a demo of that -- just made it up!
---
(end of snip)
Yeah - like all of you won't be waiting in line the first day any of these are out in stores. That and a few $50 games to go play in your mom's basement, eh?
but when are they going to add sufficient ammounts of memory? The scratchpad on the PS2 was a f***ing nightmare as was memory addressing/fetching etc. - in general was very tricky - more emphasis needs to be placed on resolving memory issues - not CPU speeds CPU speeds do not matter very much these days...its just a way for Sony/MS/Nintendo to blow smoke up people's asses in order to revive the new life-cycle of new console...(though admitedly, Nintendo does this far less than the other two) --
Nintendo has been pretty honest in the past as to their actual performance specs... and if what they say about being roughly 2 to 3 times more powerful than the cube is true, that puts them neck and neck with the XBOX360 and PS3.
That along with the ability to download old games makes me, if anything, more excited for Nintendo's new offering than the phony specs for XBOX and PS3 ever did.
now we just have to hope that they don't pull.. well a Nintendo and do something totally freaky with their controller. To be honest, I have high hopes.
While I realize that the gaming industry thinks that games are Hollywood productions, I honestly think fun games require nothing of the sort.
Urgh. Never understood why people thought Hollywood was glamorous or in any way desirable.
But that's beside the point, which is that those in The Industry want it to be like Hollywood, because somehow that's Grown Up. This Shows that The Industry Has Matured. They want their prestigious awards. They want to be Just Like Movie Directors. It all smacks of insecurity.
It also smacks of driving themselves into a bloated hole where they now can't *afford* to take risks because the costs of game development are so high.
There will always be a market for unimaginative, glossy games, and there will always be the bottom line. But to treat this as an ideal is frankly twisted.
Games are *not* (or should not be) like films. Films are not interactive. Games are. Imagine what the film industry would have been like if Directors had been in thrall to still photography.
"High production value" cut-scenes are bullshit. They aren't interactive, and they jar with the style of the rest of the game; but they let bloated-ego software developers Compare Themselves To Hollywood.
If you want to apply production values like that, apply them to the game itself, not to cut-scenes, no matter how well-made.
Instead of playing wannabe Scorsese, those in the industry should be concentrating on the potential of *their* medium; to allow the player more freedom to do what they want to do (the path it would have been interesting to see them go down), to choose new and different styles of gameplay, rather than the same restricted gameplay in progressively better-rendered worlds. Cut scenes, by their very nature, are going to force gameplay through predefined points. It's all so..... old-fashioned.
Anyway, enough... yeah, I'm probably getting old, but this isn't so much about romanticisation of the past. It's criticism of the way that, rather than focusing on the way technology could open up exciting new avenues in gameplay, the Industry has concentrated on turning out (basically) the same old stuff, but with ego-bolstering production values.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I guarantee you that anybody who's seen the latest gear is forbidden to speak thereof. This ain't GNU/Linux kissed by RMS we're talking about.
...are PCI/PCI-X/whatever slot boards which would put most of the best part of a game console into the PC and finally merge them. One console in each slot and I can keep them in one media PC on the entertainment center.
We're getting to the point that these are nothing more than stripped down yet souped up PCs anyhow. We're also getting to the point that video cards are approaching the complexity of graphics workstations all by themselves. Might as well put them together and get one decent device.
Not that I expect Microsoft or Nintendo to stick hardware in my PC where grubby hackers can write unapproved games and other stuff for them though...
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
According to the article, the Cell's SPE's end up not being useful because it takes too long for them to access the main memory. Given the early nature of the development systems and libraries and that the rambus interface should be plenty fast enough, I wonder if the DMA issue can be cleared up before the PS3 ships?
I'm actually a bit glad that the CPU's suck for standard, single threaded games, because it almost forces the developers to try something different. You've got two CPU cores in the Xbox 360 just sitting around, why not try some interesting AI? Code them in as bots and the latency won't matter at all, it works over the internet even now after all. How about a little voice-recognition for, well, practically everything? I wonder if a PS3 and one of those HD-eye toys can do facial recognition... a Japanese dating game that could read your facial expressions would be cool (Sakura Taisen Remake Again, hurrah!). As long as it's mainly the FPS makers getting hosed, I'm happy.
AnandTech is talking like they've had access to both consoles and have tested extensively when it's all hearsay. You don't say things like "Although both manufacturers royally screwed up their CPUs..." on hearsay. It is extremely unlikely that MS and Sony would both be stupid enough to "royally screw up" on something so important to them. They also imply that IBM is stupid (or evil?) for selling MS and Sony on their inferior product. I find it extremely unlikely that one person over at Anandtech is smarter than Sony, MS, and IBM.
Also, as the article stated, the platforms were designed for extensively multi-threaded games, but no one is writing games that way. So... why are they surprised that it's (supposedly) slow? If I put the bread on top of the toaster it takes a lot longer than if I put it in the slots. That doesn't make my toaster slow, though, it makes me an idiot.
(No body but this.)
I'm glad you guys are all having fun ripping apart the article. Yes we knew these consoles were over hyped, but I for one found the article to be informative. Now we know roughly how powerful these consoles are. Rougly twice the power of an original xbox, or roughly twice the power of a pentium III 733. Time and time again I read online how it doesn't make sense to play games on an expensive PC when you can get a console instead. Don't want to pay $1000 every two years for a new PC? That $1000 dual Nvidia graphical system is a f!@# joke to you when you can get a new console once every 5 years for $300? Fine. Valid arguments. "acceptable" quality/performance at a "reasonable" price is certainly a good route to take. But don't expect to see quality and performance at the same levels as that new $1000 system. I think the line "You get what you pay for" sums it up nicely.
Whenever people buy a Nintendo console, they're always telling me how great it will be to play old games. What is this obsession with buying clunky hardware just so you can stick a GBA game in your Gamecube and play it all over again.
The only other reason people buy a Nintendo is because of a few first-party titles. Give me a system with good first and third party titles that I can expect to play non-stop for a few years instead of one where I have to wait a year for the next Zelda or Mario to come out.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2461
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/06/28/news_61283 06.html
http://www.tenjou.net/
See? I just rotated the console 360 degrees for you, without even moving!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This article really seems to take the wind out of their sails regarding what's being boasted 'under the hood' and what it's actually capable of doing.
:)
But I look at a game like doom3 running on a xbox. Yes it's low res and yes I read their changed some of the levels so there isn't as much draw distance (like removing a window from a corridor etc).
But still, it's doom3 running on what is a 733 mhz cpu with ONLY 64 megs of ram and doing a pretty good job of it.
Whereas my p4 1.6 with only 128 megs of ram (really need to upgrade) and a gf4ti4200 runs doom3 like shit. Downright unplayable. Heck I wish I could have the xbox version of doom3 to run on my pos system.
My point? Well, history has shown that the developers will eventually make these systems do tricks that no one initially thought the systems were capable of. But the pc is such a moving target with so many configurations that we don't see near as much optimizations.
But I'm a pc gamer for life and mainly cause I hate exclusive agreements and would love to see these systems be a disappointment.
I miss the days (snes/genesis) where only 1st party titles were exclusive (mario vs sonic) and with pretty much all other titles it was may the best console win.
How much do they offer these developers to only play on one side of the fence? I think one of the biggest first exclusive agreements was tombraider on the ps1. But what I always liked was the pc was ignored in these agreements. Doesn't seem to be the case these days. Cough, halo, cough. And I'll never forgive the developers dropping the pc with the oddworld series. Ok way OT now I'll stop rambling.
They don't have to be, but you might as well buy a Gamecube if you want games for your kid. That's not to say kid-friendly games don't exist, but they aren't the big sellers or the ones that 'take the platform to its limit'. Sony and Microsoft are really fighting over the same market - the gaming 'enthusiast'. Not kids, really, unless the kids have the dough to keep up with that market.
Generally, Kids have to convince their parents to buy games, and systems, which cost money. Thus a company like Nintendo by sticking to their guns must innovate, be kid-friendly, and provide systems at a reasonable price, otherwise parents will balk. I applaud Nintendo for doing this, but it seems to me that Sony and Microsoft just don't see the big bucks in that.
What they do see is that hardcore 'gamers' will buy $200 video cards, or splurge $300+ on a console. All basically so they can play newer, 'more realistic' 3D FPS shooters. Consider the PS3, which based on statements they've made so far about the Japanese release and US pricing, is probably going to come in close to $500. My guess is that the XBox will come in either at the same price or at most $100 less. These are NOT consoles that most kids are going to get for Christmas. Or, consider that the PSP. at $250, certainly doesn't look as appealing as a Nintendo DS to parents on a budget. But these consoles *will* sell - to kids from well-off families and to the working, adult 'gaming enthusiast' - gaming geeks. Those geeks will splurge on games, and high-powered add-ons, etc. to keep up with trends and be able to frag with their friends.
Me? I've had nearly every gaming system from the original Atari up until PS2 and Gamecube. But I didn't buy XBox (because I like to keep having choices in the future :), and neither PS3 nor the XBox360 look appealing to me, ESPECIALLY at the price points they'll likely come in at. I'll wait a couple years, though I'm sure PS3 is going to release a new $#&!@*& Metal Gear Solid game right after launch to make that really, really hard to do.
What I WILL likely be buying is the Revolution. It'll probably be less than $300, and in fact I wager it'll come in at ~$200, and I'm going to take that extra money and download tons of fun games from NES/SNES/N64 days. And of course I'll be getting the new Zelda, Mario and Mario Party, etc. games. Nintendo, despite it's mistakes, is the only major player in ther market who still remembers what gaming used to be about. Gaming. :)
The interesting thing is that gaming's never been this expensive before. If they go through with this, they're relying heavily on that enthusiast market to keep sales high. We'll see, but I've always been a console gamer, and nothing about the new systems (except for Revolution) is exciting me whatsoever. So the pictures are prettier. Wow.
BTW, if you want new games that are still actually fun and kid friendly, get a Gamecube and get Mario Party 6 or even Super Mario Sunshine. Nintendo still finds ways to make incredibly fun games, and I've never met a person who didn't like Mario Party 6, though you might have trouble getting the 'fraggers' to swallow their gamer pride and play a 'kids' (actually family) game. :)
Labeling Mode 7 "hype" is ridiculous.
One of the biggest limitations ended up being the meager 64MB of memory that the system shipped with.
One of the most important changes with the new consoles is that system memory has been bumped from 64MB on the original Xbox to a whopping 512MB on both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. For the Xbox, that's a factor of 8 increase, and over 12x the total memory present on the PlayStation 2.
One of the biggest limitations was the 64mb of memory - clearly too little. Now, five years later, they've increased that by a factor of 8.
*quickly does sums on fingers*
4.5 years = 18 months x 3
Didn't some guy come up with a rule about this? (My local library was all out of copies of that issue of the magazine)
2^3 = 8
So, five years on, they've managed to about keep pace with historic advancement, being relatively no better than the 64mb that was widely regarded to hamstring the last generation of consoles?
Sure, right now, 512mb sounds great... But then 64mb sounded good five years ago too.
HalfLife2's High Dynamic Range lighting model is expecting to need one to two gigabytes of system RAM to work properly. Sure, PCs run with a clunky OS but it's not that bad. Battlefield 2 needs 512mb minimum and prefers 1gb.
Five years ago, console fanboys dismissed PC gamers when they pointed out 64mb might be nice now but would barely cut it in two years and seriously hamstring the console in 4-5 - the lifecycle of a typical console. They were wrong then.
Now, five years later, all they've done is up that hamstrung amount in accordance with Moore's law and, once again, it seems fine for a console's release and is going to be a major issue well within the system's lifespan.
Hydro Thunder?
:-)
Give the man a prize!
Hydro Thunder!
I believe it's still in a few arcades.
A few weeks ago I was at a D&B and played a really cool new shooter called Ghost Squad. Very cool.
Sounds interesting. (Although the review comparisons to VirtaCop are not encouraging.) I can't say I was ever too fond of light gun arcade games, but I did love the Time Crisis series. That probably had something to do with the free shooting ability (I always fancied myself a pretty good aim) as well as the nicely weighted gun. Much better than the Area 51 guns, and a lot more free (and less frustrating) than the Sniper game.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Just to state the obvious, console manufacturers sell their products at a loss in hopes of making it up in licensing on the software. So the "get what you pay for" argument doesn't quite fit with this sort of business model. I'd expect better from the oft-pro-OSS Slashdot crowd.
In the end, will it really matter that the new Cpus are only twice as powerful as the old ones? Just how much power does it need? Won't the quality of the games be more important to the sucess of the console than how much "processing juice" they drink?
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
You're right--the programmers should be taking full advantage of the hardware... and for many games that will happen.
However, I can think of at least one reason why alot of games will only use a single processor: the games are intended to be multi-platform. If a game will be released for PC, Xbox, and PS3, then there is no way the programmers are going to have time to re-optimize their code three times for three different architectures. They will use generic programming approaches, and let the compilers do their work. This means that the code will not be perfect... it will run and probably only use a single processor.
So titles that are only released on a single platform may use the hardware more efficiently, but nowadays a great many popular titles end up being released on different platforms (sometimes with time delays mind you), and this will mean inefficient hardware usage in some cases.
There are other reasons why programmers might not be able to fully optimize their code, like deadlines. As TFA mentions, these hardware platforms are rather new and it will take time for programmers to learn to exploit them properly. It would have been easier to give the programmers a variant on current hardware.
From reading TFA, it sounds to me like Sony and Microsoft were both thinking that highly multithreaded games will be the next big thing when they chose their CPU designs for the PS3 and XBox 360. Unfortunately, game developers don't seem to agree (or at least they only agree to a certain extent).
My guess is that games won't start to take real advantage of multi-core/multi-CPU/cell-processor systems until such setups become mainstream for desktop PCs (and more than just hyperthreading), which tend to be the preferred test bed for next-generation gaming hardware and software ideas. When such setups become sufficiently commonplace, game developers will become more comfortable and familiar with concepts and methods that take advantage of larger-scale hardware multithreading.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
So if the XBox 360 system is only 2X more powerful than the old box, it seems like it's going to be hard to pull of backwards compatibility really well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Who cares if the processor is slow or fast. The only bench mark I care about is "Will it play the game that I bought for it?". I don't care if MS or Sony use Quad Optertons, with 1 TB of RAM or a P2 slot 1 333 and CF card.
As long at it plays the game I bought, it will be "fast enough"
I don't mean to sound like a troll, flamer, asshat, or other nasty forum lurker, but does the computational power of a console make or break it?
Well if computational power makes or breaks the console, then we'd all be playing Atari Jaguars and Neo-Geo's today.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
"Speaking under conditions of anonymity... "
/.'ers do anyway).
Oh come on, if you're not going to have the courage to own up to the words that come from your own mouth, then don't even open it.. worthless coward.
"The brave don't live forever, but the cautious don't live at all". ~ Timothy Luce
Yes, this post is from "Anonymous Coward" because slashdot doesn't allow anything else without being logged in and I don't see the point of creating an account (don't have time for that due to having a life) on someone else's machine for the sole purpose of arguing (which is what most
This is a large reason why Apple went to Intel. The lastest Powerpc chips have been sucking up the devs at IBM and they were not working on the G4 and G5. The cell chips are more made for imbedded and set top markets and plain old suck on the desktop. The G4 1.33 is about as fast for normal FPU tasks as the cell. The great graphic capabilities of these processors are not going to be used for 99% of all apps, even things like Photoshop, so the PPC is somewhat of a dead end for the desktop market.
Welcome to the Entropy Bar, may I take your order?
I would like for someone to answer the
following... Why don't they put vga
outputs on Xbox or PS2 conosoles so you
can hook them up to a monitor? Cost? I'm
sure there is a good reason. I just don't
know what it is.
Now, I'm no hardware wiz, so I can really only comment on this from the perspective of the average non-techie gamer, but... I've played the new (ie. unreleased) Need for Speed on the thing, and I must say that it looks damn sweet. Sure, maybe the article's right and the machine doesn't perform as well as it should, but as a gamer, am I going to notice the limitations? Is my gaming experience going to be impacted by this? Probably not.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that while the article is certainly interesting to the geek in all of us, saying that the processors are "Not Up To Hype" seems a bit too sensational given that the only people who will notice these minor failings are the developers who, one would hope, already know about them.
I think the problem is the same as the problem with any popular entertainment media (movies, tv, etc) which is (with apologies to Peter Guber) "If at first you succeed, try the same thing again"
This is why there are like 12 CSIs and 24 Law & Orders on TV. If you want innovative stuff you end up on the baby networks or cable. The production quality and budget may not be good but the content is usually better.
The same goes for indie games. Sadly due to licensing strangleholds, they're unlikely to make a showing on consoles (except maybe the Revolution).
In the meantime, check out games like Tribal Trouble and the competitors of the Independent Games Festival.
Please send all UCE to scally@devolution.com so I can f
Anything that can run Unreal Engine 3.0 games and more has my respect at least.
I'm pretty sure it'll rally a lot of gamers and fulfill its purpose.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
..it seems like most game devs know shit about parallel programming! they just try to port their pc-targeted engines (== mostly single threaded) to the new architectures and wonder how awful the performance gets.
:/
what about pipelined calculations for a beginning?
esp. the description of the ppe in the cell as a work horse for most of the load is just bs.
it's more likely to play the same role as the proc core in every microcontroller: manage, but don't do the dirty work yourself...and they regard the spe's as some kind of "full blown cores" with a "crappy ram access" where in reality none has a clue what they really are good for.
the whole cell-hdtv-demo (30 channels synchronously, etc.) may be rigged by a great part but there seems to be a certain percentage of truth in it...try this with a beefy single core cpu - the one most of the devs seemed to be looking for
take off every zig
As a long time Mac user, I totally feel and understand the pain or sorrow the hard core gamers must be feeling. You were given the koolaid and it was sweet while it lasted.
Yes, we Mac users have been on the end of the marketing stick with regard to PowerPC chips...we feel you.
^_^
Because so much of the console market is just dying to spend an extra $500 for a PPE, after the $500 for a good PC GPU.
As a PS2 and XBox owner (but not a PC gaming rig), let me say: no, thanks.
Well if computational power makes or breaks the console, then we'd all be playing Atari Jaguars and Neo-Geo's today.
The Neo-Geo wasn't much more powerful than a Sega Genesis. All it had over the Genesis were a slightly faster CPU, more simultaneous sprites (which Genesis games eventually faked by rewriting sprite memory several times during horizontal blank), and bigger ROM chips. The Jaguar lost in part because the PlayStation was significantly more powerful and had better development tools.
They want to stick with things they know, they are scared of the complexities of multithreading and they are used to having the processor do all the work for them.
It seems like since both new consoles have environments similar to the PS2, that current PS2 developers have a bit of a leg up in regards to making games for either console...
Also, it seems like it might come down to a War of the System Libraries.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Er...isn't that the definition of hype, otherwise known as hyperbole.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
"Now Nintendo's claims that its Revolution will be "only" two or three times more powerful than the Gamecube don't seem so bad. I always root for the underdog, and I like their lack of crazy hype so far."
Nintendo never said this, it was a magazine which made this quote and was mistaken. This was NEVER said by Nintendo.
The fact that people are excited about Battlefield 2, which is yet another FPS war sim army-style, just blows my mind. I have a friend who's trying to justify it to me.
"No, it's great. See, the graphics are amazing, and the netplay is wonderful. Now, you spawn on your team leader, and you all work together. It's brilliant!
My response, "So it's yet another Doom clone with new spawn rules and a graphics update. Yee-haw. Know what I was playing? Katamari Damacy and Way of the Samurai 2." Trying to explain to him these games, let alone show them to him, is an utter waste of time. He walks out at the title screen, claiming he can't stand graphics so "old".
It's really depressing, because as long as there are people like him, we're going to see more games like EAInsert-Sport-Here 200X, Halflife 2 (Just like Halflife 1, but more so).
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Cell may not be good for Apple, but that doesn't mean it isn't good for the PS3.
It isn't appropriate for Apple because it doesn't have regular Altivec. So that means that code written for older PPCs wouldn't run well on it. It also wouldn't be appropriate because the Cell doesn't have out-of-order execution (retirement) of instructions. That means that instructions must be scheduled in the proper order, taking memory latencies into account. This isn't possible on a Mac, because Macs change all the time. Today's CPU has a 5 clock latency to memory, tomorrows has a 7 clock latency (because CPUs speed up more rapidly than memory does). If that happened, Cell would start to run slowly because the code isn't arranged correctly for the new latencies.
But on a console, all those relationships are fixed when the console is first built. The CPU doesn't get faster over time, they're all the same until the console is retired.
So, don't jump to conclusions here. Cell may not be for Apple, but it looks like a great choice for a console.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The PS2 has hardly any FPSes. Same with the GameCube.
A couple years ago Jason Rubin (of Crash Bandicoot/Jak&Daxter fame) gave a speech about Hollywood that seems to have been wildly misinterpreted. He likened the current state of the video game industry to the packaged goods business. People aren't buying the content of games, they're buying the box. They're buying the marketing, the [evil] publisher. The [evil] publisher wants it that way, they want to remove the public's association with talent from the purchasing of the game... they want consumers to think that all developers are the same and let hype take care of the rest (at this pointed he pointed out that Crash games are still being made, but not by Naughty Dog).
He then mentioned that if the top 300 game developers got in an airplane and it crashed, the industry would be set back a decade. If the top 300 marketing people fell into the same misfortune, the Industry wouldn't miss a beat. People hooted and cheered at this irony... laid out so eloquently, between where the publishers place the importance of moving products with where the real importance was.
He then confused a lot of people, talking about Hollywood is the future and getting invited to parties, and so that is what a lot of people walked away with... However, the real crux of the passionate speech was that Game Companies, not publishers, belong in big bold letters on the box. Game development is a talent industry, not a packaged good... Game Designers who consistently design good games deserve the same name recognition and the same selling power as the equivalent Hollywood celebrities, Robert Deniro, Kevin Spacey, etc. with their name Right There on the Box in the same way that Hollywood movies are marketed (And that there are more people making good games than just Will Wright and Miyamoto). Until developers make those demands, publishers will feel free to keep marketing and unloading the same crap on the unsuspecting public.
Yeah, Hydro Thunder is still pretty common, at least in high end D&B type places.
You have a full size plastic assault rifle in Ghost squad. There's a switch that flips it between fully automatic and burstfire. There's also an action button on the gun to rescue hostages. There are also strategic decisions to make as you go through the levels (such as stay on the first to rescue hostages, go after the terrorists on floor 2, or enter a certain room with a flashbang). Sometimes your gun will turn into a sniper rifle and there will be sniper rounds. Lastly, the game lets you calibrate the gun when you start every game. This is great thinking ahead on the part of the game designers. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to play shooting games when the sights on the guns were very far off because the arcade operator didn't regularly calibrate them.
I never liked time crisis. Not sure why. It just never clicked with me.
This weekend I'm going to hit the Gameworks in Columbus, Ohio. Hopefully some quality arcade gaming will be had =]
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
If you look at the systems and you see Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 with these over-hyped benchmarks and uber powerful systems and then you look at the Nintendo Revolution with a simple "about 3times more powerful then last gen systems". In my opinion Nintendo is the only one doing this right. Devolpers do not like learning new dev. kits every time a new system comes out. Most are reluctant to learn new things and would rather stick the things they know. Nintendo is already quoted to saying that their dev kits are almost the same as the GameCubes. In doing this Nintendo is ensuring that the new games will be good looking, fun gameplay and different. Look at the last gen systems the intial games that came out pretty much sucked....except halo..but other wise there were few games out with the systems worth playing. But since nintendo is making it so easy to make games it will allow all the small game devolpers and the big game devolpers the same chance to build quality games. Also Nintendo is attempting to break its past mistake of no 3rd party support, already doing it at the last e3 by inking deals with many companys including Capcom, Square Enix, EA, and many many more. Not to mention being able to download all the old games and play them on your tv with an actual controller (not on a computer). And who knows what Nintendo has up its sleeve with this controller that is suposed to "revolutionize the gaming world". Alls I gotta say is I'm rooting for Nintendo the underdog and even if Nintendo gets back to the top I will still root for em. SO what I'm trying to say is that the quality of games comming out with the Nintendo system as compared to the Xbox or PS3 will be higher to begin with.
You're right--the programmers should be taking full advantage of the hardware... and for many games that will happen.
In the good ol' days developers under-utilized the power of the C64. It was left to the hacking groups to fully utilize the C64's potential. They even got it to do things it wasn't even supposed to be able to do! e.g. utilizing the stupid border around the screen, sampling music, memory dumping games and being able to load them from disk in 10 seconds, rather than several minutes. Heck, even their demos smoked commercial games for their eye candy and performance. Now if only these hackers would become game developers for modern hardware. (sigh)
All this story amounts to is that poorly coded, single-threaded code will run slowly on these architectures. What a surprise! There is no more substance than that to the whole article, and it pointedly ignores the fact that this presently underutilized hardware will be useful if one decides to take advantage of it.
The most telling point is that a P4 is still twice the size of the 3 PPE cores! This is not because the PPE cores are that much less powerful, this is purely an indication of how much hardware is required to squeeze an acceptable level of performance out of poorly written code on an antiquated architecture. Instead, they chose to spend the transistor budget on something potentially useful. That is why the hardware will last, unlike your P4 gaming rig. In the latter case, there is no more performance to be had, now or ever. Software can evolve, though they are stuck with this hardware for a long time. This is a necessary compromise.
The bottom line is that the game coders desperately need to realize that single threaded code is not a scalable solution. Multithreading/processing is here to stay. Hardware parallelism will only be increasing in the future, and if you need performance, this is where you must look. Complaining about it will not make your code any faster on modern architectures.
ajtoxrs
Most people don't really care if the games industry is like hollywood, they just want fun stuff to play. The publishing companies are the ones that want to make games like the movie industry. Lots of money flowing, almost entirely controlled by a few major players.
Hollywood is a hit driven, risk adverse industry, and that's what the media industry is used to. So that's where they're driving it. And just like a lot of movies today, they're focusing on fancier and fancier special effects and visuals, because it's easy. There's a bunch of computer engineers and graphics nerds doing all the hard innovative work in that field. They just have to hire some and tell them what to make. Add in a couple big names, and you've got yourself a blockbuster. You don't even need a new storyline, just remake a movie that was successful a couple decades ago.
It's cheap, it's easy, and if there are only a few big companies all doing the same thing, they can pretty much out hype any choice the consumers have, and they'll make lots of money.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Bothers me that I couldn't find the word "bullshit" more than once in the comments.
1. Development hardware isn't anywhere NEAR complete yet. Somewhat close for Sony, far as hell for Microsoft. ( Does the fact that Ati hasn't released its R500 yet set off any alarms? ) In other words, when it comes to verifying performance, the article writer and his sources DON'T KNOW SHIT.
2. Video game makers haven't made multithreaded code as a *standard general practice* in the last 40 years. Saturn was wierd. PS2 was sub-processors that needed *assembler code* to use for the first TWO YEARS or so. Now things are different. EVERYONE (save for MAYBE Nintendo) will have multiple CPU cores. Cell, Xenos, Athlon ( X2, anyone? ), Pentium IV (D =3), PSP (read up on it) you NAME IT. In other words, given that neither system is coming out for at least 5 months, the writers of this articles and their sources DON'T KNOW SHIT.
In other words, this whole fucking article is an 8-page long piece of BULLSHIT. Call me again in a year and tell me if you can write that piece of trite *then*.
People quite often misunderstand Nintendo's design strategy; Nintendo believes that the system is just a 'shiny box' to users and that technical specifications are only important to developers. When Nintendo announced that the Revolution would be 3-4 times as powerful as the Gamecube they were just being brutally honest in order not to mislead potential developers.
On another note, people forget what developers constantly said about the Gamecube; rarely did developers claim that the Gamecube was the 'most powerful' platform but it was common to hear that it was 'perfectly balanced' and 'bottleneck free'. Now, most of this was probably just hype but it demonstrates that less power used well is comparible to more power used poorly.
Now, to put this in the context of the article. Basically what the article is saying is that neither the Cell nor the Xeonon are able to come close to their theoritical maximum in real-world tests. If you extrapolate the design approach that was used on the Gamecube to that of the Revolution it is possible that the Revolution would be less expensive, theoritically less powerful and yet out-perform both the PS3 and 360.
Yeah, but the problem with calling modern games worthless, unfun crap that no-one would want to play is that people do want to play them. If no one wanted to play the upteenth iteration of GTA then there wouldn't be an upteenth + 1 version of it. The problem is the majority of people do want to play GTA and can't wait for the next one to come out. They love the graphics and the cut-scenes. It is not just the industry steering itself in that direction, it is the also the money and that money is coming from the consumer who is buying all these damn rehashed games.
I feel most slashdotters (myself included-considering the only game installed on my computer right now is Angband) don't realize how in the minority they are. The gaming industry for the most part is in it to make money, so why make games that would please a few thousand slashdotters (at least the ones that would actually pay for the game) when the could sell a flasher game to 100X that audience. There will always be small niche game makers who do it for the love of the craft, but big companies want to make big money. And to say these developers are digging there own graves rehashing the same old ideas just doesn't jive with reality, since people are obviously buying the games. So complain about the lack of good games, but don't just blame the developers thinking they are on some ego-maniacal trip, they are just doing what the public, in general, wants.
So basically while seeing a lot of "this is bullshit" comments, we're not seeing any comments from anybody who really knows or has worked with either of these two platforms. Instead, we're seeing people more willing to believe MS and Sony who have everything to gain from lying about their products vs. a more realistic view of two over-hyped machines by a website who will attract viewers to their article whether they say good things about these two consoles or not. It really will make no differenc to Anandtech. People will come to read their articles because they've earned a readership so they've no real motivation to make stuff up or distort things.
Admit it people, some of you just don't want to hear what they're saying. Had they said that the PS3 does put out 2 teraflops and the XBox 360 only one, then you could have simply continued on with the normal console flame war which has been going on since E3 ie 3 cores vs 7 SPEs, etc. Then of course, there'd be doubters from the other side accusing Anandtech of being on the payroll of MS and Sony.
Look at the motivation people. Think about who's really got cause to BS the console gamers.
I'm sorry but I've found the opening paragraph in the article quite condescending and below what I would expect from anandtech.
;) ).
If his "source" doesn't make use of the 3 cpus (cores) of the Xbox, well, he's just showing he can't code multithreaded or simply that he lacks either the will, the budget or imagination on how to use this extra juice to offload some calculations. I'm sure some other gaming companies won't.
I can see why some are bashing on specific core enhancements such as vector units which aren't boosting overall performance by much (it's still arguable; people at sony wouldn't put these features in if they weren't going to help for something) but bashing against a powerfull CPU that has itself multiplied by 3 fitting in a single die, cmon. Anyone who's doing 3d today and got himself a dual AthlonX2 machine will tell you how much he gained compared to if he would have been using a dual cpu setup (as opposed to dual cpu with dual core). 180% increase clock per clock depending on the type of scene and renderer would be a conservative estimate.
Granted this isn't the same, cinematic 3D and realtime 3D is 2 completely different beasts, but bashing on something because you use only 1/3rd of what's given to you, it's just too easy... it's like someone bashing on an athlonX2 while benchmarking it under windows 98 (singleCPU support).
I agree that marketting overload people with hopes (and lots of border-line BS), but still, grand tourismo 4 TODAY would be awesome on these machines, you'd have extra juice for simualtion, and could actually have higher resolution and antialiasing instead of looking like an "almost cool" game which lacked the juice to live it's full technical miracle.
If the coders of this game (GTA4) are their anonymous source, I'll gladly eat my socks, but I bet you 10$ they've coded something like tetris (I can be condescending too
People with the brains will know how to make good use of this technology, developpers who just code and compile without doing research on new technology don't even diserve this much (anonymous) exposure
my C$0.02
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
This is probably the oldest genre in games that still is being produced. Its old crap, driving a make believe car around? I don't care how pretty the graphics are, its OLD OLD OLD hat and supremely boring. NO innovation has occured whatsoever in this genre for two decades. Please, MC3? You call that innovative? I was customizing cars in racing games on my C64 20 YEARS ago. Somebody kill this genre forever please.
The Cell processor doesn't get off the hook just because it only uses a single one of these horribly slow cores; the SPE array ends up being fairly useless in the majority of situations, making it little more than a waste of die space.
This review is retarded. That's as clever as I can word it.
A little background. Let's look at Sony's PlayStation 2. Compare the first generation titles to, say, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas or God of War. Talk to some developers. You'll notice that games got significantly better over the years, and that the hardware was consistently better made use of. This isn't accidental. The Sony Emotion Engine is notoriously hard to program for, and consequently it took some time before developers even had any idea as to what their hardware was really capable of.
Fast forward a few years. The PlayStation 3 is in the works, and it's sporting a Cell processor with a radicically new architecture and 7 SPEs. For some reason this doesn't sound any easier to program for than the PlayStation 2 hardware. And word on the street is that it's not; it's suicidally harder.
So who's still surprised that developers are claiming that the next generation consoles are barely any better than the last? Who still thinks that they actually have enough of a clue to even be able to gauge what the hardware really is or isn't capable of?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
If you can't deal with simple multi-threading, you shouldn't be a professional programmer.
..
It's not very hard, as long as you divide your tasks logically.
some possible divisions are:
User Input: The CPU spends far more time waiting for the user than the user on it, this can be it's own thread, that sends messages to the other threads as needed. Invalid button?, send a note to the Sound thread. Analog movement within margin of error of not really moving?, queue it up. Fire button? interupt another thread.
Sound: generally, you have a signal to start playing a sound, and it plays until it's done. nowdays you have 3-d sound, so you have to calculate doppler, stereo effects, reverb, etc. hopefully this is taken care of by hardware, but a seperate thread to manage the hardware could be handy.
I/O: waiting for a disc or network is very slow, and you might have to filter packets, or re-try errors, as well as compression and encryption.
Being fail-safe is nice as well, for example, in Final Fantasy VII, if you ejected the disc while a battle scene was loading, it would try to continue the battle with the characters that were able to load.
So, lets say you push the wrong button, the User Input thread gets the press, and sends a note to the sound thread; the sound thread notices the error beep is not in memory, so sends a request to the I/O system to load it into memory... but the disc is scratched! the sound thread keeps playing it's other sounds, and the UI thread keeps accepting input, while the disc tries to re-read. the timeout for the I/O request is reached, and the sound thread is notifed that the sound could not be loaded, but referancing the request from the UI thread, this request is non-critical so it fails silently.
Another reason MS should've gone with a medium performance single core:
Sony would be the only one asking developers to please please pretty-please write multithreaded code. Developers would stick to one or two threads because changing a game engine to accommodate Cell would be too much effort. End result? Xbox360 would outperform Cell on any cross-console game.
Gamespot recently released an article explaining exactly the opposite.
0 31.html
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/06/22/news_6128
The anandtech article aparently is talking about the developers kit which (According gamespot) is not as fast as the "final" ps3 (or xbox 360 for that matter).
Who to believe? well at this point, you can believe anything you want. The coin is still in the air. Although considering the actual prototypes shown (not CGI or demos) Im going to take a wild guess and think they are just going to be as twice as poweful as modern consoles not 10 times as hyped.
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
Yeah, but the problem with calling modern games worthless, unfun crap that no-one would want to play
Which wasn't at all what I said; for one thing, I wouldn't make such a blanket statement, and secondly, I didn't say that they were worthless or unfun (although a large proportion undoubtedly are).
If no one wanted to play the upteenth iteration of GTA then there wouldn't be an upteenth + 1 version of it.
Which I acknowledged by saying that "there will always be a market for unimaginative, glossy games, and there will always be the bottom line".
I'll admit that that comes across in quite a negative manner; I'd intended putting something in there about mindless arcade games sometimes being fun. But they're still pretty uninspiring in the long run.
The problem is the majority of people do want to play GTA
Isn't this a self-fulfilling prophecy? The kind of people who buy computer games are the kind of people who are into computer games, who are the kind of people those computer games are written for. In other words, the majority of people who currently buy mainstream computer games, *not* the majority of the potential market out there.
I reckon at one stage 4 or 5 years ago, that the most played computer game in the world must have been either MS Solitaire or the Nokia phone Snake game.
And even back then, they looked as crude as hell. Most of the people playing those games probably wouldn't ever wander into their High Street branch of Game, or whatever.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
When I spoke of Cell not having Altivec, I said regular Altivec for a reason. It doesn't execute regular Altivec code. So that means you have to break binary compatibility. Once you're gonna break binary compatibility, why go with 2nd best?
So Cell made no more sense for Apple than Intel. And Intel has a lot of non-CPU things to offer Apple. The Centrino chipset for example.
What people don't seem to talk about with Cell is that Cell is made up of CELLS. You can configure a Cell to have different things on it than Sony did. So it could have had two PPC cores for example, or 3. And no SPUs. So "Cell" isn't one big Altivec. Sony's Cell has a lot of vector processors though.
But one thing you can't put on a Cell processor is regular Altivec.
And as I said otherwise, Cell promises no forward or backward binary compatibility. This is a killer for a platform that will have a whole family of machines on it. But it's great for a console.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
In the case of the Neo-Geo, it was remarkably similar to a Genesis. Both had 68K CPUs and both had Z80 sound chips. The Neo-Geo couldn't justify a $500 cost over a Genesis which was virtually identical.
A 3D0 had significantly better hardware, like a CD-ROM drive. But even it couldn't justify its higher costs.
Jaguar had some good capabilities, but overall was a mess. And the controller! Oh boy. But most of all the problem was Atari's marketing. Atari couldn't market immortality.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Instead of rushing out and buying one of these things, just wait a few months and listen to what people have to say about it.
It's not rocket science folks.
Interesting reply, thanks.
The one thing I'd point out is that I *do* see the developers being interviewed, gushing about how they can render stuff that competes with Hollywood, yadda yadda, and you really do get the impression that they're so keen to have these Hollywood values that they miss the irony that they're basically denigrating their own medium by feeling the need to judge their own success by the terms set in a different field.
As for game makers' names going on the box... I remember the Bitmap Brothers doing that in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, it smacked of pop-industry hype back then.
Anyway, if I was religious, I'd thank God I'm not that much into modern games; it would break my heart to have to put up with the bullshit and compromise involved. And I might get starry eyed and end up working horribly long hours on production-line code at EA games. Ugh.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Who cares? My favorite PS2 games in the last year have been Katamari Damashii, Phantom Brave, and Disgaea. I'm convinced the latter two could run on the PS1, sans voice acting, and Katamari doesn't push the PS2 particularly hard.
All this bullshit about what a machine's potential performance is is a waste of time. It's about the games, stupid. From what I've read, Nintendo's machine is going to be terribly underpowered compared to the PS3 and Xbox, but the games will probably be a blast to play.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Here's your source!
http://cube.ign.com/articles/522/522559p2.html
Q: Is Revolution "two-to-three times more powerful than GameCube"?
A: USA Today reported this news based on a comment from Nintendo of America's vice president of corporate affairs, Perrin Kaplan. The information was later determined to be false. We do not yet know how much more power Revolution wields over its predecessor.
Not only was it one of Slashdot's best posts, but thisis probably the most thoughtful, intelligent statement on the subject, period. You usually either hear the biased opinions from the developers/gamers, or from journalists/politicians who are only looking for attention.
After reading the article, this is a typical Anadtech 'nothing' article, even the one they did previously on the Cell was horrible, and so full of incorrect 'guesses' that they make themselves look insanely stupid.
C 05/index.html C 05/17.html
0 525/105050/ t ails.html?&L=1&talkid=156 0 425/104149/?ST=english
.. and only 6 SPE's were being used for it.
If they had talked to _anyone_ working on the Cell they would have pointed them to this nice article, which I wish people would read before crapping on about the Cell:
http://www.research.scea.com/research/html/CellGD
This isnt some marketing junk, it actually has some pretty decent info about how the Cell _works_. Unlike what everyone has been saying, the SPE's ARE general purpose processors:
http://www.research.scea.com/research/html/CellGD
I wish people would stop with the "everyone chooses the Xenon because its more general purpose", what a load of. The Xenon has issues.. one being they dont have many pressed yet!!! The Cell _has_ been tested in various forms, as a Linux Server:
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/2005
As a Linux Workstation:
http://www.linuxtag.org/typo3site/freecongress-de
As a TV mpeg-2 stream decoder:
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/2005
The last one alone shows just how much data can be operated on
Personally I think Anadtech should stop taking drugs.. and read around a bit.. maybe they might be able to be a bit more thorough with their articles then - youd think google was broken looking at the crap they are putting up.
I think the neo-geo had a much more powerful sprite engine
Which I mentioned. But nowadays the GBA's is at least as powerful, right?
Many more colors on screen.
Which the Genesis games hacked around using palette rewriting during horizontal blank, as well as dithering. Games for home consoles could get away with more dithering because the consoles of the time most commonly used RF video, not the component video used by the Neo-Geo arcade system.
380 sprites of various size VS 80 sprites at most on the sega genesis
Values of sprites per scene are misleading, as the list of sprites in the scene can be rewritten repeatedly during horizontal blank. The true limiting factor is sprite pixels per scanline; the Genesis maxed out at 320 and the Super NES at 256 (both corresponding to 1x overdraw).
I've been told by an ex-SNK employee that you could build out an extra scrolling layer using just sprites on the neogeo.
PC Engine games had to do that, as the system had only one layer. Even some NES games such as Star Force used sprites to simulate parallax.
heres the way I see it. the video game industry will only truly grow with innovation. This innovation must come in both hardware and software. Quite frankly, the Xbox 360 and PS3 dont apear to be in any way innovative. The PS1 and PS2 managed to spark a little innovation when they introduced the Dual Shock Analog controllers. never before had we been able to controll the characters in our games with 2 little joysticks in our palms. and with it came some greatly interesting games, like Ape Escape. now with the new PS3 controller, the onyl thing taht seems to have changed, is the look of it, for better or worse. same thing with the Xbox 360. Sure a more powerful processor will allow developers to do fun new things with their games... but how many do you think really will? faster processors are allowing developers to intricately use real time physics interactions to create new gameplay dynamics... btu this is the only real gain i am seeing from the more powerful systems, other than graphics. As far as i can tell. Sony and Microsoft arent interested in furthering the game industry, and creating fun new systems. theya re jsut interested in making the same old games as pretty as they can be, and makign a fortune. And the average consumer and fanboy isnt helping. cuz lets face it. if Sony were to ditch the controller, and make soemthign truly new... people woudl scream and holler about their perfect controller they love so much... i mean, a lot of people are really freaked out by the relatively small changes to the PS3 controller. Thats the 2 big guys... but then theres Nintendo. I think Nintendo is the only one really trying to push the game industry, atm. looking at the Nintendo DS and the Revolution. I own a Nintendo DS, and i love it. its very fun playign witht he stylus, doign thigns i havent really ben able to do before in games. but then came the PSP... with its graphics! oh, the graphics! its jsut a rehashed playstation with a smaller screen... and oh, i guess its easier to carry with you. I am really lookign forward to future games for the DS, like Nintendogs. as silly as it is, its something new, and exciting. And the Revolution... with its fabled controller we still havent seen, with its possible gyroscope and touch screen. think of the possibilities... so many new great things you coudl do with that! also, Nintendo is the only company i see really putting out new, interesting, and incredibly fun games... ofcourse the more power int he system, the more potential for quality games... but there needs to be more thought put into things otehr than pure power, or video games are going to get stale, and people will stop playign them... in my mind, Nintendo is still the industry leader, because they are the only ones innovating. But if Sony and Microsoft can keep brainwashign the public with their hype... I dont know if Nintendo can hold on too much longer :/
My hand touched her hand. Her hand touched her boob. By the transitive property, I got some boob! Algebra is awesome!
The Xbox included a Celeron, not a Pentium III >_
~The TwoTailedFox posts again....
ideally, your next gen console will be digitally connected to your HDTV and thus the whole deinterlacer, linedoubler, scalers, ect completely bypassed.
"Ideally," a household would have one set for watching 1080-line programming and another set for watching 720-line programming. Display technologies other than CRT cannot display both 720p and 1080p on the same screen without either using some sort of scaler or windowboxing the whole picture.
You can use Bochs or DOSbox to emulate an old pc... Both are emulators, so they have a slowdown feature you can use to get the same speed. As for games, I'm sure you can find most of them from abandonware sites, and I have yet to see any that don't play under the emulator.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Developers pushed the GC to over 14 million shortly after it was released. (I think it was in one of the star wars games). The numbers that Nintendo was putting out were not only realistic; they were slightly conservative.
Contrast with Sony and MS whose claimed performance numbers for the last 6 years have been pure fantasy and/or hype.
That's because FPS's on consoles suck balls. No mouse? No way.
The article didn't make it clear if the developers they talked to had the actual consoles to test on or just emulated dev kit enviroments. If it's just the dev kit enviroment and not an actual development console then their experiences really don't mean much of anything.
:)
The only things this article said that were actually substantial were both obvious.. next gen consoles won't be everything marketing says they'll be and that developers don't like having to learn to write code for a new architecture.
Code ported from, or modeled from, current code bases obviously won't get the most out of parallel cores, SPEs, etc but that really doesn't say much about the real world limits of these systems. Just don't expect developers to slap a copy of Quake X on these consoles and have it run at 10 times the speed it did on the previous consoles.
I am a little disappointed that neither next gen console is supposed to have a dedicated phsyics processor. THAT along with their boost in CPU and GPU power would be radical.
Remember.. a weakness in a market is an opening for competition. Does anyone have the guts to slap a nice AMD-64 CPU in a box, gigabit ethernet, modern Gforce 6800 or better video card, and a phsyics processor, and 4GB of ram in a box and sell it as a console? Do it, and avoid going broke from the costs, and the console market could be yours.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Just when I was getting to the juicy stuff, BAMMMM!!!!!! I get a fuckin search page????
Where's the rest of the damn document?????
Oh, well it's just trash talk anyway. Both systems will have good games and noone will give a rat's ass about specific details of the CPU.
Only 2 cents worth. I'm saving the rest for a GOOD topic.
You realize that most of those shiny games towards the end of the SNES lifecycle used expansion chips which did all the work instead of the main CPU, right? Running at 10 or even 20 mhz? Yoshi's Island for example, had a 20 mhz coprocessor in it.
Still, its true that developers for the SNES (and most other consoles) dramatically improved their techniques over time. E.g. the ROM compression techniques for SNES improved steadily in the early 90's.
Don't know why, but it looks like the article has been pulled off the site. Speculate as you wish.
Damnit I was reading that. Offer up your local caches, people. If they pulled it I definitely want to read it all now.
It's no wonder that Steve Jobs et. al. decided not to pursue the Cell microprocessor for Apple's future! Most likely, Apple compared it to the G5 and Intel CPUs and found its real-world performance to be significantly lacking.
Indirectly at least, this article basically demonstrates why Apple decided to go Intel.
As the girlfriend of a guy with an Xbox 360 under his desk, I'd like to post what little I've observed of this machine.
First, it was noticed at E3 that the XB360 games weren't even running on an XB360, but instead a dual Apple "emulation" of the platform.
Second, I have a close friend who is contracted by Microsoft who was working on the XB360 platform until a month ago. Asking him if he's gotten his XB360 yet from MS, he said that they're still busy trying to complete the production-level design of the box in China.
And I have yet to see even a screenshot of someone playing a game running directly on the console itself. I'd be content though if someone showed one to me.
Your post is completely on the nose as far as I'm concerned - except for the point above, which I would categorically reject.
High-production-value cutscenes can add immensely to the storyline of the game. I would refer you (as an earlier poster did for a different point) to Ico on the PS2, to see cutscenes executed for the sake of the game's development and not wannabe-Scorsese grandstanding. "Cut-scenes" - we're really talking about filmic sequences after all; directed properly, they leverage all hundred years or so of editing language and cinematic presentation to the benefit of your interactive game (character development comes to mind). Cut-scenes simply need to be applied with the interactivity in mind - brief, to the point, not beleaguered in pacing or relevance, etc. There is a whole structure to how linear sequences fit within the interactive structure that you could write books about. I could go on but you get my point. There is no sense in banishing all of our learned language of filmed narrative just because some games suck at it.
As long as the interactive core of the game itself is held as the actual point, with cutscenes supporting that, then I do not see a conflict.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
With three cpus, couldn't the programmer just decide to dedicate one to physics? Or would that require an API that MS doesn't provide?
"PS3 article is pulled for now because Anand is worried about MS tracing his anonymous insider."
"As the girlfriend of a guy with an Xbox 360 under his desk..."
:)
It's not the size, it's the controllers.
(minus page 6 about the GPUs, it got squased in my cache when I tried linking back after it was pulled)
In our last article we had a fairly open-ended discussion about many of the challenges facing both of the recently announced next-generation game consoles. We discussed misconceptions about the Cell processor and its ability to accelerate physics calculations, as well as touched on the GPUs of both platforms. In the end, both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 are much closer competitors than you would think based on first impressions.
The Xbox 360's Xenon CPU features more general purpose cores than the PlayStation 3 (3 vs. 1), however game developers will most likely only be using one of those cores for the majority of their calculations, leveling the playing field considerably.
The Cell processor derives much of its power from its array of 7 SPEs (Synergistic Processing Elements), however as we discovered in our last article, their purpose is far more specialized than we had thought. Speaking with Epic Games' head developer, Tim Sweeney, he provided a much more balanced view of what sorts of tasks could take advantage of the Cell's SPE array.
The GPUs of the next-generation platforms also proved to be quite interesting. In Part I we speculated as to the true nature of NVIDIA's RSX in the PS3, concluding that it's quite likely little more than a higher clocked G70 GPU. We will expand on that discussion a bit more in this article. We also looked at Xenos, the Xbox 360's GPU and characterized it as equivalent to a very flexible 24-pipe R420. Despite the inclusion of the 10MB of embedded DRAM, Xenos and RSX ended up being quite similar in our expectations for performance; and that pretty much summarized all of our findings - the two consoles, although implementing very different architectures, ended up being so very similar.
So we've concluded that the two platforms will probably end up performing very similarly, but there was one very important element excluded from the first article: a comparison to present-day PC architectures. The reason a comparison to PC architectures is important is because it provides an evaluation point to gauge the expected performance of these next-generation consoles. We've heard countless times that these new consoles would offer better gaming performance than anything we've had on the PC, or anything we would have for a matter of years. Now it's time to actually put those claims to the test, and that's exactly what we did.
Speaking under conditions of anonymity with real world game developers who have had first hand experience writing code for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 hardware (and dev kits where applicable), we asked them for nothing more than their brutal honesty. What did they think of these new consoles? Are they really outfitted with the PC-eclipsing performance we've been lead to believe they have? The answer is actually quite frequently found in history; as with anything, you get what you pay for.
Learning from Generation X
The original Xbox console marked a very important step in the evolution of gaming consoles - it was the first console that was little more than a Windows PC.
The original Xbox was basically a PC
It featured a 733MHz Pentium III processor with a 128KB L2 cache, paired up with a modified version of NVIDIA's nForce chipset (modified to support Intel's Pentium III bus instead of the Athlon XP it was designed for). The nForce chipset featured an integrated GPU, codenamed the NV2A, offering performance very similar to that of a GeForce3. The system had a 5X PC DVD drive and an 8GB IDE hard drive, and all of the controllers interfaced to the console using USB cables with a proprietary connector.
For the most part, game developers were quite pleased with the original Xbox. It offered them a much more powerful CPU, GPU and overall platform than anything had before. But as time went on, there were definitely limitations that developers ran into with the first Xbox.
One of the biggest limitations
Much as I hate to say it (ok, not really), I told you so. Did you really believe that the new consoles would be 30x as powerful as the last generation? There are rules about these things and they are not suspended just because we're dealing with a game console. Nintendo isn't the least powerful, just the most honest.
Link doesn't work anymore, article doesn't appear to be on the site.
clicking on the link brought the Anandtech search page and searching for "ps3" brought a comparison look at the 2 consoles but no "anonymous developer says this sucks" content...
am i missing something?
Most of the commments for this slashstory say the same thing. "Nintendo's doing it right still!" If you posted a comment that said something to that effect, for god sakes *go support them*. Go pick up a DS and Kirby: Canvas Curse. It's ridiculously fun, completely innovative, and supports the only major player left that *relies* on innovation to sell their products.
I hear these same comments on every Sony/MS/Nintendo debate. Gamers love the cube, etc etc. Yet each year it seems like Nintendo get's a slightly smaller piece of the market share pie.
I have all three consoles, and both new handhelds. So don't even try to flame me with "you just never tried X." The big N not only gets most of my dollars, but *all* of my respect.
-- I have fans? Wow.
anyone notice the article has been removed? perhaps a cease-and-desist letter has been sent. did anyone cache the article?
Personally, as long as the game is fun, I don't care what the abilities of the consoles are. What I'm worried about more is the price of a single game. Already they're jacking the price up from $50 to 60. And that's using the power of one processor alone.
When developers start using more cores, I fear the price is gonna jump even higher. I mean, these guys are only human, and they can't learn how to program multiple cores AND keep their focus on gameplay, so the companies will be forced to hire more people. In doing so, they have to make sure they can pay their employees and still make a profit. Plus, with court cases ruling in favor of better working conditions for developers, companies might actually pay their developers overtime!! I'm no economics buff, but if it costs more to support employees, wouldn't that directly effect the price of the game (aka, raise the price)?
Now, I understand our economy is getting better, but we've got mortgages to pay!wealth goes to those with the right connections for the most part. haven't you noticed that a higher and higher percentage of that wealth is increasingly controlled by a smaller and smaller percentage of the population?
sum.zero
*Insert voice of Kahn from King of the Hill*
...
You all so funny. Act like kids hillbilly parent actually give a damn.
(Seriously all, if you are reading this, and care about it, you are most likely NOT the problem)
The fact of the matter is that to get optimal performance from any computer architecture which has multiple processors simply isn't possible using either straight assembly or conventional imperative programming languages.
The sort of programming language which would be ideal would be a statically typed functional language with concurrency and side effect primitives (probably in the form of regions for cheap/fast memory allocation and deallocation). Additionally, there might be a restriction (either by the language a la Sisal, or by good style) to using first order functions which are more amenable to time efficient analysis for optimization than are higher order functions.
There probably other things I'm not considering, but that should summarize the key points. The only issue is that I doubt that the people who have the background to construct such a compiler will ever get the funding, nor shall the relevant programmers likely be interested in spending their time learning what would be a superior language. Oh well
Does this link still work? If I click on it, I just get the AnandTech search page. I can't find the article on there any more...
Link doesnt work. Did they kill the article? Anyone have it that can post it for us to read?
The developers are unquestionably PC developers, not console developers. If you program the next gen machines like a PC (ie, Unreal Engine) you're going to get SHIT performance.
You only have to take a look at all the postmortems on Gamasutra from last gen that thought they would be able to port their PC game to PS2 in a few months and it usually ended up taking 18 to rework their shit into a console ready game.
At the same time, looking at developers that actually understand console programming and a PS2 stil OUTPERFORMS a PC. Check out Jak 3 or Ratchet and Clank 3 and show me any PC game that is even close to pushing that many polygons even today.
The new consoles will run rings around today's PCs but only if you learn to program them. The massively generic C++ FPS engines written for PCs are not the correct way to get power out of a console.
Amen Brother!
These people don't understand the insane stuff we PS2 devs have to do. I'm not going to miss the 4 megs of texture memory or building GS packets from scratch.
http://forum.xbox365.com/ubb-data/ultimatebb.php?/ ubb/get_topic/f/66/t/000578/p/1#000009
Learning from Generation X
The original Xbox console marked a very important step in the evolution of gaming consoles - it was the first console that was little more than a Windows PC.
It featured a 733MHz Pentium III processor with a 128KB L2 cache, paired up with a modified version of NVIDIA's nForce chipset (modified to support Intel's Pentium III bus instead of the Athlon XP it was designed for). The nForce chipset featured an integrated GPU, codenamed the NV2A, offering performance very similar to that of a GeForce3. The system had a 5X PC DVD drive and an 8GB IDE hard drive, and all of the controllers interfaced to the console using USB cables with a proprietary connector.
For the most part, game developers were quite pleased with the original Xbox. It offered them a much more powerful CPU, GPU and overall platform than anything had before. But as time went on, there were definitely limitations that developers ran into with the first Xbox.
One of the biggest limitations ended up being the meager 64MB of memory that the system shipped with. Developers had asked for 128MB and the motherboard even had positions silk screened for an additional 64MB, but in an attempt to control costs the final console only shipped with 64MB of memory.
The next problem is that the NV2A GPU ended up not having the fill rate and memory bandwidth necessary to drive high resolutions, which kept the Xbox from being used as a HD console.
Although Intel outfitted the original Xbox with a Pentium III/Celeron hybrid in order to improve performance yet maintain its low cost, at 733MHz that quickly became a performance bottleneck for more complex games after the console's introduction.
The combination of GPU and CPU limitations made 30 fps a frame rate target for many games, while simpler titles were able to run at 60 fps. Split screen play on Halo would even stutter below 30 fps depending on what was happening on screen, and that was just a first-generation title. More experience with the Xbox brought creative solutions to the limitations of the console, but clearly most game developers had a wish list of things they would have liked to have seen in the Xbox successor. Similar complaints were levied against the PlayStation 2, but in some cases they were more extreme (e.g. its 4MB frame buffer).
Given that consoles are generally evolutionary, taking lessons learned in previous generations and delivering what the game developers want in order to create the next-generation of titles, it isn't a surprise to see that a number of these problems are fixed in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
One of the most important changes with the new consoles is that system memory has been bumped from 64MB on the original Xbox to a whopping 512MB on both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. For the Xbox, that's a factor of 8 increase, and over 12x the total memory present on the PlayStation 2.
The other important improvement with the next-generation of consoles is that the GPUs have been improved tremendously. With 6 - 12 month product cycles, it's no surprise that in the past 4 years GPUs have become much more powerful. By far the biggest upgrade these new consoles will offer, from a graphics standpoint, is the ability to support HD resolutions.
There are obviously other, less-performance oriented improvements such as wireless controllers and more ubiquitous multi-channel sound support. And with Sony's PlayStation 3, disc capacity goes up thanks to their embracing the Blu-ray standard.
But then we come to the issue of the CPUs in these next-generation consoles, and the level of improvement they offer. Both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 offer multi-core CPUs to supposedly usher in a new era of improved game physics and reality. Unfortunately, as we have
Don't insult my poor old PII/333! It's a great webserver! It can kick your webserver's ass! Well, it could've eight years ago....
Let's get it straight, the power of consoles are getting better and better, but the contents? Not as growing...
We want fun games.
The comparison to video games and Hollywood started before that. It started when game sales began approaching the same level as Hollywoods yearly take. I think it was latched onto because it was seen as a new thing for Wallstreet to invest in. The comparison was simply to say "Look video games are raking in nearly more money than this 100 year old industry. Invest!"
No sig for you!!
"led to believe," dumbass. should have spent less time playing video games and more time doing your homework. :-P
I personally can't imagine what you're going to do with 512 megs of memory.
Have you noticed how load times seem to have gone up, not down, as consoles have advanced? If that 512mb allows the game engine and level to be kept in memory when you toggle out to the menu, rather than having to watch that damn bar each time - that'd strike me as a pretty good use of it. Keeping a couple of key soundtrack files there so the optical drive can just read game data rather than having to bounce off to wherever the audio's stored and back again - all those uses would be great.
If I could pay an extra $50 (give or take, the cost of an extra stick of 512mb RAM) when buying a console and be assured of never seeing a load screen again as one 512mb stored the last level's data in case I went back, 128 stored everything to do with the menu, 128 stored common game assets like music and the last 256 was busily pre-caching the next levels, I'd absolutely pay it.
As the albeit untrue legend about Bill Gates goes: Just because you can't envisage a use for more memory now doesn't mean there isn't/won't be one.
You're thinking of Star War: Rogue Leader, which was a Gamecube launch title and pushed as many as 15 million polygons. A feat not duplicated on XBox for several years.
Unless you also happen to work at EA, your boyfriend should be fired for letting you into his cube. Non-co-workers are not allowed in development or testing areas.
This is why you don't have a girlfriend.
First of all, Moore's law originally applied to processors, (complexity, not speed) and represents a trend in power/$.
I was wondering how long that would take to get pointed out. You are correct, technically, incorrect philosophically.
The reason Moore's law gets (mis)quoted so often is because, whether intended or not, it holds absolutely true over time for other areas too.
Let's take a look at memory in home PCs for the last 23 years I've been using them:
1982 BBC Micro - 32kb RAM
1990 286 PC - 1024k RAM
Time: 8 years (just over 5x18 months)
Capacity increase: x32 or x2^5
1995 Pentium PC - 16mb RAM
(Granted there was a 4mb 486 in the middle here but that fits the exact same pattern so I'll skip it)
Time: 5 years (just under 4x18 months)
Capacity increase: x16 or 2^4
2000 Pentium 3 PC - 128mb RAM
(OK, there were constant PCs in between this point as I worked in the field now - but, for simplicity's sake, I'm pulling out a few milestones)
Time: 5 years (just over 3x18 months)
Capacity increase: x8 or 2^3
2004 Pentium 4 PC - 512mb RAM
Time: 4 years (just over 2x18 months)
Capacity increase: x4 or 2^2
2005 Pentium 4 PC - 1gb RAM
Time: 18 months (1x18months)
Capacity increase: x2 or 2^1
To prove minimal rounding errors throughout, let's look at that BBC through to today:
1982-2005 = 23 years = just over 15 x 18 months
32kb-1gb = 32768 = 2^15
Or, comparing PCs to PCs (Sorry, couldn't bring myself to say Apples to Apples) just in case you want to argue the change in systems from an 8080 to an 80x86 makes a difference (which it doesn't for this law):
1990-2005 = 15 years = 10 x 18 months
1mb to 1gb = 1024 = 2^10
Looks like it works out exactly.
So, even if Moore himself didn't hypothesize that typical home PC system memory will increase by a power of 2 every 18 months, I will. It's held true for as long as I've been using home computers which goes back to within only a few years of the birth of the genre.
If you like, as it's true that it's not Moore's law, you can call it Davison's law. Save this web page. In 25 years, people will be stealing copies of it from their libraries.
this is good news.
sucks for all those who want to game and dont/cant shell out $$$ and deal with Windows security problems though
Mike
I heart the RIAA & MPAA, im sure its mutual...
The article doesnt mention importance of physics middleware. Havok, Novodex Meqon and others will be heavily optimized for Cell SPEs. This makes life much easier for game developers, and it changes the story.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2453 &p=2
The point of a gaming console is to play games. The PC user in all of us wants to benchmark, overclock and upgrade even the unreleased game consoles that were announced at E3, but we can't. And these sorts of limits are healthy, because it lets us have a system that we don't tinker with, that simply performs its function and that is to play games.
The game developers are the ones that have to worry about which system is faster, whose hardware is better and what that means for the games they develop, but to us, the end users, whether the Xbox 360 has a faster GPU or the PlayStation 3's CPU is the best thing since sliced bread doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, it is the games and the overall experience that will sell both of these consoles. You can have the best hardware in the world, but if the games and the experience aren't there, it doesn't really matter.
Despite what we've just said, there is a desire to pick these new next-generation consoles apart. Of course if the games are all that matter, why even bother comparing specs, claims or anything about these next-generation consoles other than games? Unfortunately, the majority of that analysis seems to be done by the manufacturers of the consoles, and fed to the users in an attempt to win early support, and quite a bit of it is obviously tainted.
While we would've liked this to be an article on all three next-generation consoles, the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Revolution, the fact of the matter is that Nintendo has not released any hardware details about their next-gen console, meaning that there's nothing to talk about at this point in time. Leaving us with two contenders: Microsoft's Xbox 360, due out by the end of this year, and Sony's PlayStation 3 due out in Spring 2006.
This article isn't here to crown a winner or to even begin to claim which platform will have better games, it is simply here to answer questions we all have had as well as discuss these new platforms in greater detail than we have before.
Before proceeding with this article, there's a bit of required reading to really get the most out of it. We strongly suggest reading through our Cell processor article, as well as our launch coverage of the PlayStation 3. We would also suggest reading through our Xbox 360 articles for background on Microsoft's console, as well as an earlier piece published on multi-threaded game development. Finally, be sure that you're fully up to date on the latest GPUs, especially the recently announced NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX as it is very closely related to the graphics processor in the PS3.
This article isn't a successor to any of the aforementioned pieces, it just really helps to have an understanding of everything we've covered before - and since we don't want this article to be longer than it already is, we'll just point you back there to fill in the blanks if you find that there are any.
Now, on to the show...
A Prelude on Balance
The most important goal of any platform is balance on all levels. We've seen numerous examples of what architectural imbalances can do to performance, having too little cache or too narrow of a FSB can starve high speed CPUs of data they need to perform. GPUs without enough memory bandwidth can't perform anywhere near their peak fillrates, regardless of what they may be. Achieving a balanced overall platform is a very difficult thing on the PC, unless you have an unlimited budget and are able to purchase
On a purely hardware level, ATI's Xbox 360 GPU (codenamed Xenos) is quite interesting. The part itself is made up of two physically distinct silicon ICs. One IC is the GPU itself, which houses all the shader hardware and most of the processing power. The second IC (which ATI refers to as the "daughter die") is a 10MB block of embedded DRAM (eDRAM) combined with the hardware necessary for z and stencil operations, color and alpha processing, and anti aliasing. This daughter die is connected to the GPU proper via a 32GB/sec interconnect. Data sent over this bus will be compressed, so usable bandwidth will be higher than 32GB/sec. In side the daughter die, between the processing hardware and the eDRAM itself, bandwidth is 256GB/sec.
At this point in time, much of the bandwidth generated by graphics hardware is required to handle color and z data moving to the framebuffer. ATI hopes to eliminate this as a bottleneck by moving this processing and the back framebuffer off the main memory bus. The bus to main memory is 512MB of 128-bit 700MHz GDDR3 (which results in just over 22GB/sec of bandwidth). This is less bandwidth than current desktop graphics cards have available, but by offloading work and bandwidth for color and z to the daughter die, ATI saves themselves a good deal of bandwidth. The 22GB/sec is left for textures and the rest of the system (the Xbox implements a single pool of unified memory).
The GPU essentially acts as the Northbridge for the system, and sits in the middle of everything. From the graphics hardware, there is 10.8GB/sec of bandwidth up and down to the CPU itself. The rest of the system is hooked in with 500MB/sec of bandwidth up and down. The high bandwidth to the CPU is quite useful as the GPU is able to directly read from the L2 cache. In the console world, the CPU and GPU are quite tightly linked and the Xbox 360 stands to continue that tradition.
Weighing in at 332M transistors, the Xbox 360 GPU is quite a powerful part, but its architecture differs from that of current desktop graphics hardware. For years, vertex and pixel shader hardware have been implemented separately, but ATI has sought to combine their functionality in a unified shader architecture.
What's A Unified Shader Architecture?
The GPU in the Xbox 360 uses a different architecture than we are used to seeing. To be sure, vertex and pixel shader programs will run on the part, but not on separate segments of the hardware. Vertex and pixel processing differ in purpose, but there is quite a bit of overlap in the type of hardware needed to do both. The unified shader architecture that ATI chose to use in their Xbox 360 GPU allows them to pack more functionality onto fewer transistors as less hardware needs to be duplicated for use in different parts of the chip and will run both vertex and shader programs on the same hardware.
There are 3 parallel groups of 16 shader units each. Each of the three groups can either operate on vertex or pixel data. Each shader unit is able to perform one 4 wide vector operation and 1 scalar operation per clock cycle. Current ATI hardware is able to perform two 3 wide vector and two scalar operations per cycle in the pixel pipe alone. The vertex pipeline of R420 is 6 wide and can do one vector 4 and one scalar op per cycle. If we look at straight up processing power, this gives R420 the ability to crunch 158 components (30 of which are 32bit and 128 are limited to 24bit precision). The Xbox GPU is able to crunch 240 32bit components in its shader units per clock cycle. Where this is a 51% increase in the number of ops that can be done per cycle (as well as a general increase in precision), we can't expect these 48 piplines to act like 3 sets of R420 pipelines. All things being equal, this increase (when only looking at ops/cycle) would be only as powerful as a 24 piped R420.
What will make or break the difference between something like a 24 piped R420 and the unified shaders of the Xbox GPU is ho
Link directs to http://www.anandtech.com/articles.aspx now. I bet some pressue was placed on anandtech to remove it.
I hate to plug an old project, but this was something I started working on when I was 15 or so and I was quite proud of it. I suppose I still am. It's a DOS menu system programmed in QuickBASIC. It builds out batch files and then reruns itself, so it uses no memory while your program runs.
l
I threw the files back up from an old backup. Unfortunately, my harddrive crashed while I was working on the next version and I lost all the source code. By that time DOS was very much on its way out even for games. If you (or anyone else) like it, email me at stuntman06@hotmail.com (put QSM or SWX or something in the subject) and I'll create a registration key for it.
QuickStart Menu v1.00: http://mysite.verizon.net/res0gn20/qsm/qsmenu.htm
It seems that the Anandtech has pulled the article.
Any mirrors?
to protect sources????
i guess ms and sony would come down hard on anyone that bad mouthed them..told the truth.
any place where the page is cached?
:).
:)
:) I never have written a single statement for a console, but reading about how they're programmed it's similar to old amiga hardware as in: utilize the different hardware to get as much out of it as possible. That wasn't hard, it was FUN :). Good to know there are still people out there enjoying that kind of work :)
Nothing is more rewarding than fiddling with hardware registers, parallel execution lists and then... finally... get something visually on the screen
reading your post made me think back to the old demoscene days on the Amiga 500.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Who does he really think he is?
Claiming those processors suck badly.
The reality is this, those processors have more power than most PC cpu:s while consuming lesspower.
Each individual CPU is less powerfull, but not much, since going for IPC don't give much per added costs, so they make each individual somewhat CPU less powerfull. BUT they make more of them available.
The same is going on for PC world the transformation is in place, but it takes time to increase the number of CPU:s significantly. But these game consoles are ahead the curve in this matter. And when transition happens like this one, there is always people who have hard time grasping it. And those people will continue claiming it sucks because it cannot do their legacy stuff as well as the optimized for legacy stuff processor. Their peak performance is much higher than PC:s and for parallerisable tasks, and they have ability to get it when the software is ready and optimized for the platform that doesn't change a bit for years. Now with single threaded minds doing sequential stuff is going to be obsolete in future unless they can upgrade their wetware, which takes time for some people. And those who adapts to it slowly will complain, always.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Isn't it too early to judge the new consoles? after all, it's not the CPU that counts, but the entire system. The new consoles are very complicated, have lots of tricks under their sleeves. And don't tell me companies like Sony and Microsoft would release underpowered consoles. We have to wait for at least one generation of games to see what they can do.
http://forum.xbox365.com/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=ge t_topic;f=66;t=000578;p=1#000009
Please google and research "peak oil" a bit. You will discover this crisis is a lot worse than they have told you
Anyone have a cache of this article? They seem to have pulled it down.
Absolute BS!! I dont believe you can feel a lag in the order of microseconds while gaming on a HDTV console/TV because at 1080p you are displaying 60 frames per second which gives you one frame per 16 miliseconds. 1 milisecond is 1000 microseconds so the only noticeable lag would be such that delays the rendering by over 16 000 microseconds. Thus if a scaler delays the rendering of a frame by a couple of hundred microseconds you will not notice the difference!
"Game Designers who consistently design good games deserve the same name recognition and the same selling power as the equivalent Hollywood celebrities, Robert Deniro, Kevin Spacey, etc. with their name Right There on the Box in the same way that Hollywood movies are marketed"
There are some that get their name on the box, like Tim Schafer (Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Monkey Island), however I do get your point.
This is why the actors protest was so badly received by the games developers, because in a Game, the developers get f*ck all credit compared to the movie industry, and starting to push for a bigger emphasis on the actors rather than the developers, would be the wrong end to start at.
While I do recognize that good voice acting is important in some titles, good acting carries a film much more than it carries a game. A crappy game can never be made tolerable by great actors. A crappy film can be made tolerable by great actors.
Worms (1, 2, World Party) -> Worms 3D :) )
:)
Warcraft (1,2,3) -> World Of WarCraft (since you mentioned RTS
Yes, you are getting old.
You are not the only target for games now.
However, you should be.. you have the money.. if not the time.
The 'games generation' has grown up. What that means is that we now have the money to buy the games we used to not buy
It's a pity they don't make games for us, isn't it?
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
I'd say more like the same compiler.
I don't think so.
At 110v you need to pump through a lot more amps than at 240v. Actually it's the rest of the world that has it right, not you. 240v is safer than 110v. Mostly because of the increased current going through everything.
High voltage gives you a nice jolt to make you pay attention again. High current kills you.
> no, yes, maybe (tagging beta)
Ermm...let me guess: you're an american, probably from the bible-belt states?
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
If the new console are so great, can Sony/Microsoft answer this question.
Why do I still buy NES games, why do I use a NES emulator on a Dreamcast to play my good ol games?
The end result of a game loop is a new video frame. So much HAS to be ready to go in a dependable amount of time, adding threads only complicates the situation. The problem isn't just lazy programmers.
After thinking about it a little more, I think that things like AI and most scripts CAN miss a few video frames without hurting the game.
-In opponent AI, you don't really want enemies that react within 30 milliseconds. They would hopelessly outclass human players. A random reaction time in the 500-1000 millisecond timeframe will do better for most purposes.
-Scripts that trigger things like the spawning of new enemies can also take a bit longer. The above timeframe will be more than sufficient, because the in-game situation will not change that much within 1-2 seconds.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Too bad we don't see all that much from Sid Meier anymore. Pirates! was genious, and Red Storm Rising was great, too. And F-19. Untold hours spent in my high school years on those games exclusively. Need I mention Civilization, the marriage killer?
Bottom line-- put Sid's name on the box and that is all it takes to generate a sale.
ps-- yes, I tried out the new(er) version of Pirates! and it is just as good as the old one (passed my up all night gaming test). I'd be playing it right now if my pc could run it smoothly.
"Few of them were truly spoiled; I would have traded the fear of being shot or beat up any day of the week for what they had; being exposed to all that humanity and "real life" has only made me cynical and distrustful of others."
Certainly: we ALL want to be rich and comfortable, that's in our nature. But ask yourself this: if one of those 'rich' and 'enjoy life' dudes would become poor and end up in those same subburbs that you talked about, who would have the most chances of surviving it; him, or you?
Rich people ARE spoiled, point. I'm not saying they are not good people, or that they are all disgustingly spoiled or immoral or without ethics and what not..but, they ARE spoiled.
And I'm not saying this out of envy: I'm a 'member' of the higher middle-class myself, in a rich industrialised western country. But at least I *know* I'm spoiled. even compared to my the former generation (my parents), I'm pretty spolied. Let alone when I compare myself to those that really have to struggle to have any sort of life. Would I trade it for being poor and being more 'street-wise'? Heck no. Would those poor people rather be rich, spoiled and complacent, like me? I bet they do.
But that's not really the issue here. My greatest concern is if I should buy a AMD64 dual core, or the latest pentium or not. While THEY have to deal with real important life-or-death issues, and have to form the skills to do it (and survive).
So, yes, I'm spoiled. I'm not spoiled in the I-don't-care-about-anything-but-me sense, but I *AM* spoiled. Put me in a situation where 80% of the populace lives in, and I wouldn't last a week. I never learned anything that would keep me alive if I wasn't in the pampered, highly artificial situation I am in.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Go to an online inflation calculator.
The Atari 2600 (Then known as the Atari VCS) cost $199 when it was released in 1977. That's $645.75 in 2005 dollars.
In fact, here is a price list of some major consoles released in the past 20 years, in 2005 dollars:
Atari VCS (2600) ($199 in 1977) - $645.75
Intellivision ($299 in 1979) - $846.68 (Holy Crap!)
Colecovision ($199 in 1982) - $403.70
NES ($249 in 1986) - $426.54
Sega Genesis ($199 in 1989) - $310.19
SNES ($199 in 1991) - $280.82
Playstation ($299 in 1995) - $372.01
I think that shows that video games have come down drastically in price over the last 20 years. But the geniuses over at Sony (and Microsoft) know that the market should easily tolerate a $400 - $500 console.
Inflation, Ain't it a bitch?
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Well, I'm with you on a lot of points, but I must say I read/interpreted the parent poster a bit differently. And, there are still some issues in your own post I don't totally agree with.
:-)
"How the **** is GTA or any other video game or movie even slightly representative of "real life"??"
It is not about how representative these are of real life. In fact, one may argue it's just because they AREN'T very represenative of real life, that they are exellent tools to start educating/exposing them, in regard what IS out there, in 'real life'.
It is like the age old activity of reading stories to kids, even when they involve witches and monsters, and are a bit scary. What do fantasy-stories have to do with real life? On itself, very little. But it is a medium that HELPS kids in exploring fears, anxiety, morals, etc. Exactly the same is true for movies and games; it's not about what they actually teach you about real life, it's about dealing with the issues that are raised in them, such as pain, fear, violence, love, sarcifice, heroism, etc.
The best thing to do, as a parent (or whatever) is to guide your kids, not to forbid them from exploring it. And in your example, I think it's preferable they first try to deal with keeping an eletronic pet alive, then a real goldfish, for instance. (Especially from the viewpoint of the goldfish
"All this will occur at an age where I think they are mature enough to understand these things."
This is another problem I have with your post. This is the reason why currently, there are laws in the USA which forbids drinking before age 21. Because OTHER people DEEM it's not 'due time' yet. (see also a former post of mine in this regard). I refute the idea that it is only a matter for the parent to decide when someone is 'old enough' to understand something. First of all, kids understand more things then most people are even willing to imagine or concede. And secondly, it's fully arbitrary and one-sided: a parent can consider any age as his kids being not mature enough, with all the consequences that we have seen in the past (and even now, with tight-assed parents and other bible-belt nutcases). And they may even be convinced they are right in witholding of forbiding it - even though history shows tis rarely helps anything.
I'm of the opinion it's not just a matter of the parents, or grandparents, (or whomever) deciding it; it is foremost the kid itself that indicates when its 'due time'. For instance, if he himself asks questions about poverty, sex, violence, etc THEN it is already time. I think it sucks when parents use the 'I'll tell you in due time'-line: everyone, including a kid, has the right to an honest answer to his question, not a shove-off with a 'you're too young for it' platitude.
A personal example: A nephew of about six years old asked me someday what 'homo(sexual)' meant. I guess he probably heard it in school, or something. so I explained it. I could have said that he was 'not mature' enough to understand it, but I think that's crap: it's for you to explain it in terms that he CAN understand it, then, me thinks. My mother (who's obviously from an older generation, with less tolerance about some issues) thought it wasn't appropriate. I was rather suprised by that attitude, but then again, I don't think there is something inherently immoral about homosexuality neither. I doubt she would have expressed the same reservations if I had explained what an 'atom' was, or even 'heterosexual'.
I, on the other hand, was (and am) of the opinion that, since the kid asked what it was, he was also old enough to get an answer to his question. 'Due time' and 'maturity to understand' are implicitly present the moment the kid starts exploring and/or asking questions about it, and thus shouldn't be used as a way for adults to leave someone in the dark, or the forbid it outright. Even if a subject is to complex (the atom would be), it's your duty to give a truthful answer in a way he can understand, instead of
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Black and White creator Will Wright has been working on a game named Spore. I think it's going to be pretty interesting and definitly very original. You'll find a video of him demo'ing it at the 2005 GDC here.
I'm trying to improve my English. Please correct me on any spelling/grammar errors in this post.
Dear god, why is it that I never get mod points when I actually WANT to use them :-(
I can't even begin to describe the cultural gulf between programmers at my company who spent their teenage years wedging ML apps into their C-64's cassette buffer, or hacking with copper display lists on their Amiga... and those whose first experience with programming was Visual Basic. My VB-era co-workers can't even fathom how an afternoon of assembly language could possibly be fun.
I feel sorry for them... they never really got to experience the magic summer vacation afternoons of literally discovering new cool things you could do with hardware, like accidentally discovering PCM digital audio by writing a program to rapidly switch the c64's volume between 0 and 15 and getting a tone as a result & wondering whether you could actually do something cool with the effect... or expanding the computer's color range by stuffing new values into the color registers during scanline retraces.
Sigh. Was middle school and the c64/atari 800 era REALLY 20 years ago? I almost feel like taking a road trip to my parents' house, digging my old c64's box out of the closet, and seeing whether the old tapes I saved my summer experiments on way back in '85 are still readable...
USA TODAY said that the REV would be 2-3 better than the GCN, however Nintendo stated later that it hasn't even got the hardware finalized and has not released any performance information.
It is funny to see posts like this: How does it come that the Cell processor has been presented at various supercomputer conferences and will take a major slot at the Hotchips Symposium for High-Performance Chips.
The first benchmark proved, that it is about 100 times faster in large FFTs than a Xeon processor: PDF
I can't remember any presentations of the Emotion Engine at a supercomputer conference.
> 1. With the next generation of consoles becoming nothing more than computers, what becomes the purpose of having two separate machines? Or perhaps the real point is, why use your computer for gaming?
I own a console so I only have to upgrade hardware every couple of years, instead of every couple of months.
When PC gaming, each new game I wanted to play meant buy a new video card, upgrade ram, etc.
With console games, all the new games run on my console without forced upgrades (minus the occasional peripheral device).
perl -e '$_=":: Qjvtug ZpQbjryy
Microsoft's Xbox 360 & Sony's PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU Performance
In our last article we had a fairly open-ended discussion about many of the challenges facing both of the recently announced next-generation game consoles. We discussed misconceptions about the Cell processor and its ability to accelerate physics calculations, as well as touched on the GPUs of both platforms. In the end, both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 are much closer competitors than you would think based on first impressions.
The Xbox 360's Xenon CPU features more general purpose cores than the PlayStation 3 (3 vs. 1), however game developers will most likely only be using one of those cores for the majority of their calculations, leveling the playing field considerably.
The Cell processor derives much of its power from its array of 7 SPEs (Synergistic Processing Elements), however as we discovered in our last article, their purpose is far more specialized than we had thought. Speaking with Epic Games' head developer, Tim Sweeney, he provided a much more balanced view of what sorts of tasks could take advantage of the Cell's SPE array.
The GPUs of the next-generation platforms also proved to be quite interesting. In Part I we speculated as to the true nature of NVIDIA's RSX in the PS3, concluding that it's quite likely little more than a higher clocked G70 GPU. We will expand on that discussion a bit more in this article. We also looked at Xenos, the Xbox 360's GPU and characterized it as equivalent to a very flexible 24-pipe R420. Despite the inclusion of the 10MB of embedded DRAM, Xenos and RSX ended up being quite similar in our expectations for performance; and that pretty much summarized all of our findings - the two consoles, although implementing very different architectures, ended up being so very similar.
So we've concluded that the two platforms will probably end up performing very similarly, but there was one very important element excluded from the first article: a comparison to present-day PC architectures. The reason a comparison to PC architectures is important is because it provides an evaluation point to gauge the expected performance of these next-generation consoles. We've heard countless times that these new consoles would offer better gaming performance than anything we've had on the PC, or anything we would have for a matter of years. Now it's time to actually put those claims to the test, and that's exactly what we did.
Speaking under conditions of anonymity with real world game developers who have had first hand experience writing code for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 hardware (and dev kits where applicable), we asked them for nothing more than their brutal honesty. What did they think of these new consoles? Are they really outfitted with the PC-eclipsing performance we've been lead to believe they have? The answer is actually quite frequently found in history; as with anything, you get what you pay for.
Learning from Generation X
The original Xbox console marked a very important step in the evolution of gaming consoles - it was the first console that was little more than a Windows PC.
The original Xbox was basically a PC
It featured a 733MHz Pentium III processor with a 128KB L2 cache, paired up with a modified version of NVIDIA's nForce chipset (modified to support Intel's Pentium III bus instead of the Athlon XP it was designed for). The nForce chipset featured an integrated GPU, codenamed the NV2A, offering performance very similar to that of a GeForce3. The system had a 5X PC DVD drive and an 8GB IDE hard drive, and all of the controllers interfaced to the console using USB cables with a proprietary connector.
For the most part, game developers were quite pleased with the original Xbox. It offered them a much more powerful CPU, GPU and overall platform than anything had before. But as time went on, there were definitely limitations that developers ran into with the first Xbox.
One of
This isn't the article in question, but an earlier one that's still available on the AnandTech site. If you have the actual article cached or saved, please post it (or a link) here. Thanks, AC
Who modded this idiot up??
C64? You gotta be kidding. C64 games were just one step above pong and you have the nerve to compare them to modern racing games? Better lay off that crack pipe already.
MC3 is not just about pretty graphics, it's about some of the most intense racing ever in a game.
And yes, drive a make believe car around because it's not something you'd want to do in real life, wherein if you're into FPS, you could always just go to Iraq and get paid to kill people. You retro-gamers can be such morons.
I second that. While Nintento doesn't have a monopoly on game creativity, they do a better job than the game makers for the PS2 and the Xbox.
Pikmin. Super Mario Sunshine. Windwaker. Mario Party. Double Dash. Bomberman Generations. No blood, no guts, but original and more fun than most titles for the PS2 or Xbox IMO (I realize others may disagree).
The two I will be picking up will be the PS3 and the Revolution.
I'd like to know who these real world developers are, who were disappointed to find they couldn't write general purpose code for vector units, and for whom multiple threads are too large a hurdle to overcome before PS4.
;)
:) The comment is probably valid for the first cycle of games, when people are mostly concerned with time to market, but the 2nd round will be impressive. Actually, from the way Kameo and Ghost Recon looked at E3, the 1st cycle might be impressive too.
This article is just silly. Of COURSE if you do a straight port, your performance is going to suck. That's like writing a game for the PS2 and only using the core, while neglecting the 2 vector units on that machine. A static mesh renderer written which fully exploits the VU1 pipeline on the PS2 will be at least 20x faster than one that works only on the core. I am sure the same issues are at play in PS3/XB360. Any developer who has been around for a while has a decent idea of what they are in for given the specs for the new hardware. PS2 developers especially are used to balancing processing work across multiple chips. If the "real world developers" he talked to are coming over from an XBOX only dev environment, then yeah, I bet it's a rude awakening
And the idea that developers will just let silicon go to waste is ridiculous too. If they can't use it for the code they traditionally run it on, they will find things to put on it that WILL run well, like inverse kinematics for example. If game programmers have cycles left over to burn, they will find things to burn with them
-marsh
I RTA, and it seems that both MS and Sony will at least be able to keep their promises to us that their games will *Look* better, (and probably nothing else), but personally, I'm not interested in that (anymore). There was a time when I wanted the best looking slime on the walls, but more and more, I just want to share fun games with friends and family. I still play my SNES occasionally, while my PS2 sits and gathers dust. (I sold my XBox long ago...). I like what I've been hearing from the Nintendo camp: Focus on Gameplay, fun for the whole group! I'll be buying the Revolution when it comes out, but as for the other two, I think I'll save my money for my PC hardware.
It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end.