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Elite Won't Replace Premium or Core Skus
As the day has progressed, more information about the 'Elite' has become available. GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that the other two 360 skus will still be available. The Elite is not replacing either of them. Interestingly, there's no word on a price drop for them either. Major Nelson's most recent podcast has several interviews and details about the new offering, which you may find informative. There's more analysis available, if you find that interesting: CVG wonders aloud who is going to buy this thing, while a Wedbush Morgan analyst mentioned to GamesIndustry.biz that he thinks this validates the PS3 strategy. "'It appears to me that Microsoft sees the writing on the wall - Blu-ray is going to win the format wars ... Ultimately, Microsoft will likely offer a Blu-ray drive with the 360 Elite, and I think consumers will be able to select based solely upon other drivers.' Pachter also believes that although the Xbox 360 Elite will register with early adopters of hi-def content, the current 20GB model will still be sufficient for many consumers."
I find it very interesting that in this generation people are concerned about needing more than a dual layer dvd to store game content. I don't work in the industry but I have to think that filling 9Gigs of data is a pretty impressive and expensive feet. I imagine development costs will be much higher for a game that requires that amount of space. Packaging it on one really expensive new Blu Ray disk or multiple easy to press DVD's is probably the least of the worries.
The PS3 just had the greatest console launch in history in Europe. No, the PS3 just had the best European launch of a console. That is not the same as "the best launch in history" with an implied comma and then "in Europe." The PS3 is selling at a faster rate in the US. That statement is meaningless. Faster than what? Faster than in Europe or Japan? Faster than the Wii? People are asking who do they have to kill to get into the Home beta. Only people at least as demented as you. And presumably as young or younger than you. Every single developer who supported the 115+ million selling PS2 is making games for the PS3. That is not saying much. What matters is how many games they are making for the PS3, and how many are exclusive to the PS3, as compared with the development scene for the 360 and to a lesser extent, the Wii. Sony's first party developer lineup is stronger than both Nintendo and Microsoft combined - there are over 150 first party games alone in development. Finally, some good (though uncited) information. But still, I have to wonder how many of those games will make it to the market, and how many are at all original. And you failed to provide any data about Microsoft and Nintendo to back up your claim that the are not being as prolific game developers. Even PC developers are looking to the PS3 for their games as the pc game market continues to die. That sure seems to be a totally baseless claim. In fact, I think it is probably totally wrong. First of all, not many developers would go through the trouble of porting a game from the PS3 to a platform that is dying faster. Second, the PC gaming market is not dying. Third, the portion of the PC gaming market that is composed of PS3 ports is, and always will be, very small. The PS3 has turned out to be the most reliable console ever made. By what measure? Sure, it seems to have gotten much less press about it's problems than the 360, but that doesn't make it the gold standard. Certainly the hardware can't be all that reliable, given the extreme complexity compared to the other consoles on the market. For example, the Cell processor in the PS3 has an SPU disabled because they can't produce the whole processor at mature yields. And the PS3 has not been on the market long enough to compare with, say, the GameCube. Also, with the exception of the wrist strap issue arising from improper but foreseeable usage, I expect the Wii to be the most reliable of the consoles, given the simplicity of its hardware and the fact that it is mostly already proven. Yeah, if the PS3 'survives'... The PS3 is by no means destined to come out on top or even in second. No games for any of the three platforms are out yet that were developed after feedback from the launch titles. And they still have been on the market for less than a year. For a product with an expected lifetime of at least five years, this is way too early to be making judgments with that level of confidence. Oh wait. You are referring to how Sony had to divert manufacturing capacity in last month from the US to Europe for the launch and there were low NPD numbers... It has been well documented that the PS3 has been in excess supply in many of the biggest markets in the US. With or without the European launch, Sony needed to divert production capacity away from the US. And I have yet to see any evidence that that diversion has caused any shortages in the US.
(1) They both have 512MB, but the OS on the PS3 permanently takes a much bigger slice of that, something like 128MB?? vs 32MB used permanently by the OS on the 360.
(2) The 360 has symmetric multiprocessors--3 dual-core PPC chips that use the same memory heirarchy, caches etc. That's 6 in-order execution pipes. Compare that to the PS3 which has *one* general processor pipe and *7* (not 8) SPUs which are basically DSPs. One of those SPUs is permanently reserved to the OS so you only get to use 6 of them. The SPUs have a stupendously tiny amount of RAM each (128 KB or something?) so you have to shuffle data back and forth from the main RAM with DMA in order to get anything done. That transfer can be fast but its still often a bottleneck.
(3) The 360 is pretty flexible about letting you use any of your 480MB as graphics memory or for non-graphics stuff. The PS3 requires a fixed division. This combined with the OS memory usage means that when porting 360 games to the PS3, we usually divide all our texture sizes by 2.
(4) The 360 has 48 unified pixel/vertex pipes. If you game heavily uses vertex shaders, more of the pipes will be doing vertexes at any one time, and if it heavily uses pixel shaders, more of them will be doing that--but you can easily get near-100% utilization of the hardware. The PS3 has classic dedicated pipes (I don't know how many) so you still have to balance that usage like you have to on PC video cards.
(5) The Microsoft devkits are not perfect, but they are really good -- much better than Nintendo's and 1000x better than Sony's.
The combination of these things means the Xbox360 is MUCH easier to program for, MUCH easier to port existing console or PC graphics engines to, and in general easier for developers to extract the power from.
I predict it will be at least 2 years before we see PS3 games that rival the best Xbox360 games in graphical quality and performance.