Heavy hitters only?
on
PS3 vs. Xbox 360
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· Score: 2, Informative
Hmm... not the best written comparison on the web at the moment, quite shocking when you realise it is on the Guardian web site!
They have a number of glaring mistakes including:
Microsoft's will be 8 times larger than PS2's current 8 MB card, but Sony's will support their SD memory sticks.
Err... no Sony has nothing to do with SD memory cards and shun them where ever possible in favour of their own "Memory Sticks".
They also mention that the large number of cores will make it difficult for developers to start coding on the PS3 - I doubt that this will be too much of an issue as all of the new games are going to be multithreaded anyway. It's a case of 8 cores on the PS3 vs 3 cores on the XBOX 360 which in turn run 6 threads. The main issue for coding on the PS3 is going to be the development environment which is most likely to be an extension of the PS2 environment which is in turn an extension of the archaic PS1 environment.
But the one area I really want to know about is reliability ie will the PS3 actually offer any? The fact that one of the 8 SPEs is disabled for reliability/stability issues is triggering alarm bells for me.
And finally they completely discredit Nintendo as not focusing on high-tech:
Editorial note: the Nintendo Revolution is its own entity; the company is focussing on content rather than high-tech so the below only deals with heavy-hitters Microsoft and Sony.
So WiFi, downloadable content and one of the smallest home consoles ever doesn't count as high-tech now? Yes the Big-N has so far released no specs but to discredit it like this is a tad unfair.
THey could just download the new code via XBox Live when you inserted an old CD (still reading the media content from the CD).
Right... lets do some figures here.... lets assume that for a said XBOX title 1Gb of code needs to be re-downloaded (not unfeasible, especially considering that an XBOX disc can hold up to 9Gb). That's 1,048,576kb which on a typical T1 connection (I'm classing my university link as typical ~300kb/s downspeed) would take around 1 hour to download... On a 512k broadband connection this would take closer to 4-5hours!
Then you have to take into consideration the fact that a lot of XBOX titles will be coded using bits of assembly language to improve performance - This is going to be far more than a mere recompile.
They are not going to recompile the source and put it on Live! The backwards compatibility is going to be emulation!
Looking at the article:
Elsewhere, Microsoft revealed that the Xbox 360 "will be backward-compatible with top-selling Xbox games." This non-specific explanation seems to indicate that the changing processors between Xbox 360 is going to make it too difficult to ensure complete compatiblity - however, it's unclear what percentage of Xbox titles will run on Xbox 360.
This sounds to me that they will only guarantee compatibility with the most popular titles so it is most likely to be a fairly standard emulation affair (like the PS2, GBA, DS...) - Microsoft are just covering their backsides just in case game x isn't compatible.
(Also someone mentioned that Steel Batallions won't work as their is no controller port - XBOX controllers are USB, the XBOX 360 has 3 USB ports!)
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They have a number of glaring mistakes including:
Err... no Sony has nothing to do with SD memory cards and shun them where ever possible in favour of their own "Memory Sticks".They also mention that the large number of cores will make it difficult for developers to start coding on the PS3 - I doubt that this will be too much of an issue as all of the new games are going to be multithreaded anyway. It's a case of 8 cores on the PS3 vs 3 cores on the XBOX 360 which in turn run 6 threads. The main issue for coding on the PS3 is going to be the development environment which is most likely to be an extension of the PS2 environment which is in turn an extension of the archaic PS1 environment.
But the one area I really want to know about is reliability ie will the PS3 actually offer any? The fact that one of the 8 SPEs is disabled for reliability/stability issues is triggering alarm bells for me.
And finally they completely discredit Nintendo as not focusing on high-tech: So WiFi, downloadable content and one of the smallest home consoles ever doesn't count as high-tech now? Yes the Big-N has so far released no specs but to discredit it like this is a tad unfair.