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ARS Technica 360 Article - Part 2 now up

sonycowboy said:
And what does Microsoft have?

1) First Party titles (Sony seems to have a substantial edge in 3rd party exclusives currently)
2) Live

This seems like an odd statement.

Are you of the belief that there is no power differential between the two systems? And I don't mean theoretical. We've heard numerous rumors that the PS3 is more powerful than the 360. So either you don't believe the hype (from a real-world application standpoint) or you don't think it'll make a difference next generation.

You're saying that Sony only has 2 things going for it?

1) Exclusive titles (both first party and the major third party franchises)
2) Brand Name

but what about?

3) Power advantage
4) Blu-Ray (using movies as a way into the living room and more storage)

I don't know about substantial, i think its safe to say they have a slight not a substantial edge unless you want to prove it.
 
akascream said:
Not that it would matter if they were talking. What exactly came of that AOL/PS2 online stuff?
I'm not going to debate this point again... Sony made announcements about pacts, and demo'd equipment, they never gave an official release date for the AOL stuff... or the REAL stuff... I'm not even sure how many shows they continued to demo those products act... bottom line, until we get close to release... grain of salt on the whole thing.
 
vangace said:
I don't know about substantial, i think its safe to say they have a slight not a substantial edge unless you want to prove it.

I agree that it's a bit premature, but so far, Sony has managed to keep ALL of thier major exclusive franchises and only lost FFXI ( MGS, Final Fantasy, Devil May Cry, Tekken, GTA (rumored)).
 
DarienA said:
I'm not going to debate this point again... Sony made announcements about pacts, and demo'd equipment, they never gave an official release date for the AOL stuff... or the REAL stuff... I'm not even sure how many shows they continued to demo those products act... bottom line, until we get close to release... grain of salt on the whole thing.

I think that is a safe way to approach anything Sony heh.
 
"So let's see, to sum up:

Games may look awesome, but maybe not as awesome as some demos. Or maybe they will later on, just not at launch.

Gameplay may suffer, or it may not seeing as programmers are working with closed architecture

Gee, thanks a whole fucking lot, "tech experts.""


This is the part most people don't want to actually THINK about. (and I'm not talking about you but just most people in general, you probably understand) When he's talking about non- graphics code suffering, he's not talking about gameplay being any worse to what we have today, but rather in COMPARISON to the OTHER things these chips CAN DO.

Do you really believe that OVERALL, the 360 and PS3 chips are going to be LESS capable of running AI, physics and gameplay code than current Xbox and PS2 chips? If you do.......

A common man would simply take out that the jump in graphics, is going to be much larger this generation, than the physics, AI, and other non-gameplay capabilities jump compared to older chips. But then again, can you blame MS and Sony when no developers are even asking for this stuff because gameplay is just not growing at the same pace as graphics?

Seems to me they both designed a couple of perfectly suitable and great chips for what we the gamers need. More mind blowing graphics...with more or less the same gameplay we're so accustomed to.
 
"This seems like an odd statement.

Are you of the belief that there is no power differential between the two systems? And I don't mean theoretical. We've heard numerous rumors that the PS3 is more powerful than the 360. So either you don't believe the hype (from a real-world application standpoint) or you don't think it'll make a difference next generation.
You're saying that Sony only has 2 things going for it?

1) Exclusive titles (both first party and the major third party franchises)
2) Brand Name

but what about?

3) Power advantage
4) Blu-Ray (using movies as a way into the living room and more storage)"

Yes I think that's what he's saying. But I want you to think about this logically for yourself and see what you come up with. We're at a point where diminishing returns are even more apparent than last generation, so that a system being two times the power of another is even less apparent now than it was 6 years ago. ( 6 cars on screen vs 3 cars on screen is a lot more apparent than 1000 characters vs 500 characters...then you could clearly see it was doubled....now you might be able to tell there's MORE, but you have no idea how many more and you won't even care because you're not going to count them) Follow me so far?

The Xbox was supposedly about 3 times the power of the PS2....you saw the kind of graphical difference that made for...it was there...but compare the BEST looking PS2 games with the absolute BEST looking Xbox games, and you'll already have arguments from everyone pointing out things they believe makes one game better looking than the other.

Now imagine the same difference today. Say the PS2 WAS, which we're all led to believe it's deffinetly not, 3 times as powerfull as the 360. Going by the example above, you could very easily argue that people are going to be having an even harder time pointing out graphical superiority.

Now let's talk reality and realize that SO FAR most of what we're hearing is the PS3 being 1 and half to 2 times overall, if that, as powerfull as the 360 and I think you're begining to see why a lot of people are assimilating this to the difference between the Genesis and the SNES. That's pretty much what you have here.
 
jimbo said:
The Xbox was supposedly about 3 times the power of the PS2....

Two comments -

First, you're assuming that the PS3 will be about 2x the 360. This assumption bugs me for a few reasons. The trend I've seen in these discussions is that people are assuming the PS3 to be twice as powerful as the XBox 360, no questions asked. But whenever an acticle comes out, like this one, that suggests otherwise the "we still don't know enough about the PS3" line comes out. So apparantly we know enough to know it's 2x the 360, but not enough to refute claims to the contrary? There could be any number of reasons Sony is not exercising the level of disclosure that MS is with their system specs, but if we really don't know enough then NO assumptions should be made one way or the other.

Second, I don't recall ever seeing a claim that the XBox was 3x the PS2. While I in general agree that slight power differences between the systems are becoming harder to see, I do think that kind of a swing would be VERY noticeable. I thought the XBox had a much smaller advantage.
 
"First, you're assuming that the PS3 will be about 2x the 360.

I never made such an assumption. I said 1 and a half to 2 times, if that ........but the MAXIMUM theoretical performance of the two systems is 1TFLOP vs 2TFLOPs(now this is fact). That's twice at MAXIMUM peak, not taking into account which system is supposed to be more efficient.

"Second, I don't recall ever seeing a claim that the XBox was 3x the PS2. "

Just go back and read all the techinal articles on the Xbox and PS2...arstechinca, tomshardware...etc. The theoretical difference was actually even greater than 3x for polygons(less than the PS2 for particle effects), but I was being conservative.


"While I in general agree that slight power differences between the systems are becoming harder to see, I do think that kind of a swing would be VERY noticeable. I thought the XBox had a much smaller advantage."

You just contradicted yourself in that statement. If you think the difference is harder to see.......how's it going to be more noticeable if the difference is about the same or most likely, even smaller?

Because we HAVE seen articles that said 1 and a half to 2 times which leads me to believe the difference will be smaller than this generation...but I haven't seen one that said 20 times...in order for the difference to actually be bigger and make that difference VERY noticeable.
 
I am truly layman scum when it comes to this stuff, so I wont mind if someone calls me an unqualified idiot with this comment. But I think the author may still be living in x86 Ville on Single Core lane, if you will. And that would be a mistake when assessing these new processors and how traditional code like physics and AI will eventually be applied. Just a hunch.

These multi-cores are a pretty big shift for developers I gather, so a certain amount of initial pessimism doesn't surprise me. But there has been a lot of money spent on these puppies, and Im kind of optimistic it was done so with the foresight that the horsepower can be harnessed by the talented developers under their wings.

Of course creativity and imagination will always be the true bottlenecks in gaming. It wont mean shit if there aren't good ideas to go on in the first place.
 
but the MAXIMUM theoretical performance of the two systems is 1TFLOP vs 2TFLOPs(now this is fact)

I don't think anyone has been able to demonstrate how these "Facts emerged". Especially given that 1.8 Tlops for Sony's console is coming from the RSX according to their slides.
 
ahh, who to believe. A guy who admittedly knows jack about the cell and is thus only conjecturing, or Mr. Sweeney @ epic games who has had the pleasure of working hands on for over 2 months on a ps3 alpha dev kit...


Freeman: Okay. How will that affect the performance of Unreal Engine 3 running on a hardware physics engine as opposed to a software physics engine?

Sweeney: Well, the big thing there is how we'll be able to put far, far more physical effects, with things like particle systems, and fluid effects, where without the Ageia system, we'll have a particle system with only a few hundred particles, and with the system, we could have tens of thousands of particles there. And it's really nice, because it mirrors the kind of non-traditional processing power that's available on the Playstation 3 with the Cell architecture, so it's a factor of ten times more computing power, but it's very special-purpose.

Notice how he starts talking about the ps3 w/out having been asked about it specifically? hmm? lol.
 
CrimsonSkies said:
I don't think anyone has been able to demonstrate how these "Facts emerged". Especially given that 1.8 Tlops for Sony's console is coming from the RSX according to their slides.

???

Of course we know how these "facts emerged". You've just given your own answer. The only resource we have AT ALL for the specs are given by Sony & Microsoft. We have gotten some detailed information on the CELL and on Xenos, but the 360 CPU & most especially, the RSX are still pretty much a mystery. Actually, Xenos gives us some specs, but again, without knowing the detailed workings, we're still using alot of guesswork.
 
"I don't think anyone has been able to demonstrate how these "Facts emerged". Especially given that 1.8 Tlops for Sony's console is coming from the RSX according to their slides."

:lol C'mon now, even J. Allard is admitting to this. Time to get a grip on reality :D

Regarding PS3: "They are right on their claim. Indeed their FP performance is twice of ours in the system totals"
 
ypo said:
"I don't think anyone has been able to demonstrate how these "Facts emerged". Especially given that 1.8 Tlops for Sony's console is coming from the RSX according to their slides."

:lol C'mon now, even J. Allard is admitting to this. Time to get a grip on reality :D

Regarding PS3: "They are right on their claim. Indeed their FP performance is twice of ours in the system totals"

Can someone explain in laymans terms how floating point and integer math are used differently for game?

Now, XBOX 360 has 3 times the integer processing performance of Cell.

I've seen that tossed around (this time by Allard), but don't have a context for it.
 
Doube D said:
ahh, who to believe. A guy who admittedly knows jack about the cell and is thus only conjecturing, or Mr. Sweeney @ epic games who has had the pleasure of working hands on for over 2 months on a ps3 alpha dev kit...




Notice how he starts talking about the ps3 w/out having been asked about it specifically? hmm? lol.
He's a nvidia fanboy who gets millions from them so of course he's going to mention the machine that runs their card. I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't get a nice little bonus for promoting the ps3. I would certainly pass out the money hat if I'm nvidia.
 
GhaleonEB said:
I've seen that tossed around (this time by Allard), but don't have a context for it.

I saw a post on B3D that basically said this was BS as the 360 GPU is pretty stripped as well and that there's no problem at all with the CELL's integer performance. It's more a factor of the access that the SPE's have to main memory that ~could hinder more general purpose code.
 
dorio said:
He's a nvidia fanboy who gets millions from them so of course he's going to mention the machine that runs their card. I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't get a nice little bonus for promoting the ps3. I would certainly pass out the money hat if I'm nvidia.

Oh common you can do better than that can't you?? Tim is hardly in a position where he would need to or want to push one system over the other. Epic is providing middleware for both ends (including all in-house MS games). In fact, Epic is also developing an exclusive game for microsoft (if you want to talk about money hats).... a game that is hailed by all @ E3 as the x360's sole graphical savior in the face of the ps3 tech demos (along w/ perhaps PGR3).

Sweeney has gone on record saying both machines will be great. The fact that he goes on to say that the CELL (which last I checked has nothing to do w/ nvidia) will be pushing PHYSICS processing to another level is very telling. This is the exact opposite of what some nobody who ADMITTEDLY knows nothing certain about the cell is claiming.

Like I said, who to believe indeed.
 
Doube D said:
(including all in-house MS games)
Just a point of clarification, I'm fairly certain it is not not ALL MS games, just the ones they decide to use it for. I beleive the place that said it was all MS games was deemed to have been mistaken.
 
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