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[Ghost of Bill Gates]

Two editors have already responded with opposing viewpoints. They both claim to have heard from devs that the difference between XBOX 2 and PS3 is more than trivial.

Yes, I know..but for some reason I believe Ivan Sulic over Matt Casmassina...but thats just me.

 

[Vince]

Ivan Sulic
Copy-burgler! My ideas are not good and you know it, so don't copy, copy-jerk!

Seriously though, that's actually a little weird, Matt. I honestly haven't heard from anyone that PS3 whoops Xbox Whatever (and I've spoken to a lot of folks, though I doubt they'd like me to name them here). What I did once hear was how the PS2 could be used to render Jurassic Park and Star Wars in real-time!

Basically, I remember Microsoft being super honest with me about what it had with the original Xbox and developers being just as candid. I also remember Sony saying a lot silly things about Emotion and missile guidance systems with PS2 and developers saying, "I can't get no damn anti-aliasing." I'm not keen on trusting the hype machine twice. Every X2 developer I know says the system is solid and the next-generation of gaming will be so similar it won't even matter. I got to trust that...for now at least.

Who is the douchebag? Seriously, I've never heard of him, although his attempt at sarcastic overtones which are funny is cute.

I'd love to talk to this guy and just see how long his argument stands when questioned; for example, when did Microsoft release anything remotely representative of the XBox in as far as specifications? I seem to remember a chart listing XBox specs and PS2 specs circulated in the mainstream press that basically spun every number possible to give the Xbox the upperhand, regardless of how disengenous it was. (Which, in all honest is done by all PR departments, but it works both ways -- mea culpa Ivan.)

I do, on the otherhand, have the ability to link to Sony's press release for the PS2 which states multiple, real-world preformance metrics (such as the GS release) which have all been met and PS2 demo's which have all been exceeded. I suppose, on the other hand, that pre-rendered Raven demo that used as many samples per pixel as an offline Pixar flick is represenatve.

 

[sonycowboy]

I have a question....and if it's stupid or not appropriate to this thread I apologize. I don't read much of this sort of information but...

How do developer's feel about Sony? I'd say this gen it has an inescapable lead in developer's both east and west. If the system were more capable at this late in the game it would probably have even more of the PC-like content that the Xbox gets exclusive. Now my question is this...are these the sorts of relationships that are built by being the most powerful game in town...or is there the added benefit that Sony is really a good company to develop games for? Or at least license them too? I have no idea what their corporate environment is like or how the licensing structure works.

The reason I ask is I wonder how their momentum will carry to the next gen. I would guess that MS is doing everything in their power to secure a greater breadth of that, and it must seem attractive to some developer's because it's launching first (a big factor, like it or not). If it's likely to be the same, with the same 3rd party support then I would say ....game over already. Even if MS scores a few small coups. Nintendo isn't really worth considering in the "war" aspect. Or will so many of these huge franchises get greedy for the opportunity to jump into new sales and power before it happens all again?

I know some of that is like looking into a crystal ball, but I also know some of you have greater insight into the business aspect of this obsession than I do. Sorry to sidetrack, but I'd love to hear some tidbits about this. Ultimately, it's about who has the games (to me).

I don't think there's any one or right answer for your question. Without a doubt PC developers have loved the Xbox because it's familiar and was more powerful and Microsoft courted them heavily. On a similary note, publishers love the Playstation because it generatates mountains of money for them. Given that there are fewer and fewer independant developers these competing factors need to be taken into account.

It's much more attractive from a financial standpoint to continue to develop for current generation system because of developed tools and the installed base. Money can defintely be made by early adopters of the new system, but that's much more of a limited opportunity because of the much, much smaller userbase and the fact that there will be quite a bit of competition early on for Xenon.

IMO, launching early makes it tougher to get content. They are still very divided as to which generation they're going to support and with only one system until late 2006, vs 4 systems in the current gen (PS2, Xbox, GCN, GBA) or 6 if you count PSP & GBA, it's a tough sell to develop for the 2-3M userbase heavily vs the 150M+ userbase of the current generation. Especially when 2005 should be a banner year for software sales as the installed base really sinks some dollars into the system. That's why you're seeing SO MANY PORTS on the Xbox 360 release lists.

 

[sun-drop]

So when, pray tell, do you think MS should launch XBox2 lambchop? I mean, I keep hearing this comment from certain gamers, yet they rarely offer a suggestion of when would be the PERFECT time to launch the console.

My DC coonection is that the thing failed because consumers and then devlopers took a "wait and see" attitude to it ...which turned in to "wait for ps3".


if i was MS i wouldn't attempt ths crazy paln of 'getting the jump' on sony. it's either arogence and total over estimation of their own worth ..or desperation to gamble and hope to win big.

MS should have 'laid up' next gen ....given xbox it's proper life cycle length instead of cutting it short as they have ... and gone for a 6 to 12mth post ps3 launch.

sur e it wud give sony the lead again ..and prob mean a lead sony keeps ...but i think MS launching agasint revolution would be safer ..they would get a solid 2nd ..and in all likelyness prob improve on thir market share next time round as having established there brand this gen .you would HAVE to assume MORE ppl would take a wait and see aproch to ps3 than ppl did wth ps2.

launching 1st is highly risky ..wehn selling tot he exact same deomgraphic ..i duuno about you but when it comes to launch priced consoles, games and add ons ... i make a decsion ..and buy the one i think wil lserve me best ...and don't even think about buying another console for a good deal of time there after, if ever. And it think the vast majority of the gaming public act the same way.

i think MS are showing their neivity with this launch plan .... as they have shown many times this gen starting with the god aweful industiral desgin of the orig xbox ..


they may survive however ... to what extent depends on what effect nintendo have later in the piece.

 

[Kleegamefan]

Basically, I remember Microsoft being super honest with me about what it had with the original Xbox and developers being just as candid.

-some guy who is a friend of a developer

"One of the basic premises of the Xbox is to put the power in the hands of the artist," Blackley said, which is why Xbox developers "are achieving a level of visual detail you really get in 'Toy Story.'"

-super honest quote from Microsoft's Seamus Blackley on the what they have with the original Xbox.....honestly

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-250632.html?legacy=cnet

 

[highrollinn]

I think that the PS3 will be so powerful that Microsoft will have trouble making Xbox3 launch games look better than late-gen PS3 games 5 years from now.

Is this supposed to be a sarcastic post?

 

[Agent Icebeezy]

-some guy who is a friend of a developer

-super honest quote from Microsoft's Seamus Blackley on the what they have with the original Xbox.....honestly

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-250632.html?legacy=cnet

Looking at Wreckless 2, I think they got there

 

[Panajev2001a]

OK. less TTL hardware, cheaper, less heat ---> higher clockspeed and more of them inside cell.
so if the horizontal mathematics and broadcasting cant be done in the SPEs, is that where the VMX comes in? it readies the information to be fed to the SPE, feeds it, SPE calculates and stores the resultant data in the local cache where it waits to be used?

No, AFAIK the VMX unit in the PPE is a standard VMX unit as you can find in the G5, so we would still lack broadcast operations and horizontal math.

http://developer.apple.com/hardware/ve/simd.html

You can do things without broadcast operations and no/limited horizontal math capabilities: it is not the end of the world, but it will require some thinking if you were accustomed to VU's like the ones in the Emotion Engine.

 

[Endymion]

Yes, I know..but for some reason I believe Ivan Sulic over Matt Casmassina...but thats just me.

If I remember correctly, Ivan Sulic said that Xenon was more powerful than PS3 because some devs confirmed it is capable to run Unreal 3 engine flawlessly, while he didn't know anything about PS3. Quite the logic there.

 

[ThirdEye]

If I remember correctly, Ivan Sulic said that Xenon was more powerful than PS3 because some devs confirmed it is capable to run Unreal 3 engine flawlessly, while he didn't know anything about PS3. Quite the logic there.

:lol IGN rules.

 

[mrklaw]

I don't think there's any one or right answer for your question. Without a doubt PC developers have loved the Xbox because it's familiar and was more powerful and Microsoft courted them heavily. On a similary note, publishers love the Playstation because it generatates mountains of money for them. Given that there are fewer and fewer independant developers these competing factors need to be taken into account.

But while PC compatibility/ease of porting was a plus for Xbox, it really only helped it to get off the ground quickly.

For the next-gen, I'm not sure how relevant the PC is. Fact is, the standard development platform nowadays is PS2 due to marketshare. So development methods next gen may find PS3 a more attractive platform simply because they are used to the foibles/demands of PS2.

 

[Izzy]

Ivan Sulic is a bloody MORON, with the capital M, and I'm not even referring to his PS3/XBox2 comments. Check this out:

Monday, March 29, 2004

GDC Keynote address? Booooring!
When John Carmack talks, the gaming world listens. But it doesn't necessarily report.

I say this because of an absolutely horrible article over at 1-up covering Carmack's 2004 Game Developers Conference Keynote address. Calling it an article might be too nice, however, as it barely reports on the speech.

The article's author, Ivan Sulic said that the speech by "id Software's Chief Recognizable Guy" was mostly "of the fairly uninteresting fluffy speech variety," that "I care not to report and you care not to read."

Hey, Sulic, reporting on this stuff is YOUR JOB! I'll decide for myself if I want to read it, and since I clicked on the link to the story, that's a pretty safe bet, you lazy bum! Tell me about the speech!

The one bit of important news in the speech, according to Sulic, was a vague mention that Doom 3 is "'pretty close' to completion." I find that interesting, because GameSpy managed to find two pages worth of worthwhile stuff to write about the speech without even mentioning the Doom 3 date!

A few choice Carmack quotes wisely included by GameSpy author Sal "Sluggo" Accardo:

"Character interaction is hard, and if you start making characters look really, really good, but they still act like cardboard cutouts, it's an open question whether that's a good direction to pursue."

"There's a level of craftsman's satisfaction that you get from trying to do what you do at an extreme level of quality, but I find that's not my primary motivation... I found that I get the most satisfaction when I can tell that the work I'm doing has maximum leverage on the final product."

"Wolfenstein was blocks. There were shipping maps that were done in less than an hour, and they worked. They were fun. But when we look at things now when it takes man-months before a map gets to the playtest stage, and I worry."

Now sure, not every reader is going to be interested in quotes like these, but I sure was. I think any reader who enjoys thinking about where the game industry has come from and where it is headed would love to read some stuff like this. Any reader trying to track down information about the Game Developers Conference would gobble quotes like these up. Any reader who clicked the link to a story about this speech would probably expect to read some QUOTES FROM THE FREAKIN' SPEECH!

Ivan Sulic has simply let these readers down. Sal Accardo has not.

At the end of his article, Mr. Sulic has the audacity to tell the interested readers that "do worship every id word," to "please find a complete transcription of the keynote here, in hell." That link goes to Google and I assure you it was not added by me.

At the end of his article, Mr. Accardo references Carmack's recent struggle to build a small, manned spacecraft, "Somehow, when you listen to Carmack talk, the idea of a small group sending someone into space doesn't sound that far out of reach."

It seems almost amazing the Mr. Accardo and Mr. Sulic were listening to the same speech.

Author's note: Sorry for all the exclamation points and capitalized YELLING, but this has got me absolutely pissed. Feel free to post a comment and tell me I'm out of line, but don't expect me to listen to you.

 

[Fafalada]

so if the horizontal mathematics and broadcasting cant be done in the SPEs, is that where the VMX comes in?

No - AoS and SoA representations are functionally equivalent (ie. you can calculate anything with either one) the difference is just the notation.
AoS notation is closer to notation we all learned in school at math classes, therefore it feels more "natural" to use for most people.
On the other hand, PC has been using SoA (SSE, 3Dnow, SSE2, 3DnowExt) for over 8 years now, so in a kind of twisted manner, this aspects of Cell is more PC developer friendly, leaving those of us on the "other" side, to bitch and moan for a change.

That last part goes particularly for those of us that were spoiled by the most recent console, where vector processor allows arbitrary swizzling of vertical and horizontal operations simultaneously inside register set, something that no other vector ISA in consumer space featured before.

 

[Izzy]

Who is the douchebag? Seriously, I've never heard of him, although his attempt at sarcastic overtones which are funny is cute.

Do I think PS3 will have the most amazing graphics? Honestly? Not a chance. Just knowing that NVIDIA is supplying Sony with a stock GeForce 6 successor sobers me up quite a bit. If you remember, the Xbox was powered by a sort of GeForce 3. It was impressive, but not revolutionary. I see something similar happening with PS3. I basically hear Cell Processor and think Emotion Engine. Right now PS3 is just a mysterious entity powered by a bunch of dumb as all ass buzzwords that probably won't amount to anything at all. Though, I do sincerely hope to be proven wrong.

Also, ATI has shipped some incredibly impressive graphics cards. From what I understand, the power behind Xbox Next's visuals is said to be leaps ahead of current or even next-generation PC hardware (which means hardware that will release in six months and 12 months, respectively). It's such a robust piece of technology that I've heard Epic's astonishing Unreal 3.0 engine runs maxed out on it without a hitch, and after virtually no work put into the port. Now that's impressive. For those that don't know, the Unreal 3.0 tech features the equivalent of richly detailed Todd McFarlane toys that happen to be capable of moving realistically. It's total insanity. Conversely, I've heard nothing but, "Man is that beast going to be tough and expensive to develop for," from potential PS3 devs.

Still, cross-platform titles are the wave of the future. So, even if one console ekes out the other, most game's will probably be indistinguishable from one another.

Because you mentioned it, Sony did not actually pioneer analog pads. The PSOne controller featured a digital pad, four face buttons, and four shoulders. There were no analog sticks. It wasn't until Nintendo released its N64, which came bundled with an analog capable controller, that Sony rethought its input device strategy and came up with the dual analog configuration we now use. Their design is obviously better (and is now the bar by which all other controllers must live up to), but it was not some brilliant idea they pulled from out of nowhere. It was a brilliant idea they pulled from out of Miyamoto

You asked?

 

[Panajev2001a]

True Fafalada, but without things like broadcasting (and without special dot-product instructions) to work out a mat4x4 * mat4x4 operation you cannot do it in 16 steps (think VCL Macro) unless you transpose the other matrix.

My point is that you are right that functionally they are equivalent, but changing the notation can cause advantages (repeated dot products use the hardware more efficiently in SoA notation and you get basically cheap loop unrolling as you process batches of vertices instead of one vertex at a time) and disadvantages (a bit messier looking code, even if IBM and Apple say that it looks more like scalar code... generally you either waste performance on the vector processor permuting stuff around and transposing matrices or you have to have everything worked out that way since the moment you export your data and load it up in RAM).