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Next-Gen Console CPUs Not Up to Hype
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Jun 29, 2005 04:06 PM
from the psss-they're-game-consoles-pass-it-on dept.
from the psss-they're-game-consoles-pass-it-on dept.
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.
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Random Thoughts: (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Random Thoughts: (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Random Thoughts: (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Random Thoughts: (Score:5, Funny)
He would wave hello, but he has no hands.
(Yay for obscure references)
Parent
Re:Random Thoughts: (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Random Thoughts: (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm totally with you on kids and games. We did get my daughter both a N64 several years ago and recently a Gamecube, but a game doesn't go in until we've played it and given it a green light.
We chose the Nintendo over Sony or MS because Nintendo seems to have better (read appropriate) games for kids. Sure, there are mature titles like every other console, but it seems like a lower number.
So many people are robbing children of their childhood these days in exposing them to things that are inappropriate. It sounds like you are doing an awesome job with your son in that regard and that parental control will pay huge dividends in the future, just like it is now.
Parent
Re:Random Thoughts: (Score:5, Informative)
They're inexpensive and downloadable off the net, too
These days, most of the really good, non-violent stuff in PC/Mac gaming comes from web sites marketing their goods online. The small developers haven't "sold out" to Hollywood yet.
Parent
Re:Random Thoughts: (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, because nothing builds character like a good skull fracture, and everyone knows helmets are only for people who want to look stupid.
Don't give in to the tyranny of helmets! No more lies from the helmet industry conspiracy!
Parent
Re:Random Thoughts: (Score:5, Insightful)
As soon as I saw the parent's post regarding controlling what content their children were allowed to see, I *knew* there would be a surge of outrage (not by you specifically) and talk of "sheltering" by the Slashdot crowd.
I'm not trying to invalidate your opinion, but do you have kids of your own? Are they older than two or three i.e. at an age where these issues become more relevant?
Children do not need to be taught life's hard lessons as soon as they can walk; they will learn those things in due time. Personally, I question whether anyone should be taught or conditioned to equate bloody violence with "fun" (ability to separate truth from fiction being irrelevant - its still a pretty sick form of entertainment when you think about it. Don't worry: I'm as guilty as you - I play the FPS on occassion and love pen-and-paper RPGs). Children should be allowed to enjoy their childhoods free of the fear and loathing that adulthood will, inevitably, teach them. Very, *very* few children are truly "sheltered" - they are exposed gradually, over time, when the parent determines the timing is appropriate. Before it gets mentioned, there is not a single parent out there that is not aware of the fact that society is beating on their door and that their children will be exposed to outside influences from very early on - this is why it becomes particularly important to stem the tide as best as you can.
Which way do you (once again, collectively - not specifically) want it:
You can't have it both ways...but I'll tell you this for sure: the parent will get blamed/criticized no matter what choices they make.
Parents who restrict what their children are exposed to, whether you agree with it or not, are doing part of what is expected of good parents. They will be held responsible for the actions of their children (financially and/or socially) and, therefore, have a responsibility to themselves and society to do so. Note: the parent poster did not say that his children would never be exposed to violent video games - only that they were not being exposed now. This is a very reasonable approach; so is limiting exposure as the child grows into a teen, restricting game play to set times/places/lengths, etc.
When you are held accountable for your child's behavior, you might see it the same way as well.
My son is 4.5 years old and would gladly play video games every night if I allowed him to. I do not and when I do, I am present and likely playing with him. Obviously, the reason we limit him is because he is 4.5 years old and needs to learn to play Memory Match, Chutes and Ladders, Rescue Heroes, Action-Figure-Of-The-Week, share his toys with his siblings and friends, etc. As he gets older, he will need to learn to read, write, and do arithmetic, to socialize in larger and larger play groups, etc. The point being: at every stage of development, children have different milestones they need to hit on the path to adulthood - every parent, in my opinion, will restrict/encourage behaviors along the way.
I graduated from school in 2000, and most of you have no idea how sheltered and spoiled most of the people I had as classmates were. It is embarrassing to be even in the same age group as these kids.
Do you realize how arrogant that sounds? What is with the rush to pile burdens onto your, or anyone else's, shoulders?
Sheltered? Are you s
Parent
Re:Random Thoughts: (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a little one on the way and I had already made my decisions on this sort of thing before reading. I agree with you totally.
A child' mind is like a dry sponge, they absorb the information around them at an enourmous rate. (much more than an adult) Their world perception is developing at this point also.
I do not agree with lying to children and sheltering them from "real life". This just means they learn not to trust what you say. Also, unless you are some sort of a marketing/acting god, you will find it hard to perpetrate the lie in a plausable way.
However:
How the **** is GTA or any other video game or movie even slightly representative of "real life"??
What kind of "real life" message is it teaching exactly?
If I want my child to learn about death, I will buy them a goldfish. Not a video game.
If I want them to learn about sex, I will tell them myself. Not rent them a porno.
If I want them to learn about poverty in the 3rd (and 1st) world I will show them a documentary/book/explain it myself. I will not buy them Nike shoes.
All this will occur at an age where I think they are mature enough to understand these things.
PS: I am very liberally minded, not conservative - in case you were wondering.
Parent
Re:Random Thoughts: (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Random Thoughts: (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I'd argue that this is an incorrect premise. The next-gen consoles are *not* general-purpose computers, but rather, extremely powerful media DSPs. The multicore, in-order execution of the Cell and the Xenon are meant to eat through datasets very quickly, but aren't going to be particularly powerful for general purpose use.
Both these CPUs are going to require quite a bit of rethinking of design by developers as traditional engine designs just aren't going to perform that well. Design is going to have the shift toward highly threaded engines which are designed around the idea of feeding datasets into each of the many cores as quickly as possible. The XBox 360 in particular was designed around the idea of dynamically generating as much content as possible, rather than using stored content as in the past, but the Cell's design lends toward the same type of approach.
I'm not sure whether or not this is why developers are reporting the machines to be relatively underpowered or not, but I'd certainly suspect it. To be quite frank, our current engine designs will *not* run well on this type of an architechture. In general computing terms, it wouldn't surprise me that the 360 is only twice as powerful. As a media DSP, however, Xenon should run circles around the P6 based CPU of the XBox.
In short, these next-gen consoles are based around a very specific set of requirements, and I wouldn't expect them to replace your desktop PC any time particularly soon. Set-top box, sure. But they're not general purpose computers.
Parent
Re:Random Thoughts: (Score:5, Interesting)
Arguably they are general purpose computers, their design is just such that they excel in a certain area.
DSPs are great for a lot of areas, especially graphical work where you can get away with only a minor amount of conditional logic, but a whole metric tonne of pipeline streaming. However, video games tend to be split across all sorts of hardware. The multimedia can always be enhanced with DSPs for sound, DSPs for video, DSPs for artifical music, but what about AI?
It strikes me that this next generation of consoles potentially ignores one of the key uses for branched logic: Intelligent Machines. AI was getting quite good about the time of Quake (who remembers the Reaper Bot? $$%%$@ thing kicked my ass), but it hasn't advanced much since then. For a *fun* game, better AI may not be necessary. Then again, the entire purpose of enhancing the hardware with multithreaded DSP equipment is to improve immersion. What does it help if your graphics are more realistic than ever, but your opponent is dumber than your two year old brother? (And he just hits random buttons.)
Perhaps it's time for consoles to begin considering AI hardware, or perhaps a smaller secondary procesor?
In short, these next-gen consoles are based around a very specific set of requirements, and I wouldn't expect them to replace your desktop PC any time particularly soon. Set-top box, sure. But they're not general purpose computers.
I'm not so much thinking of replacing the PC with a game console, but rather adding a strict division of labor. Why should a desktop PC be incurring the expense of fancy gaming hardware when it's just going to be replicated on the console? In the past the answer was that the PC could do a lot cooler games than consoles, especially in the areas of simulation and immersion. But now consoles have nearly as many buttons as a PC (which annoys the hell out of me) and can actually do immersive games *better*. In addition, a console can theoretically be more social than a PC. (Although the X-Box and Playstation don't show it.)
Just my random musings, anyway.
Parent
Re:Random Thoughts: (Score:5, Insightful)
Like the old Mac ads: It Just Works. Drop in the disk, plug the box into the TV and you're good to go. No having to fish around in the OS to adjust display settings because you're opting to use TV output, for example.
They also tend not to have bug-ridden web browsers "intergrated" into them.
"Or perhaps the real point is, why use your computer for gaming?"
For that set of people who buy the bleeding edge hardware. I could go on, but this'd turn into flamebait.
"How many times can you run around shooting the same bad guys with the same tired weapons?"
How many times can you run around a maze eating dots? The 1980's game crash happened for a reason, and there are those that believe, as gaming and, more specifically, game content have gone mainstream, we may be staring down another one on the horizon, possibly with this upcoming generation of hardware.
At this point, I'd say that, if not this upcoming generation, then the generation after that will rely on whatever Nintendo still has up their sleeves for the Revolution. They claim that they'll be targeting non-gamers like nobody else (while Microsoft and Sony both seem to still be aiming at the "appliance" angle), but whether or not they can actually deliver remains to be seen.
"While I realize that the gaming industry thinks that games are Hollywood productions, "
I'd say more that Hollywood believes that games are Hollywood productions. Look at who owns what game companies nowadays. They're applying Hollywood thinking to game publishing, and that's even failing them in the movie-making business nowadays.
"Keep riding the bleeding edge of gaming."
Bleeding edge isn't as safely profitable as rehashing out old games.
"Why do games today *have* to be something I can't let my 5 year old son play?"
So long as 18-24 year-old guys keep on spending lots of money on little more than tits and blood, then that's what they're going to keep publishing. It's going to continue to be this way until that demographic decides to move on to something else (which I don't think has ever happened in the history of humanity), or some other demographic rises up and throws around equally large sums of money on something else. This goes back to the Hollywood factor.
Again, things will depend on the Revolution's ability to reach its stated goal of attracting large numbers of non-gamers.
Parent
Preach it! (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Parent
**** your insecure, Hollywood-wannabe mentalities (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:**** your insecure, Hollywood-wannabe mentaliti (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Random Thoughts: (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Random Thoughts: (Score:5, Interesting)
You fight like a dairy farmer!
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Who cares about the CPU? (Score:5, Funny)
This just in... (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:This just in... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www-306.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/
http://research.scea.com/research/html/CellGDC05/
http://research.scea.com/research/html/CellGDC05/
If you don't split up the local store, you're going to incurr a 500 cycle penalty while waiting for memory. If you split up the local store, you can fetch to half the mem and process on the other half. This amortizes, if not completely masks the cost of main memory access.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
It's up to the developer to optimize their code and ensure that it is being scheduled properly.
I'd love to hear from a developer that is actually doing everything they can at the low level to optimize data flow. What's their experience with keeping the processors fed with data?
Parent
Re:This just in... (Score:5, Informative)
On the PS3, we get 256 KB of memory with a vector processor running 3.2Ghz, and people are complaining? And we get a bunch of em. Whoever they talked to were not PS2 developers. The same people who made sweet PS2 games will be making sweet PS3 games, trust me. For everyone else it will be harder to get used to.
For one thing, you can kiss your virtual calls goodbye.
Parent
Re:This just in... (Score:5, Interesting)
I do think they must have been talking to PC developers or something, especially when they say things like the original Xbox was limited by a slow CPU and "only" 64 MB of memory. At least when co-developing with the PS2, it felt like the Xbox had gobs of CPU time and RAM, and the limiting factor was fill rate and memory throughput.
Also, as someone who's written non-graphics VU0 code, to me the SPEs look like a walk in the park. Integer multiplies? We can use C? Read *and* write memory without CPU intervention? Sounds pretty good to me, although of course it will probably be hard to find enough tasks that are a natural fit to the SPEs, not to mention multi-platform issues.
I remember when we first moved to PS2 development from the PC, and all the PS1 developers were saying how awesome the seemingly crippled PS2 was and I thought they were delusional. Now I feel like an old codger telling the kids how in my day we had to pair our instructions by hand, and we liked it! Actually, I am kind of sad to see the end of the PS2; while I've certainly done my share of cursing at a black screen or a 30 page DMA log, it has been pretty satisfying to pull off all the various hacks you do to get stuff running on a PS2, plus the nice feeling that doing all your graphics straight to the metal without a single library call. I think those days are over, and in ten years, nobody will care that we once got MSKPATH3 to work with DMA call/return or whatever. Such is life.
Parent
Sounds like demoscene coding on an amiga... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well... Toy Story wasn't rendered real-time, after all. Perhaps they were sayin that given enough time it could deliver Toy Story.
"Same thing with the infamous "Mode 7" in the Super NES system."
Huh? Nintendo Power said the SNES would deliver scaling and rotation. When the SNES came out, we got... scaling and rotation. The only thing that wasn't delivered were game companies that had figured out what to do with it beyond the a/v shows that all launch titles end up being. That took time.
But even then , F-Zero was a launch title, as was PilotWings. That's a heck of a lot more Mode 7 than the ActRaiser cut-scenes that Nintendo Power focused on at the time.
Parent
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
I'd also point out the "Toy Story in Real Time" thing was never a Sony claim either. As far as I've been able to track it down, it was some idiot journalist that made the claim, not a Sony spokesperson or any Sony marketing literature.
Parent
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-250632.html?legacy=
Parent
PPU is the answer. (Score:5, Interesting)
Info about the PPU (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.pcper.com.nyud.net:8090/article.php?ai
From the link:
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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!
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(end of snip)
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:shocked: (Score:5, Funny)
Re::shocked: (Score:5, Funny)
\(^-^)/
Oh wait...I think that's happy.
Here's shocked...
\(O_O)/
Parent
More hype (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't know what any system will cost.
Re:More hype (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Moderation (Score:4, Insightful)
HDTV gaming, lag? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Take both sides with a grain of salt. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Great graphics, boring games (Score:4, Insightful)
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>
Makes the Revolution look much more interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Makes the Revolution look much more interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
The graphics of any particular game are only important to me for about the first five minutes. After that, it's all gameplay that matters. I still play Advanced Wars 2 on my GBA, almost every day, and the graphics suck. Putting it on a more powerful system wouldn't make it any more fun. Paying hundreds of dollars for more Mhz isn't appealing to me anymore. I don't want shinier or faster games, I want new types of games. I want something that couldn't be backported to the previous generation of consoles just by toning down the number of polygons in each model and turning off a couple of the advanced lighting features.
If a new, wacky controller can help bring us new gameplay, then I'm all for it. I hope that whatever Nintendo does, it's new, it's different, it's well thought-out, and it drives some ideas. I hope it leads to a bunch of smaller, more independent studios making games for the Revolution that won't work on the other consoles. I want a company to offer me an experience that no one else is.
Sony and MS are busy trumping up their own system, while at the same time bad mouthing the other's. But really, they're both the same. Some of the hardware has different names printed on it, and slightly different specs, but they both basically offer the developer and gamer the exact same thing. Which is the exact same thing that the last round of consoles offered us, just more powerful. Big whoop, we've been getting that from consoles and computers for the past two decades. I want something new.
Parent
Speculation (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Hmm, what about doom3 on the xbox? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Xbox 360 twice as fast as Xbox? (Score:5, Insightful)
Each new feature added to the console requires learning that developers for past consoles, who have been used to the last console, will do slowly, and maybe reluctantly.
What developers really want is the *exact same* architecture, but much faster, more memory, etc. No more processors, no more complex ways of addressing different caches. Just make the thing the same, only faster, and developers would love it. Initially...
However, a year from now, the developers will learn the basics of the new consoles, and want something more. Then they will get into all those features that the new architecture gives them, and be excited to be the first to make a game that has realistic crumbling concrete when the tank slams into a wall, or whatever else they decide to do.
But asking a developer now about how their next gen console devkit performs is premature.
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No more free lunches; should we get used to it? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [www.gotw.ca], if this article is to be believed. (This may have featured in
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Re:Xbox 360 twice as fast as Xbox? (Score:5, Insightful)
Please provide a link if you're absolutely sure there is. I've been mongering every scrap of information released on the next gen console and I can guarantee Ninty isn't "expected" to have any kind of processor on the Revolution- Nintendo has kept it completely quiet.
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Re:Xbox 360 twice as fast as Xbox? (Score:5, Insightful)
Interestingly though, the article also says that the two GPUs (which are again nearly the same in performance) will be much better than their predeccesors. The other components will be fairly improved as well, so overall the consoles will be over 2x as fast as Xbox 1. Not as powerful as the manufacturers claim, of course, but still a good improvement over the last generation of consoles.
On the other hand... 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.
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Re:Xbox 360 twice as fast as Xbox? (Score:5, Informative)
False! I don't know how old you were last console cycle, but Nintendo was very realistic about the Gamecube's abilities before it was released. They said, "it can render 9 million polygons per second under realistic conditions." Cue Sony: "Well ours can render ONE HUNDRED BILLION polygons per second!" and then microsoft: "We can do INFINITY BILLION TO THE INFINITY POWER!!!". So it isn't at all clear to me why the fact that Sony and MS overhype indicates that Nintendo overhypes.
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Re:Xbox 360 twice as fast as Xbox? (Score:5, Informative)
"It is accurate that at this time we will not support high-definition [on Revolution]," Kaplan told IGN.com.
It's really hard to tell what will happen by the time it's released. The Gamecube is theoretically capable of 720p output, though the games only utilize 480p. Considering the video hardware that is being used, it's safe to assume that the Revolution is at least as capable as the Gamecube It's not going to matter all that much, because we're still going to be stuck with 480p DVD movies for a while. 480p is a form of SDTV. Even if it's not "HD", it's still much higher quality than any analog television. Your comment about the RCA analog television is grossly exaggerated.And let's be honest... All three systems will have hardware that's paractically the same, regardless of these cracked out specs and numbers (ironic isn't it that all three are using what is essentiall a next-gen Gamecube with PowerPC and ATI graphics). What it will really boil down to is the games.
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