The following is an excerpt from a comments section found in engadget.com. The topic was “which of the three consoles will you buy.” The topic went south real quick and became yet another flame war as to which console will be better. Kyle Egbert, apparently a software developer, put in his 2 cents, which I thought appropriate for our quaint discussions, although considering those of us who frequent this place, I doubt there will be much dissention from his post. Nevertheless, for your reading pleasure, I offer the following:
Posted May 29, 2005, 7:50 PM ET by Kyle Egbert
I have personally looked into all the aspects of all the consoles and I am a software developer, so I do know some other aspects of each console.
For ease, I will ignore the Nintendo Revolution for now. They need to release some more information about their console before I can comment on it…
First off, both systems will be awesome and blow the minds off gamers and game developers. Although I personally prefer the XBOX 360’s look, I know many people prefer the PS3.
An interesting side note: (From what I have read…)The PS2 did well in Japan and the asian countries because it was small. Not to be stereotypical, but asians love small-type gadgets and they live in smaller housing. It will be interesting to see how the some-what smaller XBOX 360 performs here against the noticably larger PS3.
I think that the PS3 specs are somewhat overblown. Remember that before the PS2 came out, Sony promised that it would be able to render Toy Story in real time. Also, even thought the Cell processor may have 1.8TF of streaming floating point calculations, most games don’t benefit from it. (Please forgive my numbers if they are off, but they should be somewhat close.) 87.5 percent of the Cell processor is dedicated to streaming floating point calculations. When you anylize the best games today, you notice that only about 10-15% of the game time is floating point calculation, while only about half of that is streaming floating point.
Also, it is foolish to use blue laser technologies for the generation of gaming. The most requested thing from developers for the next versions of consoles were quicker disc seek times and faster reading. By using new blue laser technologies, you instantly loose the seek time performance because the disc size is so big. Also, if it gets any bit damaged (much easier on a higher density disc), the read errors increase and then you lose performance. Lastly, the third major request from game developers was a lower price. By using a (now unfinished) blue laser technology, you can instantly add about $100 to the price (remember how much DVD drives cost when they came out). XBOX 1 games used dual layer DVDs, but 90% of the games would fit on a single layer disc, so there isn’t much need for more storage.
Both systems are not dirrectly compairable because of the new technology (Cell vs 3 Core PPC, ATI vs nVIDIA), so lets try to assume that they are about equal. The reason that XBOX 360 games will look great in the future will be because of their new (patented) “Procedural Synthesis” technology. Basically, this makes games look much better and much quicker to develop by using code instead of art. I will quickly try to describe it here, but there is a full article on it here(http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360-1.ars?978…). Lets say you were trying to make a great looking forest. In cheap games, developers make one tree and copy it a hundred times to make a forest. In good games, developers hire an army of computer artists to hand make trees to put in the forest. In the XBOX 360 world, you make code to generate the tree and the XBOX 360 will automatically create each tree differently. This saves memmory space because all the trees’ vertex points don’t need to be saved, making the game render faster and look better with less memmory needed.
Lets also use “Procedural Synthesis” for another problem. I know you have seen games where something is suppost to be circular, but instead it is a polygon. This is because the computer artist is not able to make a circle because all objects are made with triangles. Also, the artist needs to think about how long it takes to render a good circle. Well with a fake-circle (polygon based) there is much memmory taken up by storing each triangle’s vertexes on the circle. In XBOX 360, an artist is able to create a “circle” without having to worry about performance because the XBOX 360 will intelligently render the circle to the best it can without lag. This produces a better looking circle with faster performance because very little memmory needs to be used to define the circle.
Also, regular gamers don’t really care to the specific performance specs of the system, it is the games and accessories. At E3, Sony said that their PS3 was running on stage at full performance, so don’t expect the games/technical previews to look much better. On the other hand, the XBOX 360 hardware was only working 25-40%, so expect big jumps in performance and graphics by launch. I think that the technical topics of the systems are too overblown and what will ultimately determine the success of the platform will be the games. With Microsoft taking a lead with “Procedural Synthesis”, more games will be developed quicker with better graphics. Software is a major topic that isn’t being discussed and since I am from a developer’s point of view, I can safely say that XBOX 360 should provide ample competition to PS3.
Now, for my market analysis, I believe that the XBOX 360 will tie or overtake the PS3. Remember that system performance is not a major factor in market share, so I am looking at the business decisions for my analysis. When the XBOX 360 is released, people will be so amazed that they’ll buy the system. Being first is a great advantage. Also, XBOX 360 (from my knowledge) should be less in cost than PS3. People expect PS3 to be between $400-500. It shouldn’t be the normal $300, because Sony said at their E3 launch that it would be more than the usual amount. Microsoft promised developers to be around $300 at launch, so it should be in ballpark. (I think it would be funny if they sold XBOX 360 at a price of $360) Lastly, since the Dev-Kits for XBOX 360 have been out for a much longer time, there should be many more games for 360 at launch than PS3. Microsoft said 25-40 games would be released at launch with another 180 games already in development for release in 2006.
If I might say one last thing… If you would ask any gamer if they would like backwards compatibility, they’d say yes. But seriously, how many PS1 games did you play on PS2? Most people would say not very many. If they did play any PS1 games, it would only be the best ones. XBOX 360 will be backwards compatible for all popular games, so this shouldn’t be an issue.
Just for your knowledge, I have not altered any of the information and I am only giving my best professional opinion with the most accepted facts about the consoles. In the end, all gamers have benefited from the competition from Microsoft and Sony.
Thanks for reading! I would love to hear your comments (kyleegbert@hotmail.com).
Kyle Egbert
*There was one response to his missive that was a bland retort (IMO), it is about 2 post below his but I have not incuded here. Feel free to look it up at engadet.com, at your own leisure.