An interesting read, although almost definitly biased towards microsoft. I personally plan on getting all 3 next gen systems cause each will have their own stuff to offer.
PS3 vs Xbox 360
Remember it's best to wait until both systems are available and cross platform games are available to better judge which one performs better overall. This is how it should be with everything.
Also this could have gone under the nintendo/sony/microsoft which one are you getting thread, but I felt this deserves it's own thread as the revolution is still quite secretive specs wise.
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http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/617/617951p1.html
but who knows...
anyway at that point i think it's learning to program for the system that's going to make a difference, and quite frankly, by the time anyone starts making any headway, they'll have spamed another console onto the market.
anyway at that point i think it's learning to program for the system that's going to make a difference
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Agreed. Id go one step further and say that its the ability of the engineers to equip their marketing department with the programing selling points to convience the developers to invest in their platform.
The E3 eyecandy does little to reveal the potential of the system but Im sticking with 360 as my pick. The PS3 is still a year off and 360 is just around the corner. The PS3 eye candy was made as a commerical for E3. While the 360 stuff is probably just what the dev's have to show as they grind for the upcoming launch. Nintendo is still in the hole they dug when they dropped the Sony partnership and released the 64; Nintendogs has no appeal for me.
What does that mean? Well, the PS3 does faster vector processing but the X360 can do more general processing stuff (such as AI, gamelogic, etc). What you have to keep in mind is that these things are in-order processors, i.e. they require much more optimized code to archieve their maximum performance. Without heavy optimization, both the PS3 and X360 have no chance against a similarily clocked PC or Mac*. Chris Hecker estimated that in-order CPUs archieve only a third to a tenth of the theoretical performance in actual usage.
On the other hand, the single processor in the PS3 makes coding easier than the three CPUs you have to coordinate in the X360. The SPUs, PPC vector units and GPUs are all special-purpose processors so there is no confusion what should go where as one task is usually suited to only one or two of those. Also, vector processing is usually some simple stuff like "move all particles by their speed vector and accelerate them according to gravity", gamelogic is more complicated and a slight difference in one value could completely change the outcome. Multithreading games can be kinda hard.
*= MS said the Macs they were demostrating on were only one third as powerful as the final box. I wonder if they factor in stuff like out-of-order execution and other things a computer does that the X360 doesn't.