I assumed I would need to buy a developer kit, and I have no idea if they sell them to anyone, but it seems logical they would want people developing for the platform.
As for unsigned code, wasn’t aware of that, any other details you know about this would be much appreciated. I assumed that if I bought a developer kit I would be able to run the code, but maybe that’s only for 1 box tied to the kit??? not sure how that works.
As for linking being non-trivial, again, understood. My assumption is that they will have some form of tcp/ip communications for connection to internet, which I should be able to use. Not the fastest, but I’m hoping I can design the multi-box version of this thing so that communications is reduced.
There will be someone who wants to escape what they should be doing with a game, right there, not at some other place or machine.
There might be better platforms. Like the Mac. Or the iGame that is certainly coming down the line after the iPhoto and iPhone have had thier run, along with perhaps the iBelt (a refrigerated cannister for your favorite beverage), and the iBreath (to make sure you’ve not had too much). But then, you wanted to get away from religious discussions didn’t you? LOL.
My point was. Sure, there are platforms, screens and controls that may be more suited for the high end games than what sits on your desktop or lap right now. But for any of us who remember the c-64, the Trash 80, the IBM 360 or the Apple II-C, you can do LOADS more with what the worst unit you can find now than anything we could dream of then, so, games for the pc dying? Dream on. As long as there are teenagers able to scrounge around and find a book on visual basic who need carfare or date money, there will be new games for the desk top computers coming down the line. Even if they would not deign to play them themselves.
Anyway, that’s my guess.
Oh, note to STEVE. I have no inside sources at Apple. I just made all that stuff up. So if I stumbled on any corporate secrets by accidents, the best way to keep me from guessing in public is to put me on a big salary as a home product tester send me all the coolest stuff to test and let me keep and that will keep me quiet under an NDA. Meanwhile, I have other cool possible Mac stuff to think up, like the Tiger’s Tail. But I’ll let you think about an offer before I explain that one. He he he he he. (If he buys that one…)
As far as I know, there are two kinds of development kits. The regular kind that your licensed game company gets probably runs in the tens of thousands and may be out of your league. However, Sony has had a history of also providing a “light” dev kit for enthusiasts a couple of years after the console comes out . First you had the net yaroze then the linux kit for the PS2. I’m not aware of any equivalents being made available by Microsoft or Nintendo but I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft to make one available for the xbox 360. We will see.
Well, if we’re to extrapolate from past experiences, the light devkit either includes a modified console capable of running unsigned code in one way or another or some hardware accessories to modify it. Either way, you’d only be able to use it with one console. Of course, if there is a way to mod the console cheaply, maybe it’ll be possible to buy only one and use it for all of them. Heck, for the xbox, you don’t even need a devkit.
Nice, Gozu, if you wanted to establish that you are incapable of demonstrating even the most basic debate skills you have succeeded impressively. Look at these responses:
You know what all the above items are of course: posturing, revisionist assertions. Yet again you steadfastedly refuse to engage in a discussion, and instead expect other readers to take your assertions as gospel.
It’s not that I “got caught up trying to argue against every single thing” you said, it’s that with each new response to me you provided a lot of assertions that just begged to be challenged. Besides, I remind you that it is you who started gainsaying everything I said, not the other way round. Scroll back to practice those reading skills and you’ll see what I mean. In particular read my post # 131, and you will see it’s pretty impossible to accuse me of “trying to argue against every single thing”.
I also repeat (again) that you have failed to provide support for any of the assertions I am challenging you on, which leaves you with nothing but a lot of hot air. So, without further ado, your time-wasting assertions quoted above are (again) summarily dismissed pending real arguments and real support.
I was referring to the recent games in the franchise, not a particular game (I suspect you mean SH 1). And if you look closely at games 3 and 4, you will notice they actually look really good in terms of environments, which is what I was very clearly talking about. Gamespot certainly seems to agree, since they assigned a 10 and 8 in graphics score for Silent Hill 3 and Silent Hill 4, respectively.
Oh, fancy that, you provide anecdotal evidence that actually agrees with me. I am impressed. Let me remind you what I originally said:
“consoles are that cheap because the games for them are more expensive and contribute revenue to the console companies. If PC game publishers had an agreement with hardware vendors to share revenue in return for subsidies, you would see dirt cheap power PCs too. Instead we get another trade-off: fully functional computers for a higher price, but slightly cheaper games.”
Do you remember your highly erudite response to that argument? Let me refresh your memory, it was:
Well, as it turns out, it was just plain right. I then explained:
“It’s well known that consoles are regularly sold at a loss, even when they are first released at the apex of their pricing. The reason, as already stated and restated and explained, is the licensing deals that enable Sony and Microsoft and the others to push more boxes and recoup losses on hardware through game sales.” as well as: “So yes, Consoles may be cheap, but in addition to getting considerably less than (admittedly rather more expensive) PCs, you also subscribe to a hidden cost for the life of your box”
That’s what I’ve been saying from the beginning of the argument. All you’ve done is try unsuccessfully to gainsay it based primarily on the force of your opinion.
But wait, there’s more! I said, in response to one of your many arbitrary contradictions:
“And why should we only look at launch prices? Everything is priced at a premium at launch. Retailers slashing prices is hardly an issue when you consider that all the price information (except one game IIRC) comes from Gamespot’s sales affiliate, which seems to be one single retailer. Additionally, you appear to be complaining because retailers can slash prices more substantially on PC games than on console games.”
Pay attention to the last sentence in particular, which was then elaborated here:
“If anything that suggests that PC games afford greater latitude for price cuts. Which is not at all surprising if we revisit the publisher/hardware revenue share argument, where we learned that game sales subsidize console hardware losses.”
I had to put that in bold in the hope that it would remain in your RAM for longer than the other matters we have been discussing. Your response was:
In other words, you provided just more nay-saying and hand-waving without any real argument or evidence in sight. But now here you are in your most recent response confirming exactly what I have been saying all along since the very first post you objected to! You could have spared us time and energy by not posing as the authority in such matters to begin with. And, by the way, in Great Debates even the ultimate authority has to provide cites when asked, something which you have refused to do for weeks now. Very poor show.
Oh, but it does matter. In one of your responses to me, you stated explicitly, in an attempt to gainsay something I was arguing:
Therefore I then showed you that consoles are NOT sold at cost or near it, they are sold at a loss and this loss is frequently substantial. I also showed that this loss on hardware is recouped through game sales. This confirms beyond doubt that console games have a price component that is in fact a hardware subsidy, which is why they cost more than PC games (even in the US, where the price difference appears to be the smallest, a fact you have tried to steer clear of since I mentioned it). And you will remember one of the original arguments put forward for the “death” of PC gaming was that consoles are so much better and cost less. I argued that you’re paying for that “cheap” hardware every time you buy a game, for the entire life of your box. That is why, I explained, consoles ultimately aren’t that cheap… it just seems that way because of a simple but highly effective sales & marketing gimmick.
Hardly surprising.
Yes: I set up and demonstrate my arguments with rather more effort than I should be wasting on an unsupported opinion, and you provide hot air denials. A vicious cycle if I ever saw one.
That’s not the issue. “Real” RPGs are (as I already argued) merely an emerging field in console gaming and so far mostly restricted to the XBox. It’s a field that has not to my knowledge been demonstrated to be as appealing, as satisfying, and as “deep” (and of course nowhere near as established) as the PC counterpart. My point was that there is no shortage of people who for various reasonsprefer to play on a PC, just as there are those who prefer to play a console.
Nonsense. Either you thoroughly misunderstood or the above is another attempt to evade the real meat of the discussion. One of the “arguments” in support of the death of PC gaming was that the next generation of consoles (as yet unavailable) would be so much more powerful and better that PCs would be left permanently in the dust and gaming would migrate off the platform entirely. I cited a couple of developments, such as the advent of 64 bit computing/gaming on PCs, that would be putting a stick between the wheels of your argument. I am sure there are many more such items, but 64 bit computing jumped to mind immediately (another one could be multi-CPUs becoming standard, something I find not unreasonable given that so many people in this thread seem to insist that HDTV is enough of a standard today to make a difference to the visual quality of console games).
Now, what is left from your original battered position that the end is nigh? Mostly several instances in which you contradict yourself or backtrack confusedly in an attempt to prove your predetermined conclusion, plus your opinion that a handful of currently unavailable consoles (the specs of which we are not even clear about) are going to take over PC gaming. That’s your opinion Gozu, and that’s fine, we can all acknowledge that. But stop insisting on it, unless you manage to obtain better support for your opinion than just more of your opinions.
And look at the game release figures provided by Alien. There were far more PC releases in the last three months than there were releases for any kind of console (1.7 times as many PC games as PS2 games; over twice as many PC games as Xbox games; and almost five times as many PC titles as GC titles). You would need to combine all the releases for the two console industry leaders (PS2 and Xbox) in order to exceed the number of PC releases, and then only by a margin of 9 over 116. These data are hardly indicative of a moribund industry.
No offense Abe but every answer to one of your posts takes me over an hour to write and that feels too much like work for me to keep at it. I tried to follow through for a while but we basically came to a standstill. For example, I already said that I only buy games at launch and that they are the same price. I also pointed out that some console games do get very very cheap. As cheap as the cheapest PC counterparts. You know, you have the katamari damacis of games, the platinum editions and whatnot. They all retail at $19.95. That’s as low as games can go before ending in some clearance bin. I wasn’t making stuff up as you imply. It turns out that there are more pc games that get cheaper faster. So be it. I admit I didn’t have any statistics and was going from personal experience alone. You may claim a victory there if you wish. It’s certainly nothing like the $20 difference you pointed out at the beginning now is it? One could argue you were wronger than I was. Ack, here I am doing it again.
No, no, I’m done. No more arguing with you. At least not for now. Maybe when I am done with my finals and I’m bored, I’ll come back and give it another shot. I’ll let the readers decide who made the best arguments until then.
Since this is still on page 1, I felt I should apologize for my misinformation earlier in mentioning my projector states it is displaying 540p. I double checked and it actually says 525p.
I can’t believe this has made it up to 5 pages without someone pointing out a huge gaping flaw in the analysis of relative performance.
Power5 processors aren’t going up against Itaniums, their going up against GeForces and Radeons and, to put it mildly, if they can only muster up 3x the FP performance of Itaniums in that regard, then they suck donkey balls.
It’s meaningless to compare FP performance of itaniums to Power5’s since virtually nothing that requires FP is being done on the CPU anyway apart from maybe physics so all a more powerful Power5 is going to give you is the possibility of slightly more realistic physics. Even that won’t be a given if PhysX succeeds with their hardware physics simulator.
AI relies far more on branching that raw grunt and I haven’t seen any data on how the Power5 does with branched instructions.
To be able to accurately compare graphics, you need to ignore the CPU’s completely and look at the GPU’s. In the case of the Xbox, the GPU’s are made by ATI so will likely look like a moderately high end card at launch and then become rapidly obsolete from a PC perspective 2 years later.
If you read the posts, and look at the benchmarks, and look at the benchmarks on TPC.ORG and SPEC.ORG you will realize that Pentiums were included.
Once Again
The Data
Integer Performance
Xeon @ 3.6ghz 1,800
Itanium2 @ 1.6ghz 1,535
Power5 @ 1.9ghz (1 core=1,452) 1 processor=2904
Floating Point Performance
Power5 @ 1.9ghz (1 core=2,796) 1 processor=5592
Itanium2 @ 1.6ghz 2,675
Pentium4 @ 3.6ghz 1,916
Xeon @ 3.6ghz 1,825
Unless I am in an alternate reality, both the Pentium4 and Xeon (shown here at the bottom end of the most recent 2 quarters of SPEC.ORG benchmarks) are indeed “Pentiums”, the Xeon merely being a Pentium designed for multi-processor systems.
PLEASE IGNORE PREVIOUS POST, I didn’t read the whole thing I was responding to.
Here is a response that addresses the other post from Shalmanese:
Agreed about GPU.
That point was ceded long ago, the new advances in the GPU’s of the consoles will certainly be matched and passed relatively quickly in the PC arena, as has happened in the past.
The CPU is important when comparing PC to console because of 2 critical facts:
Intel/AMD are both helped and hindered by backwards compatability
They are helped because of the massive installed base and software compatability means that some other CPU, no matter how powerful, is probably not going to dislodge them from the PC market in the short term.
They are hindered because they can’t just toss out old designs for new advanced ones because there is no compatability (Itanium anyone? good chip, stuck in a niche).
The CPU does significant work. Certainly the GPU is very powerful, but it doesn’t do everything needed in a game.
The CPU does virtually no graphics work. Until possibly half-life 2, every single modern fps style game was ridiculously GPU bottlenecked. The main CPU bottleneck now is in physics simulation. Even that might be moved off board if there is enough demand in the next few years.
And Graphics card mfgs are perfectly happy to scrap their entire designs every 2 years to come up with a radically new architecture and the API’s are changing about as fast too.
This isn’t an issue because my argument that you objected to remains exactly the same: consoles are not that cheap when you consider that you are actually paying for your console with every game you purchase. This accounts for the higher average price of console games versus PC games.
Another poster pointed out that in the UK there seems to be a difference of about 18, which is very substantial. I pointed out that **in Hong Kong** I have noticed a similar price difference. The only data I ended up discussing in depth was for the US market and I tabulated a number of multi-platform games to show that there is indeed a price difference; I also stated that in the US the difference seems to be the smallest (typically 5-10).
If you are a fairly active gamer and buy 10 games a year for the life of your console, that amounts to $250 - 500 more that you are paying, on average, compared to PC games because of the console subsidy. So if you paid $200 for that console, at the end of the day it ends up costing you well over double or triple that deceptively low sum. If you were one of the early adopters, paying (at a guess) $350 and up for your box, you can see how expensive that can get. The real costs of consoles are hidden and amortized in this cunning manner.
This isn’t about claiming victory, it is simply about providing the data to support one’s claims.
Heh, I am struggling with those damn Walkers in the campaign, so haven’t checked out CS:S yet. And I am not sure if my PC can handle running %#&^ Norton bloatware in order to play online. But I’ll drop you a line if I figure it out.
But remember, this is the point that is being countered with the performance argument:
“Consoles are not more powerful than PC’s for games at time of release. PC’s do not take a couple years to catch up.”
So all of the talk about the new consoles and their processors (ignoring the GPU’s because we know those advancements will then make their way into PC’s) was merely to show that there is some very solid evidence that at least the Xbox2 will exceed PC processing power for games, which tells us in general terms where money is being spent, which tells us where the market is going.
CPU Does No Graphics Work
CPU does need to keep the GPU busy. As can be seen in the www.anandtech.com half-life 2 article on CPU’s.
And, as you noted, CPU certainly needs to perform physics and AI calcs. These will only continue to grow, don’t you think?
In addition, notice what the Xbox development team is saying about Xenon. They will be trying to make use of the raw power of their new processor by off-loading GPU work back to the CPU where it makes sense.
They also stated that they would like to move away from function specific hardware because it can’t be upgraded easily.
If the processor is powerful enough, and those functions are in software, then new advancements can be downloaded and used.
As I said, HL2 has been the first modern game to really strain the CPU since Q3 and the TNT2’s. If you dig back further on the Anandtech Site, they have done some CPU scaling graphs on UT2003 which showed that dropping from a 3Ghz processor to a 1Ghz processor only decreased framerates by 5% or so.
My original point was that a lot of people were throwing about “the next gen consoles will have Power5’s which means they will look 3x prettier than the “old” x86 architecture” when, in reality, all the Power5 is going to give you is maybe slightly more realistic physics.
The Xbox is going to use an ATI chip at launch so it’s very likely that it might be marginally more powerful at launch but certainly woefully underpowered in 6 months when the next GPU update cycle happens. Theres no magic technology ATI can pull out of their behind that can make that not the case.
All this talk about off-loading GPU work back onto the CPU might be fine in theory, but I doubt it’s going to help much. The bandwith and latency issues mean theres precious little you can do to help.
I think you are right historically. But if you read what they are doing with Xbox2 and PS3, bandwidth and memory latency are clearly being addressed, so I think you will see that the processor will make a difference.
The ati 9700 pro came out in august 2002. The ati x800 pro/xt came out in may 2004. This indicates a 18-24 months cycle. Where did you come up with your 6 months figure?
Even if Ati paper-launches its next next generation cards this upcoming november at the same time the xbox 2 comes out and even if they are just as good as what’s under the xbox 360’s hood, it’s likely that the card won’t really be available for purchase for another 2-3 months. Add to that the fact that because all xboxens are identical, developpers can heavily optimize for them so you won’t actually see games that look as good as xbox games until the next generation gpus come out (so another 18 months or so). So yeah, 2 years before pc games look as good as xbox 360 games.
Well, the Xbox 360 was officially annouced… specifications here .Is it the PC killer that everyone was anticipating?
Personally, my inital thoughts were a) How the hell are they going to cram so many transistors in for $200 - $300 and b) It looks more like an evolution of current PC systems than a revolution.
Current x86 systems are already coming in at around 3.2Ghz dual core and, assuming that VMX is reasonably more efficient than SSE3, I would say that CPU peroformance might be optimistically put at 200% better than current state-of-the-art which means overall system performance might be optimistically 50% better. Not a lot of work has been done in multi-core gaming so who knows, pessemistically, I might put it at 120% of state-of-the-art.
The GPU is purely derivative and I expect a PC clone to be coming out sometime later this year. The integrated DRAM is interesting though, I’m not enough of an expert to comment on the performance impacts. ATi still haven’t got SLI working so it’s quite likely than and SLI’ed nVidia box could be the system out of the gate.
The hard drive is curiously small albeit upgradable, I would have thought it uneconomic to go for anything less than 80Gb with the current price curves.
Any thoughts?
Gozu: I was referring to the Spring and Autumn refresh cycles which GPU manufacturers used to commit themselves when the Xbox was just launched, although they seemed to have slowed down recently.
Ignoring the difficulties and actual work required to exploit multi-core and multi-thread on either Xbox or PC, I would say the following:
1 Power core at 1.9ghz outperform x86 at 3.6ghz (see published becnhmarks).
IBM’s SMT very significantly outperforms Intel’s HT
Based on benchmark numbers:
Power
1.9ghz goes up to 3.2ghz
1 core goes to 3
SMT turned on so you get 6 simultaneous threads (unlike HT which does not give you this)
Intel/AMD
3.6ghz goes down to 3.2ghz
1 core goes to 2
AMD: no HT, and that’s ok because AMD is faster than Intel anyway
Intel: HT turned on, which gives you a little boost, possibly up to the level of AMD
When you put this all together, along with design of entire system (for example reducing memory latency was a key design focus), I don’t see how you end up with only a 50% gain.
Remember that PowerPC is an entire family of chips and comparing clock speeds from one variant of the PowerPC is not indicative of the entire family. Fundamentally, it comes down to an issue of transistors. IBM and MS don’t have some magic process to make laying down transistors any cheaper. To reach their $300 price point, theres only a certain number of transistors you can put on a chip. And there’s only so much you can do with each transistor.
Taking everything into account, I think a 1:1 clock ratio is not unreasonable.
There is an advanced method of circuit design that uses significantly fewer transistors to create an equivalent circuit. Intel and AMD do not use this method, but IBM has.
I don’t know if they have employed it in this case, but yes, they do have a method of reducing cost due to fewer transistors.