Based on what measurements for the two?
Not saying you are wrong, but I would like to know how you came to that conclusion.
Gozu, if you have a substantive argument to justify re-opening this long dormant thread, please provide it, otherwise I’m going to lock this up and you can re-submit your views on the Xbox in CS or IMHO.
Well, the xbox 360 just came out and this thread was about how next-gen consoles would impact pc gaming. I think I said somewhere in the thread that, in my opinion, consoles at launch are more powerful gaming machines than PCs are. I felt I owed it to whomever disagreed with me to recant this statement when it comes to the 360.
I do not have a strong opinion on whether this thread should be closed or not though. Do what you think is best with my blessing 
Gozu, you have me very curious as to how you came to your conclusion. Would you be willing to provide numbers/stats/data that influenced your opinion?
Oh, I took a look at all the launch games in their final forms and compared them to the latest PC games and the graphics are about on par. Of course, the xbox 360 is much, much cheaper so I’d still recommend it for gaming. Very nice interface too.
I just sold it for double what I paid for it by the way . I wasn’t going to but I couldn’t pass up the offer. Some guy paid 1200 dollars for it. Sometimes, capitalism is sweet.
So there you have it, eh? Play a game on one system with a bajillion pixel/inch display six inches from your nose, and a similar system with a lower-res screen 12 feet away, and they look roughly similar.
At which point, you factor in the cost differential for designing/coding/testing/debugging and post-launch support on one single locked-down platform versus the festering snakepit that is the PC installed base, and realise that you will make more money selling the console version than the PC version by far, even if sales are equivalent.
I haven’t owned a console since the days of the PS1 (Wipeout2097 :eek: ) but I play PC games a lot. Of late, every big PC release has been massively flawed. The star performer this year has been FEAR, because it had its patch available at launch :rolleyes:. The PC won’t die as a games platform, far from it, but it will become a definite second-string platform.
Hollywood does NOT make blockbuster movies for your TV, they make them for the cinema. You can enjoy the cinematic experience at home on a TV, but late and only if your TV can impersonate a cinema.
Similarly, developers will not make the huge multimillion-dollar games for the PC - they will target them for the consoles and port them.
Personally, I am very attached to the PC as a platform, but if the games that come out on console are as good as the games that come out on the PC, why would I care any more? And they will be as good, because they will be pretty much the only big games around.
You can argue about the nerdy details forever, but they don’t matter one jot. Do the consoles look good enough, play good enough, and offer enough fun/money? Yes they do, and for more and more genres - it used to be only beat 'em ups and racing games, now they can do most types of games.
Are they easy to code for and easy to do post-sales support for? Much more so than PCs.
So - not with a bang, but a whimper. Not death, but an endless twilight of second-rate games, budget ports, homebrew shareware and SIMS expansions.
That is certainly a valid perspective from which to judge the platforms, and probably the way the masses do. But I don’t think it indicates this statement is wrong “consoles at launch are more powerful gaming machines than PCs are” if you assume that “powerful” is the computing capability of the platform instead of the effectiveness of original launch titles to use that power.
But maybe your original post really was focused on the measurement as you describe it.
Either way, I’m following the technical details of all of this closely because of a personal project I am working on that requires lots of computing power. If I can network 10 inexpensive consoles and get better performance than buying 10 PC’s, then I will do that (assuming I can work through the various details of getting custom code running on those consoles).
So far, as I look at theoretical numbers for the new consoles vs PC’s, the consoles do look more powerful.
There are some in-depth articles on Arstechnica about how powerful the xbox360 is. They’re a must-read for you if you haven’t already.
In fact, Arstechinca has some really kickass articles so go to this page and read anything else that interests you too
Thanks for the links. I read those first two earlier in the year, but I see there are some articles in that 3rd link I haven’t read yet.
I thought that was a very good post. I am in agreement with it. One little nitpick though:
Consoles were never all about beat them ups and racing games. Sure, those genres were important ones (along with platform, shoot’em ups, sports and puzzle games to mention a few) but ever since the beginning, consoles have had no less genres than pcs in my opinion.
A couple unrelated notes:
I’ve realized recently what my biggest peeves with PC games are:
1- The sheer amount of tinkering that must be done in order to have a satisfying playing experience. I really don’t want to have to mess with Soft Shadowing, Dynamic Lighting, Anti-Aliasing, Anisotropic filtering, level of details for about a dozen different things, texture quality, resolutions and god knows how many other factors before playing.
Everybody wants the highest level of detail that the pc can run at a decent framerate (Usually, one that never dips below 30 is ideal) but to find that out, one must spend an INSANE amount of hours tweaking and testing. And even then, if after you think you’ve nailed it, you might get a scene where the action becomes hectic and witness with horror your FPS dip to 10 or 15, making the whole thing stutter and forcefully end your immersion. I so hate that. Nevermind knowing that you’re getting a subpar gaming experience because you have not spent $1200 on the latest DUAL GPUs that’d let you experience the real thing.
Another thing is that PC game makers often assume that you won’t mind playing with V-Sync disabled. V-Sync, for those who do not know, stands for Vertical Synchronization and , when disabled, the image experiences tearing. Unfortunately, turning V-Sync on to eliminate said tearing will reduce framerates significantly. I can’t stand tearing. It is a constant reminder I am playing a game that is experiencing technical difficulties. Now I suppose that giving me the choice between decent FPS and tearing is better than no choice at all but I wish the devs would just calibrate the games ASSUMING no one will have V-Sync off. But maybe I’m the only one bother by tearing.
Nowadays, many games “auto-detect” your hardware and select your settings automatically. Unfortunately, they ALWAYS get it wrong. I don’t blame them. Real life numbers change from one configuration to another. What they should do is let you go through a calibration phase when the game shows you a certain amount of scenes and you get to pick at the end of each one whether you were satisfied with the visuals and the framerate or not. I think this would be much more effective since it factors in the preferences of each user instead of making blanket assumptions.
I have no doubt that some people actually enjoy tweaking their game settings one by one and would have it no other way. I respect that. They are freaks just like people who collect stamps or put on teddy bear costumes and rub against each other. More power to them I say but they MUST understand that we can’t ALL be expected to enjoy boring and tedious crap like that.
Well then, I think I’ve written rather more than I had planned on. For the record, I have a gaming system that’s in the top 1% according to the microsoft analyzer as I have just spent about $900 in CPU, GPU and RAM less than 2 weeks ago.
The problem with consoles is that the online games can’t be easily updated and modified. Too much information will have to reside server side unless consoles begin to incorporate massive hard drives, which just means they will be more PC than console.
The draw of most online PC games is the ability for change. Although very little is on the client, most of the CPU intensive stuff is, like graphics. As any avid online gamer can tell you, framerate suffers in areas where the graphics have to be drawn from the server - large gatherings of players or a player created and controlled area (i.e., housing zones).
Then you have the problem of communicating with other players. A MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) will never work with voice command - too much traffic to the server. So now you have to attach a keyboard to the console and it’s even more like a PC. Why bother?
I’m not sure why a hard-drive will make consoles “more pc”. You could argue that the optical drives they have, the USB ports that both Sony and Microsoft have embraced and the networking cards they are all including all make consoles “more pc” anyways though I’ve never heard it said before. No, HDs are just another tool that many more appliances embrace. from iPods to DVRs, it’s only natural for consoles to follow (or lead as the case may be). I believe that rewritable storage will become standard with consoles either in the form of HDs or flash memory of some sort in the future. It will be necessary as the online component of gaming will inevitably grow more and more important.
I fail to see the difference between PCs and consoles. Everything you said is equally true for both.
Life works fairly well with voice command. As MMOGs evolve and get more and more refined in both their interface and infrastructure, I see no reason why voice could not replace keyboards. Might take a few decades though. Til then, Console MMOGs can require a keyboard. It has not deterred Phantasy Star Online or FFXI. Since consoles will now accept any USB keyboard, it is not necessary to bundle one. Regardless, keyboards are really not made for the living room so I will readily concede that MMOGs as we know them today are definitely better suited for the PC.
And this is a huge draw. I’ve never used Xbox live but I understand that it is orders of magnitude more hack-proof than any online PC game. Besides, what is a ‘massive’ hard drive these days? I remember when a PSOne memory card for savegames cost a big chunk of money. For a similar amount nowadays you can get a couple of gig of flash memory or a cheapie USB hard drive, so cost isn’t an object. As average broadband speeds move toward 10Mbit/s, I would expect to see a trend towards storing all this stuff online anyway, further facilitating antipiracy and customer lock-in.
Well, given that people are already buying dedicated gaming keyboards for their PC, I don’t see why it would be any different plugging it into a console. It’s just another peripheral, like a steering wheel, lightgun or one of those stupid dance mat things.
One single manufacturer-controlled platform, guaranteed to be 100% identical to, and compatible with, your development hardware. Proprietary subscriber-only online networking and online functionality to let you control hackers and pirates, and allow milking of customers for extra revenue. Just being able to forget about PunkBuster and Gamespy must save developers a lot of time, effort and money.
I’m probably going to spend $1000 or so upgrading my gaming PC in the next month or so, shifting all the replaced bits into my ‘doing useful stuff’ PC. That kind of money would buy me a console and a LOT of peripherals and gmes. It wouldn’t surprise me if in a year or two I was spending my money primarily on some kind of console, but maybe it will take a bit longer.
Most people use computers sitting at a desk and use consoles sitting in front of their television. Keyboards dont really work unless you have a flat, stable, correctly positioned surface to place them on.
I’ll still be playing Counterstrike and Team Fortress on my 900Mhz CPU, monitor I bought from a student for $15 and three year old video card in the year 2010.
Really? Even if CounterStrike 4 and Team Fortress Ultimate Armchair Warrior 2009 are only available on consoles, and 98% of all CS and TF players are using those versions? I can’t think of a single 5 year old game I play regularly, never mind play online. I’m not arguing that PCs are an inferior platform to play games on, just that they are less attractive to developers, and that customers will follow the content.
Very true. However, I believe you can get steering wheels and so on for consoles, and the same caveats apply to those. Anyway, I’m sure some geeky entrepreneur will manage to work around this. Probably some hideously ugly cross-breed of the z-board and a Game Commander that you attach to your sofa with a piton gun or something. So long as it vibrates and is a funny colour someone will buy it…