Epiphany

When someone has an initial bias that they will not overcome, nothing anyone says will change their minds. Hence your support for the PS3, along with Enders, regardless of the facts that are thrown in your face. But, to quote you you said "Now you yourself said that the 360's at E3 were representave of the final 360" <-- that's talking about hardware, not software. Perhaps you should review what you've typed before you try to prove me wrong.

Again, I never once stated that the X360 at E3 was representative of final hardware. I hope at some point you "care" and look through the 20 or so posts I've made so that you can see that I at no point, said what you're claiming. Nice try though.

I never once stated that the E3 hardware was full power, please don't put words in my mouth. E3 had the ALPHA kits, which were dual core 2.5 ghz PowerPC processors with a standard ATi GPU. They were ~30% of final product power, according to their public relations. BETA kits just shipped a few weeks back, and those are based off of final architecture, from what I've read.

Considering that I have not been flat out wrong... I'll repeat (again) for you, a break down of the PS3 technical specs. copy/paste The Cell itself is extremely poorly designed, and the heart of its performance comes from the SPEs, which will be pretty much impossible to use to their potential. There is no cache associated with them and they only have 256KB of local memory at RAM speeds that need to be DMA'ed to from main memory. It requires linear memory access, and a memory manager to run on the SPE in order to map addresses between the local 256KB and main memory. Branching in your code throws out a significant portion of your performance on the SPEs, and pretty much NO code goes long without branches. The one exception would be processing lists of vertices, but that's why the GPU is there, and there isn't much reason to supplement its vertex processing power. The power of the SPEs is entirely focused on floating point arithmetic, which doesn't even make up a significant amount of game code these days. In other words, the BULK of the Cell's processing power is unusuable by games as they are generally architected. At the very least, it is insanely difficult to harness. The fact that you can write code for them using C++ does nothing to change their arhitecture or make planning for the system any easier. All of those architectural decisions are known facts coming directly from Sony in numerous public events as well as in their developer documentation. There is no ambiguity here. No hidden power. No "well maybe we don't know everything yet". No tricks left up their sleave. That is the architecture of the PS3 as it is set in silicon. The only CONCEIVABLE way in which the PS3 beats the 360 in terms of performance is if you take all of the gigaflops on the machine - the PPE, the 7 SPEs, and the (totally a joke) GPU number (in bold) = 36 + 7(26) + 1800 ~ 2 teraflops Notice how 90% of that number comes from a very suspect GPU number. And the 10% which remains for CPU floating point arithmetic is divided amongst 8 processors, 7 of which will be very difficult to manage. And the performance gets much worse when you talk about anything other than floating point. So, sorry, but the GPU is not going to push 1800, it's simply not going to happen. In recent news, Sony has already said all 7 SPE's will not be functional. On top of that, the PS3 could have 1+ defective SPE's on top of the redundant SPE(s) that will not be used. The number of SPEs we equip to the Cell and how many we will actually use are two different things. If the Cell's final chip dimension is about 200 square millimeters, making one without any defects is extremely difficult. We can't reach our anticipated production yield with that. Of course, we'll take various measures to lower the defect density, but that won't be enough. Taken from a Gamespot interview. Take care, and have a wonderful day.

lol A big, huge, fat, negative on that one, Ace.

Um... When you take a simple look at multi-console games that specifically take advantages of the hardware, such as Splinter Cell, you see a huge difference between the visual quality and features between the PS2 and Xbox versions. The majority of the games you listed are EA products by one way or another, and EA builds for the lowest common denominator.

The guy is a fruitbasket. He's the same guy that made a food analogy regarding next gen consoles, and also started talking about this and that before ever getting PS3 development kits. The Cell itself is extremely poorly designed, and the heart of its performance comes from the SPEs, which will be pretty much impossible to use to their potential. There is no cache associated with them and they only have 256KB of local memory at RAM speeds that need to be DMA'ed to from main memory. It requires linear memory access, and a memory manager to run on the SPE in order to map addresses between the local 256KB and main memory. Branching in your code throws out a significant portion of your performance on the SPEs, and pretty much NO code goes long without branches. The one exception would be processing lists of vertices, but that's why the GPU is there, and there isn't much reason to supplement its vertex processing power. The power of the SPEs is entirely focused on floating point arithmetic, which doesn't even make up a significant amount of game code these days. In other words, the BULK of the Cell's processing power is unusuable by games as they are generally architected. At the very least, it is insanely difficult to harness. The fact that you can write code for them using C++ does nothing to change their arhitecture or make planning for the system any easier. All of those architectural decisions are known facts coming directly from Sony in numerous public events as well as in their developer documentation. There is no ambiguity here. No hidden power. No "well maybe we don't know everything yet". No tricks left up their sleave. That is the architecture of the PS3 as it is set in silicon. The only CONCEIVABLE way in which the PS3 beats the 360 in terms of performance is if you take all of the gigaflops on the machine - the PPE, the 7 SPEs, and the (totally a joke) GPU number (in bold) = 36 + 7(26) + 1800 ~ 2 teraflops Notice how 90% of that number comes from a very suspect GPU number. And the 10% which remains for CPU floating point arithmetic is divided amongst 8 processors, 7 of which will be very difficult to manage. And the performance gets much worse when you talk about anything other than floating point. I hope you realize the "demos" you saw were simple FMV, that require no actual scripting code, or anything of that nature, just make it and hit the proverbial "play" button.

45 to 50 is not "vastly" more information :| I read, last year, from a Toshiba press release that HD-DVD would play on current DVD players at 480 resolution. Finding the article is impossible now that the "war" has exploded to what it is though. But I'm done, using "M$" is something that annoys me, and causes me to discredit everything people say. Take care.

Sadly it will be, if an agreement is not made. Perhaps there will be some 3rd unified format, who knows.

Consumers will support the format with the most options. Seeing as how every movie, in HD can fit on both a single layer of Blu-Ray and a single layer of HD-DVD, the consumer will not notice a single difference between the formats, aside from one requires a new player, and the other is backwards compatible to current tech, giving them time to purchase a new player for added benefits at a later date, while still building up a collection of HD DVD's. HD DVD will win.

The market does not primarily use game consoles as their movie playback. I'm talking in the larger scheme of things, not just focusing on the gaming crowd. In a nutshell, to the average consumer - Blu-Ray requires you purchase a blu-ray player HD-DVD requires you purchase a HD-DVD player for HD playback, but will work in standard DVD players as well. The consumer will see this, and support HD-DVD more for the simple fact that they can continue to buy new movies released in HD format, yet not have to buy a new player right away. You're putting too much emphasis on console movie viewing, which is such a "drop in the ocean" compared to whole picture.

I'd say there is a noticable difference (perhaps not as drastic as the PS2) between first gen Xbox titles and the current batch of games. Look at the evolution of Splinter Cell for instance. Chaos Theory is one of the best looking console games, ever.

Blu-Ray is an option of high def DVD playback, HD-DVD (developed by Toshiba and NEC is the other). HD-DVD is launching this year, and Blu-Ray players are not available for mass market, and won't be for this year. Which do you think consumers will support? A format that can support your current player until you purchase a new one (HD-DVD) or a format that forces you to upgrade to a costly model (Blu-Ray)?

Oblivion is anything but empty... Regardless of whether or not a handful of NPC's per village have the same voice overs, there will always be another handful of people, per town that have vital information to give the player, ie, fresh dialog. But you're ignoring the aspect of pre-rendered cutscenes being less of an impact for the simple fact that the game engines are so powerful, who will need them? When in game looks like this, this, or this, who needs pre-rendered?

Next gen dual-layer DVDs hold 9 gigs, and as I said, games with little to no pre-rendered CGI will not have a storage problem. If Oblivion is fitting on a single dual-layer DVD, with explorable content that large, and over 2000 voice acted NPC's then any game that doesn't bombard you with 5 hours of pre-rendered cutscenes will do the same. Blu-Ray will be insignificant next gen, mark my words on it. The only thing it will do is add unnessecary cost to the PS3, a console already pushing $500.

While Blu-Ray is a wonderful feature, and I hope Sony does well with it, it's fairly moot regarding video gaming. The vast majority of games don't even come close to filling current generation DVD's, as programming takes little room, it's all the CGI and voice overs that eat it up. With the next generation, I see a trend of more "in game" cutscenes across the board, seeing as how Xbox 360 games are looking fairly realistic in terms of lighting, animations and features. I'm also quite sure that the PS3 will be capable of producing similar graphical effects. Aside from your standard Square-Enix title, and other "rare" cases of games with production values through the roof and beyond, I doubt you'll see enough CGI to push the limits of your standard DVD's all next gen. Unified architecture in a closed system is always superior to dedicated chips of lower value. It pigeon holes you into only having X amount for what you're doing, when you may want Y & Z instead of X & X. At many points during a game, you may need to pull a little extra RAM for video or pull some for the CPU. I'm puzzled why you're looking forward to playing a current gen game on a next gen system though, rather confusing to say the least...

Then are you just riding the hype train with the "more powerful" comment?

Knowing the difference between consoles, and promoting the positive direction the industry is taking with next generation consoles does not mean I'm being "paid" by a company to do so.

Just to clarify, the PS3 is not officially more powerful than the Xbox 360. While the Cell may in theory, be able to do more floating point calculations, there are limitations, such as running general AI processes, added to the increased difficulty in tapping into the full potential of the processor. The biggest draw back will be with the GPU. Nvidia already stated that the RSX will be roughly twice as powerful as the 6800 series, which is significantly less powerful and flexible than ATI's Xenos. The unified shaders, the eDRAM on the GPU, along with the smart memory all create a superior platform on which to design games in a closed system. Don't jump on the hype train too quickly, as everything Sony showed at E3 was plain pre-rendered CG. Nothing was actual gameplay, as there were no hardware units to actually run games on at the show.

What RPG/action/adventure game has featured 20,000 units on screen, battling in real time? What RPG has taken use of time in such an emotional way like Lost Odyssey is? What game has successfully woven tactical combat, 3rd person shooting and survival horror before? What game ever reached what "Project Ego" set out to achieve? The industry seems to view these four games in paticular as highly innovative, and fresh to the market. It's just the nay sayers and "doom criers" that continually harp on the "lack of innovation", when it's standing there smiling in their face. The Gears of War closed door demo was so "uninnovative" that it got best of E3, Epic had more interviews than any developer over the game, Cliffy B did several interviews on his own, talking about the industry, the UE3, and of course, his new IP. Innovation is technology, to deny that is to keep your eyes closed to the future. With higher technology, developers can do things previously not possible (20,000 units on screen, fighting in real time). The innovation is there, I'm sorry you're unable to see it. It's hardly marketing PR from MS. It's factual information regarding those paticular projects in development. I'm "moderated" because a mod, a long time ago had it in for me, and dispite me doing exactly as s/he said, I was put on moderated status. Oddly enough, the mod doesn't appear to visit here anymore, after looking at their profile.

Did you try to image google them? I found 2990 pictures with a search of knights of the old republic 2...

It's not how you get things fixed, it's how you try and get a company to disappear. Nothing will get developers to fix stuff, the running theme with the majority of them is release it and forget it.

blah blah blah blah blah If you think I was trying to provoke you into a fight, then you're horribly mistaken.

You complain about my negativity, yet you have never played the game, so your first hand knowledge is completely void. You don't see me telling over optimistic borderline fanboy's that they're being too positive do you? Are you trying to represent the minority of people that think the random item generator is amazing, are you going to be one of "those" kind of people? Even the true fans of this game (people that accept it the faults it has, not those that think it's perfect), acknowledge the broken random item generation. I'm glad you plan on playing it dozens and dozens of times though, I truely hope you can muster the energy required, and that you don't run across any bugs that completely turn your view of the game around 180 degrees. Yeah, it would have been 100 times better had they done what Bioware did, and give players accurate equipment from killing enemies. Instead, we find sith warblades in tiny little creatures, and blasters on dark jedi... Oh, you can ignore my previous comments to you, it's obvious you'll be one of "those" people, instead of one of the rational ones.