When graphics don't matter

[razu]

LOL, yeah, sorry mate. I was having a bit of a laugh

All the lip-flapping over next gen tech specs just gets on my nerves some times...

[weresheep]

I'm not sure AI and Physics will be making any great strides with the PS3 and Xbox 360. Both consoles have been designed to offer number crunching through parallelism and have sacrificed a lot of the techniques PC CPUs use to get good performance with complex, braching code.

They'll be great at graphics/media (once the devs have made the shift to the new mindset) but I don't think the more complicated stuff will see a great leap.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paed.../xbox360-2.ars

So, if graphics don't matter anymore (or at least aren't the distinguishing factor) and neither console is up to much with AI etc. then the only think left to make a platform stand out is going to be the non game related features.

Not sure if that is a good thing or not.

-weresheep

[eastyy]

fancy 3d graphics are all well and good but i would like to see how good they could make a 2d game look if they tried.

I had a picture of a 2d castlevania game (perhaps like symphony of the night) but with hi res and incredibly well animated characters (and backgrounds)

I thought the same with 2d fighting games perhaps the hi res and effects of guilty gear x animation of streetfighter 3 and characters from a snk game.

[gingerj]

Please do people actually believe those long floating point numbers will be anything like the real machines outputs?

[MikeRox]

hmmmmm, tbh if graphics don't come into it, I think it's gonna be pricing and the titles availible on formats that sell it. I do think Sony are gonna retain the market leader position, but I think much like Labours new government, it'll have a seriously reduced majority.

[Gunstar]

revolution is all about graphics not mattering, at least thats what is hopefully gona be about pr marketing aside. Hopefully this will change things in the industry even if it is slight, and maybe developers will risk making original/risky projects on a machine with good graphics capability (games look great now and three times the power of a gamecube is loads especially if it is sold/manufactured at a low price) and cheap production costs.

Are nintendo doing something about the licensing fees? (ignore the rest if I imagined they said something about it) Will Wrights opinions of nintendo crippling the industry because of it's publishing structure it setup might be about to be solved. i guess having no licensing fees could be one of revolutions biggest plus points .

[fiendicus_prime]

PS3 is about twice as fast as 360 in raw theoretical number crunching, 360 is much faster in memory bandwidth. Depending on what benchmark you care to cook up, you can easily make either machine look twice as fast as the other.

Personally, by the time you've got a slab of middleware in the way, I think the two machines will be close enough in terms of actual, useful power that multiplatform titles are going to be very, very similar.

Only the 10MB frame buffer on the 360 is much faster than the PS3. The PS3 actually has roughly twice the effective bandwidth for the bulk of the memory because it has different data buses for the video ram (256MB) and system ram (256MB), whereas 360 only has a single bus to all 512 MB.

It'd be a bit silly if the PS3 wasn't a bit faster at least. It's coming out later, Cell is a far more radical design, and Sony have been planning it for longer. It may well be very difficult to program for but I for one will look forward to a steady improvement in graphical quality a la PS2 (God of War) - rather than maxing out with top quality graphics in generation 1 games a la Xbox (Dead or Alive 3).

I'm sure both consoles will continue to push graphics as the main selling point, despite the waffle about gameplay mattering. Firstly we are still miles off photorealism, and secondly it is a lot easier to make better graphics than it is to make a better game.

F_P

[Ady]

revolution is all about graphics not mattering

Quite, but this doesn't mean the graphics will be ****, which is what most people seem to be assuming will be the case.