Posted on 12/05/2006 10:01:59 AM PST by sportutegrl
Well, there's that and the fact that almost every exclusive contract for all three companies ran out this year. Almost none of the developing companies would resign their contracts so that they could release their games for each system (who could blame them).
I own a Wii. There's no way in heck I'm buying a PS3. There's no proof that Blu-Ray is going to be the future, so there's no reason for me to buy it for that reason. I already own a computer that easily connects to my TV, so any multimedia functions are irrelevant.
That leaves the gaming console. The launch games of the PS3 universally suck. Resistance Fall of Man is their only good title and it's still a B-grade offering. There is very little indication that the PS3 is going to have good exclusives this time around. In fact, exclusive games are dropping like flies and those games are being developed now for the 360 (and sometimes the Wii) as well.
I thoroughly enjoy my Wii. For the record, I have used both the Sixaxis and the Wii remote and Sony's Sixaxis is NOTHING like the Wii remote. It cannot do the same things at all. They are night and day. Yes, the Wii does not have as good of graphics, but it's an extremely enjoyable playing experience which is why I play games anyway.
I've been a hardcore gamer for years by the way. I'm just not willing to jump on the Sony bandwagon again this time around because there is simply no reason, except more hype from Sony, to do so.
Microsoft has been able to keep some of the major exclusives. Sony has not, even though it's tried to show the green. There's a reason for that and a good part of that is due to the expensive developing cost and difficult issues that come from developing a game especially for the PS3. Insiders in the industry have made it clear that it's not an easy thing to develop for and that the developing tools and kits royally suck. Microsoft, on the other hand, has a very good dev kit. (As does Nintendo, which comes as no surprise.)
I should add that Sony has kept one or two of its major exclusives, but the rumor mill strongly suggests that it will lose those by the beginning of next year.
Sony thinks their PS3 product is "art" not just a game.
Sony has bludered yet again.
Have they ever released anything that they have held onto as leader? It seems everything they have done has been immitated and been done better by their competition.
LOL
The PS3 could provide the intelligence and Edwards could provide the hair.
Sony should be careful; Edwards might end up filing a class action lawsuit against them if their claim turns out not to be true.
FReeper have our own team, 36120 that has been active for a couple of years.
We are now up to about 1050 CPUs and 160 regular contributors.
#58 on the charts and climbing.
Join us if you have unused systems.
Oh, Please! Don't go there.
I just dewormed my puppy last week. Disgusting!
WOW, cool stuff. How did he sort out the driver set isues?
It's worse than that. MUCH worse. Your puppy will start voting, I can hardly say the word...Republican! In direct contradiction to the clear guidelines laid out in the IPDPU (International Puppies and Dead Persons Union) voting guide.
LOL
Modern Linux usually doesn't have driver issues anymore. I imagine it went on quite smoothly.
I have had no issues on newer machines, but on older stuff, not so much....esp NICs. But then I have been using Mandrake (10.x)
First, the two are closely related. They are both horrible as general-purpose chips, and require programs to be written very precisely or else performance will suffer massively.
The XBox is easier to program for and pretty powerful, and it has great development tools to help take advantage of the power. The PS3 is extremely powerful, but takes some serious programming to take advantage of it, and it doesn't have very good development tools to help in that. I doubt any of the current PS3 games come close to fully harnessing the Cell's power, although this Stanford client probably does. The straight-forward number crunching it does is already optimized towards the strengths of the Xenon and Cell. They already get some amazing results doing the crunching on the newer ATI video cards.
Back to games. There are three basics problems. First, most games are written to best take advantage of maybe one or two processors. Developers need to learn to parallelize their code better -- three on the Xenon and 1+8 on the Cell. Valve will be coming out with a multi-processor optimized game engine soon, so anything from them using it should rock on these systems.
Second, a lot of current non-graphics code (artificial intelligence, physics and such) works best with processors capable of out-of-order execution, which neither the Xenon or Cell do. Developers have to learn to make instructions in-order to work efficiently on these processors, and good development tools help quite a bit.
Third, the PS3 has a pretty new way of thinking of how the code handles its memory, since each processing unit has access to its own bit of memory, can ask for memory from other units, can get memory from the main processor's cache, or from main memory. It's pretty complicated, but it has huge potential. Again, good developer tools would help a lot.
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