famousringo said:
VanceIX said:
famousringo said:
So when you say the word "power," what you really mean is "man-hours of design and programmer work?" Because nobody is going to think that's what you're talking about when you say "power."
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By "power", I mean the hardware's ability to perform tasks in the game that result in the wholeness of the game. Power =/= graphics. What's the point of that great resolution output and textures when the game is severely limited in terms of enemy A.I, world design, and tasking? In games like Halo 2, you could have 50+ enemies on the screen, each doing their own thing, in a map that is probably bigger than all of Nova 3. Some games have tried and come close to the quality of Xbox and PS2 games (Ravensword is one of them), but small things like huge load times due to being able to display only a small part of the world at a time hold them back.
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In that case, you're just full of it.
Apple's A7 chip benchmarks in the ballpark of a dual core Sandy Bridge i5 from 2011.
The Xbox CPU was a P3-based celeron processor from circa 2000. That's what, six generations of Intel behind?
You want to talk about memory bandwidth? Xbox has a theoretical 6.4 GB/s, the same as an A5 SoC two mobile generations ago.
The flash-based storage in a mobile device will stream data faster than any optical drive I know of, and far faster than the DVD drive that shipped in the xbox.
Even with the "bare metal" advantage, there is no meaningful metric by which the Xbox outperforms current mobile hardware. The 50 enemies and large game worlds that get you so excited are feats of software engineering, not hardware muscle. They are possible because game designers decided to spend their processor and memory budget on more characters and a larger game world rather than high-rez textures. The limiting factor is development resources, not any kind of compute "power."
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In theory, mobile platforms smash Xbox and PS2. iPad and iPone, however, have hardware resources dedicated to running the OS for the majority of the time. Much of the processing power is completely theoretical and unsustainable- battery management and overheating are big concerns. Sure, if you want to go into the theoretical side Xbox is inferior. But it can devote 100% of its hardware to gaming, without fear of battery management or running a OS, which limit the hardware potential of mobile devices. You think companies wouldn't try to make console-par graphics if they could? They do. Some mobile games had budgets that easily eclipsed the average PS2 or Xbox game, but it makes no difference because the performance is simply unsustainable. It is catching up fast, as seen by studios like Rockstar, but for now they are inferior as pure game consoles, hardware and software wise.
