DarkNight_DS said:
Third parties had no choice... the PS2 sold like crazy... they had to support it! Look at most of the PS2's first couple of years titles... a lot look like garbage....some even look as bad as PS1 games. It wasn't until third parties figured out how to program for it that we started getting good looking third party games. Some third parties were better then others though and Sony having developed the hardware did the best job of making games look good on it. |
Indeed, it is not the fault of the developers that the PS3 is hard to program for. Sony had a choice, and a quadcore for example would have been more powerfull and easy to develop for. (yet i do understand Sony took the other option)
Yet if you look further then that both consoles offer a similar Graphics Card, i can understand that the core computations do matter, but how do you expect a game to look a dozen times better on the PS3 then on the Xbox if the graphics cards are the same.
We already saw an example: Killzone2. It lightening system consists of heavy computations that relay mainly on the CPU. But it will be hard to port a game an substitute existing GPU-based operations by CPU-based operations to in the end getting more from the GPU and have an advantage on the XBox.
Combine that with the fact that also for the XBox 360 progression will be made, the Xeon isn't a regular CPU after all.
The current differentiating factor that you call is time for developers, but you have to look further into that. Ohter graphical devices for both the movie industrie and PC games are advancing too. So for now games like MGS look actually better then what you can get for PC but this wont last. And if there is not a awesome looking game out there soon, the graphics won't be the selling point any more because both those of the XBox and the PS3 will look old and dated.
Combine that with the fact that 5 years ago a new engine meant a new revolution, after half-life, doom and far cry games tend to look just good. At least i never had the 'Whaauw...this is amazing!' feeling after those games came out. Of course games do look better now, but it's not like it's a feature any more. (as we have seen with lair, reviews do not have mercy any more for great looking games, instead if they notice the game doesn't play as good as it looks you have a problem!)
And for the future?
N64 games looked bad in the beginning, great at the end
XBOX/PS3 games looked great in the beginning and the will look greater at the end
The difference was huge for the N64 and you had to be blind not to see it, for this generation you'll have to pay attention to notice the difference.
