| HappySqurriel said: We're hitting a point where developers have been working on the PS3 and XBox 360 for nearly 5 years and nothing has been shown for either console which is dramatically better than what the other console can produce; and the few games that people would claim give the PS3 "The Edge" are almost all games with such insane budgets that it is questionable whether they can turn a profit at all. If given enough time and money to tweak every model, texture and effect in a game to eliminate waste you can get any system (including the Wii) to do some amazing things, but it is (generally speaking) not a practical approach to game development and few developers would ever try it. Now, from a technical perspective the PS3 will not stand up well against a next generation console ... Consider that today a (roughly) $100 graphics card, the ATi Radeon HD 4770, plays the same games as the PS3 and XBox 360 at twice the frame rate at a higher resolution with higher polygonal/texture detail, more complicated shaders, and with better AA and AF. Two years from now it is likely that a $100 graphic card will produce images with similar per-pixel detail at 1080p@60fps as the PS3 and XBox 360 could do at 480p@30fps, and a $100 graphics card represents graphics hardware which would be less expensive than what was in the PS3 or XBox 360 at launch. |
I disagree! 
Console development moves in cycles, you can tell which cycle we're in by the number of releases in a franchise made by the same developer in a generation. As the console development cycle moves forward the performance of the consoles are extracted and the games are made in a more efficient way to do more with less, essentially the smoke and mirrors that good developers use to fool the eye.
Cycle 1: Development on unfamiliar hardware, even development without knowing exactly what the console will look like. Say Gears of War, Halo 3, Call of Duty 2. This development starts before the generation begins.
Cycle 2: Development on familiar hardware. The developers can essentially extract the full measure of readily available performance from the console. We're mainly in this cycle at present given that we're seeing a lot of games with 2 in their titles.
Cycle 3: Basic development becomes 'easy' as the developers are not experienced with the hardware. This means that they can extract performance from the quirks of the hardware, the Xbox 360 tessellation unit, the PS3s Cell processor etc. We won't be fully into this cycle until next year and we won't see the full fruit of it until 2010/2011. Once this cycle is over then the major improvements in game engines have been made.
Btw that $100 RV740 has the same die size as the Xenos GPU in the Xbox 360. IIRC it has something like 3* the number of more efficient shader units and far more texturing performance and memory bandwidth (55GB/S vs 22GB/S)
Tease.
