| slowmo said:
Your talking about a system that is in all probability twice as expensive only just having the clout to beat the 360 graphically. The PS3 was a rushed design that produced a overly expensive product that is inefficient, in the 360's case the rushed design caused the horrendous reliability. The Cell may bolster the weaker the GPU in the PS3 but for the component costs it should be pushing a lot further ahead by now 3 years into it's shelf life. The Cell is hampered in the PS3 by most of the other components, memory is way too limiting, the GPU was a bolt on last minute addition as Sony relized the costs were sky rocketing for their original design. Also I personally hate the smear effect the Cell AA post processing produces, although it would probably be better than jaggies I'd imagine, this isn't bolstering the GPU on the PS3 to surpass the 360 in nearly every multiplatform title even now. People constantly blame the developers for not getting the most out of the hardware but the bottom line is Sony have produced a substantially weaker SDK than Microsoft and they've built a very complex parrallel architecture that will never be truly cost effective to redesign game engines to get the best from. The last home console that was as complex as the PS3 was the Saturn which also used a parraellel architecture (albeit it a bolt together quick fix), it bombed badly on multiplatform titles as it was too expensive to spend all the time to make it work equivalent to the competitor (PS1). Ultimately Sony have jumped the gun on parrallel processing this generation as developers will take years to get up to speed properly, PC titles having multiple cores for a long time prove this. Finally I don't buy Sony haven't had enough time to build a mature SDK, they got their CPU from IBM at almost the same time as Microsoft, they have had exactly the same amount of time to get where we are now, they've just not produced the goods to the standards of Microsoft. Perhaps Microsoft have a advantage being the software giants they are but that'sfor Sony to have solved by hiring staff not for people to make excuses for them.
I'll add some positives to what is a very negative post towards the PS3, imo Killzone 2 and ultimately Unchartered 2 will be the best looking consoles games for a while and that proves with the right developers and a lot of time and money the PS3 can produce the goods the 360 might struggle at. I happen to agree the Cell is a better CPU than the 360 equivalent also, it's just the packages as a whole that muddy the waters in discussion. |
I wouldn't say that the architecture of the PS3 or XBox 360 was any more rushed than the designs of previous consoles as much as Sony and Microsoft have moved away from the traditional position (technically) most consoles have existed in ...
Videogame consoles have traditionally been moderately modified somewhat outdated hardware that because of the lower overhead of running a game on a console, the focus on low level development for the physical hardware of a system, and the lower resolution of images produced videogame console gave the impression of being high end hardware when they were released.
Sony's mistake in my opinion was that they decided to go for very expensive exotic hardware under the assumption that the system would sell so well that hardware costs would come down rapidly, the entire focus of the industry would be on getting decent performance out of their system, and (with effort) the performance benefit of the PS3 would be realized. Unfortunately, the sales of the PS3 are slow enough that it has seen price drops at a rate which preven them from recovering hardware losses, third party publishers are focused entirely on multiplatform games, and even Sony's first party development teams after 3 or 4 years of work and tens of Millions of dollars are not demonstrating much of an advantage over what is being produced on the XBox 360.
