| Teragen said: HappySqurriel, I had a great laugh reading your post. I really did... It's a shame that it contains a lot of errors and general misconception. On second thought, no it isn't because that's what made me laugh. Look, I don't want to come off sounding like a jerk, but not a lot of what you said in your post makes any sense. The difference between the Xbox and the GC was very small, which was apparent by comparing system specifications or simply comparing both system's best looking games. If you honestly believe that either Microsoft or Sony was increasing specifications of their systems to the point when it was time they had to be released, you seem to have a very limited amount of knowledge as to how corporate decisions are made, especially when it comes to hardware designs. Seeing as there are too many hardware components in a console it would be a too lengthy of a post to try to explain the whole process. Let's just say that the only thing that could have been changed up to the upmost latest moment, which is well before any launch, would be clockspeed. Now, it's also obvious that you know little to nothing about the process of developing a game or programming in general. The reason as to why you're seeing framerate problems is not because said console it being pushed at it's limits. If I wanted I could make a game with visuals comparable to that of a basic Ps2 game and make it stutter on the Ps3. The reason as to why you're not seeing framerate problems on the Wii is because developers are familiar with the system's hardware. The fact that the majority of games released on the system boast visuals that wouldn't even make the Ps2 brake a sweat is certainly another reason. Also, I don't get what you mean with: they are pushing the limits of what is (currently) possible on the other platforms They're closed systems. What's possible in 10 years is possible now, seeing as the hardware doesn't change at all. The only limit developers face is that of their own incapability. Visuals will be better in the course of time simply because of the reason that developers get more familiar with a certain piece of hardware. That familiarity will result in them knowing the possibilities and boundaries better as well as making them able to work around certain bottlenecks and exploit a system's strength. |
Being that I'm a fairly good professional software developer with a degree in Pure Mathematics (with a focus on projective geometry and linear algebra) and another degree in Computer Science (with a focus on Computer Graphics) I think I have a VERY GOOD IDEA of what I am talking about ...
The fact of the matter is that most people have unrealistic expectation of improvements that are possible due to how far games came on the Playstation and PS2. Back in the early days of 3D graphics, most developers had a very poor understanding of the data structures and algorithms of creating a 3D game engine; developers like John Carmack introduced BSP trees, KD-Trees, Octrees, portals and countless more efficient datastructures and algorithms at events like the GDC which drastically improved games. With the PS2 developers finally started to take advantage of licenced game engines and middleware which (essentially) meant that they began to leverage the skills of far better developers to take advantage of the processing power of the console.
Most developers today are already leveraging licenced middleware which is being produced by a collection of the most educated and experienced 3D programmers in the world which means they're already getting really good performance out of these systems. As time goes on and their code becomes more optimized you will see improvements, but it is more likely that the performance increases will be used to produce graphics on the level of Lair at a decent framerate ...
The comment on "Running out of time" was simple on purpose ... If you offered Sony/Microsoft the ability to double the number of cores in their processors, take advantage of a smaller process and increase their clock speed, or add a physics co-proccessor (all with no added cost to the system) they would have taken advantage of this technology; this is what I mean by they didn't choose the processing power of their system.
