By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
richardhutnik on 15 April 2012
Edit Thread
Alby_da_Wolf said:
richardhutnik said:
zarx said:
So basically they let Mark Rein design it
http://www.sleepygamers.com/unreal-engine-4-awaiting-massively-multi-core-processors/

Maybe they are driving it.  Like, in the past, it was said that Epic had Microsoft double the planned amount of memory in the system, in order to make Gears look better, which upped the costs around $1 billion:

http://www.industrygamers.com/news/xbox-720-ps4-must-show-dramatic-leap-from-current-gen-says-epic/

Sweeney pointed out again that Epic is always eager to talk with platform holders to ensure that hardware is advanced enough to enable big leaps in quality. With the Xbox 360, for example, Epic persuaded Microsoft to up the RAM from 256MB to 512MB, and while that cost Microsoft about $1 billion more, it also enabled Gears of War games to look far more detailed.

If this rumour is true, Epic actually SAVED XB360: with just 256MB unified memory, considering the console's main audience, the greater importance for it than for competitors of PC/console multiplats and 3rd party devs, less efficient in the use of HW resources than 1st parties, probably by now XB360 would have been dying with lower nsales than the current ones and unable to recover the initial costs, despite them being lower. Anyway I seriously doubt those 256MB more cost $1B, most probably around half of that sum.

Listening to your develpers, rather than bean counters, is what matters most.  I believe the decision to go more memory meant releasing an XBox ssystem without a hard drive to keep down costs.  In the end, it was the right one, considering what the PS3 came in at.