Is the Xbox 360 a Success?

[slowmo]

Pemalite said:

mjk45 said:

What nonsense , MS had no hand in the PS3's GPU , the DX argument is irrelevant , for many reasons one being PS3 uses Open GL , that according to nvidia's developer site is the worlds most used api , plus if you used your argument you could say Sony was responsible for the 360's CPU seeing IBM used a variant of the cell architecture to produce its cores , the truth of the matter is MS is responsible for their product , just has Sony is for theirs , I remember bill Gates talking about the success of the PS1 and how the market had grown  and video gaming at that time was well on the way to becoming the biggest thing in entertainment, and since MS was hamstrung with the way the  PC market worked in regards to hardware ownership , becoming a console manufacturer was the best way of getting some of that pie and  with their background , creating a PC in a box was a no brainer , yes they have had the good and bad since becoming a console maker and still haven't made up  completely all their losses from the original X box through , but that doesn't matter any more because that paid for them to now be  entrenched in the business , profitable with a good stable income stream through live, plus anyway  they will eventually see every dollar back and more .

Regardless if the PS3 uses OpenGL or not.
The GPU in the PS3 is a PC part, It's not an actuall Sony design. It came from the PC which adheres to the DirectX standard that nVidia and AMD make great strides into being fully compatible and optimised with, being OpenGL compliant is a side effect of this because that too is a PC technology used by a few game engines, the PS3's GPU is indeed fully Direct X compliant, they just happen to use a different API to access that GPU's features, that is all.

An example of this is 3dc Texture compression that AMD invented, Microsoft adopted it into the Direct X standard in Direct X 10 which then became available in the Geforce 8 series.

If you look back in history every large jump in graphical fidelity in AAA games was because of Microsoft's Direct X, Direct X 7 with TnL, Direct X 8 with programmable shaders, DirectX 9 with more advanced programmable shaders, shadows etc'.
An exception to this is if you go back even farther to the era of 3dfx and their Glide API which was based on OpenGL, but even then their domination in the graphics arena was short lived when they got beaten by nVidia and Direct X.

This generation is a little bit of an oddball, Most developers are targeting the consoles, mostly the xbox 360 then improving them for the PC and Porting them to the PS3, but even the Xbox uses a variation of Direct X which makes porting games to the PC far easier; this is in stark contrast to previous generations where all games were targeted for the PC and then downgraded for the consoles.

OpenGL does not have the penetration like it used to in AAA games on the PC, most AAA developers use Direct X and then port to OpenGL to other platforms.
Which brings up the point that OpenGL used to be a leader in API development, but since probably the release of DirectX 9 has lagged significantly behind Microsoft in feature adoption and market penetration rates.

Sure it might dominate on iOS, Android, Linux, MacOS and other OS's, but those aren't really platforms where you see bleeding edge graphics, it's always on the PC with Microsoft Windows and Direct X.

As for Sony influencing the design of the Xbox CPU, I doubt they would have to any great extent.
IBM was the origional creator of the PowerPC architecture, Sony did collaborate on the design for the Cell processor but mostly it's based on IBM technology at any rate, it's not like Sony made a whole new instruction set, but they may have improved the PowerPC instruction set for all future designs, so next generation may benefit from this. But without more indepth knowledge on PowerPC I can't really say for sure.

In the book Race For A New Game Machine it details the creation of the 360 and PS3 Power PC Cores from intial concept all the way through to the finished design and manufacturing by the head of the project for IBM David Shippey.  In summary the initial concept was two similar cores to be optimised differently for each platform.  In the end though the time constraints meant they had to compress it to one core with some lesser modifcations to share between the Cell and Xenon CPU's. 

This resulted in compromises for both the Cell and the Xenon as sometimes they had to make changes to benefit one at a marginal expense to the other.  In the end the designer hit his target that he aimed for (except for the 4GHz clock rate) and you could argue that any design choices made had little effect on the end product for either as they are both great processors.  As such I would say you were right that Sony didn't influence the 360 CPU design, they simply put a requirement for the core they wanted that Microsoft happened to want the same thing also so the project was undertaken by IBM to do both.  IBM actually kept Sony in the dark for as long as possible regarding the other use of the core for Microsoft as they were within their rights under the contract Sony, Toshiba and IBM signed.

IBM had the most input on the creation of the core and influenced the design of both consoles.  In other words I support your stance, I recommend the book mentioned if you ever get the time and money to buy it.