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Forums - Sales Discussion - 2008: How much will PS3 outsell 360?

MikeB on 18 February 2008
Parokki said:
I'm not convinced that it's happening at all. So far it looks like the PS3 will have slightly better exclusives in 2008, but the 360 hasn't had a single price drop yet, and we don't know what'll be happening during the second half of the year yet.

Chances are that the gap is getting a few millions narrower, but probably not by too much.

The XBox 360 Core launched at 299 USD, dropped in price to 279 USD in October 2007 and is now replaced by Arcade versions at similar pricing. Seems like the 360 isn't as easy to cost reduce, maybe due to repair expenses and additional measures to prevent RRoD.



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales

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HappySqurriel on 18 February 2008
MikeB said:
HappySqurriel said:
MikeB said:

@ HappySqurriel

First off, can you show anything that can demonstrate that the PS3 can produce noticeably better graphics, AI or physics than the XBox 360 in real world performance?


Once you have your physics engine running on the Cell's SPEs it will run circles around an equivalent engine using the 360's Xenon.

Currently Uncharted is a good PS3 game with regard to visuals, but that's only Naughty Dog's first effort. Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction is also a good showcase with regard to things happening on screen with high quality at an impressive 60 FPS. But the technical gap between Resistance 1 and 2 is expected to be huge, this due to nearly all legacy code being moved from the PPE onto the Cell SPEs.


So, in other words you have nothing which can demonstrate that the PS3 can produce noticeably better graphics, AI or physics?


LittleBigPlanet is a nice showcase for the PS3, most PS3 games so far have been 360 ports and the Xenon isn't well equipped for Physics like the Cell is and overall the 360 is designed too differently to get really good results with ports, including Physics code. Some interesting quotes:

Tom's Hardware:

"PhysX is the best thing that can be utilized on a pathetically under-performing [Xbox 360] PowerPC processor"

Note that the Xenon CPU at its core isn't that bad, but the shared L2 cache (by all 3 cores) and shared slower higher latency main memory (shared with the GPU) is bottlenecking potential (which in RAW numbers would else be 77 GFlops vs 218 GFlops for the Cell, the Xenon bottleneck comes into play when using multiple cores, 3 cores don't translate in 3 times the performance by far). Low latency is very important for CPUs, hence the low latency 3.2 Ghz XDR memory and SPE's high speed dedicated local memory stores combined with the Cell's high internal bandwidth are of such importance.

Ubisoft Montreal tech director, Dominic Guay:

"We were positively surprised by how efficient the SPUs (the Cell processing units) were to do such things as run our vegetation simulation, our animations or our physics systems."

Just for 3rd party reference contrasting.


If the Wii can produce a game like Bloom Blox ( http://youtube.com/watch?v=TpMkCF3AdMY ) which has dozens of objects which are fully controlled by a physics engine; considering there are more objects being impacted by the physics engine on Bloom Blox that Little Big Planet, I see nothing that would suggest that Little Big Planet is beyond the abilities of the XBox 360.

By the way PhysX =/= Physics ... The PhysX physics API may have been built with certain assumptions that make it particularly poorly suted to the Xeon processor; this (of course) does not mean that you can not produce a highly optimized physics engine for the XBox 360. Regardless, the fundimental question you seem to constantly dodge is not whether the PS3 can provide an improvement, but whether it can produce a dramatic and noticeable improvement. As I pointed out earlier, Bloom Blox, Elebits and Super Mario Galaxy are fairly good showcases of in game physics useage and yet are produced on the "underpowered" Wii; being that no one disputes that the XBox 360 should be several times as powerful as the Wii, don't you think that a major physic showcase could be produced on the XBox 360?

 



Retrasado on 18 February 2008
HappySqurriel said:
MikeB said:
HappySqurriel said:
MikeB said:

 

 


If the Wii can produce a game like Bloom Blox ( http://youtube.com/watch?v=TpMkCF3AdMY ) which has dozens of objects which are fully controlled by a physics engine; considering there are more objects being impacted by the physics engine on Bloom Blox that Little Big Planet, I see nothing that would suggest that Little Big Planet is beyond the abilities of the XBox 360.

By the way PhysX =/= Physics ... The PhysX physics API may have been built with certain assumptions that make it particularly poorly suted to the Xeon processor; this (of course) does not mean that you can not produce a highly optimized physics engine for the XBox 360. Regardless, the fundimental question you seem to constantly dodge is not whether the PS3 can provide an improvement, but whether it can produce a dramatic and noticeable improvement. As I pointed out earlier, Bloom Blox, Elebits and Super Mario Galaxy are fairly good showcases of in game physics useage and yet are produced on the "underpowered" Wii; being that no one disputes that the XBox 360 should be several times as powerful as the Wii, don't you think that a major physic showcase could be produced on the XBox 360?

 


Who was saying that LBP couldn't be run on the 360? heck, you could probably run that game on the GC with no problem (other than maybe the 1.5 GB storage medium) And if you are intent on proving your point, you are correct that there are currently no PS3 games that noticably outperform 360 games in any area. However, if you compare current PS3 games (14 months after launch) to 360 games 14 months after launch, there is a noticable difference in at least graphical quality. (Uncharted vs. GeoW? give me a break) So yeah, you are right, there are currently no PS3 games that significantly outperform 360 games, though some PS3 games do marginally outperform 360 games in some areas. This fact should not be very suprising because of the 360's simpler and more conventional architecture and the fact it's been out for a year longer than the PS3. However, if you are attempting to demonstrate the technological superiority of the Xbox 360 over the PS3, that's not the way to do it because second-gen PS3 games are marginally outperforming third-gen 360 games. (which indicates that the PS3 is more powerful)



Not trying to be a fanboy. Of course, it's hard when you own the best console eve... dang it

HappySqurriel on 18 February 2008
Retrasado said:

Who was saying that LBP couldn't be run on the 360? heck, you could probably run that game on the GC with no problem (other than maybe the 1.5 GB storage medium) And if you are intent on proving your point, you are correct that there are currently no PS3 games that noticably outperform 360 games in any area. However, if you compare current PS3 games (14 months after launch) to 360 games 14 months after launch, there is a noticable difference in at least graphical quality. (Uncharted vs. GeoW? give me a break) So yeah, you are right, there are currently no PS3 games that significantly outperform 360 games, though some PS3 games do marginally outperform 360 games in some areas. This fact should not be very suprising because of the 360's simpler and more conventional architecture and the fact it's been out for a year longer than the PS3. However, if you are attempting to demonstrate the technological superiority of the Xbox 360 over the PS3, that's not the way to do it because second-gen PS3 games are marginally outperforming third-gen 360 games. (which indicates that the PS3 is more powerful)


Even though the argument was taken off track a bit, the core of my point was not whether the PS3 was or was not more powerful than the XBox 360 ... The point was whether the performance difference actually mattered.

Consider a game like Bloom Blox running on each of the three systems. Suppose that the Wii can support 128 Blox, the XBox 360 can support 512 and the PS3 can support 640 under the same constraints; certainly the PS3 (in this example) can produce more, but is that additional 25% really going to excite someone (besides MikeB) to choose one system over the other?

In a lot of ways this question is one of the main reasons the HD consoles have not taken off to the extent that the Wii has. The Wii's processing power enables it to create a rough version of the exact same gameplay that is available on the XBox 360 and PS3, and the average consumer is not refined enough to notice that the trajectory of an object is off by 2.5% in the Wii version or that your AI in the Jeep on the Wii version runs on a pre-determined path rather than deciding to run you into a cliff on its own.



TheBigFatJ on 18 February 2008
HappySqurriel said:
Right now the PS3 is selling at a rate that would have it outsell the XBox 360 by 2.5 Million units this year ... I suspect that the XBox 360 will be able to reduce its price dramatically and will be able to limit the ammount it is outsold by the PS3.

I agree.  There's not a lot Sony can do to pass the 360's LTD this year.  At best, it will happen in later 2009.



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Diomedes1976 on 18 February 2008

MikeB ,discussing with starcraft is completely useless .



Ail on 18 February 2008

It should outsell the Xbox360 by 3-3.5 millions if things keep going this way ( expect abyssmal Xbox360 sales for Holydays 2008 in Europe the way things are going...)

 NA : Xbox wins by 1 Million

Japan : PS3 wins by 1.5 Million

Other : PS3 wins by 3 Millions. 

During 2008 Holydays PS3 software sales will tie Xbox360 software sales ( not LTD, but it should get there during the holyday period).  That will happen mainly due to others...

2008 will be the peak for Xbox360 sales, sales will stay good in NA in 2009 but Japan+Other sales won't be worth being mentionned after 2008....



PS3-Xbox360 gap : 1.5 millions and going up in PS3 favor !

PS3-Wii gap : 20 millions and going down !

minicook on 18 February 2008
TheBigFatJ said:
HappySqurriel said:
Right now the PS3 is selling at a rate that would have it outsell the XBox 360 by 2.5 Million units this year ... I suspect that the XBox 360 will be able to reduce its price dramatically and will be able to limit the ammount it is outsold by the PS3.

I agree.  There's not a lot Sony can do to pass the 360's LTD this year.  At best, it will happen in later 2009.


Maybe it WONT HAPPEN. Has anybody ever thought of that? The PS3 just cant compete with the 360. deal with it.



minicook on 18 February 2008

The only possible way it could pass would be through japanese sales.



rukusa on 18 February 2008

I dont speculate about how much it will outsell the 360. Im more interested in which software will boost the sales of it.



Nintendo & Sony supporter:

 Consoles: Wii & PS3.