The Next Generation Consoles

[Alarick]

I loved my Xbox, but the PS3 is looking damn near incredible. Plus, Sony has apparently ramped up their production to try and beat the Xbox 360 to the market (when they were originally going to hit the market well after the Xbox 360 did).

Where did you see this info? Last I've heard, there's no way that PS3 is coming out this year, and Xbox is definitely going to be out this winter according to many official sources. I've been keeping up with things as best I can, and I have yet to see any indications that PS3 will be out in 2005 at all.

The PS3 is a friggin beast, but the Xbox 360 is no pushover either. The PS3 being listed at 4*(2.8 tflops per Cell) is kinda misleading, since the CPU is "only" listed at 218 gflops and then they added that to the 1.8 tflops for the GPU.

I think your numbers a bit off. From what I can gather, the total Operations per second for the Cell processor is 2.18 Tflops. Again, this may be misinterpreting that available data, but I'm pretty sure the numbers are based on total performance for all of the sub-processors on the Cell chip.

Perfect Dark Zero looks awesome though, plus Halo 3 of course, and hopefully they'll start actually releasing some decent non-BioWare RPGs with Sakaguchi in the stables. The state of Xbox 360 backward compatibility looks very lame. At first it sounded like they were just going to write an emulator for major Xbox games (which isn't a perfect solution either), but the prospect of having to buy "recompiled" versions of games I already own certainly does not make my frown turn upside down. Hopefully they'll just have downloadable version available through Xbox Live. That wouldn't be too bad.

Yea, I wasn't sure what the backwards-compatability statement meant, either. It was pointed out to me a moment ago that they confirmed that at launch, only a select number of games will be able to be played. They want to get it to all games, but that seems like it will be a big issue to deal with compared to the other consoles having full access to the game library of the previous consoles. Shame.

Also, Blu-ray (the PS3 format) just blows HD-DVD (the Xbox 360 format) out of the water. (See: Blu-ray and HD-DVD) It will be interesting to see what the developers do with the over 2x more storage space on the Blu-ray disks.

Actually, Xbox360 is using normal DVDs, and not HD-DVDs. It's mostly for cost, as far as I can tell. The only real difference is capacity, and only a few games required more than one DVD for an entire game, so the increased cost of using a state-of-the-art disc drive may not be worth it at all.

Xbox 360 starting at $300-350 and PS3 $400-450 seems to be the initial implications.  PS3 is opening in Japan at 50,000 yen ($465 US).

In the end, I'm probably going to stick with the Xbox 360 - but that PS3 is sick. Might have to bite the bullet and get both :)

Pricing is going to be a huge issue. Last article I saw said that Sony is attempting to be nuder the $500 mark for PS3. I doubt Xbox360 will be over the $300 mark that the Xbox started at, and if these prices are accurate, it will be a factor for many.

Some videos of the PS3 in action:
http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/748/748475/vids_1.html
http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/748/748480/vids_1.html
http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=1683

The Killzone movie is just absolutely insane. That's *in-game* footage. I'm sure they've polished it up a bit (it was a presentation and not playable), but still... wow.
Anyone have any more links to share? Been trying to absorb as much info on the next gen consoles as possible.
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Screenshots mean little anymore. Frequently, the game will look great in screenshots, then play like crap for other video-related issues. videos are quickly becoming the only realy way to tell how "nice" a game looks.

Another thing to think of is that every Xbox360 game being shown is not running at 100% of the processing power of the final system. They're all being played on Alpha test systems, and the typical guess is that these systems run at about 30-33% of the final power of the system. They also don't have access to full screen AA, and have frame-rate issues.
Taking all of it into account, I've been more impressed at the Xbox360 games shown so far. Mostly, I like the fact that most of them being shown are actual games and not simply tech demos. I don't think tech demos of any kind, even those done "in engine" show the true result of games. Usually, tech demos tend to look much nicer than the engine produces in the end. At least, that's the way I've seen it in the past.


P.S. I will be sorely pissed if "Best Game of E3" goes to a tech demo again like it did for Doom 3. Give the award to an actual game!