ORIGINAL: Tim Strickland

Hey ginji. Not to question your quote, but if the 360 took a $100 price cut, that would make the Premium version only $50 more, not the Core right?

So, if they in fact were to cut the price that much, that could be HUGE for them. Just adding my two cents!

You are correct, sir. As it stands now, the Core 360 is $299, which is only $50 more that the Wii (if it releases at $250).

I think what Nintendo is banking on is the same thing they' ve always touted; gameplay over power. Nintendo pretty much has the little kid demographic locked down! Moms and kids everywhere can' t resist Mario, Zelda, Donky Kong, and Pokemon. If they come correct with some fresh new IPs, and their new control scheme is a hit (which I bet it will be) then they' ll do some major damage this generation.

I just hope they unveil some kind of competent online strategy. Besides the download thing, that is (although that' s sweet too!)

Actually Chee Saw, I read that whole IGN article he quoted from - that thing is RIDDLED with errors - statistical errors, grammatical, spelling, the list goes on!

Actually, you can count me as being on the bandwagon with the Wii60 idea. Nintendo is on to something - the theory seems to be that everyone will have an XBox 360 or a PlayStation 3 - and THEN have a Wii also. It seems like a great complement system, which Nintendo themselves as stated as their goal.

Their internet scheme does seem pretty interesting - the whole, " You' re system is off but someone can leave you a present in your world, or " wii" can upload things while you' re sleeping" idea. Plus, if the web browser works out as a built-in feature, someone could finally pick up on the Dreamcast' s greatness.

Wii can only hope for a great future in entertainment - and no, I can not avoid the now not-clever puns with the name.

wrong thread EDITED

http://media.xbox360.ign.com/articles/617/617951/img_2812597.aspx

What does this mean?

It could mean a lot in the future - great physics is the first thing that comes to mind (on Sony' s conference there was a demo of some basketball where players feet were calculated on each step(where they will stand so there won' t be 180 robotic turns)).It' s mostly up to your imagination - think about things that need to be calculated almost non stop in games (AI,Physics and so on) - that' s where the boost will go.

Oblivion was on one disc.

yeah and that could be the reason why most dungeons look alike and towns and every oblivion gate is almost the same.

I wonder how they managed to put all those bugs on one DVD :)

Seriously now - Blu-ray is just as good for games as CD was back in the days - more voice samples to play, more textures to store and HD CG movies that could be used like in FF13 (with quick transitions into realtime).It is a great feature (it' s price however does not justify it' s benefits yet)

PSX had CD drive x2 and now blue-ray has 2x speed in PS3 - add to this HDD and I wouldn' t worry about loadings too much.

I don' t like the whole 599 and dualNOshock3 idea , but people have been dissing Blue Ray for games way too long ,which is unfair.

Oblivion for 360 is the most common argument, it' s on 1 DVD, cool but did it have a choice? not really.

I' m pretty sure games for the 360 are not gonna suffer cuz of the space on a DVD. the blu-ray move on sony' s part is just so they can tap into the movie industry, cuz they know movies will definitely need bigger optical storage devices.

And I just bought a 360 premium on ebay fo $440 CAD, w00t w00t. also bought halo 2 (I never had a retail copy and adam didn' t send me my prize for being a winner, which was a copy of halo 2), dod4 and criminal origins. Will be buying more. Also bought s-video cables, the nyko intercooler.

BTW, it' s been a while people! How u been. I' ve been soooooo busy with work it' s crazy, this new job is killing me. anyway, I' ll be around more often now. c ya around!

yeah and that could be the reason why most dungeons look alike and towns and every oblivion gate is almost the same.

I wonder how they managed to put all those bugs on one DVD :)

Seriously now - Blu-ray is just as good for games as CD was back in the days - more voice samples to play, more textures to store and HD CG movies that could be used like in FF13 (with quick transitions into realtime).It is a great feature (it' s price however does not justify it' s benefits yet)

PSX had CD drive x2 and now blue-ray has 2x speed in PS3 - add to this HDD and I wouldn' t worry about loadings too much.

I don' t like the whole 599 and dualNOshock3 idea , but people have been dissing Blue Ray for games way too long ,which is unfair.

Oblivion for 360 is the most common argument, it' s on 1 DVD, cool but did it have a choice? not really.

Almost every developer agrees, DVD9 is enough! So why wouldnt it be enough? I wouldnt sacrifice the speeding load times, for the ones the Blu ray games are probably going to have, id rather switch discs!

yeah it' s enough, but I don' t want my games to be cool " enough" to play - I want them to blow me away - 9GB is a lot of space but when your system works on 512MB data all the time it' s not really that big.

DVD9 may be enough but that doesn' t mean 25GB won' t help a lot - and some people realise it now ,while others will have to see it (and I' m sure it won' t be shown in first wave of PS3 games , maybe even second wave won' t proove it , but it will happen).

Having said that , I never had problems with switching discs - I don' t mind , but back then, games had a lot of CG for story tellling - now that story telling happens in interactive enviroment so it could be harder for devs to make games with DVD switching.

Another cool thing is that they have this space - if they make any game for 360 and it takes 8GB - it' s cool it fits , but if some game takes 8GB for PS3 they can put there trailers , demoes, making of , and lot' s of things .
IT' s cool to have it all on one disc and if blue ray does well ...it will be an amazing feature.

Speed load times? it' s not the case with most 360 games - loadings are at leat as long as in current gen (it' s 360' s first year so it' s not really bad since they will definitely improve upon it) - PS3 also has a nice HDD that is suppoused to be used in every game plus it' s hard to talk about load tmes since it' s not even out

While it all sounds like I defend Sony - I hate those fuckers , but it' s silly how people treat blue-ray - the most common thing you hear is " loading times will last forever and who needs 30GB?" - I wish there was at least some proof for that.

Gangsta,Gears of war will not have any loading time,as with Halo2,it will load for like 1-1,5 min then it wont load between any missions at all.

Thats cool :P

Sure it WOULD BE cool.

I' ll judge when it' s out but this game is really cool so who cares if it loads 5 s instead of 1:)

With extra space you could place data on disk for quicker access.

What is the read speed on the 360 anyway? I have never really played one.

I know alot lot of Xbox games I had aside from Halo(s) (altough it did load sometimes)
had long loading time. especially Unreal Tournament

If the cost for the PS3 was 100 cheaper I wouldn' t buy on launch day but
would have a problem with it.

The PS3 games shown at E3 had pretty good loading times and lots of the developers have so far not shown much worries about that.

PS3 games on E3 were (all of them) running from HDD.

Actually the,no loading times confused me in Halo2,cause you never known when you finshed a level or not,you almost finished the loading times :P

Well then the PS3 games will probably use the HDD to reduce loading times.

What does bandwidth have to do with games? Like how does it make games look?

Well then the PS3 games will probably use the HDD to reduce loading times.

That would be my guess.

Blu-Ray is still in it' s infancy and their won' t be 8x drives until sometime next year, possibly even longer because of the costs involved. PS3 is bottlenecked by their main memory division, 256Mb x 2 which i still don' t get. If it was unified then they could have sidestepped minor difficulties and the unit would be slightly more developer friendly.

I think the inclusive HDD will help the machine run Linux, but i still don' t expect a fully fledged OS (though it would be nice), and i think developers will utilize it to minimize loading times wherever possible, but there is still the issue of streaming data from the drive, and that will still be slower than 360 titles.



Quez, i expect Gears of War will still have loading times, even if they are trying to stream huge portions of the game without pauses. I think we can expact something like GRAW, where it loads while you' re being transported ingame but can only move the camera about.

Then again, Epic know their engines so anything is possible. I' ll ask.

Here' s a post Cetra made a while ago with a link to... some guy, who seems to know stuff. Might be interesting to read for someone who knows a bout technology:

http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell3_v2.aspx

There you can see he mentions that cell will be difficult to do some specific tasks for. However, he mentions that this will not be a new type of challenge, as its equally hard to do these tasks for multicore PC' s.

He also mentiones that middleware and programs will be made to make some tasks dont be a problem at all, and these programs will also fool the processor into overcoming the bottlenecks of it.

He also mentions that the SPE' s will do alot of the hard real time programming automatically, so the programmers wont have to worry about this. When cell has all these SPE' s its been stated that developing games to process in all these will be one of the big bottlenecks, well theres the solution.

Based on that, I' d say it pretty much kills the bottleneck hype of the CELL. It states that some tasks will be hard to do for it, but there will be solutions for everything. Maybe this is why the SCE worldwide studio has been established, to help people overcome these bottlenecks. I would suppose they have already made the middleware programs.

-

You can also see the example of the CELL realtime rendering 48 different MPEG2 videos into one single HD screen at the same time, I would like to see if xbox could do this.

You can also see that Linux will be running on it as a core OS, and then you can bring up the question, what is best, linux or windows? I mention this because it was brought up how MS were a software manufacturer that would have privelages developing software for own defined hardware.

All based on Sony' s " theoretical" data.

John Carmack is the man that everybody wanted to hear talk about the next gen hardware and he claims that actual hardware performance falls well short of Sony' s predicted figures (which was a given anyway) and that it' s...

" a pain in my ass"

...to code for.

Lets hope Sony can improve the chips yield quick enough to have machines realy for a worlwide launch instead of their almost pathetic " seed quantities" rubbish.

Not that it matter to them, ...they couldn' t care less about market share!

360 drive speed is 12x (someone asked before)

I have to disagree about Halo 2 - while it was cool to play the single player campaign with no loadings , after you finished the game and tried to play any of the unlocked levels , loadings where incredibly long.

With PS3 and it' s HDD clearly to be used as cache , you could have one loading screen to fill the cache and then have blazing fast load times all over.

Add some background streaming to that (and you should know that PS devs are the best when it comes to streaming data - check Dragon Quest VIII - no loading screens or stuff like loading hiccups in Oblivion) and it could be smoother than 360.

I also don' t think that 2x256 would make anything hard for Devs - they can' t use values like " 300MB for GPU and 200 for CPU" , and that' s the only difference comparing to X360.

It is limiting in some sense , but it doesn' t make it harder to make games - that limit is very clear.I' d say it takes more time to measure and go for the perfect RAM ballance while producing a 360 title.

Yeah, but the speed of the Blu-Ray drive will directly affect loading times.

It was originally assumed that PS3 would ship with a standard 1x drive, but Pioneer starts shipping Blu-Ray players this summer and they' re shipping with 2x drives, so a 4x drive is conceivable. If they shipped with a 4x drive though then they would have to incur huge losses since the faster drives cost a lot more to manufacture.

A 2x drive is the most likely candidate, and that would mean a 64mbps = 8mb/s data transfer rate. In comparison, 360' s DVD drive is 12x which allows for a 132mbps = 16.6mb/s transfer rate.

Games on 360, if developed to take advantage of the HDD (if present) would have MUCH faster loading times than the same (multi-platform title) PS3 game.

As for the 2x 256Mb RAM not really mattering, -- it' s the developers that have slated Sony for it and praised Microsoft for 360' s unified architecture along with virtually everything else in the machine. Sure there will be ways aroiund it, but developing the tools to do that will have cost implications for the developer. It was simply a stupid decision.