lol I'm a second gen gamer (the GameCube was my first console) so I couldn't tell. You might be right thought. As a geek, I know a lot about the gaming history and I know that competition used to be sane for the market. Now you got Sony bashing on other companies and copying to steal and divide the market and Microsoft who shows no respect for their consumers, making them pay for every pixel on the screen. Yeah, I don't know if you think like I do, but that was my feeling.
http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03/burn_the_house_.html
This is what i was recollecting. This was shortly after the final specs of the 360 were disclosed. Game devs were furious. (despite all the propaganda spread now, the 360 has a very very weak gaming cpu for its power draw and clock speed. Its just clocked high. One dev deliberately breaks nda, announcing he doesnt care, and complains about the fact xenon would only be able to run things like game control, and ai at 1/3rd to 1/10th the speed despite its clock speed.... Yet the graphics focused units were ridiculously more powerful. He (they all) Complained this would lead to stupid bloated budgets, complete reliance on publishers, And near absolute aversion to risk in the form of everybody making the exact same kind of game with inconsiquential differences.
Which is exactly what happened.
It was Chris Hecker who broke ms nda over his rage.
"So, as you know, graphics and physics grind on large homogenous floating point data structures in a very straight-line structured way. Then we have AI and gameplay code. Lots of exceptions, tunable parameters, indirections and often messy. We hate this code, it’s a mess, but this is the code that makes the game DIFFERENT. Here is the terrifying realization about the next generation consoles: I’m about to break a ton of NDAs here, oh well, haha, I never signed them anyway.
Gameplay code will get slower and harder to write on the next generation of consoles. Modern CPUs use out-of-order execution, which is there to make crappy code run fast. This was really good for the industry when it happened, although it annoyed many assembly language wizards in Sweden. Xenon and Cell are both in-order chips. What does this mean? It’s cheaper for them to do this. They can drop a lot of cores. One out-of-order core is about four times [did I catch that right? Alice] the size of an in-order core. What does this do to our code? It’s great for grinding on floating point, but for anything else it totally sucks. Rumours from people actually working on these chips – straight-line runs 1/3 to 1/10th the performance at the same clock speed. This sucks."
Edited by 3Dude, 10 January 2013 - 05:23 AM.
