a688 said:
Let me compare the pps numbers to horsepower for cars. Cars have two different horsepower raitings, one is measured at the crank which is directly attached to the engine and one is measured at the wheels and is the true amount of horsepower that you will have when moving your car. Granted telling somebody their car has 500 horsepower but not telling them that they will only get that at the crank isn't a lie but it is unethical and doesn't paint a true picture of the ability of the car when it only gets 350hp at the wheels.
Because of this, there are two
defined scales. There is horsepower, a 'theoretical peak maximum' if you will, and there's brake-horsepower, or 'real world performance'. Generally cars are listed at bhp ratings, and presence of the bhp qualify confirms that scale is being used.. Similarly we have different measures for temperature. 100 degrees doesn't mean anything until qualified as either Celsius or Fahrenheit. There's nothing wrong giving real information as long as it's qualified. Seems to me those who mess up much of these specs are magazines. We all know how way-off-the-mark internet articles can be when talking console "facts".
As it is, without a universal standard for console performance measurements how do you communicate to your developers what sort of performance they should aim for on your hardware? You could give average figures like Ninty, but that assumes average use. The PS's 66 Mps peak may not apply in most situations, but what if one dev comes up with a novel use for that? By giving peak specs you give the educated developers a chance to see what aspects of performance are possible, and they can work out what level of performance they'd get when choosing what effects to use. Of course the press will get wind of such figures and banter them around anally, which fanboys will regurgitated incessantly in the multitudes of forums spreading the FUD, and I wouldn't be surprised if Sony, MS
et al deliberately considered this in their marketting strategies. But 'til now and Allard's claims of 1 teraflop performance for Xenon, obviously a massaged figure to counter KK's Teraflop comments for Cell, I don't know that performance figures have ever been
lies but
statistics for use by those in the know. I wasn't paying attention to the release of this generation.
I'll add that Sony have a notorious reputation for hyping PS2. I missed the original claims and have searched the web ceaselessly (well, a couple of times!) for what was said by KK. Much of his broken promises were actually subjective and, taken in context of the leap in graphical performance for the time, not too out-there. There were a couple of seemingly bald-faced lies, and I have NO idea what George Lucas was thinking when he said PS2 was rendering Episode 1 in realtime, but the claims against Sony seem exaggerated to me. Seems to me more often than not, the press is to blaim, feeding unvalidated, unqualified data to the public who haven't the interest (or intelligence?) in researching the reality.
