Blogcast Audio of Tech Engineers(?) on PS3 vs Xbox360

[Megadrive1988]

at the time that I am posting this ( thursday, 10:10 pm central time) I am not sure who these guys are, that are talking, but they are apparently the guys who wrote that fairly biased (toward 360) article on PS3 vs Xbox 360


http://www.major-nelson.com/blogcast/mnr-5-26-05-wma.wma



i myself am listening to it now....


edit: ok I see who they are. they're from the Xbox Advanced Technology Group

Xbox 360 vs PS 3 Blogcast (MP3)
Posted: May 26, 2005 @ 5:01 pm (3 hours, 11 minutes ago) By: Major Nelson

This is a special blogcast that is an interview with Michael and Bruce from the Xbox Advanced Technology Group. That is the team that authored the Xbox 360 vs PS3 report that has caused quite the uproar in the gaming community. In this blogcast, Michael and Bruce address some of the questions that people have posted on this blog, as well as explain more of the inner workings of the Xbox 360.

Warning: Parts of this blogcast get extremely technical.

 

[Farid]

How people are supposed to discuss pieces of "technical information" that comes straight from viral marketing websites?

edit: BTW, I'm around half the webcast and there's nothing extremely technical here. Only some Cell bashing (It only has one core!1!!).
The first few minutes are "interesting", on a marketing point of view though.

 

[Megadrive1988]

I just finished listening. indeed, it was not at all that technical. and it was pretty much a straight bash of Cell CPU.

although to be fair, they said that RSX and Xbox360 GPU are fairly similar in power, but they clearly were playing up the bandwidth advantages of their GPU, which in all honesty seems like a fair thing to do since they want to claim their advantages.

 

[passby]

since they have highbandwidth EDRAM and RSX does not.

Let's not do that again - Faf, nAo and archie are going to throw a fit!

 

[Farid]

I just finished listening the whole thing, and the only thing there's to say: F.U.D.

Except if you're interested in the marketing approach of all this, there's nothing new, or interesting, to hear. And nothing technical (That could interest this forum) at all.

although to be fair, they said that RSX and Xbox360 GPU are fairly similar in power

They started by saying that they don't have a lot of info about the RSX. But by the end of the webcast they can say the GPUs are quite comparable.

Anyway, I must admit that I think this online marketing approach from MSFT is clearly interesting. From a social marketing standpoint, that is.

 

[Megadrive1988]

to avoid any arguing, i edited it

 

[wco81]

ATG sounds like it would be the PhDs MS hired to do pure research, not get involved in product development and certainly not in marketing.

 

[Rockster]

One tidbit gleaned was the claim that alpha kits are r300 based and not r420. I'm a bit skeptical of that.

 

[Carl B]

One tidbit gleaned was the claim that alpha kits are r300 based and not r420. I'm a bit skeptical of that.

They probably mean in the sense of the architecture as a whole - the R420 being R300 derived.

 

[Acert93]

One tidbit gleaned was the claim that alpha kits are r300 based and not r420. I'm a bit skeptical of that.

When the first kits shipped a long while back they had 9800Pros in them. Comments as of late have hinted they have X800s. I am not sure if that is official or not.

 

[Fafalada]

not get involved in product development and certainly not in marketing.

Well maybe they are multitalented ppl, their marketting skills are quite good, judging from this audiocast.

 

[Urian]

Time will tell.

Games will be the judge of the three next gen consoles, not technical specs.

 

[archie4oz]

Does anybody else feel the urge to go out and by some Oxy Clean?

Anyhow I sorta like now having to explicitly read and write data from main memory (like a file system) for "general purpose" programming is "pretty terrible"... Sorta conjures up images of Spengler warning Venkman not to cross the streams 'cause "it would be bad..."

 

[gmoran]

I find it somewhat ironic that MS here are complaining about the use of meaningless unknown specs like Shader Ops and fixed function TeraFlops, when it was MS who introduced these into the battle in the first place.

The reason MS did this of course, is because they knew they were about to be "beaten" on CPU GFLOPS, so they sought to dilute that advantage by using "NV FLOPS". Sony then simply used this to their advantage.

The really interesting thing here is whether MS's and Sony's TFLOPS comparisons are based on the same thing: the way NV have in the past measured fixed FLOPS in their graphics chips rendering logic; or did Sony trawl through their electronics looking for anything that might be termed a FLOP? Their 2.2 TFLOPS figure is so much biggers it's got to be the latter, hasn't it?

Still, its hard to feel sorry for Microsoft here, or to give much creedence for a paper where they attempted to compare bandwidth by simply adding it all together (after all by the same comparison PS2 beats Xbox into a cocked hat).

 

[Megadrive1988]

One tidbit gleaned was the claim that alpha kits are r300 based and not r420. I'm a bit skeptical of that.

that's odd. because the oldest Xenon development kits used Radeon 9800 Pro which is R350, not R300. although it is almost nit-picking because R350 is almost the same as R300, not like there was much difference.

i dont see why anyone would be using R300, R350 or R360 in the late 2004 to May 2005 timeframe, when X800 and X850 chips have been out for a long time, and are a large leap in performance.

 

[hey69]

MS goes to greath lengths to damage control the fact that x360 overall will be less powerfull then the ps3.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Anyhow I sorta like now having to explicitly read and write data from main memory (like a file system) for "general purpose" programming is "pretty terrible"...

How else do you run programs if you don't store them in main memory?! :? Have MS got Storage in the Ether? Have they enabled 'Spritual/Quantum Cacheing' of unlimited size directly on the processor?

 

[Ug Lee]

I just finished listening to it, and I can't help but get the feeling that MS are running scared with this whole thing. It reeks of damage control.

It also fits right in with what a friend of mine who was at E3 told me regarding a conversation he had with J Allard - friend made an off-hand comment about how PD0 looks like shit, J's response was "it's about the gameplay, not graphics".

My how times change!

 

[rusty]

One tidbit gleaned was the claim that alpha kits are r300 based and not r420. I'm a bit skeptical of that.

that's odd. because the oldest Xenon development kits used Radeon 9800 Pro which is R350, not R300. although it is almost nit-picking because R350 is almost the same as R300, not like there was much difference.

i dont see why anyone would be using R300, R350 or R360 in the late 2004 to May 2005 timeframe, when X800 and X850 chips have been out for a long time, and are a large leap in performance.

maybe i've got the wrong end of the stick but it's still the r300 architecture is it not?

i haven't listened to the blogcast but do they actually say r300 core, or do they say based on the r300?

 

[Love_In_Rio]

Could it be because of the 8 pixels output ?