Xbox showed it's superior power on day 1 when it launched with Halo. I was so impressed when I played it, I sold my PS2 weeks later and bought an Xbox, that's saying something. The power was obviously there, and it still took years for multiplatform dev's to really tap it, even then it was relatively poor use of the HW.
Well XBox had a fundamental advantage over the PS2 in that its GPU had hardware T&L onboard, whereas the GS didn't. So... it's not usrprising at all that an advantage like that be right up on the screen from day 1. The multiplatform devs
did indeed make poor use of it, but that stemmed from the fact that PS2 vs XBox were so completely divergent in architecture. There
was a clas sof dev that did regularly take 'advantage' of the XBox though, and those were the PC devs in their ports - as in this case, the architectures of the shared platforms were quite similar indeed.
Now, PS3. Thing is, it's not really even close to having such a large advantage in power, not only does it have 64mb less useable RAM, and better dev tools and documentation, but the 360's GPU seems at this point to be superior.
I wouldn't say 'better' tools so much as
easier tools at this point, and the documentation is of course important as well. But I agree with you that the RAM difference is quite real and material. Xenos vs RSX... I'm viewing the graphics output this gen as via 'graphics subsystems' vs the GPUs alone, since Cell plays a fundamental role in what PS3 is capable of outputting here. That being said, I agree 360 titles have the edge to date, and that by exploiting Cell in the graphics capacity, th eability to achieve some of the other things I'm 'amped' about in fact diminishes.
Xenos is great, I'm a fan. RSX unfortunately we don't know everything about; I understand there are still one or two aspects under NDA that really haven't played a role yet, but should. That said clearly yes the Xenos in a standalone fashion has several areas in which it outdoes RSX.
So, comparisons to the original Xbox are really not very valid here. There is no clear cut more powerful system. It will probably take xplatform Dev's a very long time to do anything remarkeable with CELL, and these games are where MS's strong dev support will really help.
Well, again I think PS3 <--> 360 dev tweaking will eventually be much easier and straightforward than was PS2 <--> Xbox tweaking.
1st party is where it's at, I want to see the games DeanoC talks about where an entire engine is built around the SPU's, then I agree we might really see something where you can say "wow, now that's a PS3 game"
I'm talking 1st party now, not sure if that's been clear - and I agree with you.
I left multiplatform a page or two ago, but the conversation keeps shifting around that I think it's hard for all of us to keep track of whereeach other are in our points.
ps - Anyone who's saying 90% of the games looked the same on Xbox as PS2 is wrong imo. You could tell they were ports, but they almost always looked and ran better.
I agree with this also; I think there's been this cloud over XBox fans that they feel PS2 dragged them down last gen in terms of games. It did guys, but believe me the multiplatform games you got tended to be better for the most part, even if only slightly so.