ruds_wp said:
The problem is that Microsoft is such a wealthy company, to see them cut so many corners and generally just be so cheap is a little disappointing.
I figured they would be willing to spend a little more money on their sophomore effort.
I figured wrong.
Cutting WHAT corners?
This is a $300 console that in 3-4 years will be in the $100 range. Consoles have NEVER had as much memory as the PC, yet they have held their own quite well (PCs are ineffecient memory hogs). Even more, how can you say they are cutting corners if:
1) They have not one, not two, but three (!) 3.0GHz PPC chips; and
2) Has a cutting edge, top of the line GPU that outpaces the best desktop parts.
We have never, ever, seen this type of technology shoved into a console. You are talking about a dedicated box with static hardware (this means developers can actually utilize and exploit the machine). So while we could always want more, faster, bigger, better, I cease to see WHAT corners are being cut.
Some of your examples were silly. Yeah, lets take out the $2 camera and put in more RAM... opps, 128MB of GDDR3 RAM is magnitides more expensive than a little camera. 12x drives vs. 16x drives. Noise is always a consideration, as is real world performance. Higher speeds often mean more latency. And stability, as many mentioned, is a big factor. Real world bang for buck is much more relevant than "16x pwns 12x!!11".
As for the PS3 getting 512MB of XDR, go read some of the PS3 threads on this. Not gonna happen.
The funny things is (a) we are not sure if these are real specs from GS, and (b) these specs tell us very little. How big is the GPU? How many shader operations per clock can it perform? Does it have eDRAM? Does the device use USB?
When MS actually tells us what is in the X2 and shows off what software can do on it we can begin to judge it. But stating it is cutting corners without even knowing WHAT exactly is inside is silly.
