MS's "rush to next-gen could see the Xbox take a tumble

[wazoo]

Besides, as I believe Qroach said, MS is still actively signing new 3rd party developers for Xbox development, while Sony are now reluctant to do this for PS2 (can't find the quote right now, correct me if I'm wrong). It doesn't look like they'll be trying to force the Xbox out of existance next year.

The only thing for sure is that Sony wants the ps2 to last 10 years, and maybe, I do not know if it is true, they are refusing new devs just because pretty much everybody develops for the ps2.

My own opinion is that while they may be reluctant to keep competing on price, Microsoft would still rather sell their Xboxes to consumers than see them buy a none Xenon product.

Xbox is a money loser business. They want to get out of it as fast as possible, i think. That is a reason, I do not see MS pushing the xbox after the lauch of their more lucrative new console.

 

[Jov]

Xbox is a money loser business. They want to get out of it as fast as possible, i think. That is a reason, I do not see MS pushing the xbox after the lauch of their more lucrative new console.

But once the Xbox is sold, MS makes money from it, be it LIVE or games. The only reason I can think MS want to limit Xbox development/support is if it hurts the Xenon sales progress before the PS3 gain momentum.

 

[GwymWeepa]

75 million peak and what was sustained london ? How about with lights ? how about with bump mapping ? how about higher forms of filtering like aniso ? super sampling ?

2.4gixel pixels ? i thought with textures it droped down to half of that ?

After that how much is sustianed ? when running features of similar quality as a radeon what would the perfromance be like then ?


Not to mention with the radeon ati showed off the first versions of smooth vision and hyper z compresion .

Which they have continued to improve .

If you have the Radeon from 2000 in todays top P4 (giving it the best CPU to trade off for the fix plantform business), can it push graphics and effects like ZOE2, JakII, SH3/4 and whatever the top PS2 games have?

I am taking the fact Sony and ATi took different approaches in achieving top quality graphics within games.

This might not be fair (one side or the other), but if the Radeon ends up to be the bottleneck then what more can be said?

DeanoC, comments given you were involved in the porting of SH2?

Well to play devil's advocate, if you put a geforce 3 in a p4 can you get a game like Ninja Gaiden, or Panzer Dragoon, or any other top Xbox game? I doubt it, its all about specialization, though the Xbox has the same video card, people creating games on a fixed platform will invariably create nicer looking games. So ps2 compared to anything remotely similar on the PC isn't a particularly good comparison IMO, since games running on the PC part won't have the same time and attention paid to them, and they certainly wouldn't be coded to just that one product.

 

[function]

Software sales obviously reduced after Sega announced it was going to scrap the DC (though by what margin I'm not sure - obviously you aren't either), but the fact that several games managed to sell into the hundreds of thousands - even towards the end of that year - proves that the DC market did not die overnight. After Jan 2001 Sega managed to shift it's remaining inventory of DC's (about 1.5 to 2 million I think) - obviously a lot of people bought software.

It died in 2k1. Please tell me what games did sell in high quantity after the Dc cancellation ?? To be clear, when Sega cancelled the Dc, it promised more than 100 games to be released in 2K1. Afterwards, you could count less than 20 games for the whole year. 20 new games for one year for a population of 10M gamers. That is a market which is dying quite fast, if not "overnight".

Died out disappointingly fast, but not overnight by any means. I bought Rez from a highstreet store when it came out in 2002 almost exactly 12 months after "the announcement".

You now seem to be trying to redefine your terms, with vuage comments like "quite fast" and "high quantity". It's dificult to argue against none specifics like these.

Incidentally, the "100 games" comment I read was about games being released globally, not in a specific territory. Not all the games coming out in Japan made it to Europe and America, obviously.

And I think you're overplaying how well DC games sold prior to the machine being scrapped. I can remember developers at Sega talking up the fact that Sonic Adventure and Shenmue had sold over 1.5 and 1 million copies respectively, globally (very good on what was at the time a sub 8 million user base). Where all the "many" over-a-million sellers come from I'm not sure. Could you provide a list? I'd be interested to see just how many titles matched or beat the sales of these "big guns".

Sonic, Shenmue, NFL2K, Soul Calibur, Crazy Taxi, Sega Rally, that is already a list, no ?? Enough to say "many".

Another vague, none specific term? Compared to the couple of hundred or more releases, no it's not many at all. Many means "a great number of". This isn't even a handful...

NFL 2K didn't sell a million BTW, and NFL 2K1 was just shy of a million in 2000, might have scraped by a million by the time Sega scrapped the DC mid January.

Sonic Adventure 2 sold more than this, as I believe did NFL 2k2 released much later in the year (despite being pretty much a US only title).

Considering Sonic1 sold 2M copies, Sonic2 was a flop despite being one if not the only big DC release for 2K1. Shenmue2 was a disaster and not even released in the US.

No-one is disputing that DC games sales dropped off significantly, so I'm not sure what you're attmepting to do here. You said the DC died overnight, but are then openly talking about games that sold several hundered thousand copies over a period many months.

Shenmue 2 is a bad example BTW, as it was cancelled after Microsoft signed the US exclusive on the game. The DC version had already been translated and ads were out in magazines for its imminent release. It's thought the decision went over Peter Moore's head, and left him with some serious egg on his face at the time as he'd been talking the game up to the press in the preceeding weeks.

Don't now try to brush me off as someone needing to "be serious" with respect to comment I never made, just because your example backfired.

Your example make me laugh (hum, sorry). you can not support the fact that the DC was still alive by bringing one release of a puzzle game 2 years after its death.

The DC was scrapped three and a half years ago, two years ago was mid 2002, but you earlier said that the DC died during 2001. Seriously, do you even know what you're typing on this particular point?

The point about Puyo Puyo Fever (also released on PS2, Xbox and GC BTW) was that the DC market didn't just switch off in Jan 2001 (or whenever it was you seem to think it almost instantly died), it was in a state of decline that still hasn't totally reached the sorry bottom yet.

The question is how significant these markets are, not whether they exist because they obviously do. I think this point might be lost though?

Many consoles have a market long after they get officially superceded, with existing games having a shelf life greater than their launch period and new titles coming out to meet demand. The PSOne is receving titles 4 years after it's successor came out, and is still slowly (but surely) generating income for Sony and many 3rd parties.

i'm sure puyo fever is generating a lot of money to Sega. Comparing the situation of the ps1 to the DC is weird. The ps1 is indeed the only real console to have a sustained life long after the launch of it successor. nothing in common with the DC.

I wasn't directly comparing the DC to the PSOne (but you seem to be!). The DC was scrapped outright, the PSOne still hasn't been despite being superceded.

And the PSOne isn't the only console to sustain life after it's successor arrival as you claim here. The NES, Master System, Gameboy, Megadrive, SNES and Saturn all continued to have commerical games published for them after they were superceded. And the DC had games made and published for it after it was scrapped.

[EDIT] Edited because the word processor ate my smilies, and made me look a bigger ass than normal. [/EDIT]

 

[function]

Infact it wouldn't suprise me to see some games jointly developed for PC, Xbox and Xenon over the next couple of years, much in the same way that games are co-developed for Xbox and PC at the moment.

Then I have the feeling devs doing this won't be pushing the edge with Xenon for quite a while if Xbox takes a bite in the production budget of the same titles or ports.

Yeah, I guess that would be the case. Xenon may have to look to it's exclusive titles to really show off for a while.

I can imagine some Doom 3 or Unreal engined titles perhaps making a showing on all three...

 

[Guden Oden]

Mario games are pretty much all very fun games, who gives a crap if Mario is in all of them? Its the gameplay that makes then worth buying.

You could say the same about the EA games and many othe rexamples of long running franchises.

Yeah I guess one could, but most games at least pretend to have a story while Mario titles (I mean the "real" ones) are pretty much just gameplay oriented. Get through the level from start to end in the first ones, collect the star thingy in the latter two. Mario as a character is basically just there to go "boooiiinnngg" when he jumps in the first couple titles, and then in the two latest titles he can say Mama Mia! and some stuff. What a screen presence he has!

Can't honestly say Mario himself EVER excited me, or that I really cared that much about HIM. It's the game around him that makes me want to play, not his moustache-adorned pudgy appearance.

Some of you guys just need to drop the "Don't you dare bad mouth Nintendo" attitude

Maybe some need to drop the attitude that everyone else has an attitude? You can criticize Nintendo if you like, that's fine with me. I just don't see how you can tire of Mario titles because of Dr. Mario and other games you never even play however, and I will ask you that question when it strikes me. That's not accusing you of badmouthing Nintendo, don't be silly.

Like I've already said, the "real" Mario titles are much more diverse than any other long-running series of titles. Maybe that has something to do with they span like 20 years what do I know, but you know what I mean! Just ignore the Mario games you care nothing about, I don't go bitch about how bad all the Lara Croft games have gotten because I haven't played any of them except maybe 5 minutes of the first one.

Even though I got Angel of Darkness with my Audigy2 ZS soundcard, why should I complain when I haven't even installed the game on my harddrive?

 

[napa]

When GS came out, Radeons were out. GS can draw 75 millions raw polygons peak. Radeons can't. GS has an immense 2.4Gpixel fillrate. Radeons don't. GS has a limited feature set. Radeons have a feature set that can't be used due to poor performance when using them.


That was just to put things in perspective................

75 million peak and what was sustained london ? How about with lights ? how about with bump mapping ? how about higher forms of filtering like aniso ? super sampling ?

2.4gixel pixels ? i thought with textures it droped down to half of that ?

After that how much is sustianed ? when running features of similar quality as a radeon what would the perfromance be like then ?


Not to mention with the radeon ati showed off the first versions of smooth vision and hyper z compresion .

Which they have continued to improve .

I have found this ps2 technical overview:
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ps2tech/page6.asp

Graphics
While there is a lot of good documentation on the Emotion Engine, much less is known about the Graphics Synthesizer (GS) and thus while the "what" of the discussion should be accurate, the "why" may not.

Image Quality
In terms of quality features and functional complexity, the GS is very much like an extremely fast 3dfx Voodoo Graphics chipset. Although Sony has 32-bit color, 32-bit Z-buffer support, the GS only has the standard OpenGL/D3D texture blend modes, leaving out the new features such as DOT3 or EMBM bump mapping, cube reflection maps, or texture compression.

Performance
As mentioned in the specifications page, the Graphics Synthesizer has 16-pixel pipelines running at 150MHz with 32-bit color, 32-bit Z-buffer. While we would expect this to mean a fill rate of 2.4 gigapixels/sec, Sony's press release indicates that texturing cuts the fill rate in half to 1.2 gigapixels/sec. This suggests that the GS requires a full clock cycle to get the texels.
Thus, when multitexturing, the fill rate should drop to 600Mpixels/sec. This should put the PlayStation 2 somewhere between the GeForce DDR and GeForce2 GTS. Though the 640x480 target resolution needs to be taken into account, the GS is really underpowered when compared to the X-box's claimed specs. The Dreamcast only has a raw fill rate of 100Mpixels/sec, but again the deferred rendering takes this value effectively up anywhere from 200Mpixels to even 1 gigapixel/sec.


Will the PS2's insane bandwidth save it?
Since the details aren't clear, it's hard to make a definite call but we suspect the answer is "no." The PS2 has a 2560-bit interface to the embedded DRAM at 150MHz. This equals a total of 48 GB/s, and yes, it is an incredible amount of bandwidth. However, only 512-bits are available for texture lookups which leaves 9.6 GB/s. The GeForce2 GTS has 166MHz DDR on a 128-bit interface which equals 5.312 GB/s.
The difference is that PS2 has to provide texture information for 16 pixels each clock cycle whereas the GTS only needs to provide texture information for 4 pixels. So, for each pixel, the GTS has 1328 MB/s of bandwidth whereas the PS2 only has 600 MB/s of bandwidth for retrieving textures. The Dreamcast has 800MB/s for each pixel. If you factor in texture compression, you need to multiply the Dreamcast's and GTS's numbers by 4. In other words, although there is more total bandwidth for the PS2, it also needs more bandwidth to reach its theoretical maximum because of its massively parallel design.

Granted, once the textures information has been provided, there is 2048-bits of read/write bandwidth for the frame buffer giving 38.4 GB/s of bandwidth. Unfortunately, there are still two lingering concerns. 16-pixel pipelines instead could ruin efficiency. Conventional 3D chips render one polygon at a time.

If you have a 1x1 polygon, then only 1 pixel pipeline could be used and 15 will sit idle, just wasting throughput. The GeForce, for example, has its four pixel pipelines in a 2x2 array. At the corners of polygons, the four pixel pipelines are rarely all used. The only way around this would be for Sony to use something completely different from PC graphics chips and "unhook" the pixel pipelines, but there is nothing to suggest that this has been done. Smaller polygons will result in poorer performance.

Unfortunately, the use of a lot of small polygons is exactly what the Emotion Engine affords. In addition, texture bandwidth is likely to be extremely important because the PS2 only has 4MB of embedded DRAM.

It seems that GS has a great raw power but overall it's very inefficient.

 

[wazoo]

Died out disappointingly fast, but not overnight by any means. I bought Rez from a highstreet store when it came out in 2002 almost exactly 12 months after "the announcement".

You now seem to be trying to redefine your terms, with vuage comments like "quite fast" and "high quantity". It's dificult to argue against none specifics like these.

So, we should stop arguing. I never though that the term "overnight" would be taken word to word. I would not have used it then. And I'm not trying to "redifine", just trying to elaborate about one short sentence.

Incidentally, the "100 games" comment I read was about games being released globally, not in a specific territory. Not all the games coming out in Japan made it to Europe and America, obviously.

Some games were still announced in January 2k1 and were cancelled during the year, (a crimson skies like game and a tank game come to my mind) including some games from Sega, not only from 3rd parties. that is a sign of a maket which is dying faster than it was meant, since those games were still demoed at E3 2K1.

The DC was scrapped three and a half years ago, two years ago was mid 2002, but you earlier said that the DC died during 2001. Seriously, do you even know what you're typing on this particular point?

caught

The point about Puyo Puyo Fever (also released on PS2, Xbox and GC BTW) was that the DC market didn't just switch off in Jan 2001 (or whenever it was you seem to think it almost instantly died), it was in a state of decline that still hasn't totally reached the sorry bottom yet.

At that time, I was an ardent Sega fan and from an european point of view, maybe it died faster than in the US, because release were very sparse in 2k1 including release of games that were already released elsewhere in 2K.


Anyway, this thread is not about the DC and I did not meant that on January 16th, the Dc market was not there (even if I typed it ), but it surely died faster than Sega thought, considering they did not released anything that was not already in development, cancelled many titles (and so did the 3rd parties) and stop all development despite Sega prez saying that they would support the Dc if games sold at least 100K (which they obviously did not). That is my definition of a fast dying market and that was I said when I typed (with excess) overnight. That is also what I expect from the Xbox market by the way.