Isn't it funny that someone always comes up with new fairy dust for Durango that will close the gap to Orbis?
When Orbis was rumored to have a 1.8 TFLOPS GPU, the "leakers" said that Durango will have a secret sauce for the GPU (some kind of super FLOPS) since it had a 7970 in the first devkit. When Orbis was rumored to have 4GiB of super fast GDDR5 RAM, the "leakers" said that Durango will have some wizzard jizz that will close the bandwidth gap. Now Orbis is rumored to have 512 GFLOPS on the computing side (8 Jaguars + 4 GCN CUs) and "only" 1.4 TFLOPS on the GPU side and all of a sudden Durango will have some sort of Super-Jaguar with ultra-beefy FPUs that close the gap again. What happened to the secret sauce for the Durango GPU? No longer required since Orbis was downgraded to 1.4 TFLOPS on the GPU?
All these Durango rumors sound contradictory as hell. I'm not believing any of it until someone comes out with concrete information.
I look at it as something normal when console rivalry is involved. I still remember the Wall Guy days, aahhhh, those were the days!! I can't recall having ever laughed so much in my entire life reading a videogames' thread. I couldn't help it but weep buckets, in such a positive manner, crying with laughter.
Wall Guy was some kind of embarrassment for Microsoft, because people thought those were the graphics that the new console could display.
There is a fan club in 1up.com but it's nowhere near as good as it was back them, cuz those comments and threads on the subject are gone forever.
http://www.1up.com/do/club?clubid=42775
I don't know about the secret ingredients -this sauce talk...- of the new consoles, but as I see it, the differences between consoles are there once again, and this leads to lots of speculation.
It seems to me that Orbis will be the most powerful system this next generation while Durango seems to be the more efficient. WiiU is more similar to the current generation consoles so I don't see any potential advantage over the others.
This new era reminds me of the wonderful GC / Xbox / PS2 era.
I think that, if the rumours are true, Orbis is the Xbox -power- of this generation while Durango is the Gamecube of this generation -efficiency-.
I certainly loved that generation, and while a brother of mine had the PS2, I had the Xbox and the Gamecube, and both were great in their own right.
I still keep nowadays, for some reason I don't remember, an email I sent to my own email address back in 2004 with two excellent posts from actual developers about the differences between those consoles. Yes, I just loved that era so much.
I believe the situation applies nowadays too, it's still valid if rumours are true.
So let's the engineers and developers do the talking. Paraphrasing them -whoever you are- 9 years since then..., thanks...
I don't know what's caused this guy to go on a rant, or where he gets all of his details from, but his final conclusion is wrong.
In real world, practical use, I've found the Xbox to be the fastest console out there. And I've seen a lot of games *in production* and know how they are really performing. How does he know Rogue Leader is pushing 15 million polygons? From a website? From the same sources he criticizes for declaring Xbox the fastest?
For the most part, it sounds like fanboy-ism to me.
As an engineer who works on a lot of real world games, here's how I generally see the three consoles:
- PlayStation2 has the weakest CPU of the three (it's also the oldest, so no suprise). It has the most fillrate, but that fillrate is only good for single-texture triangles (and those numbers from Sony only apply in optimal cases where the triangles are less than 32 pixels wide).
- GameCube has a great CPU, and fast memory. But, of its 32 megs of memory, 8 of them are in "auxillary" memory which is not as fast (and traditionally used for disc-caching and audio). The GCN also had the spectacular TEV unit which can do some incredible multi-texture effects. *BUT*, it's framebuffer is stored in YUV instead of RGB so it is more expensive to do post-processing effects on the framebuffer (if you want to do them in RGB space).
- Xbox has a great CPU, more memory than everyone else, a harddrive (for great disc caching), and most importantly pixel and vertex shaders. While the PS2 can do more at the vertex level with its vector units than Xbox can, Xbox can operate at the pixel level better than GCN or PS2. And operating at the pixel level is key for next-generation quality effects.
Every single developer I talk to (everyone of them, without exception) would prefer to develop titles for the Xbox over both GCN and PS2. They can simply do more with the Xbox.
And my favourite post of the two, most realistic of both.
As a developer who has worked on all 3 system, I do have to say I agree with Microsoft's numbers, in most cases.
In most cases, the XBox is indeed the most powerful.
The GameCube can process many many textures on a single polygon however, so there are definitely cases where the GameCube can do things faster. Overall, the GameCube and the XBox are fairly close.
The PS2 lags far behind both the GameCube and the XBox as far as real world numbers go.
I think one of the reasons you haven't seen a lot of things on the XBox that would be impossible/difficult to do on the other platforms is that the pixel/vertex shaders aren't available on other platforms. With the XBox not usually being a primary SKU, and use of the pixel/vertex shaders making a port to other platforms difficult, I think they tend to be left by the wayside a bit, and not really exploited by developers. This at least has been my experience on the XBox. Most of the work we do on the XBox is to make it look as close as possible to the "other" versions. I think if Microsoft had a higher number of exclusive titles, you would see this change. The other thing that keeps people from really using the pixel/vertex shaders is that the technology itself is fairly new. This manifests itself in that most of the developers don't necessarily have a good system to let the artists create their own vertex/pixel shaders, meaning whatever shaders are used/created are done by programmers, which means you're probably not going to see a lot of fancy stuff that is easily used by the artists. That is one of the reasons I was so impressed by how John Carmack used the shaders for Doom3. From what I understand, the artists basically make 2 models, a high poly one and a low poly one. Then there is a tool that processes those 2 models and creates shaders for the low-poly model to make it look like the high poly one. This is a great use of the shaders, and probably one of the reasons Doom3 looks so good.
Well, the Xbox was the Xbox... and the GC had some great graphics for its time -running GC games on emulators is certainly a sight to behold- and some advantages with transparencies and so on.
Imho, F-Zero GX would be impossible on the Xbox 1 at 60 fps. On the other hand, Doom 3, Unreal Championship 2 and so on wouldn't be possible on the GC.
And that's what I like the most about consoles, customized options and hardware.
