Gears of War 2 scheduled for November release Microsoft has officially announced that the Xbox 360 sequel to the popular shooter Gears of War will launch in November of this year. Much of the Xbox 360's first year success was dependent on Epic's Gears of War. It proved much more than just substitute until Halo 3 arrived and really showed the gaming quality that the …
Resistance Fall Of Man 2 on PS3, which frankly looks better than anything I have seen in any game to day (including the Gears2 screens).
Lets face it, the PS3 is now upto speed, and the year headstart that the 360 had with it's games has now vanished. The PS3 can do anything the 360 can do, and then some...
The existing exclusives on the 360 dwarf the list and quality of the PS3's exclusives hands down and it still has plenty more to come with the likes of Gears of War 2, Too Human, Halo Wars, Fable 2, Banjo-Kazooie 3, Lost Odyssey, and Splinter Cell: Conviction.
Ubisoft has also publicly stated that the PS3 can't handle the things they are doing for the likes of Splinter Cell: Conviction on the 360 because of it's limited graphics hardware that's a massive bottleneck for the system.
The PS3 is still suffering from crappy ports of the 360 versions that are released much later (Lost Planet for the PS3 isn't even out yet for example and the 360 has had it a year or so). As such whilst the PS3 has a few nice exclusives, the 360 not only has a better selection of higher quality exclusives but also has better versions of non-exclusives due to not being crappy ports and due to having decent exclusive content such as that coming with GTA4.
All round Microsoft made the right choice with the 360's hardware and release time, Cell is suited primarily to number crunching of fixed data and the graphics pipeline and other hardware in the PS3 simply isn't as powerful as in the 360, in pushing Cell and Bluray mass market Sony destroyed the potential of their system. Coupled with the earlier release Microsoft has managed to push out vastly better games and the software sales figures show it. Whilst countless 360 games - even those not overly impressive - reach Platinum on the 360 shifting 1million units easily even Sony's hard hitters like Ratchet and Clank are really struggling, only selling 75,000 units in it's first week, dwarfed by the hundreds of thousands sold by various 360 hard hitters in the first week.
When even some of Sony's finest can't shift 100,000 in the first week it shows there's a real issue with PS3 software, ironically, contrary to comments in the HD-DVD/Bluray war it would seem most people buy the PS3 as the only future compatible Bluray player rather than a games machine where it's failing miserably on sales figures.
Don't believe any of this? Go check Google, there's plenty of proof out there and for everyone counter-example such as Resistance that's sold well (because it was given away with nearly all PS3 consoles similar to how Wii sports achieved high sales figures) there's tons more that have and are failing to compete with the successfulness of the 360's library of titles both future and present.
I have both systems and the PS3 is poo!
Technically it's inferior for a games machine, wait until GTA4 comes out and you'll see by how much. Games it's also not a contest. The only reason it's selling is PS2 fan-boys and Blue-Ray (those people don't buy games so they don't count).
That and it's a system released a year or more later.
Gears of War was great. Definitely.
But lol, that is the most idiotic rant i've seen on PS3/360 in a little while (God knows there's enough..).
How can PS3's graphics capabilities be limtied with that NVIDIA beauty & Cell powering it? Ubisoft, frankly, are the worst publisher out there for crappy ports, and so wouldnt trust them at all in regards to commentign on "what they can / cant do with the PS3." If they can't make games look&play great on the PS3, then they are either lazy or stupid. Seeing as Polyphony are doing fine with GT5, we have FFXIII looking like it's going to be one of the most graphically superb games ever, etc etc etc. And ports cross-platform games dont have to be crap on PS3 either, again, it's just Ubisoft being lazy. Look at Unreal Tournament III. I have the US version, and it's superb on the PS3.
And as for no good exclusives, quantity of exclusives is great, but I prefer the quality, and so, in this instance, I'm just going to go ahead and play the trump-card, even if it has already been played:
Metal Gear Solid 4.
It's hillarious there are people still out there like yourself that believe your drivel.
Sony own a whole load of game studios, with some great exclusives this year.
For every 360 exclusive, I can name 3 better PS3 ones.
Sorry... I think it's time you got your coat.
MGS4, good but still not a Halo 3 beater so whilst it bolsters the PS3s line up it doesn't give it anything over the 360 still and hence can't really be called a trump card.
Regarding the comments about Cell and the graphics card, here's the issue, starting with Cell, putting it in an easyish to understand form.
Cell has more "cores" than the 360 but all except one may only be used for specific tasks, this makes the cell great for crunching of static data, like many terrabytes of scientific data because the data wont change, each "core" in the cell can crunch through the portions of data it's best at dealing with without worry. When it comes to a game however, the data to be processed isn't static and is constantly changing depending on the players actions the PS3 has to go through the task of deciding what data can be processed by what SPU and churning data out to that SPU, it's likely that at many points in time the data that requires processing will only be able to be processed by certain SPUs capable of working efficiently with that specific data. As a result of this not only are many cores in the PS3 not used a lot of the time for most games but the generic "core" has to spend time dishing the data out to the correct SPU leaving less time for other things. The PS3s generic "core" and SPU's run at 3.2ghz, the same as with the 360. The difference with the 360 is that all 3 cores are generic and as such far less time is spent deciding what data goes to which core and because the cores in the 360's CPU are generic they don't ever need to sit idle.
The graphics card argument is much more simple, the 360s is just simply more powerful and with the unified shader architecture is just simply more feature filled and future proof also.
The PS3 was never designed to have the best hardware for gaming, it was always simply about using a dominant market position to lower the cost of Cell and Bluray for use in Sony's other more profitably market segments. What Sony didn't count on was this having such a negative effect on their console and they didn't count on the 360 or the Wii being such strong competition that would dent their position so badly but they did succeed in their goal of boosting their other business areas with the winning of the HD format war and a reduction in cell costs.
It's one thing to support your favourite console, but to be gullible enough to swallow the marketing hype that Cell is somehow superior for gaming than say a classic dual, quad or tri core CPU merely shows ignorance of the underlying architecture and problems in using such a hardware configuration. Cell has potential for future applications in say graphics and/or physics hardware where it can dedicate itself to specific tasks such as matrix manipulations en-masse and hence where context switching isn't an issue, but as the main processor in a generic/gaming machine? It's simply not optimal.
::stepping around the fanbois guano::
Wonder how long UT3 will take to arrive on 360?
I further wonder how long it will take some mod-maker to come up with a Gears of War mod for UT3 (assuming it hasn't already been done.)
It's been pretty well established that the GPUs in each console take a different enough approach that they are not directly comparable. It's also pretty well established after a full two years of fanboy bluster than neither of the consoles has a significant lead over the other in GPU performance or over all graphics capability. They each do things differently and in the end GPU wise it's a bit of a wash. The difference maker is the Cell BE with it's SPEs. That beasty can churn out the GFLOPS and without having an impact directly on the rendering process it allows games to manage much more complex environments which ultimately has a very positive impact on the graphics, and gameplay. Ubisoft is on record saying a lot of different things about both 360 and PS3, as are Epic and many other multi-platform development teams, sometimes the comments are very positive, and sometimes they are not. The same is true of devs comments about the 360.
The long fanbois rant about 360 still having the best exclusives? Hello? What planet are you from? The gaming press has been banging on about the PS3s exclusives as being far and away the better line up this coming year for months now. Halo Wars? Banjo Kazooie 3(there was a 1 and 2?)?? Come on, scraping the bottom of the barrel aren't you?
It's pretty easy to come up with a list of exclusives for either console, but Halo Wars? Banjo-Kazooie??
Halo Wars - A Halo take on real time strategy gaming? Ah, I see, Command & Conquer cross bred with Halo. Whoa, dude. Can you say innovative? Not about this concept obviously.
Banjo-Kazooie - "A classic Nintendo platformer that stars a big, goofy honey bear named Banjo who wears tight yellow shorts and carries around a raucous, red-crested breegull named Tooie in his backpack. The bear-and-bird duo must use constant teamwork to rescue Banjo's sister from the evil Gruntilda who wants to steal her beauty."
Be still my beating heart...
The 360 has plenty of exciting exclusives coming. None of which are by Epic, in my book; Gears was easily the worst game I've ever played on the machine. Sure, the graphics were amazing, but the painfully linear gameplay was dull as ditchwater.
But then I hated Metal Gear Solid as well, so go figure.
What are those exclusives though, Mark? I'm getting a PS3 in the next few months as a BluRay player, but all I see on the games front for me are WipEout HD, Proper GT5 whenever it turns up (I'm never buying another Prologue after Tokyo-Geneva was such a ripoff) and maybe SingStar when I get bored of the many PS2 iterations I already own.
I know about MGS4 (see above) some RPGs (I hate the genre) and the knowledge that sooner or later Team ICO will turn out something pretty that runs at 10fps, but other than that it's just the vague temptation of Little Big Planet, and User Generated Content usually makes me want to break things.
All you bloody "my console whups you console" prats.
If you want 360 exclusives and content, buy a 360. If you want PS3 exclusives and content, buy a PS3.
If you want both, buy both.
If you can't afford both, stop f-kin squeeling in our ears covering up your bitterness with the "my console is better" twoddle, and save your pocket money until you can buy the other one as well.
Just go away and leave the better informed adults to it please.
Not sure where you get your thoughts on the Cell, but you're wrong in many ways.
Cell BE was designed pretty much for the PS3. Yes it's a great HPC platform, yes it can crunch huge amounts of data, but at it's heart it's a multi-media monster.
The SPEs are SIMD RISC processors that are capable of high speed single precision operation and operate best on streams of data. The internal architecture of Cell is designed to facilitate monstrously large bandwidth between the SPEs, the PPC core and the memory controller. The SPEs are actually capable RISC processors in their own right, each with 256KB of local storage - not cache, it's a local memory structure available only to the SPE it's tied to. You're incorrect to characterize the SPEs as if they were simply special purpose FP units, they are far more flexible than that.
All of Cell's cores run at the 3.2GHz core frequency, as does the internal bus that links the SPEs and PPC core. The bandwidth between processor cores inside the Cell is truly huge, the theoretical maximum is around 300GB/second, though the practical limit appears to be about 200GB/second. The memory interface on the Cell allows the memory to run effectively at the same speed as the processor so that the XDR memory that is paired to the Cell effectively runs at 3.2GHz. SPEs can't access memory directly as their local memory store is their memory, however they do not require the PPC code to access memory for them. The 64-bit virtual memory addresses that the SPEs use are passed directly to a memory controller and a DMA operation is performed for the SPE. The PPC core has nothing to do with it. The SPEs operate independently, they are loaded with a program and run their program, the PPC core doesn't spend time house keeping for the SPEs, they do it themselves.
The way you discussed the differences in data between a scientific application and a game are just plain wrong. You said "each 'core' in the cell can crunch through the portions of data it's best at dealing with" What? The PPC core is a general purpose core with it's own FP capabilities. The SPEs are SIMD/RISC processors which are identical to each other. You also said "When it comes to a game however, the data to be processed isn't static and is constantly changing depending on the players actions the PS3 has to go through the task of deciding what data can be processed by what SPU and churning data out to that SPU." That's rubbish. The PS3 is not the PPC core on the Cell, nor does the PPC core have to be constantly tending to the SPEs like a mother hen. If a developer who only thinks of the SPEs as special purpose FP units comes along and uses them in that way, then your 'model' could match how that programmer handles things. However, that is not a limitation of the architecture it's a limitation of the programmer. If an SPE is handling collision detection (for example), it can do it on it's own without any coordination from the 'PS3'. A programmer who uses the SPEs as processors in their own right will do things very differently, and gain huge benefits by doing so.
PS3 was always designed as a gaming system, you're completely wrong to say otherwise. Cell BE was designed for the PS3, the two literally go hand in hand.
To be honest, I looked at the trailer for Killzone 2 and wasn't really impressed. There are very few FPS games I do find impressive if I'm honest. People went mad over Halo, but I saw it as nothing better than a slightly above average game, coming from a background of PC gaming. I must admit to owning and enjoying COD4 but that's the only FPS I've spent money on for console.
Although it's not a comparable title (in terms of style of game) I would think that MS are more worried about the effect the likes of Gran Turismo 5 will have, assuming it ever arrives and some of the other exclusives arriving on PS3 this year.
As for the long (and highly geeky) arguments about "which console is more powerful", I think I speak for the majority when I say that we don't really care. I've played both, they're both good in their own right and there's very little between them graphically.
Dude....highly geeky arguments, on a tech news site? Who'd have thunk it?
I mean seriously, a tech site with comments and you're surprised by geeky comments?
OK, seriously, FPS games are FPS games. I haven't seen anything significantly different in basic concept or game play going from Halo to Halo2 and then Halo3. Not to mention that to my untrained eye Quake and Doom are pretty much 'samey' these days. It's like all the FPS games based on the Unreal Engine. They all have a familiarity about them. To me it looks like UT3 is the mothership, and the rest of the games are merely scripted mods. But then I'm not a huge fan of the FPS genre. The only FPS game I still have in my library is the original Doom/Doom2 games and they are pretty much the same as each other. Of course they did rather remake the mold that Wolfenstien broke.
I'm sure that people would say the same about racing games, however Burnout Paradise is not GT5, nor will it ever be. MotorStorm is a very different animal, and if Codemasters ever come back with another of the excellent TOCA series of games it will be different again.
The huge number of FPS games and their associated sequels is simply depressing. People bitch about Madden being recycled from year to year. How is that any different from all the contemporary military FPS games, the stealth fps games, the WWII fps games and the futuristic space marine fps games? At least with Madden they have new uniforms from time to time, new player names and stats and roster changes. They do have an excuse to refresh (no excuse for charging $50 every time for a game that sees very little in the way of code changing though - should go to a subscription service for roster/player/team updates).
Ah, I appear to have strayed from the topic, back to the geekiness. As far as I am concerned with game console hardware I am looking at the hardware as a hardware geek. A certain group of console fanboys will consider my opinions to make me a fanboy for another console. I don't care. The only think I am looking at in such discussions is an honest appraisal of the performance of the hardware. I consider Cell to be one of the best CPU designs of the current computing era. That doesn't make everything else bad, of course. I have to admit I hate seeing fanboy discussions of console power. Generally those debates involve people who don't understand the technology, throwing around glib statements about the performance of one system verses another. Sometimes I feel like correcting them.
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