AnandTech looks at next gen

[Vandenh]

AnandTech takes a closer look (http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2453) at the next gen consoles, their strengths and weaknesses. Very interesting.
This article isn’t here to crown a winner or to even begin to claim which platform will have better games, it is simply here to answer questions we all have had as well as discuss these new platforms in greater detail than we have before.

[Goronmon]

The article is a good read. Just takes all the technical info known about PS3 and XBox 360 and organizes them into one place. Not really anything new, but still interesting.

[bapenguin]

I find it interesting they doubt the PS3 can provide 1080p across 2 displays.

[agentgray]

Not really anything new, but still interesting.
I have a bad feeling about this.

Everyone and their mother will be doing comparison articles over the next year or so.

[Ernst_Jager]

very good read. I wish Sony and Nintendo would release more info about their systems though. Seems like most of the info about the PS3 was speculation or supposed specs.
I do totally agree that games are going to be the winning factor this time around. With the multi thread design of most console games it also looks like we could potentially be getting less and less cross platform games from consoles to PC. Not sure if that is a good thing or bad.

[kokyunage]

I doubt either system will have a majority of their games at 1080p for a single display.

[Heretic Machine]

I doubt either system will have a majority of their games at 1080p for a single display.

Funny... isn't Microsoft -requiring- that all games on the XBOX 360 be developed for 1080p?

[bapenguin]

Funny... isn't Microsoft -requiring- that all games on the XBOX 360 be developed for 1080p?

No... it's 720P as the requirement.

[carneconcarne]

So who won?

[Roc Ingersol]

We did, because there's competition.

[TRiLoGY]

We did, because there's competition.

Good Answer :)

[Meatgortex]

1080p is actually a bad resolution for action oriented games. The 1080p standard only allows for 24 and 30 fps. 720p on the other hand is a 60 fps standard.

[crashedout]

There are a few misconceptions about HDTV:

1080p is 60 fps, 1080i is 30. Most 1080p TV due in the next year under 5k DO NOT accept 1080p signals, there may be upgrades in the future to allow this over HDMI but right now no.

I worry about the remark that MS is going to use its scaler to scale 720p to 1080i. That usually means that the scaler cuts the signal down to 540 and then doubles it to 1080. Only the more expensive scalers truly scale to 1080i and at 299 I doubt they will be using one of those. It willl still look good, but not as good as true 1080i.

[bapenguin]

1080p is actually a bad resolution for action oriented games. The 1080p standard only allows for 24 and 30 fps. 720p on the other hand is a 60 fps standard.

Good point....the other point is...1080p isn't part of the HD digital spec.

[snubber]

has it been confirmed that xbox 360 will be able to upscale 720p games to 1080i?

My HDTV (and others I know) only supports 480p and 1080i, not 720p. Obviously blows, but I'm hoping the xbox 360 will automatically convert.

[Mason]

I went to the recent graduation at SMU's Guildhall program. Gabe Newell gave the commencement address.

He gave a tech-heavy speech in which he, among other things, talked about how horrible the progress toward multi-core processing will be for game developers. How there are a large number of academic-level issues with multithreaded game engines that are yet to be solved. How there's a very good chance that this generation of hardware will end before anyone learns how to make really good use of the newest consoles.

I found it interesting how many of Gabe's dire predictions are further supported by this article. Honestly, I'm not convinced that it wouldn't be better for the industry to have the next-gen consoles be effectively Xboxes with modern GPUs. Get a nice, fast, out-of-order CPU coupled with some specialty hardware to handle manipulating media streams, and possibly accelerate physics calculations. It wouldn't look as amazing on paper (23 hardware threads, a tflop of power!), but developers would love it and gamers probably couldn't tell the difference.

It isn't good for anyone to have a machine which only a few huge game companies will be able to make impressive games for. That'll slaughter the small-title console industry (which is already pretty anemic). If you note in the Anandtech article, experts estimate that it'll take 2-3 times as long to develop a multithreaded game engine as a singlethreaded one. Multiply current development costs by 2 and you kill off a large number of companies.

On the other hand, this might shift companies back to PC gaming. It'll be a long time before multicore becomes mainstream in PC CPUs, and even then they won't lose their single-threaded performance the way that the console CPUs have. If you're a small studio with bright ideas and a finite development budget, suddenly the consoles might not seem like such a great deal, unless you can pick up a really solid and cheap middleware solution.

[bapenguin]

has it been confirmed that xbox 360 will be able to upscale 720p games to 1080i?

My HDTV (and others I know) only supports 480p and 1080i, not 720p. Obviously blows, but I'm hoping the xbox 360 will automatically convert.

yup, the article right below this one confirms it.

[netcraazzy]

The first games for both consoles will, for all intents and purposes, be single threaded titles. More adventurous developers may even split up execution into two concurrent threads, but for the most part don’t expect to see a dramatic change in the quality and reality of the physics simulation of the first titles, especially when compared to titles like Doom 3 and Half Life 2.

I thought this was interesting. Sounds like 1st gen games probably are not going to be revolutionary, just a little bit prettier.

[Meatgortex]

There are a few misconceptions about HDTV:
1080p is 60 fps, 1080i is 30.

Um... no it isn't. 1080p is maxed at 30fps, 1080i has 60 fields displaying at 30fps.

HDTV Specs
http://www.hdtvprimer.com/ISSUES/what_is_ATSC.html

[Nath5000]

you can tell the article was taking a very "middle of the road" approach. It never necessarily said "this console will be better than the other" which is smart, because people have absorbed all of the facts. If he leaned towards one being better, people who have already taken a side would just disregard the information he was trying to convey.

This is what i got from the article.
1)System Balance: Microsoft put its money into GPU CPU and HD and left out the bells and whistles. PS3 has all the bells and whistles built in (wireless, blue ray etc) but drops the hard drive to compensate.
2):CPU Microsofts console is fairly decently suited to run single thread game code and eventually move towards multithread game code. PS3 is slower at running single thread game code, but has more "potential" to deliver better performance and capability for well designed multithreaded code.
3)Graphics: Microsofts GPU (ATI) is different from PC Graphics architecture because of the Unified shader capability. PS3 is more of what we've seen on the pc and could very well be a slightly modified Geforce 7800GTX except that the vertex (geometry) processing can potentially be done on a thread of the cell leaving the GPU for all of the pretty pixel processing effects (This situation seems similar to how microsoft put a modified geforce 3 into the xbox when geforce 4s were beginning to come out on PCs, which has still served the xbox very well all of this time).
4)Storage: The Xbox will use standard (although a faster drive than the xbox) dual layered DVD drive with a max capacity of 9.something GB, however games could be compressed, and decompressed using one of the xboxes secondary CPUs and offloaded onto the bundled hard drive in realtime. PS3 will give something like 24GB of space per blue ray disk,(but potentially at a higher cost at first to sony?) and therefore sony will not need the hard drive out of the box to decompress the data on the game disks.

What do I think this means? I think it means that at first xbox360 (assuming most games will still use single thread game code architecture) will have seemingly better graphics compared to ps3 launch titles. As for the future, at the end of both consoles life spans, when developers figure out how to make great use of multithreaded code for gaming, I think PS3 games may deliver more physics and potentially better graphics. In other words xbox will have an "end user experience" advantage for the first half of the console cycle, but the ps3 can potentially take that away from the xbox when people figure out how to make games for the cell later on.

Whats my solution? Im buying an xbox360 at launch becuase I cant wait to play games in HD on a big screen with wireless controllers that look visually amazing such as gears of war. Later on in the console life cycle, when multi-core coded games get more advanced, I'll buy a PS3 (which will hopefully have dropped in price at least once).
Im not going to just wait around for the PS3 and skip over the 360 if the xbox is probably going to deliver better stuff for the first round of the next console war... and all of this is just based on the fact that I love complex or detailed and artistic graphics, it has nothing to do with which console will have better games. Which console has the "best games" is still up in the air and thats "in the eye of the beholder" anyway.

Thats just my opinion. Get over it.

[StrifeSnake13*]

That was a good read. The part I found most interesting is the part about single and double threading. All games are single threaded right now and they won’t be double threaded for at least two years; so basically we won’t see very good performance from the two CPU's until 2007-8.

Until games are double threaded, current PC CPU's could do better then the next gen console CPU's.

The importance of this fact is that Microsoft has been talking about the general purpose execution power of the Xbox 360 and how it is 3 times that of the PS3’s Cell processor. With only 1 - 2 threads of execution being dedicated for game code, the advantage is pretty much lost at the start of the console battle.
Interesting.....

[mister_slim]

On the other hand, this might shift companies back to PC gaming. It'll be a long time before multicore becomes mainstream in PC CPUs, and even then they won't lose their single-threaded performance the way that the console CPUs have. If you're a small studio with bright ideas and a finite development budget, suddenly the consoles might not seem like such a great deal, unless you can pick up a really solid and cheap middleware solution.
There's also been some movement towards cell, Java/Flash, and handheld development. These seem to offer the best opportunities for actual gameplay development. I'm getting really tired of games with massive budgets but no interesting gameplay ideas or proper implementation.