Wednesday, May 18, 2005, 2:22:14 AM, Zulfiqar wrote: > Although I have been an avid MS hater, it seems that the XBOX is just > as powerful as the PS3 in terms of hardware.
> Since the PS3 uses CELL and it is a revolutionary processor, a lot of > review sites have stated that the CELL will be hard to program for at > first. It was a similar case for the PS2. The first crop of games > were horrible (graphically speaking), but just look at GT4 and it's > hard to believe that the graphics are being rendered on a PS2. > So which one is it for everyone? Well, I don't actually think the hardware will be equal. MS is going to have trouble when they don't have "most powerful hardware" to lean on. And while lots of sites are speculating that PS3 is hard to program for, that remains to be seen. The biggest hurdle is trying to create multithreaded game engines, but you have to do that on the Xbox 360 too, if you want to leverage its power. Sony has learned a lot from their mistakes too. The biggest problem for early PS2 development was the tools were crap, unfinished and often untranslated. For the PS3, though, they have tools from IBM and nVidia. It's OpenGL, linux, and nVidia's CG HLSL. Sony, Toshiba and IBM are pursuing a software platform where SPE tasks are dynamically scheduled and dispatched. It's not there yet, but some developers have been coding for Cell hardware for at least a year and are coming to terms with the stream processing method it's designed for. Unreal 3 was up and running in 2 months, looked amazing in real time and wasn't even touching the SPEs yet, according to Mark Rein. But that's not why I'll probably buy a PS3 first. I want a Blu-Ray movie player! It's funny, cause having Blu-Ray is a big advantage for the PS3, and having the PS3 is a big advantage for Blu-Ray as a standard. Brad Grenz --the Widgets http://www.thewidgets.com
