PS3 - X-Box 360 - Nintendo Revolution

[MskoDestny]

Well seeing as each of Nintendo's consoles has sold less than it's predecessor and that there are plenty of reasons to believe that the 360 will sell better than the original XBox the 5:1 prediction doesn't sound completely unreasonable.

I also don't see the Revolution's controller being all that great for FPS games. There just aren't enough buttons for most of them (jump, crouch, fire, secondary fire, weapon switching, flashlight, etc.). RTS games should play well though. Frankly, I've played Call of Duty 2 on the 360 and aiming wasn't all that hard and the positioning of the triggers works particularly well for that kind of game.

[MskoDestny]

lou_dias wrote:
You do know that you can add on to the controller right?  Watch the video.  It's expandable by plugging addons into it.   Nintendo is including the "nun-chuk" addon that adds an analog stick and 2 shoulder button held in your left hand.  Back to the controller, it offers easy access to a D-pad, B-trigger button and A-topside button.

Even with the silly analog stick dongle you've got fewer buttons than the Gamecube controller and I found it inadequate for FPS games.

Simple things like turning left and right can be done by twisting the controller clockwise and counter-clockwise along the axis that points towards the screen.  Looking up or down can be done by pointing the controller over the top or underneath the TV screen.  It can be quite instinctive once you get used to it.

I don't really see how it's more instinctive. In the case of a traditional controller you push the stick left and you look left with the Revolution controller I turn my hand left and I look left. If I taped the revolution controller to my head then indeed it would be more instinctive. It will offer greater precision for FPS games, but the lack of buttons makes it ineffective for that purpose. RTS games will probably work great as well as a number of other genres; however, FPS games won't work well without a lot of simplification.

It changes the way you play.  Don't get stuck in the traditional interface rut.

Reloading can be like the arcade gun games where you "fire" off-screen to reload.

This won't work if you're using the direction of the remote-thing to look with. Every time you go to reload you'd end up turning yourself around. Off screen reloading really only works well for games on rails like traditional light-gun games.

Revolution's controller possibilities are limitless, not limited.  A traditional controller dock was prototyped by IGN.com.  The "remote" just docks into the center of a traditional controller adapter and gives you all your analog sticks and buttons for "traditional" games but still gives you the 3D spatial movement technology.

I really don't see the appeal of having a bunch of tacky add-ons to the controller rather than just having a separate controller. The whole add-on concept seems to be a big compromise between the different needs the controller tries to fit. Simplicity and approachability for the casual and non-gamer crowd, useability for newer games that need a few extra buttons and/or an analog stick, and compatability with SNES,N64, and Gamecube games. In the end it turns into a mess. They probably would have been better off adding the motion/position sensing stuff ot a revved Gamecube controller.

http://www.gamesarefun.com/news.php?newsid=5732

This would seem to further validate my point. They got so obsessed with making the controller more accessible to the casual and non-gamer crowd that they made it unsuitable for a lot of existing game types without jamming it into a traditional controller.

I really think Sega had the right idea here. They made specialized controllers for games that needed it, like the fishing controller (which was motion sensing by the way) and the Samba de Amigo Marracas. Too bad Sega didn't have the money to fight the marketing war.

it was 2:1 not 5:1

Oops, that's what I get for posting when I'm sleepy. Don't know where that 5:1 number came from.

and I believe the article was targeting the US market only, good luck in Japan  :-P

Initial reports suggest that Microsoft has gained some mindshare in Japan with the 360. It's not entirely clear how well that mindshare will turn into marketshare, but it's progress none the less.

For fuel to the 360 fire:

http://www.gamespot.com/news/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=23889856

From the article:

[UPDATE] Well, over the weekend, eagle-eyed reader Mike Scott pointed out that in GameSpot's October 27 video Q&A with the designers of Condemned, one developer said the studio is using the Xbox 360's second thread to give opponents improved artificial intelligence. Since Sega said the game will go on sale alongside the Xbox 360 on November 22nd, it turns out the Inquirer was wrong.


Bogus or not bogus?: Bogus, apparently.

That said, it wouldn't surprise me if the other launch titles were all single-threaded. I'm pretty sure they all started life on other platforms and moving to a multi-threaded design requires quite a bit of rewriting. Given the pressure to get these titles out by launch day, I'm not surprised.

Titles like PGR3 and DOA4 will be the first to start truly showing what the 360 hardware can do.

Looks like the Revolution will be using one or two PPE cores and not a G5(or two) though. Check out this article over at Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/revolution.ars

At first it looked like mostly speculation until I got to this bit:

I now have very good reason to believe that I was correct the first time, and that Revolution will use the same PPE core that powers the Cell and the Xenon. On this point, I have to appeal to inside information the source and nature of which I won't characterize. IBM has sold this core to all three console makers as a media processing monster that packs a lot of power into a small die area, and they tried to sell Apple on it as a laptop core based on those very qualities.

[MskoDestny]

lou_dias wrote:
On your article.  Did you read it?

Yes, but did you?

a PPC core it a PPC core, but Nintendo's will have a large cache (like the Gamecube did) and use branch predicting Out of Order executing cpu (as opposed to the 360's In-Order-Executing)

While the large cache is speculated in the article, it's quite clear that the Broadway chip in the Revolution will be using PPE core(s) which do not feature out of order execution. The extra cache will help mitigate some of the poor branch prediction, but it will only go so far. The PPE has a long pipeline and it takes a while for that to refill after a branch mispredict even when the appropriate code is in the cache.

Revolution looks to be very developer-friendly.

Well it looks like the Revolution will need the least threading to achieve the maximum performance of the console which makes it the least radical departure from existing consoles. Unfortunately it looks like it does this at the cost of being the least powerful of the three.

@Waccoon
The reason I mentioned casual and non-gamers in regards to the controller is that Nintendo has made a lot of noise about the high button count of modern controllers putting off this end of the market. Their stated justification for the remote control shape is to make it more approachable and recognizable to this crowd. However, by adding on all the dongles it seems to me they've just made things more complicated than they were before which kind of defeats the whole point.

I do think fewer buttons can be better. My point was that current FPS games have too many functions to stuff on the Revolution controller well and I don't think that will change soon since most FPS games start out on the PC (which of course has plenty of buttons).

[MskoDestny]

lou_dias wrote:
I think you 2 are getting multi-threaded and multi-core confused.  They are not the same and does require special programming.

I think it is you that doesn't understand. They aren't the same. One is a software technique and the other is a class of hardware. However, they are related. Multi-core CPUs work essentially the same as standard multi-CPU systems. You need multi-threaded programs to take advantage of both cores.

Having branch predicters reside outside of the cores allows the branch predicter to send a code segment to one core for execution automatically where as on the 360, this will not happen and is up to the developers in there own code to decide on the compiler level.  This goes back to In-Order-Executing vs. Out-Of-Order...

You really don't understand how branch prediction works. It's part of the front end of the processor core, not external to it. Nintendo can't magically add better branch prediction to the PPE core. Also Out of order execution and branch prediction are two separate features of the front-end.

Also note that the PPEs in all 3 consoles have branch prediction, just not very sophisticated branch prediction. However, branch prediction is designed to keep the pipeline full not to feed to separate processor cores.

So on revolution, code will always take advantage of multiple cores...having a larger cache (and branch predicters) is also what makes this possible and why I (in another thread...possibly earlier in this one) said a 2.5Ghz G5-based Revolution cpu will initially outperform first the 3.2GHz 360 and PS3 cpus.

Except it won't be a G5. It will be PPE based which means it will have the same fundamental limitations as the 360 just with more cache to help mitigate the poor branch prediction. If Broadway runs at 3.2GHz then it would clearly do better on single-threaded code, but seeing as there should be multi-threaded games (like PGR3) out on the 360 well before the Revolution even hits the market I don't see this being a huge advantage.

AMD has had multi-core processors for years, no one had to worry about it because their branch-prediction took care of all that stuff.

They did not have multi-core processors until the X2s and dual core opterons. You're confusing having multiple execution units and multiple cores. Very different.

This is why I call the Revolution cpu "traditional".  It's just like a desktop cpu.

Except it's not just like a desktop CPU. It's PPE based like the Xenon.

[MskoDestny]

http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/nintendo-revolution.htm

I can't say I have a lot of respect for that article when it claims the 360 has 6 processor cores when it only has 3.

ah-toldyouso-chu

http://www.joystiq.com/entry/1234000320065895/

So Nintendo has gone from saying "2-3 times more powerful than the Gamecube" to saying nothing to saying "there will be no difference" I'll believe them when they release some specs or some videos/screenshots that can compete with PGR3. At the moment his statement can be taken so many ways, it's not particularly useful. I wouldn't mind reading a decent English translation of the interview. Babelfish just wasn't cutting it for me.

Waccoon wrote:
Well, most of the FPS I've seen can be driven almost entirely with the mouse, scrollwheel, and space bar. It's the wargame FPS that need millions of buttons, like the flight simulators. But, those kinds of really complex games aren't Nintendo's typical fare, and as far as I know, aren't all that mainstream.

HL2: Fire, secondary fire, use, crouch, jump and weapon selection and I consider that to be the bare minimum. At that point you're stuck jamming use onto the D-pad as well as weapon selection. Less than ideal and this is assuming that you used an auto-reload mechanism (also less than ideal). A lot of games are also adding in dedicated grenade buttons (which are quite useful).

Now I'm sure any Nintendo FPS made for the console would be well suited to the controller, but Nintendo doesn't make many FPS games. If there are a substantial number of FPS games on the Revolution they will be coming from 3rd party developers and likely have problems mapping their buttons well to the controller.

[MskoDestny]

lou_dias wrote:

Now I'm sure any Nintendo FPS made for the console would be well suited to the controller, but Nintendo doesn't make many FPS games. If there are a substantial number of FPS games on the Revolution they will be coming from 3rd party developers and likely have problems mapping their buttons well to the controller.

So Metroid Prime 1, 2 and 3(coming on Revolution) aren't FPS games, nor is Geist.  Interesting...even more interesting is how the controller with "nun chuck" addon was demoed on a Metroid Prime 2 level running on the Gamecube rewritten to take advantage of interface...

Notice how I said Nintendo doesn't make MANY FPS games not that they don't make FPS games at all. 3 FPS does not constitute many in my book. Now any given 3rd party developer may not have developed more than that, but Nintendo is but one company and there are a whole slew of 3rd party developers writing FPS games, most of which could benefit from having more than 4-buttons.

As for your supposed specs, they're just rumors. Until Nintendo comes out with specs officially I won't give them any more weight than rumors about the other consoles before their specs were announced. 512MB of main RAM doesn't make a lot of sense unless they're using a unified RAM architecture (like in the 360) in which case the GPU wouldn't have another 256MB of it's own.

If you're specs are true, it would mean the Revolution is going to be sputtering along with a 2.5GHz single-core PPE based CPU. An extra 1MB of cache isn't going to make up for having 1/3 of the processing hardware running 700MHz slower. The PPU would help out on physics intensive games, but I have a hard time believing there are many games with a massive enough physics engine to make up the difference between the two.

[MskoDestny]

These specs come from developers...and I've seen similar specs in a printed magazine.

Well purported developers anyway. The fact that they've been printed in a magazine doesn't necessarily make them true.

Like I said before.  The hardware is finalized and now it's time to show developers.

Is it? That Spanish interview made it sound like they still hadn't quite finalized the hardware, but maybe they were referring to the fact that the developers don't have the final hardware yet. It was a pretty bad translation, so it's hard to tell.

MoSys memory is both cheap and fast so I don't doubt the memory.  It's one of the things that people say "wft is T1-MoSys memory" and it made the GC so fast AND cheap.

Well I don't have pricing info on MoSys 1T-SRAM so I can't comment on whether it's truly inexpensive. My 512MB comment was more to the effect that it didn't make sense for their to be 512MB of main program RAM if there was an additional 256MB of VRAM. Consoles don't typically need a huge amount of main RAM since a huge portion of the data is graphics data. To me it seems they would have been better off with 256MB (or using a unified 512MB) and taking the money they saved to improve some other aspect of the system.

I still say the cpu is a G5 with typical Nintendo enhancement requirements.  You can call it what you want, to me a PPC core is a PPC core.  Again, going with an existing design with minor tweaks keeps the costs down.

Well a PPC core is a PPC core in the sense of what instructions it will run (with the exception of extensions like VMX that aren't present on all PPC chips), but it doesn't say much about performance. A PPC 601 at 2.5GHz (if such a thing existed) would still run like a dog compared to a G5 or PPE. The G5 and PPE will have rather different performance characteristics and the task will largely determine which is faster; however, comparing a PPE to a PPE is relatively straightforward.

I don't see them coming out with a slower GPU than the Xbox because it's coming out almost 9 moths later.

Having an equally fast GPU won't do it much good if the CPU can't keep it fed. Just looking at the early XBox 360 offerings, the difference in graphical quality between older single-threaded games (thus running on a single PPE) and games designed with the 360 in mind (like PGR3) is quite clear. Short of having the GPU do more work than it typically does, having a better GPU won't do much coupled to a weak CPU.

PS3 has SPU's for physics, 360 has more PPC cores for that, Why can't Nintendo just throw in a basic physics chip and some dedicated ram (32MB)?

Well I have no idea how much these things cost so again it's hard for me to comment.

You should notice that I've stopped saying I didn't believe the specs because of cost. A single-core 2.5GHz PPE based CPU with somewhere in the neighborhood of 2MB of cache coupled with the rest of the specs above doesn't sound too unreasonable. I don't think the 512MB of RAM is terribly realistic, but that's mostly for reasons of system balance (something Nintendo did very well with the Gamecube) rather than cost. Other than that, I don't put much faith in them because I don't put much faith in console rumors in general.

[MskoDestny]

The CPU never copies raw data to VRAM in a modern system. It's either done using DMA or in the case of the 360 there's no copying to be done since it has a unified memory architecture.

Keeping the GPU fed is about telling it what to do (what transforms, which triangle lists to draw and where, etc.). On the 360 it seems that one core is not enough to handle game logic and keeping the GPU fed. If the Revolution uses a single core PPE based processor at 2.5GHz it would seem that the CPU would not be fast enough to take advantage of the GPU if the GPU is as fast or faster than the one in the 360.

[MskoDestny]

From a CNN/Money article:

One thing's for sure: The Revolution will not support high definition video, a marked divergence from the path Microsoft (Research) and Sony (Research) are taking. And it's not something the company is re-thinking, despite the fervent hopes of some hardcore gaming fans.

http://money.cnn.com/2005/11/10/commentary/game_over/column_gaming/index.htm

As for the 360 and emulation, it's unlikely it's purely a hardware emulator. Assuming the underlying OS is still compatible with the version from the original XBox (which is likely) they'd really only have to emulate the CPU. I believe even the "direct" access to the graphics hardware was handled through a library. HLE is much more efficient than emulating every last bit of the hardware.

I kind of doubt they need a separate emulator for each game. I find it more likely that they have a base emulator core and then config files for individual games to get optimal performance out of them. Many emulators for modern systems have similar behavior needing either special config files for certain games, or certain games needing certain emulation plug-ins to work properly.

One company has gone on record to handing MS their source code.

That doesn't necessarily mean anything. It's much easier to figure out why a particular piece of software is misbehaving in an emulator if you have the source code.

[MskoDestny]

lou_dias wrote:
If you can burn a cd and have the 360 execute code then the system is already open to hackers and crackers and I don't even care which one you are.  You can hack and crack the 360 all you want, it's no skin off my ass.

1) You still have no proof that they're actually recompiling the games. Since this would be incredibly inefficient labor-wise, I find it unlikely that's what they're actually doing.
2) Even if they are actual executables, what makes you think the executables won't be signed with some ridiculously long key that would take who knows how many thousands of years to crack with current computing technology. If that's the case, this feature is no more exploitable than the console's ability to play video files provided by the user.

And as far as money comes from games not consoles. You are wrong and you can read through the middle of this thread to figure out why.

Well money does come from the games. Console hardware is sold at razor thin margins (and sometimes at a loss). The majority of the profit comes from game sales and game licensing. If you don't believe me, look at the 3DO. The company that handled software licensing (the 3DO corporation) just licensed out the hardware design to consumer electronics manufactures thus completely disconnecting the software profits and hardware profits. The result? The 3DO was ridiculously expensive at launch.

So if they lose $200 per console and if they sell 100 million consoles like the PS2 did, they'd lose 20 billion dollars. Good luck making that up in software sales.

While I also find it unlikely there will be a recordable BD drive in the PS3, your math is way off. Even if Sony did lose $200 per unit sold at launch, they wouldn't lose $200 on each console sold for the life of the console. The manufacturing costs drop dramatically over the life of the console.

I'm quite exited about the potential for XBox Live Arcade. The reduced cost associated with publishing a game via Live Arcade should allow for some interesting stuff to see the light of day that wouldn't have enough sales (or be too risky) to justify a full retail rollout.

[MskoDestny]

lou_dias wrote:
No, I have no proof they are recompiling just like their is no proof that they are not recompiling but why would they need a separate emulator for each game?  The evidence I have posted leads one to believe recompiling is what is happening.
http://www.gamers.com/?run=news&news_id=4379
What did they have to license from NVidia in order to emulate hardware that they own?  Could it be low-level library source code that needs to be recompiled for the ATI gpu?

There's a library that's part of the XBox devkit for low-level access to the nVidia hardware and it's likely that re-implementing this library would have infringed on one of nVidia's patents. It's likely there is a native version of this for the 360 that the emulation uses (this is fundamentally how UltraHLE worked). However, this doesn't require them to recompile the games.

I already gave an explanation as to why they might need a separate "emulator" for each game.

Also, to decrypt encryption, all you need is time.

It took almost 5 years to decrypt a short message encrypted in RC5-64 (which uses a measly 64-bit key) using thousands of computers from around the world. It would be trivial for Microsoft to use a key large enough that it won't be cracked for a very long time.

Since all emulators will boot the same way, eventually you see a pattern and someone will figure it out because that is what some people like to do.  Also encryption and de-encryption isn't practical all the time when you need 100% cpu for the actual game.

You don't have to sign everything, just the emulator update. It's checked once when you install it (well I'm guessing here of course). That's all that's needed for security in this case.

Sony's games are secure because their drive format (BLUE RAY) is proprietary (hmmm...kinda like Nintendo...).

Blu-Ray is a standard. Besides the PS2 used standard DVD-ROMs and the only way to get homebrew running on that (apart from PS2 linux anyway) is to exploit a bug in the PS-1 emulation or physically modify the console.

Funny how people critisize Nintendo for it...

They criticise Nintendo for it because it reduced disc capacity and raised disc manufacturing costs. The PS3 will undoubtedly still support standard DVD-ROMs for games that don't need the capacity and while Blu-Ray does cost more, it does offer substantially more capacity.

I underestimated the $200 because with a recordable BLUE RAY drive, you actually put the losses much higher than $200 expecially if they expect to lose just over $100 now with just a player.

I don't think a recordable drive will be twice as costly to manufacture. It's basically a standard drive with a second laser, some more junk in the firmware, and maybe a little extra supporting hardware to maintain burn integrity.

Now I still don't think Sony will include a recordable BD drive for a number of reasons.

Yeah, things seem to be moving to "online distribution".  Even Nintendo is going that way with the "virtual console" feature of Revolution.  Personally, I like a pretty box and printed manual.

Unless Nintendo sells their old games super cheap (like in the $1-$2 dollar range) I probably won't be interested in their online offerings. I like playing old games on the real hardware and most games can be had quite cheap through used video games stores and ebay.

What has me excited about Live Arcade is that it allows games to come to the XBox that never could under a retail scenario. This is already starting to happen on the PC with Steam. Ragdoll Kung-fu appears to be an innovative and potentially addictive game, but it never would have been released at retail.