Sony PS3, Nintendo Wii or Xbox360.

Which next-gen console are you going to buy?

Sony PS3 or PSP! thats the bomb! no compromise

Sony PS3 is certainly the best. Microsoft will never win the prize of best video games.

i currently use xbox 360 and its tite but wont mind using PS3, its not out yet so we cant judge

hope u guys know nintendo totally owned at E3 and the whole world is patiently waiting for wii.
PS3 is looking bad right now (the hardware has problems) plus did u hear how much it's going to cost? as much as the price of wii and 360 combined

ps3 is 2 times as powerful as x360 (2 teraflops for God's sake!) and 3 times as powerful as wii. so wat if it costs more? and the game isnt even out yet so wat can u possibly mean they hav problem wit the hardware? they only redesigned the pad to look more like the dualshock (hated that bat thingy ) and upped the Cell from 2.8 ghz to 3.2. all the video demos we saw at e3 were runnin on 2.8ghz. it is currently THE MOST POWERFUL and innovative home computer and wateva the cost is more than offset by the CElls capabilities and the power of the RSX GPU, which is Nvidia by the way. so im buyin, screw xbox and wii. that wii controller is never goin to work.

definately SONY PS3!! i will get mine hopefully when its released in the far east "grey market" or just pre-order it if they block exportation
I think it will coincide with the release of the new pro evolution<sadly the only game i play regularly

its gonna be expensive but wort the sacrife would have to sell my Xbox 360 and all my games

xbox 360 all the way.

ps3

just got the 360, its so much more than a game console but I think their still playing catch up with PS

Neoteny:

ps3 is 2 times as powerful as x360 (2 teraflops for God's sake!) and 3 times as powerful as wii. so what if it costs more? and the game isnt even out yet so what can u possibly mean they hav problem wit the hardware? they only redesigned the pad to look more like the dualshock (hated that bat thingy ) and upped the Cell from 2.8 ghz to 3.2. all the video demos we saw at e3 were runnin on 2.8ghz. it is currently THE MOST POWERFUL and innovative home computer and whatever the cost is more than offset by the CElls capabilities and the power of the RSX GPU, which is Nvidia by the way. so im buyin, screw xbox and wii. that wii controller is never goin to work.

PS3 broken: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32171

i don't know yet but am biased to sony platforms

i'm a nintendo fanboy all the way, but i'm gonna get a ps3 juist cos of Pro evo soccer. finito!

Neoteny:

ps3 is 2 times as powerful as x360 (2 teraflops for God's sake!) and 3 times as powerful as wii. so what if it costs more? and the game isnt even out yet so what can u possibly mean they hav problem wit the hardware? they only redesigned the pad to look more like the dualshock (hated that bat thingy ) and upped the Cell from 2.8 ghz to 3.2. all the video demos we saw at e3 were runnin on 2.8ghz. it is currently THE MOST POWERFUL and innovative home computer and whatever the cost is more than offset by the CElls capabilities and the power of the RSX GPU, which is Nvidia by the way. so im buyin, screw xbox and wii. that wii controller is never goin to work.

not true. the ps3 isnt twice as powerful as the 360. it has better paper specs in some areas, true, but that doesnt always transmit into a good gaming experience. Also, e3 has shown that there isnt any difference int he graphical quality btw the ps3 and the 360. correct me if im wrong. The ps3 cant be called the most powerful home computer on the market cos many full fetured gaming pcs have more power.
y'all drooling over the ps3 have gotta consider the price, $600. if a $120 ps2 still sells for 25k + in naija (years after its release) how much do u think a ps3 will go for? prolly about 120k (very conservative estimate).

on the other hand, perhaps thats a reason 4 me 2 get a mastercard from first bank after all,

Microsoft^R XboX 360 console

PS3 all the way but for the cost $$$$$$$

Its xbox 360 for me. Realising Xbox 360 last year is already a strategic advantge for microsoft . Although am very sure PS3 would be a tough opponent to beat, i still see microsoft gaining more market share . Why did sony decide to use the blu-ray technology. this might be their downfall.

However never underestimate the underdog Nintendo. I see a revolution in their contoll pad.

I'll be getting a Wii.

Why? Its the only reasonably priced console. At less than 250 dollars, it is an absolute steal! PLUS: I get to play gamecube games such as gekito ninja taisen, and the wii controller is the only thing besides "xbox live anywhere" that was impressive at E3 2006.

And "live anywhere" is useless in Nigeria. Hence, wii!

Ps3? this is going to be Sony's big failure. the PAL version of the console will sell for 700 pounds!!!! that's over 180,000 naira! JESUS CHRIST!!! the NTSC version will be 700 dollars, which is just over a hundred grand! for a games console! And when the Alaba boys are done with it, how much will it cost?!!

By the way, the Alaba boys won't be able to (trivially) pirate blurays, but they will be able to pirate 360 dvds and wii dvds! this should make ps3 the big loser in naija, just like the gamecube of the current generation.

Sony has gotten greedy, like Nintendo of 1996. It is time for their downfall!

PS: since I am a confessed halo LovePeddler, I may be tempted to go for a 360 if halo3 is any good. The price has to come down first, sha.

just compare the specs, 2teraflops versus the xbox360's mere 1teraflop. and u say all that mathematical ability is just paper? dont shaderpipelines crunch astronomical numbers to give us semblance of reality? and e3 did show that the ps3 is way better than the xbox360, hav u seen the trailer (ingame grfx) for mgs4 and that final fantasy video? by the way mgs4 isnt goin to be on 360 and theres noway u can ever say they have equal graphical capabilities wen the hardware specs are uneven. ps3's cell chip has a total of 9 cores compared to xbox's 3. and ps3 has nextgen nvidia gpu runnin @ 550 mhz, xbox has ATI (still havin that lame Rage architecture, i reckon) runnin 50mhz less. the ps3 is meant to last 10 years so sony went all out. and i'll love for u to tell me wat home pc currently has parallel proceesing architecture with 9 symetrical cores each core wit its own cache all runnin at 3.2ghz. its just like one pc havin 9 intel 3.2ghz processors. where do u find dat?

dude! dont fall for sony hype! Cell is NOT A NINE CORE PROCESSOR! it is a single power PC with seven (not eight) vector units! the spe's are SIMD processors, hardly a full microprocessor unit. The cell's amazing SIMD power will only help it with vector-heavy processing, which means video encoding, decoding and streaming.

NOT physics, ai and 3d! so the cell's teraflop capability is useless for games! Oh my God!

RSX is more powerful than the ATI processor in the 360, that is true. BUT not by the margin sony will have you believe! PLUS the games may actually end up looking better on xbox because:

1) xbox doesnt have the wahala of seperating video and cpu memory. They are shared! so no need to use a local bus, and the xbox has the advantage of using superast video ram for its own cpu purposes! how cool is that!

2) Cell with its 7 spe's, local memory per unit (access to main memory from an spe is slow as a dead turtle) and crap devkits will be difficult to use compared to xbox and XNA, which is already in use and is really easy for developers. In the long term, the ps3 games will look better because the rsx is plain more powerful but in the meantime programmers will suffer. Just look at the games they showed at e3 2006- either they were videos, or looked terrible. The exception was Heavenly sword from ninja theory, which, i must admit, looked like it will be ONE HELL OF A SERIOUSLY AWESOME GAME,



next point:

mgs4 trailer- video. dont believe the hype, that is NOT ingame GFX. yes I am talking about the e3 trailer where snake shoots himself. remember the killzone trailer? at least they aren't trying to lie with this one.

final fantasy 13- video.Yes, the one with the chick slaughtering crowds witha gunblade. But then ff games are filled with video anyway,

Heeeeey ma guy! ATI has been whipping nvidia's arse for ages now! and they use RADEON now, not rage!Nvidia just struck back with the 7800 series, every gen before then has seen ATI the winner. However I wont debate that the RSX is more powerful than the xbox360 graphics chip. remember the shared memory issue, sha.


bottomline: dont be blinded by the hype. the cell is a 3+ghz powerpc with seven vector units. The xbox cpu is a triple core 3+ghz powerpc. For serial nonfloating point operations, they should have equal performance. For parallel nonfloating point operations, the xbox should be 2-3 times faster, for floating point vector operations, the cell should TOTALLY KILL the xbox 360 processor.

unfortunately games are not a floating point vector based application. They are also not easily parallelized. so neither cpu has a clear advantage!

i'll have to disagree with you there dakmanzero.
the PS3 is actually multi-core. that's why it's going to be a bitch for programmers. multi-threading with 3 cores is tough on it's own and now 9 wtf!

anyway, seeing as the cost of developing games has increased. i don't think any publisher will be willing to drop so much dough for their game to be available on one platform. these means most games will be released across all platforms so that these companies can make their dough.

the way i see it, the games will be developed on a common platform (PC?) and then ported to various platforms with a bit tweaking here and there. therefore the games will look almost the same across all platforms and PS3's extra muscle power would just be a complete waste.

nintendo is winning this. PS3's price has killed it. next gen doesn't need that much power. haba!

@neoteny. cool down, it's not equivalent to 9 3.2ghz intel processors, cool down.

did u read the article at that link
PS3's RSX has half the triangle setup rate of the ATI chip

u see the truth is very few people-developers included- know how to harness next gen power or even wat it can do for games. but there is no arguin that though grafix cannot make for better games they do enhance the overall experience and actually we the gamers demand for more and more level of reality so we actually push console and game developers to up their specs.we push the standard and that is why a lot of us were disappointed by the current gen when they finally appeared. they shattered our illusions and expectations and perhaps the same thing may happen now. but why is the current xbox light years away from the ps2 in terms of graphical abilities? because it has much better specs, it has more power. you cannot expect us to swallow your rant against ps3 specs cos u seem to suggest sony's entire R and D department spent all those resources just for marketing sake and in end we are buyin a dud. if john carmack can be wowed by the ps3 i guess the rest of us mere mortals cannot help followin suit. even microsoft concedes ps3 is a powerful machine, more so than the 360. if specs dont make sense why bother makin a next gen console? because we demand for reality, and that synthesized reality has its basis on power. which the ps3 has in abundance. currently the most powerful computers can go about 36 teraflops, ps3 goes over 2teraflops. im sure u have heard of euphoria, which makes nosense of current gen AI. and wen u talk about vectors, you really are talkin about geometry, polygons. tthe cell has nothing to do wit video strteaming and contrary to wat u said the architecture allows the synergistic processing elements to be faster by not sharing memory. the cell can asign different tasks to each spe as the need arises, such as one spe workin on AI, another workin on collision detection physics. but the reality is that all these arguments are moot because the same thing was said of the original xbox and in the end the ps2 won the day and we see something similar happening between psp and the ds, and perhaps that is why nintendo (my fave) is goin the way it is. history has shown that the most powerful console may not always be the winner(atari jaguar, n64, xbox) lets just wait and see but theres no disputing which nextgen console is the most powerful.

@neoteny, you are absolutely right.

power does not mean victory.

*the psp is more powerful than the ds, but Ds wins.

*almost every gameboy-killer was more powerful than the gameboy,  gameboy killed em all until GBA

*Gamecube and xbox were more powerful than Ps2, even dreamcast games looked better due to hardware AA even though ps2 specs were (allegedly) higher,  yet ps2 won the day.

*the megadrive was more powerful than the NES,  yet it couldnt break its hold on the market.


However I disagree with you and c0dec (hows it going man! long time!) on the tech details of the ps3:

c0dec: I have a link for you- I have a technical study of the cell. Not a game magazine yanning nonsense, I mean a proper design document from ibm.com-

[url]http://www-306.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/techdocs/D9439D04EA9B080B87256FC00075CC2D/$file/MPR-Cell-details-article-021405.pdf[/url]

to be clear:

The SPEs are NOT independent processors! the cell is NOT a multicore processor in the fashion of the xbox 360 processor!

Neoteny, Vector units are NOT referring to geometry, etc. A vector unit in microprocessor design is quite different. There are certain instructions known as SIMD instructions, (single instruction multiple data) like the altivec on powerpc, or SSE and MMX on intel processors. A VECTOR UNIT is a co-processor designed to optimize these *specific* instructions. It has very limited general purpose capability. Therefore yuou can't put AI on one processor, collision detection on another, etc like you said earlier. Rather, what you do is you MULTIPLEX a vector operation and farm  out to your SPEs. this is how SONY got their huge teraflop scores! And as i mentioned earlier, simd is quite useless for games, so those teraflops are USELESS unless some genius can figure out a new form of game programming that uses them. Not likely.

Also, neoteny, microsoft does NOT concede that the ps3 is more powerful. They actually claim the 360 is more powerful (this is debatable, as regards relevance to games. The 2 extra cores of the xbox are just as useless as the spe's for reasons i will outline below,  but the real thing is that rsx is higher specced than the ati chip in x360). I have a link:

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/617/617951p1.html

They reveal a lot of sony's misyans about ps3, but they talk some rubbish too, saying crap about how shared graphics memory gives them a big advantage over sony,  anyway time will tell.

finally, neoteny, the local memory of each spe IS a limitation, unless you are not doing video streaming or encoding. These are applications where you have a large, predictable, singledimensional datastream, and you can rely on your MMU to keep the stream pumping. If you attempt to read directly from main memory or read an spe's local memory, you get a huge clock penalty. This is the designer's way of saying, don't do it. As such, the cell is custom built for amazing performance in thoe areas, but not gaming.

yo dakmanzero. i dey.

you really went thorough with the processor architectures. glanced thru the design doc. ok you're right but you could say the functionality of the SPE is more or less like another core. concurrent programming (threads and all) techniques will still be required to bring out the power and from what i've heard, it's nothing nice.

nice article but a little old though -> http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/crossplatform.ars

Yeah,you're right about concurrent processing tech being needed to make use of the spe's. The point i was trying to make is that ON TOP of this, the spe's are then again limited in what they can achieve, while the 360's 2 extra cores are full power pc units equal to the cell ppe.

But the real point is that game programming is inherently serial. It is not so simple as putting AI on one chip, collision detection on another, blah blah. Those are NOT parellelizable tasks. The tasks that are easily parallelisable are either mundane (sound, disk IO) or ALREADY parallelized (all forms of graphics). Remember- cpu's are not used for graphics in this modern age- the gfx are farmed out to parallel GPUs, in ps3s case this is rsx, in 360s case it is the ati card.

One thing that seems promising is physics. Physics CAN be parallelized! Unfortunately, this requires a decoupling from the game logic. The testing required to ensure that such a use of physics remains within a game's problem domain is insane and ultimately unrewarding, so in the end the designers either:

1) reduce it to cosmetic effects only (eg max payne 2,fear, almost every other havok-based game out there)

2) build it into the game logic, making it non-parallelizable (eg half-life 2)

I hope some genius figures out how to use parallel programming in games. Maybe it will mean a new type of game? That will really rock! 'cos todays games certainly do not benefit from multithreading.

well,  i think it's very possible to run the subsystems in parallel. it's just that programming with threads can be quite messy. i did a project on that recently with graphics, physics, some basic ai and networking running on seperate threads. might be a little project compared to the heavy games out there but hey with good OO designs, it's very much possible.

BTW, you've heard of PPUs right?

Yep, like the physex and the new physics extensions that the gpu makers are going to add to their cards.

EDGE did an article on them early in the year, actually thats where I got most of my grammar about parallelism in game programming from. John Carmack made a speech at quakecon 2005 (I wish i could still find the link, but if u look around for 'quakecon video nsv' you may get it- its a nullsoft video.)

His biggest concern was on this physics issue and i practically repeated his words verbatim. If you paralellise it,. you are choosing to remove it from core game logic, and you make the game completely unpredictable and nearly impossible to playtest to robustness.

If you choose to integrate it into the game logic, then by the nature of game programming it becomes nearly impossible to parallelize. I can get a concept of this because of my experience with quake 3 source code. I was trying to figure out how the bots in quake 3 reason (the game was beginning to get too hard) so i was reading thru the source code and I realised that the 'AI' in games is not ai in the traditional sense, but rather cleverly directed gam,e logic. you *can't* remove this from the core game logic.

Thats why we can't have 'client bots' that are pure clients, communicating with the game engine in the same way that humans do, because the intelligence required is out of this world. Bots of nowadays, in all games including fighting and stragegy games, are nothing more than the core game engine pretending to play against you, thats why they seem to cheat sometimes- they are going out of their way to pretend to play fair.

When the day comes where a fully autonomous bot seperate from core game logic exists, AI will be parallelizable. When a form of AI that can perform stresstesting on a physics-enabled playspace accounting for all possible error consitions exists, physics will be parallelizable. when setting semaphores andf passing messages between processors becomes faster than simply raising exceptions for collision events, collision detection will become parallelizable.

All these require the input of some seriously creative genius folk. exactly the kind of people that will NOT be working on ps3 and xbox (due to the ridiculous cost). So in my opinion it will be a long, long time before we see multiprocessor cpu's enhancing games in any way.

On the PC i have the idea that game makers will be happy not to use more than 1 core at a time, because that will allow them to escape from the 'close all other programs' wahala that most games usually require. They'll just code the games so the game chops one core and lets all other tasks share the next core. Imagine tanning halflife 2 and burning a CD in the background!

hehe, so u went through carmack's code? nasty eh.

well, anyway, yeah with parallelism, games can become unpredictable. thats the problem with threads, you dont which thread is going to read from or write data to at any time so things can get out of hand but thats only the beginning of it. code might work perfectly at debug mode but then in release mode, u could get something totally off.

but there's one thing i know, man has walked on the moon and i'm so certain man will overcome this. game programmers are greedy and always want to maximise and squeeze as much as they can onto hardware. the industry is quite competitive and no one wants to be left in the dust. multi-core PCs are the future and they're gonna use all cores they can get.

there's this war game on the 360 - one of the release titles - i think it's call of duty 2 or something. quite a heavy game. i heard that one of the 360 cores is solely dedicated to all the particle systems for the game.
went to a conference last month. there was a talk by some guys from rare about their 360 title, Kameo. They said they tried as much to use all the power the 360 had to offer including all their cores. with the time and relatively little experience they had with concurrent programming and the new console, they believe they did a very good job but also think there's still more power to tapped from the system which they say they'll eventually will.

exactly.

particle systems.

and what are particle systems? cosmetic physics, just as i said earlier. They have no impact on the gameplay, except maybe obscuring the vision of players during combat (which is really cool, as seen in FEAR), but if the game is being played seriously, I asure you its one of the first things players will turn off, as it adds wildcards into the game that mean sometimes you may die due to no fault of yours. realistic maybe, but not GAME. its like players turning off the lightmap lighting in competitive quake3- it looks cool but gets you killed! Plus quake3 is a better game without the wildcard of lighting- its not splinter cell which is esigned around lighting and cover. In a combat oriented game like q3, such lighting causes problems. JKinda like the terrain in tekken4 which u will notice has been ripped from tekken5. cool, but intrudes on the gameplay. (unlike VF where the games strategy is built around terrain management)

The Kameo thing, I believe, was a sound thing (like i mentioned earlier). Hardly an amazing feat.

I'm not saying people wont do it. I'm just saying it will take a looooong looooong time, or probably new types of game.



Finally the code i went thru is not the q3 source that was recently released (I'm not worthy), it was the arena source code that was released donkey years ago for the purpose of Mod-building. It had stuff like bot AI, weapon damage calculations, etc etc and was really well documenmted (in terms of naming of headers, functions etc) so it was really easy to navigate and very good fun, too! it was also humiliating to see how simple the routines that powered the most deadly bots were. I also got to see that the mode where I thought the bots had a damage advantage, HARDCORE mode, was actyually the mode where they dealt damage equal to that of the player! So I realised I had to step up my game, instead of claiming the bots were cheating, lololol!

something really cool I learned from the code was how recognizable complex behaviours were just the result of tweaking some parameters on a very simple AI routine!

For example in Quake 3 although the bots are not as smart as the ones in unreal when it comes to team tactics, they have distinct personalities. (unlike UT where its obvious the bots are all just the same guy with different likes/dislikes/tendencies/skill levels) You know that Doom will do his best to get a railgun, even sacrificing his life in the process- you know that sorlag will always use ranged attacks when he can, will try to knock opponents off course in mid air for crater kills, will move towards bounce pads whenever he can. You know biker will avoid direct confrontations and will instead choose to sneakily interfere with fights that are almost over, killing the weaker player. I read the code, hoping to find the source of all this but instead saw that there were just a few generic routines with some parameters here and there 'weighing' random number generators, and each bot was just a set of parameters fed into the same set of routines! Incredible!

The guy who wrote that code is jean paul van waveren and I think he is too much! however the gaming community has turned up theior noses at him, cos the q3 bots are so crap at team tactics. But how was id to know that team games would take over the gamespace after q3, eh?

cosmetic physics though it may be but it's still part of the physics engine. and those explosions do interfere with gameplay. well, my definition of game logic is everything outside the rendering phase.

well, anyway, yeah with AI it's the results that usually matters. if it looks good, no need to go all complex. despite it's age, most games still use finite state machine (FSM) technology for their AI. though some games do implementing more advanced AI techniques - take a look at spore. not sure wat UT2004 uses but i hear 2007's gonna be using fuzzy logic (just some rumor maybe). game AI is quite interesting and intuitive if you're into it but the biggest problem is in debugging.

i just started a new AI project. check it out with some of my other crappy projects.

i might just have to go thru some of those codes. i need ideas for team tactics in a football game.