Ok, by now everyone is aware of the "10 Reasons Sony Wins" article the Chief Creative Officer at Insomniac, Brian Hastings, wrote. Well this post ISN'T about his forecast for the future, half of his article is speculative and he isn't a fortune teller (I'll ask Cleo if I want to know the future).
What he is, however, is a Game developer with intimate knowledge of software and hardware. So the specific items he touched on regarding the technical attributes shall be considered true by me until another developer claims differently. I don't want to see any crappy posts in here from "anonymous devs". If they have something to say the should be willing to speak openly. I respect Brian for having the guts to put his professional opinion on the line. With that said, let's get busy and explore the technical issues he discussed.
1: Gears is the best looking game to date, including RFOM.
Gears of War is a beautiful game and shows off the highest resolution textures of anything yet released, partly because of the Unreal Engine's ability to stream textures. This means that you can have much higher resolution textures than you could normally fit in your 512 MB of RAM....
Sometimes people ask us, "If Resistance takes 14 gigabytes, why doesn't it look better than Gears?" Well, for one, Resistance didn't support texture streaming, so we had to make choices about where we spent our high-res textures.Brian Hastings
2: 50GB of data WILL make games better.
As games get bigger, more advanced and more complex, they necessarily take up more space. If developers were filling up DVDs last generation, there are clearly going to be some sacrifices made to fit current generation games in the same amount of space....
There's no question that you can always cut more levels, compress the audio more, compress the textures more, down-res the mpeg movies, and eventually get any game to fit on a DVD. But you paid for a high-def experience, right? You want the highest resolution, best audio, most cinematic experience a developer can offer, right? That's why Blu-Ray is important for games, and why it will become more important each year of this hardware cycle.Brian Hastings
3: The Hard Drive MATTERS.
The problem with including a hard drive in one version of the 360 and not in the other is that developers can't use it for the games. Or, at least, they can't use it for any required features. When you are guaranteed to have at least a 20 GB hard drive in the console, you can write your load caching routines around it, or use it for your application's storage needs. To a developer, an optional hard drive is roughly equivalent to no hard drive at all.Brian Hastings
4: 360's GPU has slight edge over PS3's.
The GPUs on the Xbox 360 and PS3 are roughly equivalent, with the Xbox 360 arguably having a slight edge.Brian Hastings
5: PS3 has major CPU advantage over 360.
The difference in CPU power, however, is far greater with the PS3 enjoying the advantage. The PS3's eight parallel CPUs (one primary "PPU" and seven Cell processors) give it potentially far more computing power than the three parallel CPUs in the Xbox 360. Just about any tech programmer will tell you that the PS3's CPUs are significantly more powerful.Brian Hastings
So there you have it. Anything that disputes these points that doesn't come from another developer will be ignored, or proclaimed as bunk. However if another dev disputes this then we will finally have a real discussion in the gaming world about the real limitations of both of these consoles.
EDIT:
People PLEASE READ the post BEFORE you respond. Alot of you are making yourselves look silly.:shock: This post is NOT saying that Insomniac's word is law concerning PS3 winning the console war. This post IS saying that the TECHNICAL issues that Mr. Hastings has broached will be considered TRUTH up until the time that another developer counters them. If you do not understand this, please take a reading comprehension course. Thank you.
Log in to comment