"Yes, it can output to 1080p. Yes, it will have better online and storage abilities. But these are all features Sony has told us, not shown us."
Technically Sony has shown us -- well, more like our representatives, the journalists. We've seen 1080p (RR7, VT3, Lair, NBA'07 etc.), better online (Resistance, Warhawk, Motorstorm, flOw etc.) and storage (photo slideshow, Resistance, Lair etc.). Some might not think it's enough, but they have shown it. And at the same point...
Didn't Ridge Racer 7 run at 60fps in 1080p at TGS? Are there any games for X360 in 1080p resolution?
To say the Cell isn't well suited for gamecode is ridiculous and is taken directly from a MS PR-stunt. There are a lot of games to prove that, and quite a few which are supposed to be superior to their X360 cousins: Virtua Tennis 3, Blazing Angels, Full Auto 2 etc.
In the old days when physics and dynamic graphic effects didn't play a big role in games programming...
Besides you are wrong -- XBL Arcade games are cheaper yet.
... it is the rest that is difficult: worldwide payment framework, online store, chat-messaging etc.
Atleast the mountain part in the end. The track was playable at TGS... But it still needs A LOT of polish.
This "war" isn't decided in the first or even second year making the current pricepoints and the X360's lead in sold consoles almost irrelevant.
Sony takes MS very serious and that is exactly why they've gone to great lengths ensuring the PS3 will be the console of choice from a hardware point of view the next seven to ten years.
In two years time, when Blu-ray probably is mainstream (and I don't necessarily mean for movies, although I believe Blu-ray w...
And sometimes more saturated colours aren't the most desirable... look at my above post for my arguments...
It has nothing to do with the consoles... purely design choice...
Last gen it had more to do with the game engines, but not this gen.
The overly saturated look of games make for a less realistic image quality. If you take a look at a well calibrated TV or a random magazine spread, you'll find everything is less saturated compared to most videogames. Movies are always colourgraded and often some kind of colour tint is used to enhance the storytelling in one way or...
Just like when they made the X360 version they have had to make the engine optimized for the PS3, and finetuning once they've got final dev kits. I would guess they've probably spent most of the time doing just that and therefore an improvement in graphic quality doesn't necessarily come from the added development time. If there is any, it would probably be more likely to come from the power of their firstgen PS3 engine compared to their firstgen X360 engine.
Have you got absolutely no clue what you are talking about? Procedural synthesis, raytracing and all that stuff are just algorithms that you could do on a calculator if you wanted to. It would be a slow process, but it would be feasable.
Some developers might choose to use one or the other algorithm in their game, but that is always after a cost/benefit analysis -- how much resources does it take compared to the user experience. How slow will the framerate be? How much memory would...
But why the repetition of textures immediately next to each other? It's apparent in every batch of new screenshots, and it's a bit annoying when the rest looks so good...
Ofcourse it is only so visible because of the detail of the textures, but I do believe they could have removed just a bit of the detail that makes the textures so easily recognizable and thereby avoiding the patterns.
I don't think you can call the usage of all of a platforms forces as lame programming. Ofcourse they make use of the extra space available. They don't need to share textures or geometry between levels, giving the level designers absolute freedom.
If they had designed the game for the X360, they would probably have thought more about how to reuse art assets. Let's not forget what they were able to do with PS2.
Actually Sony do intend on shipping 6mill PS3s worldwide by the end of March '07 (4.5 months after launch) -- that is 1mill more than MS were able to ship X360 consoles by the end of June '06 (6 months after launch).
If Sony are able to produce PS3s at that rate continuosly, that equates to 8mill PS3s shipped in the same period as MS shipped 5mill worldwide -- or more than a 50% larger quantity shipped.
In that perspective, the first six months sales of X360 was actually...
1. What are the real reasons behind the late production?
"Blue diodes are in short supply and high demand. In the production of any piece of electronic, if you are missing a key component, manufacturing simply cannot start. Thankfully we have secured a large shipment of said diodes and we have prepared several production lines in numerous countries. We believe we are on track to shipping 2 mill. consoles before years end and 6 mill. by the end of this financial year."...
Very few TVs today accepts 1080p input and has a native resolution of 1080p. Of theese few TVs, only a handfull actually displays the input as it is supposed to look, the rest first downscales the picture, does its image optimizing, and then upscales it to 1080p again. This is because of the amount of data in a 1080p frame, which makes image optimizing circuits that handles 1080p native very very expensive.
This will ofcourse change in the coming years.
TVs that accept 1...
XNA is a developer environment -- not something the average gamer can use. If you today are making games for Windows or have the skills to do it, then you can use XNA for making crossplatform games for the X360. Otherwise it is completely useless to you for creating games.
And XNA is actually comparable to the Linux environment shipped with the PS3. The difference being, that you will need a PC to use XNA and just a keyboard and mouse for PS3. Ofcourse XNA is a bit easier to us...
Actually... I just noticed something... You mention that the X360 will be capable of HDMI because of it's digital output. You seem to forget one thing:
HDMI, if used with the HD-DVD drive, will only be really usefull if it supports HDCP, and that is a hardware thing. ATI (and NVidia) has only recently started to ship graphiccards for PCs that are actually capable of that, so it's highly unlikely the X360 has that capability as it was initially meant for Component output only. Know, ...
The HDMI / Component debate is different than the 720p / 1080i / 1080p debate.
There is one thing you've completely misunderstood about your TV, and that is one thing which happens because of the same reasons that the HDMI / Component debate is useless on todays TVs:
The exact same circuits in your TV that messes with signal from the cabling, also upscales or downscales any input that comes into the TV. So if you feed your TV with a 1080i signal (supposing it accepts it,...
That is expensive ;-) Atleast you can keep your fingers crossed it will be silent too... and not have that big brick you can't leave on your carpet.
They will have to work hard to catch up with XBL. But to say they don't care about live gameplay is silly... 40 people playing Resistance deathmatch is ok... Most games will have live content. A few won't (among those the famous couple of games from devs that haven't gotten sufficient info from Sony). But theese are first gen launch games for a console that will last for 7-10 years, and in this generation online really matters. Sony will deliver. Wether it will be up to XBL standard is anothe...