If you just bought a 360 Arcade and you want to use all the advertised features of Forza 3 this is what it will cost you right off the bat.
Forza 3: $60 (300 cars)
HDD: $100 (adds 104 cars via disc 2 install)
DLC: $60 (adds ~140 cars via download)
Live: $50/yr (to use online racing/community)
Total: $270 (Total Year 1 costs for Forza 3)
That, my friend, is the most expensive console game ever made.
1) I'm sorry you bought a Samsung. A few years ago I made the mistake of getting one after reading CNET reviews but I wish I had done more research on my own.
Samsung TVs have trouble with dark colors, which tend to just black out, significantly reducing visible detail. Samsungs actually use the exact same lcd panels as the Sony (joint manufacturing agreement) so the fault probably lies with Samsung's inferior circuitry.
In the high end LED backlight models, Samsun...
but unless you buy the $100 hard-drive you can only use one of the discs?
Imagine if Best Buy sold sound systems that way.
Example
Imagine you're at Best Buy after seeing an ad for brand new Bose 7.1 surround sound system at an amazing price of just $500.
Salesman: So here's the Bose system you asked about.
You: Wow! I'm so excited!
Salesman: I'd recommend that you buy these special $1000 wires.
Yo...
1) Nice try spinning the 360's dismal pre-price cut sales performance last year with PS3 sales from this year (after economic downturn). Afraid to compare 360 and PS3 sales from the same time period?
Reality check:
Before the 360 price-cut to $199, the PS3 was outselling it by 35%.
2) Are you seriously suggesting that the sudden increase in 360 sales after the $199 price-cut is not because of the $199 price-cut?
You're either easily confuse...
1) The $199 SKU is a much larger percentage of sales than you want to admit. 360 sales were pathetic until the price drop. The $199 also helped boost sales of the Premium in the same way that used car ads show a low priced car to draw people in to the store to buy a 360 where trained staff then talk them into buying something more expensive.
2) Apparently you aren't tired of being ripped off. $49 is a good price for a brand new 250GB hard-drive, not a used 20GB hard-drive wit...
it was obviously a reference to the transistor count rather than the actual physical dimensions of the chip. Why would I care about the physical dimensions of the chip? As shown in my first comment my interest is in ray-tracing performance relative to transistor count.
Secondly, what does Fermi's improved double-precision performance relative to the GT200 have anything to do with anything? It's irrelevant to this discussion about ray-tracing.
Fermi's single-precis...
it's quite apparent that it does not have 10x the polygon detail promised by Microsoft. In fact, it's has noticably fewer polygons than GT5 Prologue which made no such claims.
The contrast is most easily seen in the c**kpit view of the Mini. The Mini's curve filled interior is very difficult and even the usually flawless GT5 Prologue shows a few polygon edges. However Forza 3's attempt is simply horrendous.
The shortcuts Turn10 has taken with the Mini interior (c...
<<Cell with all 8 SPE's Enabled = 100 GFLOPS average floating point performance.
And each SPE gives a theoretical 25.6 GFLOPS of single precision performance. 6x25.6=153.6 GFLOPS. >>
Huh? You mean 8 SPE = ~200 Gflops
Note that Gflop ratings alone isn't a real indicator of real-world performance. We've seen the Cell consistently provide performance increases an order of magnitude greater than what it's gflop rating would suggest.
<&...
Single Layer Blu-Ray: 25GB (first gen Blu-Ray movies)
Dual-Layer HD-DVD: 30GB (only HD-DVD format used for movies)
Dual-Layer: Blu-Ray: 50GB (second gen Blu-Ray movies)
The first generation of Blu-Ray discs were single layer. Not only that, they were often encoded with the older Mpeg2 codec at a lower bit-rate. So those Blu-Ray discs actually had worse performance than HD-DVD.
However, once dual-layer Blu-Ray movies came out, the massive increase in cap...
You're turning what could have been a civilized discussion about Fermi's relative performance at ray-tracing (the topic of the article) into a whiny fanboy rant about how much better Fermi is than Cell at "other things" and how PS3 "needs a GPU."
Who gives a crap about "other things?" I never mentioned anything other than ray-tracing and my focus wasn't on using Cell for ray-tracing in actual PS3 games but Cell being an order of magnitude better at ...
<<Most and I mean about 90% of the same movies that are on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray use the same encode and run at roughly the same bit-rate.>>
No they don't. Early Blu-Rays (25GB) typically run a different codec and low bit-rate while later Blu-Rays (50GB) use similar codec and higher bit-rate.
<<HD-DVD has a higher read speed and doesn't require the same bitrate as blu-ray's.>>
You're confused. I'll break it down for you.
You never promise perfection.
Why?
Because everyone has a different idea of what that means. In other words, you're just asking to get roasted by someone or the other. Just look what happened to Turn10. Then again, they kept making over-the-top claims and comparisons so, yes, they did force the issue a bit.
HD-DVD was not cheaper. HD-DVD movies were about the same price as Blu-Ray movies (despite being cheaper to manufacture). HD-DVD hardware, on the other hand, actually had the same manufacturing cost as Blu-Ray hardware. In fact, they use the same primary component and have virtually identical hardware layout.
Most people get confused about it because Toshiba's HD-DVD players were selling at a lower price at retail than stand-alone Blu-Ray players. The truth is, Toshiba was ...
Microsoft's getting desperate and planting anti-PS3 articles. Nothing new, they've been doing it for years, just like they've been paying people to populate forums with anti-PS3 posts.
Here's the first Microsoft written article carried by IGN and signed by an IGN editor back in 2005. Again, the timing was not a coincidence. IGN later (much later) added disclaimers that it was written by Microsoft but when it was first published it looked like an article by IGN staff.
<...
before engaging in discussions of this sort.
I'll put this in a way you should be able to understand., ie, a simple 1:1 comparison. For ray-tracing a scene like the one above:
Fermi: 1 fps* from 3000 Million transistors (512 execution units)
PS3 Cell: 4-6 fps from ~200 Million Transistors (6 execution units)
In other words, despite the massive amount of hardware put in Fermi, it's not very efficient at ray-tracing.
*Very favorable est...
running on a CPU or GPU. It just shoots the rays and constructs the scene. When it comes to ray-tracing, how good it looks is all about performance.
If a CPU runs the software faster then the GPU, the CPU output will look better and run smoother.
GPUs are better at traditional graphics (like the DirectX stuff you're used to), and to be fair, most CPUs are bad at ray-tracing. However the Cell processor was designed to be good at advanced graphics tasks.
Based on that video and the specs shown so far, Fermi will render that scene about twice as fast. Fermi might take 2-3 seconds per frame. Maybe they can tweak the code and somehow get it up to 1fps. It's still a slide-show.
In contrast, 8 Cell processors (without GPU assistance) can ray-trace a similar scene at 1080P/30fps.
Sounds too good to be true?
A scene similar to the one above (more complex, actually) rendered by 14 cell processors at 1080P/60f...
The idea was to look at GPGPU solutions since that's what the article header alluded to.
I have no idea why you brought Intel and AMD desktop CPUs into this. Those represent an architecture that is outdated and increasingly irrelevant. Similarly, your quote from Wikipedia is meaningless in the context of this discussion.
There is something in that quote that's relevant to this discussion: A simple "gigaflop" comparison can be misleading. Tests using opti...
Actually the comparison was made by Greenberg and most of the responses here have been direct related to Greenberg's comparison. Making comparisons is inviting comparisons. If you don't want to invite comparisons, don't make them in the first place.
Right where it was before it's price cut to $199.
Before the PS3 and Wii came out, the 360 had 12 months with no competition to take over the market. It failed.
Once the PS3 and Wii came on the 360 was sent to the back of the pack in sales. By 2008 the PS3 was outselling it by 35% every month.
Then Microsoft dropped the price to $199 and Sony did not respond. The Wii was too far head to catch but they could atleast try to catch up with the PS3. T...