Consoles Explained

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I know nothing about consoles really. I'm mainly talking about the 360 and PS3 but what I'm interested to know is how they compare to typical gaming Desktop Computers regards outright power and performance?

I've googled the consoles specifications but it doesn't seem as straight forward as a PC regards understanding it. PS3 has a 7SPE CPU at 3.2Ghz?

For instance, the 360 has been out a while but all the new titles that come out play on it without a second thought - thats what consoles do, but when the same titles come out on PC, we all scurry off to check our system is up to the job, even if it's only a month old - Crysis springs to mind! Is that planned to come out for the 360??
 
No... They might port it later on.

Anyway the philosophy behind consoles is that the hardware is constant, developers program with that hardware in mind. Current PCs are more powerful than both ps3 and 360 but are not used as efficiently due to the open nature of the PC.

Dont try to compare specs of consoles to PCs, its meaningless.
 
I thought it might be. But makes you wonder if say, you spend £800 on a gaming system that will run Crysis on High, then it comes out on the Xbox which you can buy for a couple hundred quid and plug in a mouse and keyboard, why don't we just all game on a console?

I say this cos I saw Bioshock on my mates 360 and I didnt really notice any difference between that and the PC version. Maybe they need to be run side by side at the same time to differentiate.
He also had it connected to a massive 42" HD display, which you can't easily do on a PC without some sort of perfomance loss due to the higher resolution.
 
Well, I'm not sure if this helps, but a good gaming computer nowadays can just about emulate a PS2. The CPU in that is 299Mhz. Ideally you need a dual core processor to play games at the same frame rate.

Though obviously an emulator isn't going to be able to match a piece of hardware, so a lot of power will be lost.
 
The way the PC is designed means that brute force is its main asset. Console hardware is highly specialised and so is the software that runs on it. The PC on the other hand is a very generalised platform designed to be flexible.

Take the Cell processor as an example. It absolutely shreds through decoding tasks and scientific calculations but you wouldnt replace your Core 2 with it.
 
Crysis will never be ported onto a console because they lack the ram to be able to support such huge areas. If you look at console games they are full of loading points and linear maps because the console cant handel it . But they are very well optimized. If you had the same hardware in a pc as you do in a console the console would run the games a lot better then the pc version becuse the console games are highly optimized for that specific spec and pc games arn't.
 
No... They might port it later on.

Anyway the philosophy behind consoles is that the hardware is constant, developers program with that hardware in mind. Current PCs are more powerful than both ps3 and 360 but are not used as efficiently due to the open nature of the PC.

Dont try to compare specs of consoles to PCs, its meaningless.

That's pretty much it, also think for example whenever there's a new major game released, Nvidia or ATI release updated drivers afterwards...
 
If thats true, I guess its due to the cell processor being weird. Sure, its super powerful, but its also complicated to make things work on it.
 
well the orange box has been a fauilure on the ps3 serposidly due to it being so hard to code that all but portal is working on it. It was reviewed as unplayerble. Works sound on the 360.
 
If thats true, I guess its due to the cell processor being weird. Sure, its super powerful, but its also complicated to make things work on it.


Someone did a post about similar problems affecting the PS2 so Sony have been here before.....

and we all know how dominating the PS2 was/is in the consoles market...
 
Well, I'm not sure if this helps, but a good gaming computer nowadays can just about emulate a PS2. The CPU in that is 299Mhz. Ideally you need a dual core processor to play games at the same frame rate.

Though obviously an emulator isn't going to be able to match a piece of hardware, so a lot of power will be lost.

Erm... I'm not sure where to start correcting you to be honest as you seem to have completely lost the plot.
 
Someone did a post about similar problems affecting the PS2 so Sony have been here before.....

and we all know how dominating the PS2 was/is in the consoles market...

The circumstances were very different back then and developers are no longer forced to work on a more awkward format to generate good sales.
 
Kreeeee i agree the circumstances were very different (ie sony didnt have to face the xbox back then) Whereas now the ps3 has come into a market dominated by the 360.

developers are no longer forced to work on a more awkward format to generate good sales.

Yeah thats true.. there wasnt actually as much choice for the devs back then. There was no xbox initially so it was only the PS2 (+ dreamcast? n64?)
Whereas nowadays why should they go to the trouble when its easier to do on the 360?
 
not contradicting because tbh i havent seen crysis but doesn't battlefield 2 modern combat arena's / maps count as huge areas?

is crysis that open?

Crysis will never be ported onto a console because they lack the ram to be able to support such huge areas. If you look at console games they are full of loading points and linear maps because the console cant handel it . But they are very well optimized. If you had the same hardware in a pc as you do in a console the console would run the games a lot better then the pc version becuse the console games are highly optimized for that specific spec and pc games arn't.
 
When people say "oh, the PC is full of random components whereas the console is specialised", the key is Windows. On a PC, Windows basically sits between anything you program on it, and the hardware itself, so that it can interpret what you're wanting to do, and customise it to whatever your hardware is, so that it actually understands. And of course, Windows has all those other little extra functions like multi-tasking. That kind of functionality does of course lead to a fair bit of performance loss.

On a console, you're right in there with the components from the start. When a game tells the 360 to draw a bad guy, it goes straight to the graphics card and does it (in a sense).
 
Crysis will never be ported onto a console because they lack the ram to be able to support such huge areas. If you look at console games they are full of loading points and linear maps because the console cant handel it . But they are very well optimized. If you had the same hardware in a pc as you do in a console the console would run the games a lot better then the pc version becuse the console games are highly optimized for that specific spec and pc games arn't.

I wonder if your suspension was due to this dumb comment? Shame, 'cos I'd love to hear more thoughts on this.

I REALLY can not be bothered to list them all, but there are a stack of non-linear games on ALL consoles. You only notice the "Loading" points because the game is reading from an optical drive which has a far lower reading speed than a hard drive.

Trust me, next time you're playing a game on the PC, disconnect the hard drive if you think everything is thrown into RAM and then come back on here and tell us all how far you got!
 
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