PS3 Price Slash

[Supercheese]

For some reason, that whole rant made me think of DOA Extreme 2 for the 360.

High poly... Stripped down... "high profile"... etc.

Well, maybe not the "Bleh" part. 

[Saist]

Indeed.

I do think there's a tangible difference between the Wii and the 360, but that's more in how many polys they can get on screen. Certainly the wii is under-powered, so it's going to come down to whether the games aer fun enough to outmatch the fact that they can't quite get the graphics up to par with the XBox.

At a certain point there is still a difference in graphics, the the Wii is right at that cusp. That's not to say I'm against it, just making a point.

um.  Don't know where you heard that from about having trouble getting graphics up to par with the Xbox, but that part is bull manure. Have you taken a look at the screen shots for Red Steel or Far Cry: Vengance? According to the Ubi Soft dev team the Wii is far in excess of what the Xbox can do.

I think the rumor that the Wii could only do Xbox level graphics stems from one statement, and one observation. The first is that the Wii is only 3 times more powerful than the Cube. That statement really isn't accurate since it presumes several factors such as coding efficiency and raw polgyon output. However, keep this in mind. The raw polygon output of the original Playstation was more than the Nintendo64. yet, the N64 had better graphics. Why? Because it was easier to actually get power out of.  Right now the Xbox 360 and Playstation3 are to developers, only 4 or maybe 5 times more powerful than the Xbox, because they are just getting started learning how to code for the multi-threaded platforms.

Just for a real life example, compare Jak III to the original Jak and Daxter. Same platform, but you wouldn't know holding them side by side.

the second was the observation coming off of E3 that several of the titles on display didn't look that much improved over a "standard" Gamecube or Xbox title. No wonder, Generation 3 dev kits were being used. According to ATi, the final spec for the Graphics chip wasn't even finished.

From the dev's I've talked too, while we can count the Wii out of the high-resolution chase, a couple stated that once they were willing to cut their resolution to 480p, they had no problem fitting into the Wii's specs.

Now, will that be true in 2 or 3 years when multi-threaded code is in higher usage? Probably not. At that point, raw poly difference will be a factor, and the Xbox 360 and PS3 will be in a league that physically, the Wii simply will not be able to touch.

***

Also, something else on my mind, but stylistic presentation enters largly into the equation as well. Consider for a second a Cell-Shaded title. The Cell-Shading technique masks the polygons that are used. You also have other graphics based technologies like 3Dc or the S3 Texture compression, not to mention things like Normal Maps.

The point is that a lot of things can be done to mask overall polygon counts, or lower the required counts. Something that Oblivion PC users demonstrated when they recreated a lot of the in-game models allowing lower end systems to run the bloated game.

***

okay, quite honestly, while I was writing this, I'm also playing CoH. I completely forgot where I was, and since i'm in a TF, I'm just going to hit the post button.

[Cvstos]

Actually most devs I've talked to like developing on the Xbox 360.  Microsoft usually does a good job providing developer support.

And you're right about resolution.  (Full disclosure: My primary gaming platform is the PC)

I'd rather drop the res a bit and get some anti-aliasing in.  I can run Half-Life 2 Ep 1 at 1280x1024 with HDR, but not with AA.  So I drop the res to 1024x768 (which still looks great) and bump the AA to 4X, and it runs just fine and looks brilliant.

720p with AA > 1080p without AA.  ESPECIALLY considering 1080p sets are rare and expensive as all hell.  I've only got a 720p set myself.

[Darkmoon]

I meant the 360 when I said Xbox, FYI.

[Darkmoon]

Forgot to post this link: http://www.electricsistahood.com/reviews/2006/09/do-math-will-sony-go-broke.html

[ilpalazzo]

Meh, PS3 will conquer all.