9 ms·

The Xbox One: Hardware Analysis & Comparison to PlayStation 4

FreeBird 13y ago
As usual, Anand delivers a fact based impartial comparison unlike all the biased flamebait articles making the rounds targeted at fans. Ironically it was the PS3 that advertised itself as a media center last time with bluray support. That didn't wok out well, but the 360 later pivoted to media very successfully and still continues to outsell other consoles.
rbanffy 13y ago
It looks like the Sony machine will be more expensive (or its profit margins will be a lot lower). The PS4 seems to have a lot more hardware under the hood than the One. Having said that, as I pointed out elsewhere, it's now how many things your device does, but how well it does the thing that'll define its function. If it's an entertainment system, it's how well it entertains people. If it's a videogame, it's how fun the games it plays are.
- Bosence 13y ago
  I believe they used to make the previous console at a loss, because they generate most of their profits through the sales of games and accessories. I believe.
  - missing_cipher 13y ago
    Yes, the PS3 initially launched at a loss(mainly because of the Blu Ray player from what I remember). Towards the end of its lifetime it wasn't losing them money.
- sp332 13y ago
  Exactly, the developer experience is very important, and hardware is only an issue if you're really pushing the limits. Differences in SDK made a huge difference in popularity between the PS3 and the 360. Since the 360 handled background music, matchmaking, and voice chat natively, devs had a huge head start over competitors on the PS3. Helping out the devs had a direct effect on the players' experience, which led to the 360's dominance in multiplayer games.
  - tracker1 13y ago
    Yeah.. but it does look like MS is backpedaling in support of indie devs for the XBox One.
    - rbanffy 13y ago
      OTOH, it seems developing for the One will be easy. At least, as easy as developing for Windows. Although I personally have little love for Visual Studio, most Windows developers would never leave it. Were it programmable in Lisp, I suppose developers would use it to read e-mail and chat on IRC ;-)
  - UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
    Tangent: In addition to that, I think this generation might be defined by how well each console opens up to smaller/indie developers. Modern day indie developers are making products which we would have called AAA games in 1998 and many of them are selling extremely well (just see Kickstarter). I think they have a HUGE role to play this generation, and holding them hostage in the "app" sandbox will be a massive mistake. If either Microsoft or Sony opened up their SDK to indie developers, and created some kind of arrangement where these developers could sell digitally for a fee, I think they will effectively "win" this round. And I do not mean "apps." I mean full power of the console level stuff.
- illuminate 13y ago
  And the rest of the ecosystem. I do hope the new incarnation of Live allows for PC/One simultaneous play.
- shock-value 13y ago
  Not necessarily -- the Xbox include a Kinect in the box which will increase its price/lower its profit margin. The PS4 has a camera but nothing as sophisticated/expensive as the Kinect.
  - josh2600 13y ago
    Total Tangent: I just saw Jaron Lanier speak in SF last night and he was very proud of the work he did on the Kinect. I find that particularly interesting in light of his sort of decrying the digital-social culture we've developed in the last decade. Strange guy with a lot of really different opinions; was a lot of fun. The Xbox including the new Kinect definitely lowers margins, but if Kinect becomes an integral part of the gaming experience it will be a sound bet.
    - rbanffy 13y ago
      > The Xbox including the new Kinect definitely lowers margins, but if Kinect becomes an integral part of the gaming experience it will be a sound bet. Indeed. Bundling it is the best way to ensure the Kinect is used in every title.
      - scott_s 13y ago
        I don't think the goal is to make sure the Kinect is used in every title. Rather, it allows any title to use it. Currently, the Kinect is a peripheral, which means that developers can't assume that it's there. If they want to use it, they have two options: be a full-on Kinect game that doesn't make sense without the device, or have controller-only options for everything. That's a lot of pain. But if they can assume that the Kinect is always there, there's no tradeoff.
- wmf 13y ago
  The extra CUs in the PS4 are offset by the ESRAM in the One; I would expect the die size is similar. Sony has more expensive RAM, though.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    - wmf 13y ago
      I was talking about cost, not performance.
  - nly 13y ago
    Is the eSRAM really that expensive in $ terms? Yield issues? I understood that SRAM was only really 'expensive' in that it chews up masses of die space (which isn't a bad bet going forward because there'll inevitably be a new version at some point with a smaller process)
    - wmf 13y ago
      Yes, my assumption is cost = die size.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
erickhill 13y ago
Took me a while to discover the meat of the article was hidden inside a drop-down navigation system. I honestly nearly bailed thinking, "This is all there is?" What an awful idea. Thank goodness I saw it at the last minute.
- salimmadjd 13y ago
  >Took me a while to discover the meat of the article was hidden inside a drop-down navigation system I agree! I hate their navigation UI. In general drop downs should only be used for familiar lists (counties, states, etc.) However, some of their articles are very detailed and has numerous pages and they need to provide a quick access to individual pages. One work around is to provide a simple "Next >>" at the bottom of the article. It would make it a lot less confusing.
  - jsnell 13y ago
    There are forward and backward links at the bottom of each section.
- rammark 13y ago
  This is pretty much standard on hardware benchmarking and review sites. I'm not saying that it's a good design, but it's not unique to this site.
  - landr0id 13y ago
    It really needs to pop more though. I noticed the links to the top-left and top-right of the select and really wondered why they aren't forward/back arrows. They could at least have chevrons.
- guiambros 13y ago
  That's the experienced offered by most hardware review sites - AnandTech, DP Review, Toms Hardware, Extreme Overclocking, etc. Certainly to pump up pageviews, and thus generate more revenue. Having said that, it is still bad design/usability. They could easily fix by keeping the model of separate pages for each topic, but moving the content from the drop down to an index at the bottom of each page, and also use prev/next buttons.
michielvoo 13y ago
I understand that native Xbox 360 games will not run on Xbox One, but games developed using XNA should be able to run if Microsoft ports the CLR to Xbox One no?
- Tomdarkness 13y ago
  Edit: Removed. Been quite a while since I played with XNA, totally forgot they discontinued it.
- teamonkey 13y ago
  XNA has been discontinued. I wouldn't expect Microsoft to port the CLR.
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    The Xbox One runs on x86 hardware though, porting the CLR would be rather trivial. Indeed, the CLR probably runs as part of the apps VM.
hadem 13y ago
It it really necessary that the article be split between multiple pages. At first I wondered, "where is the comparison" until I found the drop down menu...
- wmf 13y ago
  It is "necessary" in the sense that AnandTech would be out of business otherwise.
  - hayksaakian 13y ago
    this feels like a real problem that some startup should solve. clearly, websites that do this are shooting themselves in the foot in terms of UX, for the sake of pageviews and ad impressions. Is there now better way?
    - jasey 13y ago
      The other model is a paywall. When I worked for a publisher there was a long debate over UX vs page views and ad impressions. I think Google has rules around how you can load ad's also so it might not be posible to do anything dynamic. Google has all the ad inventory so is the dominant player.
      - hadem 13y ago
        This makes me wonder further. Did you see higher bounce rates when using multiple pages? If so, did the ad revenue brought in by displaying ads across multiple pages out-weigh the higher bounce rate? Honestly curious about the pros and cons.
godgod 13y ago
There is no way in hell I'm going to buy the Xbox one always online spy box. Skype has a backdoor.
kristofferR 13y ago
> "The hard partitioning of resources would be nice to know more about. The easiest thing would be to dedicate a Jaguar compute module to each OS, but that might end up being overkill for the Windows kernel and insufficient for some gaming workloads. I suspect ~1GB of system memory ends up being carved off for Windows." Microsoft actually confirmed that 3GB will be reserved for the OS while only 5GB is available for games. Check out the video at 9:44 http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/05/21/interview-with-xbox-ones-chief-product-officer-marc-whitten.aspx http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/05/21/in...
UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
My take away: - PS4 and XBox One are going to be similar hardware wise, with the PS4 having an edge in raw power and the XBox One having an edge in "cleverness" (e.g. memory caching) and power consumption (lower). - Microsoft is re-using Hyper-V in a very awesome way(!). - HDMI passthrough is Microsoft's "ace in the hole." - Developers are going to have a great time this generation thanks to how similar the hardware is (identical in many cases). I really want to know how Microsoft is able to run two hypervisors and offer GPU acceleration to both concurrently. Is this part of AMD's new CPU+GPU on one die magic, or is this something we'll see on the PC?
- wmf 13y ago
  Using cleverness to get better performance than your competitor is an edge; using cleverness to get the same performance in the common case but worse performance in the worst case is poor design. I suspect that HDMI passthrough will be a frustratingly unfulfilled promise, as it is with Google TV. Recent GPUs are virtualizeable (using multiple command queues); this is mostly targeted for VDI or cloud gaming but unused in PCs. http://www.nvidia.com/object/enterprise-virtualization.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/enterprise-virtualization.html
  - joenathan 13y ago
    I don't think it makes sense to compare the Xbox One to Google TV, Google TV is very much a side project for Google which is obvious because they aren't putting much effort behind it. While many people already use their Xbox for streaming Netflix and Hulu, the HDMI passthrough is an extension of that.
    - georgemcbay 13y ago
      I think it makes sense in that the base technology is exactly the same. There is really only so much you can do with HDMI + IR blaster (or for the lucky few with very new TVs and/or set-top boxes) HDMI with CEC. There are tons of edge cases you run into when you don't have full control of the tuning stack. As one example (I can think of dozens easily): Family has a single-tuner old school Scientific Atlanta DVR (still very popular with cable operators despite being horribly obsolete). They set it up to record a show, it is currently recording said show, person interacting with the Xbox One does something to change the channel to one different than the one being recorded on... oops! There is no way for the Xbox One to know this is a potentially destructive operation for the DVR. At worst the DVR changes the channel and loses half your show, at best the DVR is smart enough to prompt you about this and stop the channel change, but how does the Xbox One know this occurred? There are some high-end DVRs with APIs that exist in an attempt to deal with situations like this but they are very few, very far between and there are no standards for them. Corner cases like this present themselves all the time with these HDMI-in/HDMI-out devices like Google TV and they are inherent problems with the current state of set-top box technology. No matter how many resources Microsoft throws at this, the end result will still be kind of lame a lot of the time and a far cry from the seamless experience you see in the on-stage demos.
aclevernickname 13y ago
So, I have a Linux Desktop PC, with 8GB of RAM, and an AMD A10 processor. I'm running XBMC (or LXDE or Front Row), and running 5 VM's on it under KVM. Cost about $450 when I bought it. price is about $570 now. I've had this setup (with a slightly slower AMD proc) for over 2 years, and I've been running BSNES, Dolphin, PCSX2, Nestopia, and MAME fairly regularly. Today's announcement informed me that I've been enjoying much of the next-generation gaming experience already, without any of the DRM Sony and Microsoft promise to include with their systems.
- joenathan 13y ago
  >I've been enjoying much of the next-generation gaming experience already. You can't be serious. Although you can very soon be enjoying the next-generation gaming experience, what's exciting to me about this as a PC gamer is that all next gen games will be designed with x86 in mind, which should make porting trivial compared to this generation.
  - mikelat 13y ago
    They still don't budget enough time and money towards PC ports even today. I played Metro Last Light recently (released last week) and the secondary weapon selection was basically holding tab and then the menu emulated the mouse like it was an analog stick to select knives, grenades, etc. They are making huge money on the PC platform but still can't be bothered to make a proper UI or binds for an entirely different platform.
  - teamonkey 13y ago
    Porting from console to PC is trivial. Getting it working well on an infinite number of configurations is not and supporting it is expensive.
    - joenathan 13y ago
      That's what abstraction layers are for, think Direct X and OpenGL.
fuzzywalrus 13y ago
It's an interesting break down but ultimately the software will be the ultimate factor.
AdrianRossouw 13y ago
> Combine the fact that TV is important, with the fact that the Xbox 360 has evolved into a Netflix box for many, i thought the ps3 was more widely used for streaming? it's pretty fscking ridiculous that you need to have gold membership AND netflix membership to stream with the xbox.
- MacsHeadroom 13y ago
  >i thought the ps3 was more widely used for streaming? Not by a LONG shot. And you don't need gold membership to use the Netflix app on xbox. Also, the Netflix app for xbox is much better than the PS3 app.
  - lizardking 13y ago
    These posters on the official Xbox forums seem to all be under the impression that Gold is required. http://forums.xbox.com/xbox_forums/xbox_feedback/f/2602/t/379483.aspx http://forums.xbox.com/xbox_forums/xbox_feedback/f/2602/t/37...
  - pandaman 13y ago
    According to Netflix PS3 is the most popular streaming device (not just out of PS3 and 360 but all TV-connected devices). http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2412856,00.asp http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2412856,00.asp
  - manojlds 13y ago
    As a Xbox 360 user, I can confirm that Xbox Live Gold membership is required for Netflix.
programminggeek 13y ago
The only reason I could see that Microsoft would make the choices they did was to save on cost or to be easier to scale up to 10's of millions of units a year by getting higher/cheaper chip yields faster than Sony can with basically identical chips. The only way that Microsoft can capitalize on that advantage will be to actually have a lower price faster since they don't have a one year head start this time. Nintendo's only shot right now is to cut price on the Wii U. Just remember that historically the magic number for console sales is $199. That's why the Xbox 360's entry price is $199 now and the Wii worked so well at $249 with a bundled game (basically $199 console + pack in game). Mobile devices the sweet spot is more like say $150, which is why the DS did better than the PSP, 3DS than the Vita and so on. Price makes a huge difference on consumer products and getting to certain price points can be the difference between success and failure other things being basically equal.
qompiler 13y ago
tl;dr: Sony PS4 has a better CPU and GPU

As usual, Anand delivers a fact based impartial comparison unlike all the biased flamebait articles making the rounds targeted at fans. Ironically it was the PS3 that advertised itself as a media center last time with bluray support. That didn't wok out well, but the 360 later pivoted to media very successfully and still continues to outsell other consoles.

rbanffy 13y ago

It looks like the Sony machine will be more expensive (or its profit margins will be a lot lower). The PS4 seems to have a lot more hardware under the hood than the One. Having said that, as I pointed out elsewhere, it's now how many things your device does, but how well it does the thing that'll define its function. If it's an entertainment system, it's how well it entertains people. If it's a videogame, it's how fun the games it plays are.

Bosence 13y ago
I believe they used to make the previous console at a loss, because they generate most of their profits through the sales of games and accessories. I believe.
- missing_cipher 13y ago
  Yes, the PS3 initially launched at a loss(mainly because of the Blu Ray player from what I remember). Towards the end of its lifetime it wasn't losing them money.
sp332 13y ago
Exactly, the developer experience is very important, and hardware is only an issue if you're really pushing the limits. Differences in SDK made a huge difference in popularity between the PS3 and the 360. Since the 360 handled background music, matchmaking, and voice chat natively, devs had a huge head start over competitors on the PS3. Helping out the devs had a direct effect on the players' experience, which led to the 360's dominance in multiplayer games.
- tracker1 13y ago
  Yeah.. but it does look like MS is backpedaling in support of indie devs for the XBox One.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    OTOH, it seems developing for the One will be easy. At least, as easy as developing for Windows. Although I personally have little love for Visual Studio, most Windows developers would never leave it. Were it programmable in Lisp, I suppose developers would use it to read e-mail and chat on IRC ;-)
- UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
  Tangent: In addition to that, I think this generation might be defined by how well each console opens up to smaller/indie developers. Modern day indie developers are making products which we would have called AAA games in 1998 and many of them are selling extremely well (just see Kickstarter). I think they have a HUGE role to play this generation, and holding them hostage in the "app" sandbox will be a massive mistake. If either Microsoft or Sony opened up their SDK to indie developers, and created some kind of arrangement where these developers could sell digitally for a fee, I think they will effectively "win" this round. And I do not mean "apps." I mean full power of the console level stuff.
illuminate 13y ago
And the rest of the ecosystem. I do hope the new incarnation of Live allows for PC/One simultaneous play.
shock-value 13y ago
Not necessarily -- the Xbox include a Kinect in the box which will increase its price/lower its profit margin. The PS4 has a camera but nothing as sophisticated/expensive as the Kinect.
- josh2600 13y ago
  Total Tangent: I just saw Jaron Lanier speak in SF last night and he was very proud of the work he did on the Kinect. I find that particularly interesting in light of his sort of decrying the digital-social culture we've developed in the last decade. Strange guy with a lot of really different opinions; was a lot of fun. The Xbox including the new Kinect definitely lowers margins, but if Kinect becomes an integral part of the gaming experience it will be a sound bet.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    > The Xbox including the new Kinect definitely lowers margins, but if Kinect becomes an integral part of the gaming experience it will be a sound bet. Indeed. Bundling it is the best way to ensure the Kinect is used in every title.
    - scott_s 13y ago
      I don't think the goal is to make sure the Kinect is used in every title. Rather, it allows any title to use it. Currently, the Kinect is a peripheral, which means that developers can't assume that it's there. If they want to use it, they have two options: be a full-on Kinect game that doesn't make sense without the device, or have controller-only options for everything. That's a lot of pain. But if they can assume that the Kinect is always there, there's no tradeoff.
wmf 13y ago
The extra CUs in the PS4 are offset by the ESRAM in the One; I would expect the die size is similar. Sony has more expensive RAM, though.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - wmf 13y ago
    I was talking about cost, not performance.
- nly 13y ago
  Is the eSRAM really that expensive in $ terms? Yield issues? I understood that SRAM was only really 'expensive' in that it chews up masses of die space (which isn't a bad bet going forward because there'll inevitably be a new version at some point with a smaller process)
  - wmf 13y ago
    Yes, my assumption is cost = die size.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

erickhill 13y ago

Took me a while to discover the meat of the article was hidden inside a drop-down navigation system. I honestly nearly bailed thinking, "This is all there is?" What an awful idea. Thank goodness I saw it at the last minute.

salimmadjd 13y ago
>Took me a while to discover the meat of the article was hidden inside a drop-down navigation system I agree! I hate their navigation UI. In general drop downs should only be used for familiar lists (counties, states, etc.) However, some of their articles are very detailed and has numerous pages and they need to provide a quick access to individual pages. One work around is to provide a simple "Next >>" at the bottom of the article. It would make it a lot less confusing.
- jsnell 13y ago
  There are forward and backward links at the bottom of each section.
rammark 13y ago
This is pretty much standard on hardware benchmarking and review sites. I'm not saying that it's a good design, but it's not unique to this site.
- landr0id 13y ago
  It really needs to pop more though. I noticed the links to the top-left and top-right of the select and really wondered why they aren't forward/back arrows. They could at least have chevrons.
guiambros 13y ago
That's the experienced offered by most hardware review sites - AnandTech, DP Review, Toms Hardware, Extreme Overclocking, etc. Certainly to pump up pageviews, and thus generate more revenue. Having said that, it is still bad design/usability. They could easily fix by keeping the model of separate pages for each topic, but moving the content from the drop down to an index at the bottom of each page, and also use prev/next buttons.

michielvoo 13y ago

I understand that native Xbox 360 games will not run on Xbox One, but games developed using XNA should be able to run if Microsoft ports the CLR to Xbox One no?

Tomdarkness 13y ago
Edit: Removed. Been quite a while since I played with XNA, totally forgot they discontinued it.
teamonkey 13y ago
XNA has been discontinued. I wouldn't expect Microsoft to port the CLR.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  The Xbox One runs on x86 hardware though, porting the CLR would be rather trivial. Indeed, the CLR probably runs as part of the apps VM.

hadem 13y ago

It it really necessary that the article be split between multiple pages. At first I wondered, "where is the comparison" until I found the drop down menu...

wmf 13y ago
It is "necessary" in the sense that AnandTech would be out of business otherwise.
- hayksaakian 13y ago
  this feels like a real problem that some startup should solve. clearly, websites that do this are shooting themselves in the foot in terms of UX, for the sake of pageviews and ad impressions. Is there now better way?
  - jasey 13y ago
    The other model is a paywall. When I worked for a publisher there was a long debate over UX vs page views and ad impressions. I think Google has rules around how you can load ad's also so it might not be posible to do anything dynamic. Google has all the ad inventory so is the dominant player.
    - hadem 13y ago
      This makes me wonder further. Did you see higher bounce rates when using multiple pages? If so, did the ad revenue brought in by displaying ads across multiple pages out-weigh the higher bounce rate? Honestly curious about the pros and cons.

godgod 13y ago

There is no way in hell I'm going to buy the Xbox one always online spy box. Skype has a backdoor.

kristofferR 13y ago

> "The hard partitioning of resources would be nice to know more about. The easiest thing would be to dedicate a Jaguar compute module to each OS, but that might end up being overkill for the Windows kernel and insufficient for some gaming workloads. I suspect ~1GB of system memory ends up being carved off for Windows." Microsoft actually confirmed that 3GB will be reserved for the OS while only 5GB is available for games. Check out the video at 9:44 http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/05/21/interview-with-xbox-ones-chief-product-officer-marc-whitten.aspx http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/05/21/in...

UnoriginalGuy 13y ago

My take away: - PS4 and XBox One are going to be similar hardware wise, with the PS4 having an edge in raw power and the XBox One having an edge in "cleverness" (e.g. memory caching) and power consumption (lower). - Microsoft is re-using Hyper-V in a very awesome way(!). - HDMI passthrough is Microsoft's "ace in the hole." - Developers are going to have a great time this generation thanks to how similar the hardware is (identical in many cases). I really want to know how Microsoft is able to run two hypervisors and offer GPU acceleration to both concurrently. Is this part of AMD's new CPU+GPU on one die magic, or is this something we'll see on the PC?

wmf 13y ago
Using cleverness to get better performance than your competitor is an edge; using cleverness to get the same performance in the common case but worse performance in the worst case is poor design. I suspect that HDMI passthrough will be a frustratingly unfulfilled promise, as it is with Google TV. Recent GPUs are virtualizeable (using multiple command queues); this is mostly targeted for VDI or cloud gaming but unused in PCs. http://www.nvidia.com/object/enterprise-virtualization.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/enterprise-virtualization.html
- joenathan 13y ago
  I don't think it makes sense to compare the Xbox One to Google TV, Google TV is very much a side project for Google which is obvious because they aren't putting much effort behind it. While many people already use their Xbox for streaming Netflix and Hulu, the HDMI passthrough is an extension of that.
  - georgemcbay 13y ago
    I think it makes sense in that the base technology is exactly the same. There is really only so much you can do with HDMI + IR blaster (or for the lucky few with very new TVs and/or set-top boxes) HDMI with CEC. There are tons of edge cases you run into when you don't have full control of the tuning stack. As one example (I can think of dozens easily): Family has a single-tuner old school Scientific Atlanta DVR (still very popular with cable operators despite being horribly obsolete). They set it up to record a show, it is currently recording said show, person interacting with the Xbox One does something to change the channel to one different than the one being recorded on... oops! There is no way for the Xbox One to know this is a potentially destructive operation for the DVR. At worst the DVR changes the channel and loses half your show, at best the DVR is smart enough to prompt you about this and stop the channel change, but how does the Xbox One know this occurred? There are some high-end DVRs with APIs that exist in an attempt to deal with situations like this but they are very few, very far between and there are no standards for them. Corner cases like this present themselves all the time with these HDMI-in/HDMI-out devices like Google TV and they are inherent problems with the current state of set-top box technology. No matter how many resources Microsoft throws at this, the end result will still be kind of lame a lot of the time and a far cry from the seamless experience you see in the on-stage demos.

aclevernickname 13y ago

So, I have a Linux Desktop PC, with 8GB of RAM, and an AMD A10 processor. I'm running XBMC (or LXDE or Front Row), and running 5 VM's on it under KVM. Cost about $450 when I bought it. price is about $570 now. I've had this setup (with a slightly slower AMD proc) for over 2 years, and I've been running BSNES, Dolphin, PCSX2, Nestopia, and MAME fairly regularly. Today's announcement informed me that I've been enjoying much of the next-generation gaming experience already, without any of the DRM Sony and Microsoft promise to include with their systems.

joenathan 13y ago
>I've been enjoying much of the next-generation gaming experience already. You can't be serious. Although you can very soon be enjoying the next-generation gaming experience, what's exciting to me about this as a PC gamer is that all next gen games will be designed with x86 in mind, which should make porting trivial compared to this generation.
- mikelat 13y ago
  They still don't budget enough time and money towards PC ports even today. I played Metro Last Light recently (released last week) and the secondary weapon selection was basically holding tab and then the menu emulated the mouse like it was an analog stick to select knives, grenades, etc. They are making huge money on the PC platform but still can't be bothered to make a proper UI or binds for an entirely different platform.
- teamonkey 13y ago
  Porting from console to PC is trivial. Getting it working well on an infinite number of configurations is not and supporting it is expensive.
  - joenathan 13y ago
    That's what abstraction layers are for, think Direct X and OpenGL.

fuzzywalrus 13y ago

It's an interesting break down but ultimately the software will be the ultimate factor.

AdrianRossouw 13y ago

> Combine the fact that TV is important, with the fact that the Xbox 360 has evolved into a Netflix box for many, i thought the ps3 was more widely used for streaming? it's pretty fscking ridiculous that you need to have gold membership AND netflix membership to stream with the xbox.

MacsHeadroom 13y ago
>i thought the ps3 was more widely used for streaming? Not by a LONG shot. And you don't need gold membership to use the Netflix app on xbox. Also, the Netflix app for xbox is much better than the PS3 app.
- lizardking 13y ago
  These posters on the official Xbox forums seem to all be under the impression that Gold is required. http://forums.xbox.com/xbox_forums/xbox_feedback/f/2602/t/379483.aspx http://forums.xbox.com/xbox_forums/xbox_feedback/f/2602/t/37...
- pandaman 13y ago
  According to Netflix PS3 is the most popular streaming device (not just out of PS3 and 360 but all TV-connected devices). http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2412856,00.asp http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2412856,00.asp
- manojlds 13y ago
  As a Xbox 360 user, I can confirm that Xbox Live Gold membership is required for Netflix.

programminggeek 13y ago

The only reason I could see that Microsoft would make the choices they did was to save on cost or to be easier to scale up to 10's of millions of units a year by getting higher/cheaper chip yields faster than Sony can with basically identical chips. The only way that Microsoft can capitalize on that advantage will be to actually have a lower price faster since they don't have a one year head start this time. Nintendo's only shot right now is to cut price on the Wii U. Just remember that historically the magic number for console sales is $199. That's why the Xbox 360's entry price is $199 now and the Wii worked so well at $249 with a bundled game (basically $199 console + pack in game). Mobile devices the sweet spot is more like say $150, which is why the DS did better than the PSP, 3DS than the Vita and so on. Price makes a huge difference on consumer products and getting to certain price points can be the difference between success and failure other things being basically equal.

qompiler 13y ago

tl;dr: Sony PS4 has a better CPU and GPU