4 ms·

I have both a PS3 and a Xbox 360 and hence have no real loyalty one way or the other. I have to admit, that despite better technical specs, the user-experience

by trezor 17y ago

I have both a PS3 and a Xbox 360 and hence have no real loyalty one way or the other. I have to admit, that despite better technical specs, the user-experience with Xbox Live is just so much better that for any game I care for with a online-component, the Xbox 360 version gets the sale every single time. As it is, I got the PS3 for near-free and hence have little emotional attachment to it, and these days have it around mostly as a bluray player. I guess to make this comment relevant to hacker news and whoever does startups here: User-experience trumps technical merit. I don't care one way or the other if you wrote it in 100% purely in Haskell or some hacked up PHP. I want something which works for me. Might not be a very cool message with the tech crowd, but as a consumer that's how I think. Heck I even ditched a technically superior Windows Mobile phone for an iPhone 3G and dammit if I will be going back.

Retric 17y ago
Between the PS3, Wii, or Xbox 360 I prefer the PS3. Granted, FPS on the Xbox suck when compared to FPS on a PC; so I don't really play any multiplier games on it. Basically, I feel console gaming is mostly about the arcade feel and the PS3 wins that. PS: The largest gap IMO was needing to buy recharable battery's for the other systems. That really bothered me for some reason.
- chaostheory 17y ago
  The main problems I have with the PS3 are 1) the size & and the content of its software library 2) the QA level of the games Programming for the PS3 is no easy task given the strange design of the cell processor and short comings of Sony's SDKs and frameworks. Given this, I feel that most developers/publishers are less apt to take risks with PS3. This leads to less games, and more games that are mainly ports from the 360. To add insult to injury most of these ports (and DLC) come later and they also tend to have a lot more bugs. In defense of PS3, the other consoles aren't perfect either (360's were breaking left and right, and not having a hard drive by default was a big mistake game wise; Wii's software library is mostly shovel ware for 5 year olds); but imo the PS3's shortcomings are still the worst EDIT: if PS3's new motion controller is as good in real life as it was at E3, it may change things.
  - newsio 17y ago
    "Programming for the PS3 is no easy task given the strange design of the cell processor and short comings of Sony's SDKs and frameworks." Isn't the Xbox 360 processor based on the Cell design?
    - vollmond 17y ago
      looks like it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)#Xenon_in_Xbox_360 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)#Xenon_in_...
    - wmf 17y ago
      The 360's processor is based on the good part of Cell, not the impossible-to-program parts.
    - chaostheory 17y ago
      yeah all of the cpu's for this gen of consoles are from IBM including the Wii Someone can correct me, but to me the main difference between the 360's cpu and PS3's cpu, besides the number of cores, is that the 360's cpu cores are more general purpose while not all of the Cell's cores are equal... The Cell has one main core (PPE) and 8 Synergistic Processor Elements (SPEs). These SPEs are not as powerful as a normal core (and I think one of them is reserved for the OS), and (I think) they're main purpose is solely for graphics (well mainly good at dealing with floating point nums). If I remember correctly, the 360 has three general purpose, equally powerful cores (PPEs) in its version of the IBM cpu. I can imagine someone from IBM probably selling a Sony exec on how the Cell processor can save money by having Cell do both general processing and handling all the video rendering without a separate GPU... which we all know didn't quite work as well as Sony had hoped, since PS3's had an NVidia chip plopped in last min (this probably explains why programming for a PS3 really sucks since Sony wasn't planning on having a separate GPU)
      - Retric 17y ago
        The PS3 has a graphics card. SPE's can be used to preprocess some information to increase graphics quality or to crunch numbers for AI code, or do any number of things. The problem is you can either code for the lowest common denominator between the systems and mostly ignore SPE's or build a game focusing on the PS3. PS3 has: Cell@3.2Ghz, yada yada RSX 550 MHz, 300+ million transistors, ~200 GFLOPs PS: The RSX has a higher GFLOPs than the Cell but it's only really usefull for specific graphics operations.

by trezor 17y ago

Retric 17y ago

Between the PS3, Wii, or Xbox 360 I prefer the PS3. Granted, FPS on the Xbox suck when compared to FPS on a PC; so I don't really play any multiplier games on it. Basically, I feel console gaming is mostly about the arcade feel and the PS3 wins that. PS: The largest gap IMO was needing to buy recharable battery's for the other systems. That really bothered me for some reason.

chaostheory 17y ago
The main problems I have with the PS3 are 1) the size & and the content of its software library 2) the QA level of the games Programming for the PS3 is no easy task given the strange design of the cell processor and short comings of Sony's SDKs and frameworks. Given this, I feel that most developers/publishers are less apt to take risks with PS3. This leads to less games, and more games that are mainly ports from the 360. To add insult to injury most of these ports (and DLC) come later and they also tend to have a lot more bugs. In defense of PS3, the other consoles aren't perfect either (360's were breaking left and right, and not having a hard drive by default was a big mistake game wise; Wii's software library is mostly shovel ware for 5 year olds); but imo the PS3's shortcomings are still the worst EDIT: if PS3's new motion controller is as good in real life as it was at E3, it may change things.
- newsio 17y ago
  "Programming for the PS3 is no easy task given the strange design of the cell processor and short comings of Sony's SDKs and frameworks." Isn't the Xbox 360 processor based on the Cell design?
  - vollmond 17y ago
    looks like it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)#Xenon_in_Xbox_360 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)#Xenon_in_...
  - wmf 17y ago
    The 360's processor is based on the good part of Cell, not the impossible-to-program parts.
  - chaostheory 17y ago
    yeah all of the cpu's for this gen of consoles are from IBM including the Wii Someone can correct me, but to me the main difference between the 360's cpu and PS3's cpu, besides the number of cores, is that the 360's cpu cores are more general purpose while not all of the Cell's cores are equal... The Cell has one main core (PPE) and 8 Synergistic Processor Elements (SPEs). These SPEs are not as powerful as a normal core (and I think one of them is reserved for the OS), and (I think) they're main purpose is solely for graphics (well mainly good at dealing with floating point nums). If I remember correctly, the 360 has three general purpose, equally powerful cores (PPEs) in its version of the IBM cpu. I can imagine someone from IBM probably selling a Sony exec on how the Cell processor can save money by having Cell do both general processing and handling all the video rendering without a separate GPU... which we all know didn't quite work as well as Sony had hoped, since PS3's had an NVidia chip plopped in last min (this probably explains why programming for a PS3 really sucks since Sony wasn't planning on having a separate GPU)
    - Retric 17y ago
      The PS3 has a graphics card. SPE's can be used to preprocess some information to increase graphics quality or to crunch numbers for AI code, or do any number of things. The problem is you can either code for the lowest common denominator between the systems and mostly ignore SPE's or build a game focusing on the PS3. PS3 has: Cell@3.2Ghz, yada yada RSX 550 MHz, 300+ million transistors, ~200 GFLOPs PS: The RSX has a higher GFLOPs than the Cell but it's only really usefull for specific graphics operations.