Jakub's Rant: Xbox 360 and PS3 at E3 June 02, 2005 Jakub Wojnarowicz

Xbox 360

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Next-gen consoles

One thing is clear from the show, and that's the fact that next-generation consoles are going to start with a slight lead over the average PC. Whereas in 2000 and 2001, when the previous designs made their debut, they were already effectively outdated in processor and graphics performance, both the Xbox and PS3 will be equivalent to top-tier hardware available for PCs - and will remain so for at least a year, or two.

However, those of you ready to spell gloom and doom for the PC market should take a deep breath first. For starters, it's pretty much a given that the consoles will have more expensive games. This will undoubtedly go over poorly with the public, despite the fact that games haven't gotten more expensive over the past 15 years. In fact, when you figure in inflation, they've gotten cheaper over those years.

But the real killer for many gamers is that the Xbox 360 and PS3 will not be able to show anything near their full potential without HDTV. HDTV adoption has been, as we all know, slower than expected and this limits the potential market. But, you may ask, won't the new consoles create their own demand for HD? We'll get to that later.

Xbox 360

The Xbox 360 was probably the start of the show this E3, but it didn't dominate it like one might expect a new console to do. Perhaps this is because Microsoft was showing their new console in South Hall, behind EA and Activision, or perhaps it was evident they didn't have a killer app for it.

There are good games on the nextbox, there's no denying that. Battlefield 2, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, the next-generation Top Spin game were all there - and a pair of those and some more were playable. But there was no Halo, no GTA killer, nothing like the new Zelda which had people lining up for two hours. Part of this is no doubt to the tremendous size of the Microsoft booth and the accessibility of the hardware to anyone who wanted to try it. But mostly, the feeling we got is that while the Xbox gathered a lot of interest at the show, it did not dominate the way it should have. This is clearly a failure for Microsoft.

Moreoever, Microsoft failed to pitch the 360 and its features clearly and succinctly. Is it backwards-compatible? Will there be a hard drive, and if not, what will we get? That's not to say that the answers weren't there, it's just that I'd have to go look for them. That's a marketing failure, because asking questions is already a barrier to entry.

The technical minutiae of the Xbox 360 are not actually all that interesting. Its processor, an IBM "Xenon" (ignore the name, it's just more marketing fluff - think of it as a 3-core PowerPC), anyway, its processor is fairly closely related to the highly hyped Cell processor that is to make its debut in PlayStation 3. Whereas Cell is a simplified PowerPC core connected to 8 Attached Processor Units (APUs), Xenon has 3 full-fledged and fleshed-out PowerPC cores onboard. Theoretically, Cell will kill Xenon, but theoretically, the PS2 is still faster than any single-processor PC in existence. While I'm hardly a computer engineer, Sony marketing has much to answer for (remember "Emotion Engine", or PS2 sales to Iraq being banned?) and the death of the PC has been heralded so many times in the past, you'll forgive me if I tell Sony to put up and shut up before I believe that traditional processor architectures will become extinct overnight.



SIDEBAR: Top Spin 2 has some incredible animations and lighting, it looks very realistic.

Xbox 360 graphics, PS3

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Xbox 360 Graphics

Where things get more interesting, and more predictable, is between the graphics architectures. The ATI chip in the Xbox 360 is, as ATI admits itself, smaller in terms of transistor count than the upcoming NVIDIA G70. ATI claims, however, that the solution is more elegant. More details are available in Brandon's interview with Bob Feldstein, ATI's VP of engineering. Another major point in the Xbox's favor is the 10MB of embedded DRAM on the ATI chip. 4MB of eDRAM on the PS2 was enough for it to compete with the Xbox's GeForce3/4 hybrid which shared the 64MB of system RAM the Xbox had. The eDRAM on the Xbox 360 is capable of 256GB/s throughput, compared with the 38.4GB the PS2 had.

Our talks with several developers who have PC and Xbox 360 versions of games resulted in a clear nod in favor of the Xbox 360's graphics over the GeForce 6800 Ultra. This is another clear indication that both consoles will be using truly next-generation graphics, rather than merely next-generation relative to the old consoles. The PS3 will likely have a faster graphics core, but the features should be similar.

Ultimately, we expect Xbox 360 to be competitive against the PS3 at least as well as the PS2 competes with the Xbox. Perhaps fortunately for Microsoft, a lot more is in the hands of developers now than before. To bring out the most from these systems is going to take a massive investment in programming development and especially artwork. Whatever power advantages the PS3 will have over the Xbox 360, may take long to show. That is how expensive and difficult game development is getting - even top-tier games may not be worth the extra effort of making them look decisively better on Sony's system. Cell, if it actually lives up to the hype, might complicate matters, but we all know how well the "Emotion Engine" turned out.

PlayStation 3

The PlayStation 3, at this moment, is at best a crude development kit. Developers are very likely programming for simulated hardware or development boxes that are not full-speed and perhaps not even full-featured. Sony's solution, in the absence of any actual product? Sony was desperate enough to steal attention from Microsoft to show CGI of what games might look like on the PlayStation 3.

There is nothing worth talking about. Sony showed up to E3 with pre-rendered videos and blew smoke up everyone's ass. It would be laughably pathetic if not for their excellent marketing team, which had a sizeable portion of the media and most of the public convinced that this was the real deal. It's a truly amazing feat of public relations and marketing, but we'd take it all with a pinch of salt.



SIDEBAR: To steal a line from Douglas Adams, the Sony marketing department will be the first bastards up against the wall when the revolution comes.

Conclusion

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On the console side, despite all the hype, it was actually a disappointing E3. Nintendo got the biggest line-up for the next Zelda game, while Microsoft and Sony were busy beating each other up.

The Xbox 360 came in force. It was playable, visible, it was in Microsoft's booth and every publisher we talked to had its next-generation PC games ready for Xbox 360 or at least being considered. No one complained, even privately, of difficult development. In fact, the presentation team for Elder Scrolls: Oblivion mentioned on three separate occasions that the Xbox 360 version of their game ran and looked better on the console than it did on the GeForce 6800 Ultra-powered PC they had. Considering that Oblivion is at least as visually impressive as Unreal Tournament 2007, that's high praise indeed.

And yet, Microsoft didn't deliver the killer blow. Xbox 360 caught most of the media and public's attention at the show, but there wasn't a booth or game or even non-interactive demo that had audiences crowding and lining up. For a console that will have games that look as good as anything the PC will produce until at least 2007, this is a major disappointment, because it should have had at least one game that blew away everything else at the show.

Sony came away undamaged, though no thanks to their own desperate efforts. Yes, their marketing team succeeded in pitching a few million dollars worth of CGI as a next-generation console, and the smoke and mirrors show was sufficient to fool the weak-minded. But Sony won not due to any particular competence on the part of Sony, but because Microsoft failed to blow us away.

This doesn't mean that Xbox 360 is a failure, just that it won't surpass the PS3. The Xbox, especially in the past year, has made impressive market share gains and established itself as a strong brand in Europe and America. This is a good platform for the Xbox 360 to work from and it will undoubtedly improve on the Xbox's market share, but Sony will remain the undisputed champion for at least another round.

HDTV: The Wildcard

HDTV adoption is improving but still lagging behind what everyone expected a few years ago. No doubt the advent of plasma and quality LCD screens has increased the pace, but the low numbers of HD programs available are keeping the pace of sales at less than the torrent it should be.

The Xbox 360 might be able to increase the tempo, but the simple fact remains that it needs a large installed base to sell itself. On regular TV screens, the differences between an Xbox and Xbox 360 will be evident but likely not dominant enough to justify a $300-400 expenditure. Those that don't have HDTV will have to consider the extra cost of the TV itself, and anyone who doesn't have HD yet is likely not in the income bracket to easily swallow that kind of expenditure.

Sony, meanwhile, will benefit from a larger installed base (partly due to the Xbox 360) by the time it launches its console sometime in 2006. In the short run, it isn't doing itself any favors by pitching the PS3 as being 1080p native, but with their brand name and marketing, they don't have to worry about the short run. 1080p will pay off for Sony in the long run. Meanwhile, games are expected to run just fine on regular HD resolutions, and probably even standard TV.

The coming year

Over the next year you can expect to see the Sony marketing machine building steam. Sony's marketing agents will be busy convincing news media that the Cell processor in the PS3 can replace the human brain be so powerful that its sales have to be banned not just to North Korea, but France and Germany as well. Their PR agents will be contacting all their friends in the written press and sending them white paper after white paper, detailing the PlayStation 3's maximum theoretical under-optimal-conditions if-hell-is-frozen-over capabilities. The press - print and online - will obligingly read these white papers, understand maybe 10% of what's written, re-word them and print them as a "hardware analysis" of the PS3, because the public is screaming for more information about it. Amazingly, it will turn out that PlayStation 3 is so powerful according to these articles that the latest supercomputers were a waste of billions, and research institutes should have saved the money and bought a PS3.

Microsoft, meanwhile, will be trying to build off this E3 as fast as possible. They want a good, strong base to work from before the PlayStation 3 launches. The launch titles are going to be competent, but Microsoft will have a couple of top-notch games in time for Christmas, but save the big guns for the PlayStation 3 launch. When the PlayStation 3 launches, the press will obligingly disparage the PS3's starting lineup and say how you should own both systems. Some will even print quotes from careless developers who say how difficult Cell is to work with.



SIDEBAR: I've been working in the industry far too long if I'm this cynical about marketing.