For those who were stumbled by the graphics of XB1

What a joke dear,at least they could use AMD gpu instead of windows 7 PC with nvidia GPU. Exactly what the heck is going on with xbox brand?
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=590486

 

If I remember correctly that's not the first time this happened.
In the end enough customers were down for the final hardware

 

Now MS and third parties have no excuse not to port everything on XBOX ONE to PC as well. Halo 5 PC plz.

 

People please, we all know people develop on PCs. This was the case for both PS3 and XBOX 360, they were using PCs to showcase the titles. If the hardware hasn't even come off the assembly line, what makes you think they are going to setup a bunch of prototype boxes in E3 booths? Battlefield was running on a PC for the presentation and this is exactly how E3 was in 2005.

 

Couldn't have said it better myself.

 

It was about the PCs running nvidia cards for XB1, when XB1 will be stocking ATI.

 

yep, again, no real difference in this day and age. nVidia has a larger market share on PCs, even though their cards are more expensive,
generally their cards have been proven more stable for production. When a booth is setup somebody was asked for system specs and they
gave them what the devs were using. It's simple really, you have paid a bunch of money to setup a booth at E3, do you want to avoid unexpected
surprises? Yes. So then use what the devs are using and worry about the ATI card when you are actually making the game, not displaying it to
thousands of journalists.

It's not that ATI isn't good enough, it's that a large amount of devs will be using nVidia on their workstations (a bunch of apps have specific features
that work only on nvidia cards), so when the time comes to display work nvidia cards are more likely to get picked in order to avoid any potential problems that might arise from using untested HW.

 

You're over complicating this, we just find it ironic that they don't trust ATI for their demonstrations but are fine with putting ATI cards in the console. I agree with you, it's just that this isn't really about that..then again, I guess what you're saying might be helpful for a few people that would have thought otherwise and would probably post here saying something silly.

I don't know where I'm going with this point anymore...

 

I work on windows 7 PC with nvidia 440GT. Which card is good-which is bad, is not concern. The embarrassing situation is,they put AMD on actual box but they shows things on nvidia's card. You gotta be trustworthy to your customers. MS is failing in that point,day by day.

Keep dreaming dude. They had a lot of excuses,you know! Remember the time when epic refused to port GOW for PC because of piracy? Irony of fate is,that game got pirated on xbox severely. Methods are still available to play a pirated copy over XBL!!! And interesting fact is,one installment of this series got its binary leaked onto internet before release!!! With XB1-PS4 both being x86 with amd cpu,it is really easy to port stuffs to PC. But I fear things will not go to this route for some exclusive games. I do not understand some facts.

God of War III was sold 4-5 millions copies on ps3. Would it not be the figures if it were on xbox,PC and wiiU as well?
Xbox= 3-4 millions (based on the sales study of this kind of games)
PC=0.5-2 millions (based on the sales study of this kind of games)
WiiU=No idea.

Why would someone keep beautiful things as exclusives and lose such amount of money?

 

Exclusivity usually comes with compensation from the platform owner. If it was truthfully for the publishers, most games would be on all platforms. But Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all will pay some good money towards the entire development cycle, even before anyone knows if the game will be a success, to get their hands on an exclusive.

Why would they do that? Because they know at the end of the day it's the exclusives that make platforms succeed or fail. As time passes and certain franchizes become more successful, its harder and harder to convince anyone to pull off an exclusivity deal unless they happen to be owned by the platform owner. It's because of this that I insist: Nintendo got to get off their ass and start making more first party games. They are too slow.

 

Though Sony probably did the same thing secretly, they just didn't get caught.

 

LMAO :grin:

 

no point really just explaining what is likely going on. Gamers believe the games will look different on ATI, that's just ridiculous. A difference in speed maybe, depending on the model, but quality? Do shadow maps look better on an nVidia? Do post effects or lightmaps or whatever get a 'special boost' from nVidia cards?

No.

So the idea here is simply be able to show something on the floor and hopefully don't get a bunch of pcs crashing, which apparently still happened at least once. Now imagine all booths displaying on hardware not matching current dev workstations... zillions of problems.

The logic is this:
in advertising you get Madonna for example to be on your magazine cover and she has wrinkles or she is too skinny or whatever. You want to sell, you want let it print like that, so you photoshop the pic and present the best believable Madonna possible. You might see the original and think meh, but millions of people saw the edited one and said wow. What would you do?

Exclusives have nothing to do with technical limitations and everything to do with marketing. Why would you buy one console over the other if you could play all the same games? The main deciding factor would be price. Bringing exclusives into the mix changes that balance and even makes people get both systems.

Not supporting PC is simple really: if you have a platform that can be fully controlled (and has a higher profit margin), why would you want to segment it in favor of a market you somewhat control and has lower prices and a bunch of the other issues (from support to piracy, to drivers and hardware)?
You wouldn't.

Making games for a console allows a much more streamlined consumer experience and less headaches, coupled with higher profits it's almost perfect.

 

This is more about how to handle such situations, in the past it would be made clear that what was on display was running unoptimized on development machines, clearly shown for what they were, I recall Sony even showing off Playstation demos running on what appeared to be an apple mac at one point.

Assuming that what's being alleged is true then they simply should have been up front about it instead of underestimating their audience, as it stands it makes them look like they're at best naive and insecure or at worst trying to pull a fast one, either way that erodes trust. It's poor marketing and poor decision making, which is a shame as honestly outside of the hype machine the Xbone doesn't look all that bad, especially if you consider it in the light of services such as Steam and from a technical perspective, and it's certainly not as deserving of the level of derision it and MS are currently getting, but MS marketing do seem to keep on making these sorts of elementary mistakes and misjudgements that scream hubris and undermining all that their engineers have done.

 

In a straight up comparison, nVidia completely dominates the high-end GPU market and they currently hold the spot for the first, second and third most powerful consumer GPUs (not talking about rendering graphics like the quadro etc.) so I don't see where all of this is coming from? besides a console GPU will be very different than a pc one because of the api and how the developers can code straight for the console and not a number of different hardware setups.

 

What is the difference between a developer's kit (console with add-ons helpful to developers), a workstation running the engine and the final console that has pc specs and is running on a pc based os core (http://www.examiner.com/article/report-next-xbox-os-based-on-windows-8-core)?

The PCs are the developer kit for the time being.

The final console will have lower level access to key systems, allowing for medium to high performance gains compared to a PC with similar specs.

Why is it running win7, instead of 8? Well again commercially win8 didn't do as good and I bet a huge percentage of developers have simply stuck with win7 (like I have) because stuff works and it's a pretty good OS. Win8 is an iteration on Win7 anyway.

Wait I have another one the PSU will also be made by another manufacturer, so will the fans and the memory modules, OMG scandal. meh.

 

Apple computer? When did mac support PPC cell architecture? Cell is not normal PPC,its a different thing. So I think I should call this as plain rumor.

I don't think we are living in the playstation 2 era where almost every game use some form of assembly I think it is not low level access/programming to metal or whatsoever people call. It has something to do with single hardware configuration rather than a fragmentation.

 

Well that's funny because nearly every AAA game for ps3 and xbox 360 had some form of hand crafted assembly. This is normal for EVERY console generation, and this generation won't be any different. If you use fast middleware, chances are the some of it. Especially towards the latter half of a console's lifetime.

 

ps3 era consoles also needed custom flavor of Cell/PPC assembly rather than simple touch of GCC? Are you sure?
Good to know then.

I thought sony provide all the toolchain necessary with the SDK. I have seen some snapshots of phyre engine somewhere in the internet.

 

The PS3 was known to be a pain to develop because you had to manually tweak with a lot of low-level stuff. May not have been pure assembly, then again it may had been.

Microsoft heavily encouraged a much higher level development using DX, and I think Sony also provided some SDKs to get the smaller projects started quicker, but any serious budget game tends to be powered by a heavyweight engine that goes right to the metal whenever possible. If you don't, then you are at the mercy of drivers and API implementations that may not be optimal, and since its a very competitive market, it's not always on the developer's best interest to share such optimizations with Sony so they can then turn around and give them to every other developer out there.

That IS an issue why this is strange. Heck, even if you account for the fact that every console in the past used PCs for dev kits, they have historically been made as close as possible to the final product, to make compatibility testing as friction-less as it can be. I'm sure if we got one of the Unity devs here they may attest how easily it is to make code that works perfectly fine and beautifully on one chipset but breaks apart in another chipset, despite all running on the same Win7 DirectX settup.

 

I'm not sure about PS3 I know Xb360 ran off of a Mac Pro (Power Mac maybe) during demos... twas funny Microsoft using macs

 

Talk about grabbing onto the wrong end of the stick! You completely missed the point of what I was saying to latch on to this one little irrelevancy of an example. However if you want to debate fabric printing at a wet t-shirt contest then sure, you're right, the PPC in older Mac's is not the same chip as the Cell however it is part of the power architecture. But once again even that's not really that relevant, devkits are there to be an analogue, not to necessarily actually be the hardware, especially with earlier kits the hardware is emulated, the underlying architecture of the machine doing this is (if it's powerful enough or compatible enough) not really relevant.

Anyhow while there are others if you care to search, here's a delicious ironic rant for a citation http://hexus.net/gaming/features/ps3/5309-mags-telling-porkies-ps3-hands-tsk-tsk/ and because this is after all a thread about the Xbone then to remind us of MS or yesteryear, the same generation doing likewise (but no bonus points for how the processors are related) http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1030308/xbox-sdk-released-cool-apple-power-mac-g5s

Anyhow, lets agree not to derail the thread any further.

 

ps3 application running on PPC mac is not convincing to me,that is all I wanted to say Per. No need to get it wrongly. However xbox360 application running on two mac G5 seemed to be true. From what I know of cell is: it is just too alien from traditional x86 pc and normal PPC.While xbox360 used normal three ppc cores,much like core2due intel with one extra core.And it worked like a traditional PC,just in PPC flavor.I remember the anger of gabe as well when he was talking about cell architectures. whatever heck the big fish are using,point is "they should always show off on actual hardware". So,consumer's trust can be strengthen.

 

Has anyone considered the point that maybe there are a limited amount of proper devkits available right now, all in use by developers and no units of production hardware? Chances are they contracted out to HP to provide PC's of a certain specification that they could just plug in at the booths and whack the demos on with out having to spend lots of man hours building and configuring each of them manually, then testing for stability. They needed a large number of computers which would be guaranteed to not be under powered. Given the lack of final hardware available at this point in time it's certain that very few developers are actually using hardware specific features for these demos so the fact they are using NVidia rather than AMD is irrelevant. Similarly the reason why they were running Windows 7 rather than 8 is more than likely because that's what HP had installed on the machines and nothing to do with whether MS had "faith" in their operating system or not.

The Xbox360 was initially demoed on Power Macs running earlier generation radeons to what the actual 360 used, as mentioned by Par, which is less representative of the final hardware. I would assume the machines provided just happened to use NvIdia cards, but if it was a conscious decision to go with Nvidia GPUs then I would guess the reason was because the radeon options available through HP were not up to the required specifications, from what I can tell HP only offer low to mid range AMD GPUs but offers high end Nvidia GPUs. If it was a choice between an underpowered GPU from AMD or an overpowered GPU from NVidia, it would be stupid of them to go for the Radeon because the games may not perform at all well on them.

Using standard computer hardware to demonstrate games to the public on the convention floor is nothing controversial, it's par for the course when announcing a new pre-production console. MS has done it with all three of their consoles. Sony did it with the PS4 and the PS3. Even developers for both the 360 and PS3 showing off their games for the first time in the last couple years demoed their games using PC hardware while talking solely about console releases. It's not like anyone would be upset that a video of an iOS or Android game in development was recorded with a PC version, so why are so many people so outraged over something as standard as MS using PCs provided by HP to demo games for an unfinished, unreleased, only just announced console?