Xbox 360 vs PlayStation 3: Back to the Drawing Board December 26, 2006 Alan /.effect Dang

Introduction

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1. Overheating CPU/GPU

Since our article, Microsoft has extended the warranty of Xbox 360’s. Recently, my Xbox 360 had a display error related to the GPU. I called Microsoft’s tech support and since my system was one of the launch systems, Microsoft replaced my Xbox 360 free-of-charge. I went through regular customer tech support for this, and it went fairly smoothly (although the process took an hour on hold). Reports of defective Xbox 360’s have essentially disappeared with the current production methods.

2. No MSN Music

We were right to think of the Xbox 360 as a platform for online content. At the time, we were focused on MSN Music given that it was Microsoft’s established platform. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense. There was no point in bringing MSN Music to the Xbox 360 while the Zune Marketplace was in development. With the Zune out in the real-world, I’d expect to see more Zune/Xbox 360 features coming together.

We almost predicted the Xbox 360’s high-definition movie rental service. At the time, we were focused on music rather than movies not because of bandwidth or the market, but copy protection. Let me quote something from a year ago:

“...it would not have been difficult for Microsoft to release high-definition movies or TV shows using the Xbox Live infrastructure. The hardware is HD capable and the networking infrastructure is capable of handling large files -- game demos are already topping 1GB. Without HDMI or DVI/HDCP support, Microsoft may find it impossible to convince Hollywood studios to allow users to download high-def, full-length movies for playback on an analog source.”

3. No HDMI/1080p support

The fact that we have HD-DVD and HD Xbox Live Marketplace videos over analog is a real testament to the power that Microsoft wields. They have basically gotten Hollywood manufacturers to sign on. Basically, Hollywood will not allow you to upsample 480p DVDs to high-definition resolutions over analog connections... but you’ll be able to display 720p and 1080i HD source.

Microsoft has recently added 1080p VGA support to the Xbox 360. Although this is currently limited to upsampling 720p games, some of the Flash based games in the Xbox Live Arcade will potentially benefit from the 1080p support.

Xbox 360 issues cont’d

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4. 20GB is too small

We called this, despite having many readers claim that we were simply “bashing” Microsoft. With the new HD movie rental service and TV show download service, the 20GB capacity is clearly an issue. Microsoft recognizes this and has talked about producing larger capacity hard drives although no products have formally been announced.

5. Microtransaction security

In the end, pre-paid Xbox Live Marketplace points make the most sense. Sometimes retailers will sell these below the normal price as part of promotions or special coupons.

6. No internet browser

We’re not sure what’s stopping Microsoft from putting a web browser on the Xbox 360. Both Sony and Nintendo have web browsers in their consoles... Internet Explorer 7 is also an exceptional browser. Maybe it’s an issue of porting IE7 to the PowerPC architecture that’s causing the delay. Politically, there’s no way the Xbox 360 can use any other web browser.


7. No WMV-HD

At the time, we were focused on WMV-HD as it was the only commercially available high-definition disc-based platform. Most of the movies were limited to IMAX, or documentaries like Step Into Liquid, but there was also Terminator 2. With the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray on the market now, it’s no longer an issue.

8. No MPEG4 (H.264)

Once again, we have to deal with the political scenario at Microsoft. The hardware is capable of H.264 decoding, and the HD-DVD add-on proves that. On the other hand, politically, Microsoft only wants to allow streaming from Windows Media Center Edition 2005 and Windows Vista -- both MPEG-2 based.

9. No System Wide Calibration

This is still a problem. Maybe there’s hope for the next generation of system consoles.

More Xbox 360 issues

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10. Poor DVD Playback Quality


With Microsoft now selling HD movies on Xbox Live, they have even less incentive to upgrade the DVD features of the Xbox 360. By keeping the DVD playback poor, the benefits of high definition video will be maximized. By the way, isn’t it funny how gamers talk about how great downloaded HD video content looks, while the mainstream press keeps talking about how HD-DVD and Blu-Ray looks no better than regular DVDs? The short answer is that the HD revolution is real and it’s here. This is also the reason why you should read reviews from people who actually know what they’re talking about...

11. No Pressure Sensitive Face Buttons

I keep reading rumors about Metal Gear Solid 4 coming to the Xbox 360, but if MGS4 continues to adopt the gamepad mechanics of MGS2 and MGS3, the ultimate experience won’t be faithfully brought over the Xbox 360 (if the game even does show up on the Xbox 360).

Ego Boosting Comments

With the Xbox 360 in our hands for only one month when we came up with this list, it’s surprising to see how accurate our comments were. Let’s take a look at these 11 issues and see if Sony learned anything from Microsoft’s mistakes.

The PlayStation 3

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1. System Stability

So far, the PlayStation 3 has been a fairly reliable system. Sure, you’ll see the broken system our two on YouTube, but our PS3 has been flawless, even with several firmware upgrades along the way!

2. Media Marketplace

Hindsight is 20/20 and even then, the PS3 has not launched with access to Sony Connect or downloadable media. In a way, the integrated Blu-Ray player in every PS3 minimizes the incentive Sony has behind downloadable movies. People always prefer to have something tangible, and clearly Sony would rather have you purchase a Blu-Ray movie in their current war against HD-DVD.

3. HDMI/1080p support?

Standard on the PS3. Kudos, Sony. Kudos.


4. 20GB is too small

60GB on the “high-end” PS3. But what’s even more important is that Sony has made the hard drive user replaceable. Put in any Serial ATA drive you want. Coming from a company that once forced you to use ATRAC for portable music, this is simply amazing.

5. Microtransaction security

So far, Xbox Live Marketplace is superior to the online PlayStation store. Still, we’d prefer to have separate logins for games and for commerce.

6. No internet browser

Not only does Sony include a web browser, it has Flash, and works with websites like YouTube! I wonder if the SIXAXIS controller will blend...

7. No WMV-HD

With Blu-Ray, this really isn’t an issue. Microsoft had WMV-HD discs at retail but they weren’t supporting it. Sony’s only retail HD content is Blu-Ray.

8. No MPEG4 (H.264)

The PlayStation 3 does play H.264 content. Nice.

9. No System Wide Calibration

This is still a problem. Maybe there’s hope for the next generation of system consoles.

10. Poor DVD Playback Quality

I haven’t had a chance to test the PS3’s DVD playback at all. The big difference between Holiday 2005 and Holiday 2006 is the availability of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Turns out, the Blu-Ray player in the PS3 is actually very good. DVD wise, most consumer players pale in comparison to the latest video technology from AMD and NVIDIA. The exception, of course, is a consumer player with a Gennum VXP or Silicon Optix Realta or ReonVX with HQV technology.

11. No Pressure Sensitive Face Buttons

For the PS3, the problem is the lack of vibration feedback. Sigh. Imagine if you had vibration feedback and controller tilt sensations! Guys like EA and Sega Sports could come up with even crazier free throw mechanics…

Comments

In the end, it’s pretty impressive to see how Sony has been able to address some of the mistakes that Microsoft made with the Xbox 360 launch. This has nothing to do with Sony’s intuition -- it’s the advantage of coming in second.

PlayStation 3 vs Xbox 360 strengths

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Shortly after our 11 Mistakes of the Xbox 360, we talked about the seven things that the Xbox 360 special. Let’s see how the PlayStation 3 competes on these 7 fronts...

1. Development Environment

The Xbox 360 continues to offer one of the best development environments of any gaming platform today. A look at games like Rainbow Six: Vegas and Gears of War is enough proof of how Microsoft’s design allows them to succeed.


But this is more than just software support. It’s hardware. To understand what I’m talking about, we need to step back in time to the time when Sony launched the PlayStation 2. Although the hype of the “Emotion Engine” proved to offer little substance, the PS2’s atypical system architecture with parallel vector units and a high-fillrate fixed-function 3D pipeline helped it to produce games such as Gran Turismo 4, Final Fantasy XII, and the Metal Gear Solid series. Indeed, it is a true testament to the vision of Sony’s engineers and marketing department that the PS2 established such overwhelming market dominance.

At the time the PS2 launched, it seemed as if the PC had little chance of success in the gaming market. The PS2 technology demos were being showcased at a time when NVIDIA’s flagship graphics chip was the Riva TNT2. The PS2 completely outclassed the comparable PC of the time, and when Metal Gear Solid 2 came out, it truly was a marvel both in terms of gameplay and technology.

In the same way, the launch of the Xbox 360 represented that same scenario. The three-core PowerPC CPU in the Xbox360 and AMD-powered GPU with a unified shader architecture represented hardware capabilities beyond anything that was available for the PC at the time. Indeed, it is only recently with the release of products such as the GeForce 8800 and Intel Core 2 Duo that the PC has regained in dominance in the gaming world.

Along the same lines, the PlayStation 3 has been released to the world with a substantial promise of computational power. Once again, Sony’s insistence on “non-traditional” architecture persists, with the use of the Cell processor. However in this generation, the GPU in the PS3 is a tried-and-true GeForce 7-class GPU.

Xbox 360 CPU

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The Xbox360 design architecture is about evolution not revolution. The CPU represents the next logical step in design, and with a clear gaming focus, its performance is exceptional. Though the GPU is the first to implement unified shaders, it is also taking the predicted path of evolution.

Xenon CPU

When the PS2 launched, it was one of the only consumer devices that required developers to explicitly parallelize their code for the vector units. With time, the industry has now adopted the principle of explicit parallelism and multi-core CPUs as the standard approach. The decision places added burden on the developer to formulate their algorithms in a manner that can be solved by multiple processing cores – in return, the developers gain access to what may otherwise have been impossible with existing hardware technology.

The Xenon CPU is a triple-core PowerPC. There are three fully-independent general purpose CPUs with two-way symmetric multitasking. That is, there are three 3.2GHz CPU cores, each of which are “Hyperthreaded.” Unlike a traditional desktop PC CPU, however, the Xenon CPU only does in-order execution (Pentium 1’s have had out of order execution). This means that things such as AI that requires heavy branch prediction will suffer on the Xbox 360 as compared to a high-end desktop PC.

The key point is that the Xbox360 is not intended to compete with a desktop PC. What is considered “unusual” for a desktop CPU (no out-of-order execution), actually works well for a console, where graphics still reign supreme. In addition, the Xenon’s computations have been optimized for single-precision math – perfect for games.

Basically, for the Xenon, Microsoft engineers said: “Let’s take a solid desktop CPU, strip out elements that we don’t need (i.e. high precision math) and elements that will increase the manufacturing cost (i.e. out of order execution) so that we can crank up the clockspeed and have multiple cores.

PlayStation 3 CPU

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Cell

Whereas the Xbox 360 took a balanced approach with its CPU (from the perspective of a game console; it’s biased toward graphics/media performance when compared to a desktop PC), the Cell CPU takes an even more ambitious approach to parallelism.

The Cell CPU starts off with a standard PowerPC core that’s not unlike one of the cores in the Xbox 360. The next step is adding 8 additional SPEs, 6 of which are accessible to the programmer. These SPEs have a limited feature set and essentially are only useful for accelerating mathematical computations.

In a way, Sony’s vision for the Cell was different. Whereas Microsoft had come to the drawing board with a vision for the best gaming CPU, Sony had come to IBM and Toshiba to try to create something different, the fastest and most powerful processor for streaming data. From an engineering standpoint, the Cell processor is impressive, but the Cell is not purpose built for games. Dollar for dollar, the Xenon CPU is going to offer better overall performance.

In short, Sony continues to be bold with its hardware design choice but Microsoft plays the superior political game. Microsoft asked the developers what they wanted, and gave them more. Sony offers more than Microsoft, but demands that developers join their religion of massive parallel programming.

Who’s right? There are strengths to both approaches. Hands down, the Microsoft approach is right for the industry. It ensures that gamers will get the great games early on in the lifecycle of a product, ensures that the developer can maximize their programming time and monetary investment. You get better games, developers take on fewer risks, and Microsoft makes money. A win-win for everyone.

With Sony, the PS3’s architecture is sure to alienate many developers. Indeed, former PS3 exclusives continue to make their way to the Xbox 360 as developers revolt. Sony is just capitalizing on their brand name and Blu-Ray to make the PS3 work early on. What will keep the PS3 alive is the Holy Trinity of PlayStation: Square-Enix, Konami, and Polyphony Digital.

PS3 Game Developers

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Konami and Polyphony Digital

You see, Konami and Polyphony Digital represent a special breed of developer. First of all, they know what makes a game fun. Sure, Gran Turismo may not be your cup of tea, but for millions of gamers across the world it is. Finding a developer who knows what feature is fun or not is hard...

What makes Konami and Polyphony Digital special is that they buy into Sony’s vision. They buy into the religion of massively multithreaded games that harness multiple parallel CPUs. Politics and economics aside, the development teams at these two studios fundamentally approach games with the same vision that Sony offers with the PS3. Metal Gear Solid 4 may eventually make its way to the Xbox 360, but it will come with compromises.

Square-Enix

The strength of the Final Fantasy series has always been its story and so it is tempting to believe that the core Final Fantasy series could be made cross-platform. Indeed, Square-Enix has already brought Final Fantasy spin-off games to non-Sony platforms. However, ever since FF7, Square has adopted a storytelling approach that combines real-time and pre-rendered CG graphics. As good as video hardware gets, pre-rendered CGI will always be better in capturing the emotion of the characters. In the HD era, the Xbox 360’s DVD format simply does not provide enough high-res video for a 60-80 hour Final Fantasy game. Blu-Ray does. Most developers have moved toward in-game cut scenes -- Square Enix continues to be more and more ambitious with its pre-rendered CGI…

Only now is it obvious

Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 are developer oriented -- it's a question of who they’re targeting. The Xbox 360 adopts a balanced approach favored by legendary programmers such as John Carmack. It’s fundamentally and academically, the right way to do things when designing a console capable of playing a wide variety of games.

On the other hand, Sony has taken an approach that’s hated by the majority of developers, but is well-liked by Polyphony Digital, Konami, and Square-Enix. It’s clearly a risky-move for Sony, but potentially one that will have significant returns.

The mainstream press says that the PlayStation 3 is doomed: too pricey and too complex. They’re missing the point. The PlayStation 3 will be the platform of choice for the next-gen MGS, Gran Turismo, and Final Fantasy (core) line up.

Features (cont’d)

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1. Wireless controller

A year ago, everyone thought I was being silly for writing that Microsoft’s Xbox 360 wireless controller was awesome; Nintendo and Sony were both going to feature wireless controllers. Now, in December 2006, I feel vindicated. I haven’t heard of any Xbox 360 controllers breaking any TVs...

Seriously, the Wii controller may be sophisticated, but it says something when Nintendo has to redesign the strap after-the-fact. This is something that should have been addressed in the pre-release era. Likewise, although the SIXAXIS controller is wireless, it doesn’t use standard replaceable batteries.

2. Free demos

There is no doubt that Microsoft’s embracement of free downloadable demos has been responsible for Sony’s increased

3 Always on Xbox Live

Again, everyone thought I was silly for talking about “always on” Xbox Live when it was simply broadband. It was more than that. It’s the persistent user-logon that spans across worlds – something the PS3 doesn’t have.


4. Online metadata

This was in regard to the Xbox 360’s ability to pull music data from the ‘net based off music CDs. I sent my PS3 back to JCal before I had a chance to compare Sony’s music CD and SACD playback feature set...

5. HD Media MCE

This was a feature I picked up on in 2005. With Windows Vista *finally* coming out, expect this feature to be a major component of the feature showcase.

6. HD Gaming

Overall, the Xbox 360’s 720p graphics continue to be stellar. Even when comparing games like Need for Speed: Carbon, NBA Live 07, and Call of Duty 3, the Xbox 360’s graphics performance is just as good or superior to the PS3 equivalent. Again, the Xbox 360 has been engineered as a balanced development environment. It is unequivocally the superior platform and already has some very impressive games such as Gears of War. That still doesn’t mean that it’ll be able to compete against Gran Turismo, MGS, etc.

Conclusion

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Gameplay is always number one, but this has little effect on console wars. That’s because everyone wants a game that’s fun to play, even the most corporate, mega-managed game developer. Tools like the Wii controller help developers expand their creativity in one way, however developers interested in applying novel methods of realistic videos or sophisticated visual effects to improve the game play (think Splinter Cell) will find the Wii somewhat restrictive. Developers will always be looking to make the most entertaining game within the development budget they have been given. In that regard, the development environment is critical. The more time they need to spend troubleshooting something, the less time they can ask themselves is “feature X” actually making the game more entertaining. Along the same lines though, the bigger the console user base, the bigger the budget they’ll get...

Sony will remain number one due to the momentum of the brand-name. As more and more HDTV sets are purchased, Blu-Ray playback will be a more attractive feature, and despite the PS3’s shortcomings, graphics are still “equivalent” or “almost as good” as the Xbox 360. The average consumer who may easily be swayed by graphics will see games like Gran Turismo 5, and see that games like Madden and NBA Live look pretty good too.

Sony will lose market share due to increases in popularity from Microsoft and Nintendo. As a gamer, the Xbox 360 is the clear choice. It’s easily available, relatively cheap, and offers a true next-generation experience. The balanced development environment will ensure a steady stream of releases, and Microsoft’s aggressive Japanese investments (Tecmo, Mistwalker, Capcom) will likely help establish the brand in Asia. Microsoft will always have the price advantage over the PS3, and I would expect some aggressive promotions by E3 2007.

The Wii will do better than the Gamecube but will not be able to compete as effectively as the Xbox 360 and PS3 in the enthusiast market. Yes, the Wii is great, and yes, it’s affordable, and yes, it’s completely sold out. The problem and strength with the Wii is that it’s designed to introduce “non-traditional gamers” to consoles. That’s great and all, but once you’ve gotten them excited about the Wii, these non-traditional gamers are unlikely to be as passionate about games as PS3/Xbox 360 owners will be. In the same way the DDR Revolution and Katamari Damacy eventually fizzled out, so will the Wii. It’s not that the Wii isn’t awesome... it’s that the Xbox 360 and PS3 will still be dominant.

The real wild card in this final third of the decade will be the PC. The PC has quickly reestablished its dominance in hardware superior – faster than any other console product launch cycle. As advanced as the Xenon and Cell processors are, it’s always the GPU that improves the most quickly. As fast as the GeForce 8800 GTX is today, we know that a year from now, AMD and NVIDIA will have even faster flagship products, and cards like the 7950GT will be even cheaper and more mainstream. Likewise, Microsoft will continue to push DX10 gaming in their efforts to maintain a desktop entertainment platform that’s ahead of the MacOS competition.