[s_dev]

Consoles mostly died with the PlayStation 3. Consoles (At least Sony and Microsoft's offering) have become repackaged PCs for a while now this will be especially apparent with the Steamboxes going up on the same shelves as Playstations in the future.

I will concede it's hard to reason or discuss about these things without getting lost in a Ship of Theseus definition of what 'console' and 'PC' is and where the lines are. The PlayStation 3 had the cell processor and was fundamentally different to PCs imo.

Nintendo has always seemed to manage stay as a console and seems to come out of the console wars stronger than either Sony or Microsoft, so they seem to be the exception here.

[thatjoeoverthr]

The PS3 is one of a handful of systems that actually had a special processor. The NES and Genesis had common desktop CPUs. The PS1, 2 and N64 had MIPS processors which were in heavy use in workstations. GC, Wii, Xbox 360 had PowerPC. What was unusual was a special and temporary period from the 90s where “pc = x86 = basic” because everything else one way or another failed out of the market. That moment is passed and today all basic activity is done on arm based phones. Gaming is now one of the main niches of the x86, along with servers and corporate desktop. The special feature of the game console was always “we made these standards, we will commit to them for five years and sell a lot of units for you to ship games on.”

[mort96]

To my knowledge, all consoles until the Xbox 360 had normal CPUs, but very special graphics hardware. They were decidedly not typical PC hardware.

[thatjoeoverthr]

This more-or-less ended with 3D. The N64, mid-90s, had a novel 3D accelerator (heavily programmable, a kind of a proto-GPU). Its successor went with ATI. The Dreamcast had a PowerVR, which you could buy for your PC, and early iPhones had as well. Xbox had Nvidia. It has always been normal to find OTS parts. Never "IBM PC compatible" but again, the bubble itself is part of the core value proposition.

Honestly, we're dating ourselves with the premise.

There is exactly one generation (mid-90s) where the 3D accelerator design and industry hadn't stabilised. 3D then was like AI today. It was the rising thing. I wrote my first vertex shader on a GeForce 2.

They have common, off the shelf parts because it just isn't where the action is in 2026.

[mort96]

We're definitely way past the point where console hardware is vastly different from PC hardware; we're not in the age where what makes a console special is having a sprite processor which allows it to render graphics in a way that mainstream PC hardware is incapable of. It's all pretty much just x86 APUs from AMD, slightly customized compared to what you get off the shelf.

However everything other than the hardware is what makes consoles special. They're a special-purpose device which is specifically designed to only be used with a game pad on a big screen. That means stupid stuff like a pop-up which needs mouse interaction, or the system getting confused about window focus, or games which have controller support but whose launchers need mouse interaction -- issues which have always plagued living room gaming PCs -- just categorically can not exist.

And they live in a completely different market. You have one mass produced computer which benefits from economies of scale, sold to a captive audience which has to buy games from the manufacturer. This allows completely different pricing strategies from non-console PCs where the manufacturer needs to make a significant profit on every device sold.

Then there's the developer angle. In the traditional desktop PC world, you have to work around performance quirks of many different GPU manufacturers and their drivers, and you're always in this careful balancing act where increasing graphics or CPU processing time by a little bit reduces your potential market. A console, representing exactly one hardware configuration owned by millions of people, allows much more extreme hardware utilization; you can consume every available CPU core, every available byte of memory, hit exactly 16.6ms frame times, and your game is gonna run at a smooth 60 FPS for everyone.

So yes, the computer science behind consoles is boring these days, they're "just PCs". But the market dynamics and developer implications mean they still have a place as a product that has a fundamentally different role than a traditional PC.

This is coming from someone who hasn't owned a console since the PS4 FWIW; I play my games on a Linux box with an Xbox controller in my living room.

[Gigachad]

>However everything other than the hardware is what makes consoles special. They're a special-purpose device which is specifically designed to only be used with a game pad on a big screen. That means stupid stuff like a pop-up which needs mouse interaction or the system getting confused about window focus, issues which have always plagued living room gaming PCs, just categorically can not exist.

This is exactly the problem Valve has solved. SteamOS presents a just works managed OS that is fully usable with a console controller. You hit the middle button on your game controller and the steam machine just turns on, wakes your TV, and switchs the input. The UX difference between Console and PC is shrinking to near zero.

[mort96]

Yeah, until you try to launch Trackmania and its launcher needs mouse input to function.

[cassianoleal]

Valve has also solved that by incorporating trackpads to the controller. I bet the PS controllers's trackpads can also be used for that.

[mort96]

You can't seriously argue that using a keyboard/mouse interface using the controller track pad is as nice an experience as just using a controller-focused interface.

And since the Steam Machine doesn't come with a controller, I would bet that a large fraction of users will be using an xbox controller or something.

[cassianoleal]

> You can't seriously argue that using a keyboard/mouse interface using the controller track pad is as nice an experience as just using a controller-focused interface.

I didn't.

[Gigachad]

Of course games that don’t have controller support won’t work with controller. The steam store marks this with a label / rating system. If it’s for a green mark then everything will work with a controller.

[mort96]

It's a game with great controller support! I play it a lot with a controller. It's just that in the PC gaming space, "controller support" doesn't necessarily mean that you can log in to the launcher and launch the game without a keyboard and mouse. The assumption is that you always have a keyboard and mouse, and some people also happen to have a controller in addition.

[Gigachad]

I got a steam deck 2 years ago and I haven’t run in to any games like this. They all either skip the launcher or have a controller navigable one.

I just had a look at the steam page and valve has listed a long list of usability issues with this game. I guess if it was a console they could just reject it and make the devs fix the issues. But it’s still cleanly presented to the user that there’s issues here and up to them to decide what to do.

[nylonstrung]

TBH the PS3 probably should have been more similar to PC, the people I've talked to who have worked for it said the architecture was a nightmare to work with.

There's really no reason console games of that era needed, or even could benefit from 6 cores

[aleph_minus_one]

> There's really no reason console games of that era needed, or even could benefit from 6 cores

First: One problem of the PS3 was that in a late stage of its development a (rather weak) GPU was "tacked on" (originally, the Cell was supposed to replace the GPU).

Now for your point:

Just have a look what scientists did on PS3 clusters using the SPUs of the Cell, and considering this imagine what creative things would have been possible for games on the PS3.

The problem was that at this time, game development got much less specific to one platform (in opposite to how it was for basically all the previous game console generations, though I am willing to admit that the original Xbox being very similar to a PC did give a hint concerning the direction the game industry was heading), so you wanted a much more "standardized" (typically meaning: similar to PC) architecture. The Xbox 360 was simply much more similar to PCs, so it was much easier to port engines from one platform to another.

> the people I've talked to who have worked for it said the architecture was a nightmare to work with.

For previous console generations this was less of a problem (basically every console was quirky). It is easy to find statements of developers on the internet how the PS2 was magnitudes more of a nightmare to develop for than the PS3.

So, before, being difficult to develop for a console was much more accepted in consideration of the unique features each console brought to the table. What did change was rather the expectation among developers to be able to easily port engines between platforms.

[stuxnet79]

Everytime this topic comes up I always replay this clip of Gabe Newell ranting about having to write multi-threaded code for the PS3 and chuckle [1]

Was writing code for the PS3 genuinely difficult or was it also a skill issue? The counter-argument I've heard is that multi threaded programming just wasn't as common at the time due to minimal number of cores available on most consumer hardware.

Perhaps the PS3 would have fared better with a different generation of developers.

[1] https://youtu.be/dKYT6NzsUZQ?si=wzf5e5iBP3MEEJEn

[mort96]

I'm sure there's some degree of just not being used to multi-threaded code, but it's also not like today's multi-threading. When we think about utilizing multiple cores today, we're thinking about running normal application code across many identical cores, within one process managed by a multi threaded kernel.

The PS3 wasn't like that. It was a single core machine, with one big CPU core which runs the operating system and your application, and it had a bunch of co-processors. I've never written for such a system, but I'd assume that a somewhat close analogy would be a single core Linux computer with 10 microcontrollers attached. (Though I'd love to hear from someone with more knowledge whether this is a reasonable analogy.)

[aleph_minus_one]

> I've never written for such a system, but I'd assume that a somewhat close analogy would be a single core Linux computer with 10 microcontrollers attached. (Though I'd love to hear from someone with more knowledge whether this is a reasonable analogy.)

Where this otherwise good analogy basically lacks is that the SPEs of a Cell were really fast (in opposite to microcontrollers), so a better analogy could be: a single core computer that has 7 ultra-fast, identical DSPs attached, of which you can use 6. [1]

---

[1] For the 7 available and 6 usable SPEs, see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cell_(processor)&...

[masklinn]

The 360 was a multithreaded machine, it had 3 physical cores with hyperthreading (so 6 logical cores).

The PS3 was a completely different beast, it had a single general purpose core (hyperthreaded) with 6 user-accessible vector coprocessors (in-order, non-speculative, with their own ISA, and without shared memory) on a 4-lane ring bus. This was much more complex and fairly alien topology even more so back at the time, and while tooling might have helped bridge the gap Sony’s were… not great, even less so compared to MS which could lean on their windows tooling.

[masklinn]

The 360 had 3 cores. The PS3 had a single core with vector coprocessors on a ring bus.

GPGPU is what displaced the Cell SPEs, and you wouldn’t count that as cores. In fact the PS3 originally didn’t include a GPU, the SPEs were supposed to handle it all, so in a way they were approaching the same solution from the opposite direction.

[kakacik]

That cell cpu made development a hell according to devs. Or SDK around, at the end it doesnt matter. Sony even admitted to this being their strategy, so that later games look better and better as even brilliant devs only over time figured out how to squeeze full performance out of HW.

What an arrogance that everybody paid for in final prices. Well, thats yesterday reality, arrogance of companies thinking they have endless moat and can milk users forever is always eventually punished. Not losing sleep over them.

This behavior and inevitable result can be mapped into many other things, ie current german car manufacturing.

[stuxnet79]

> Sony even admitted to this being their strategy, so that later games look better and better as even brilliant devs only over time figured out how to squeeze full performance out of HW.

I think the real strategy was to make it harder for natively developed PS3 games to be ported to other platforms.

It was a sensible strategy except they effectively lost the console wars right out the gate by delaying their release a year. This alienated developers who didn't want to go through the effort of doing development the PS3 way when it was hard to program for AND had little traction among consumers.

If the PS3 had come out a year before the 360 things might have played out differently.

Sony's hubris around the PS3 was very risky. They caught up in sales by the end of that generation but early PS3 adopters unfortunately had to deal with fundamentally broken, unoptimized ports despite having superior (if over-engineered) hardware.

Also the PS3 disaster ultimately set the stage for the PS4 which had a drastically simpler architecture. PS4 was a lot easier to program for but if compared to a PC with equivalent specs it was overpriced and much more locked down.

[brazzy]

I really don't think having a custom CPU and hardware architecture different from PCs is the defining property of a gaming console. Nobody cares about that except developers and hardware nerds.

A console is a computer purpose-built and streamlined for playing games. No more, no less.

[bigcityslider]

A game console is also locked down from the user, usually because the company is selling hardware at a loss, wants to maintain control, and wants to prevent cheating in online games. May also have exclusive games tied to the hardware.

[mort96]

And as a result, the PS5 is less than half the price of a Steam Machine with similar performance.

[Gigachad]

The line is far more blurred now. The Steam Machine is a purpose built device streamlined for playing games. Yet without any hardware modifications you can put it on your desk and load windows on it. So it's clearly a PC too.

The nitpicking on language here is entirely due to the fact the distinction is no longer clear like it once was.

[bigcityslider]

Doesn't seem blurry to me, Steam Machine is just a PC.

[Gigachad]

What is the definition of a console then? At this point it’s just a pc that runs a locked down OS.

Back 20 years ago the distinction was just obvious.

[bigcityslider]

Locked down OS and hardware, or not usable for general compute for some other reason. 20 years ago you could have a gaming PC with discs like a console, but again the console was locked down.

[Gigachad]

This just illustrates the article point. We have come to the point where a console is just a worse less useful version of a PC.

Steam OS will replicate the nice TV UX of consoles but not be locked down.

[brazzy]

I'd say the opposite: Steam Machine is a console than can run Windows.

[bigcityslider]

Windows PC can run Steam though