| > Those games look like shit compared to a PC that came out on the say day, let alone years later. 1. Developers had no experience with the hardware during the initial years of the consoles. They had to switch from an out-of-order and forgiving x86 to an in-order and unforgiving PowerPC that had substantially less cache (32k/32k vs 64k/2mb/8mb) than its PC counterparts of the day. Just ask any PC-gone-console developer of that age about LHS[1], or the off-the-wall Cell Broadband Architecture[2]. 2. Developers had to manage 512MiB between the GPU and CPU. Everything has to fit into that including the operating system... and I found 1GiB uncomfortable for PCs in 2006! + It was split on PS3, and you had to DMA into 256k for SPUs.
+ EDRAM was slightly too small to fit 1280x720x32x4 render targets. 3. Developers had no guarantee of permanent storage. So everything had to be streamed from disk... which is unsavoury for various reasons. Contortionist programming springs to mind[3]. 4. PCs get upgraded. 'Nuff said. [1]: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132084/sponsored_featu... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR8CVLVmKQs&t=4m [3]: http://doublebuffered.com/2010/03/17/gdc-2010-streaming-mass... (I'm assuming Gen 7, i.e., the Xbox 360 and PS3.) |