They forgot to mention the part about still having jaggies and 2 controller ports.

Here's the problem "powerful" doesn't mean anything. I could design a processor that could operate at insane clock frequency if all it was ever asked to do was basic math and multiplication. (Division is much more involved.) So stating that one system is "better" because it can do more of X then another system usually means nothing.

I feel that the future cell architecture holds amazing potential, IBM's work on it has been nothing short of amazing from the limited white papers they have published thus far. But until it is in action it really means very little.

Several times in the advancement of processing there have been highly publicized architectures that look to be the next great thing only to fall on their face or have something better, seemingly from no where overtake it in months. So be careful how much weight you put into anything until its real. #'s and statisitics really do mean nothing, that is to the public. I don't claim to have a full understanding of this stuff at all, but do know enough that it is never safe to rely on any publicized spin of numbers, they really don't matter. When you buy a game console the only numbers you should concern yourself with are the cost and the number of great games it has that you want to play.

Is the CEL thingy X86 based? Is it 64 bit?

Very true, but it is more incorrect to say that the PS2 was "only a slight stepup from the Dreamcast" as Pig said. So much for impartial Mods.

The truth of the matter, is that Sony tried to develop a processor which was made for 3D gaming - and they did so successfully. Common x86 based processors are designed for simple calculations, while the EE was designed to handle more advanced calculations - the kind used in 3D gaming. If Sony would have included a strong graphics processor (like Nintendo and Microsoft did), there wouldn't be this talk of who has the better graphics.

Jumping all over Sony because they are the industry leader is pointless. Everyone likes to take stabs at the big guy, but if the big guy pushes back, they find somewhere else to poke.

I'll take that argument a step further - common x86-based processors have absurd amounts of baggage in order to support decades-old hardware that doesn't exist any more. That chip in your XBox can probably natively run old 80286 code in CGA mode.

That useless backwards backwards compatibility comes at a significant cost - the heart of the machine is fundamentally inefficient. EGA support could be replaced by on-chip instruction-set support for high-end graphics manipulations. That's essentially what Sony did.

Now, there's a lot to be said for not starting from scratch. Microsoft leveraged its massive investment in DirectX to pump out a specialized PC. It's pretty good, and about a million times easier than designing a complete architecture and OS from scratch.

- David Stein

Where did you get your information, because this site has PS2 at 6.2 GFLOPS and Xbox at 120 GFLOPS.

http://wars.locopuyo.com/cwsystemspecsold.php

The Emotion Engine isn't a CPU, it's many components - one of which is an embedded cpu. Calculating the entire Emotion Engine's GFLOPS and comparing it to just the CPU of the Xbox is misleading since the EE also handles memory and gpu functions as well.

In terms of MIPS, the EE is capable of 500 MIPS while processors similar to the Xbox are in the thousands - AMD K6 II 500 1302 MIPS, AMD K7 Duron 800 2239 MIPS, and Pentium III 800 2170 MIPS.

The EE as a whole is capable of an impressive amount of GFLOPS which one would think would mean it could create games with incredible AI... only problem is that some of those resources are going to have to go towards making graphics, sound, image enhancements, etc... so there's not much left to make decent AI. I'm sure they'd have a kickass version of Combat from the Atari 2600 where the enemy tanks knew what you were thinking before you did.

Looking at that link I posted (perhaps it's not 100% accurate), it has Dreamcast ahead of the PS2 on quite a few items, so it's not too much of a stretch to say that the dreamcast wasn't too far behind the PS2 in terms of "powerful" depending on how you define that word. You can't really look at one single item and decide one system is more powerful than another since you have to look at the systems as a whole due to them having different architectures.

Graphically for quite a while it was "only a slight stepup", well not really the DC had better graphics. If the PS2 chip was so much better, it should have blown away the DC easy no? I could play Shenmue 2 and think it's a next-gen PS2 game.

I don't think slight it was that grossly inaccurate. I think you are underestimating the quality of the DC processor.

What point do you think it makes to post pictures of Soul Calibur 1 and Soul Calibur 2?





I couldn't think of any games off the top of my head that were the same on Dreamcast as they were on PS2 - and came out the same time - but here's Resident Evil Code Veronica...

Dreamcast -


PS2 -


Not too huge a difference - the PS2 version had some upgraded graphics here and there and some better lighting effects (a place where Dreamcast was lacking).

I don't think it's based on any existing architecture. It's supposed to be a new concept.

So apparently the PS3 will be easy to program for.... (or easier than the PS2 at least)