[CP5670]

Console games cannot be "modded;" that alone is enough for me. (although numerous other deficiencies exist)

[Stunaep]

Originally posted by CP5670
Console games cannot be "modded;" that alone is enough for me. (although numerous other deficiencies exist)

For once, I whole-heartedly agree with you. If FS2 were made for a console, it would be dead long ago

[Tiara]

Originally posted by CP5670
Console games cannot be "modded;" that alone is enough for me. (although numerous other deficiencies exist)

*coughs*

*Has mods for Red Alert on the PS2 through internet*

[Fineus]

But how frequent are these mods? I mean are there hundreds ala PC or about 3 from dedicated fans of the game? And are they any good... anything like some of the stuff for HL and so on?

And again this is just for the PS2 remember, what about others? Game patches when there are errors etc..?

[Nico]

Originally posted by Tiara


*coughs*

*Has mods for Red Alert on the PS2 through internet*

the PS2 has a HD?

[Tiara]

Originally posted by venom2506


the PS2 has a HD?

No... A big ass memory card.

[Tiara]

Originally posted by Thunder
But how frequent are these mods? I mean are there hundreds ala PC or about 3 from dedicated fans of the game? And are they any good... anything like some of the stuff for HL and so on?

And again this is just for the PS2 remember, what about others? Game patches when there are errors etc..?

I agree. In many ways the PC is much more versatile. But some of you are cracking the console down as if it were a piece of **** (wich it isn't)

[Nico]

Tiara's right, it's all up to personal tastes.
You know, when I'm pissed up because of my PC ( "this file is not a correct .max file and cannot be opened" " Hard disk boot failure", all that stuff that happened to me for the few months ) I opfetn ask myself why i didn't buy a console instead

[Fineus]

On that I also agree - and yeah some PC owners do look on consoles as POSs, but then console people sometimes look at PCs and call them POSs for never working first time etc...

Venom has it - it's a taste thing.

[Admiral LSD]

The best way to be is to have a foot in both camps

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Stunaep
I don't see the point in consoles anyway. For $300 you get a machine, with sub-PC graphics, whit what you can play games, and watch DVDs and that's it.

For the $900 an average PC costs, you get top-notch graphics, which get better and better every day, plus, almost every PC, at least here, comes with either a CD-R or a DVD drive, you also get tons more of utilities, and the Internet.

Try to access HLP on a Gamecube.

what the hell are you talking about?  Compared to the equivalent Pc technology (same time of release), the console is far superior tech wise.  the only difference is that PC's tend to be upgraded more often - but each upgrade can cost more than a console - £200 for a graphics card, at least £50 for another 128MB RAM, etc.  Have you ever actually looked at a summary of the architecture of - for example - the Gamecube?

[Redfang]

Originally posted by aldo_14
what the hell are you talking about?  Compared to the equivalent Pc technology (same time of release), the console is far superior tech wise.  the only difference is that PC's tend to be upgraded more often - but each upgrade can cost more than a console - £200 for a graphics card, at least £50 for another 128MB RAM, etc.  Have you ever actually looked at a summary of the architecture of - for example - the Gamecube?

 
Eh? When X-Box came, PC's had already over 2GHz processors, and video card was about as powerful... don't know about the PS2, though, but I doubt it.
 
That is all I have to say about this consoles vs. PC thing.

[Nico]

yeah, but PC have a resource drain prog called windows, that makes your 2GB processor less efficient than a gamecube. make rogues squadron run smoothly on a PC with the same specs as a gamecube...

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Redfang

 
Eh? When X-Box came, PC's had already over 2GHz processors, and video card was about as powerful... don't know about the PS2, though, but I doubt it.
 
That is all I have to say about this consoles vs. PC thing.

Um...that's wrong in very real a sense.  firstly, the console has vastly reduced I/O overhead.  Secondly, the CPUs on both the X-box and Gamecube are optimised.  In particular, I believe the X-box Pentioum has an improved pipleine to it's PC equivalent.  the 2GHz P4 is nowhere near as powerful as it's GHz rating suggests - the actual architecture design has been fiddled with to give a high GHz rating, rather than to actually give a big performance boost.

Secondly, the entire operation of a console is different.  for one thing, both the X-box and Gamecube have thier data bus running through the GPU, then to the CPU - effectively making the gfx processor the heart of the system... which has a major impact on the speed for memory access for textyures, et al.  There are also, IIRC, different cache types and sizes, and the bus speeds can be better balanced to the CPU and GPU speeds than in a Pc....all in all, it is a far more optimised and efficient system.

Remeber, you don;t have the overheads of windows, and the various I/O drivers, et al.  Your better able to work with the bare guts of the machine, so you're better equipped to optimise and improve.  And when you take into account the fact that TV res is lower, it means that consoles are at least as powerful as theequivalent PC tech of the time.

Incidentally, the PS2's 'Emotion Engine' I don't really know much about, except its a sort of - I think - multi-processor system which is a ***** to develop on (as it has multiple pipelines for processing, which have to be balanced)...all I can remeber, is that it has a very small texture cache but HUGE bandwidth on the relevant bus - about 1GB/sec I think.

[Redfang]

True, PC's have software which decreases hardware speed.
 
But, X-Box CPU is worse than regular Intel Pentium 3. I know Pentium 4's are slower than 3's, but the new northwoods aren't too slow...
 
Also, you can never know how much does that "GPU is the heart" have effect on performance.

[Admiral LSD]

I just thought the Xbox was just bog standard PC hardware with a few minor differences to give the illusion that it isn't (the Celeron at its heart has a 133Mhz FSB instead of the 66 or 100Mhz that Celerons usually run at, the hard drive uses deprecated ATAPI commands to prevent it working in a regular PC, the Graphics processor in its nForce chipset is a GF3 instead of the usual nForce GF2, it's USB ports use a different connector to prevent standard USB peripherals from working etc)...

[Stryke 9]

Look- with PCs you can play games, download porn and warez, or play with lens flares, and still look like you're working. Consoles can not make this claim. End. Of. Story.

[Admiral LSD]

Thats why I'm always going to buy both and be done with it.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Redfang
True, PC's have software which decreases hardware speed.
 
But, X-Box CPU is worse than regular Intel Pentium 3. I know Pentium 4's are slower than 3's, but the new northwoods aren't too slow...
 
Also, you can never know how much does that "GPU is the heart" have effect on performance.

It vastly improves graphics processing..... faster texture access obviously, as well as the pre-rendered option.  i can;t remeber the x-box specs exactly - I did a project type thing on the GC architecture - but the buses will be balanced to maximise throughput to the GPU without bottlenecking the CPU access.... that's why it's done.  and I think the P3 in the X-box has been made of aluminuim for improved conductivity (not sure about this one....fuzzy on this detail), and the pipelines been shortened.  I think it may also have a bunch of optimisations for floating point operations, including a sepearate 10-stage pipeline (FP is very important for stuff like physics calculations, or AI).  I'm not sure if they changed the Pentium ISA for it - I know the GC's Gekko CPU had several new floating Point instructions added  to in particular.

Oh, and the nForce chipset is, I believe, better than a GF3, and shares some features with the GF4 series (sort of an in-between step IIRC).

Remember that both the X-box and GC in particular are fairly new - and they both have stuff like porgrammable pipleines, graphics API's (a new one in the case of the GC, although I think it's similar to OpenGL), machine code, caching, etc that the developers will have to learn before you see the machines' true power.

That said, it is worth noting that MS rejected the AMD competitor simply because it had a noiser fan.....

Sure, the X-box may now be being superceded by new PC architecture - that's the nature of technology - but consoles still remain much-underestimated.

[Admiral LSD]

The only reason they're underestimated is because you can't dowload porn or warez and play with lens flares while still looking like you're working