Xbox 360 - whose importing (3 Viewers)

[stazi]

I'm importing the premium bundle for $699AU from the US.
Pretty damn good price, considering the price at launch in Aus will be $650+ and I'd have to wait until late march/early april (although some EB people are saying 'by June').
Also, I hated waiting for PAL releases (until I got my modchip) for the xbox.
Can't bloody wait to get mine. Early december I'll be sexing it up.

 

[pinkelephant]

Sounds sweet.

I'll just wait, and get it later. I'm not totally desperate. I'll probably wait til the price goes down a bit, and they have some more new games out. They have a pretty good launch range, from what I hear.

 

[stazi]

the launch range isn't actually that diverse -but there'll be a lot of games by end of 2005.
It'll be a while before the price goes down (I'd say pre-PS3 launch)

 

[RanyofuKenyan?]

I'm stuck in my ways, a PS man all the way, I'll buy a PS3 when the price wars begin.

 

[pinkelephant]

the launch range isn't actually that diverse -but there'll be a lot of games by end of 2005.
It'll be a while before the price goes down (I'd say pre-PS3 launch)

Yerr, not too many games, but good quality. I'm looking forward to Oblivion coming out on Xbox360, should be good as long as the loading times aren't as long as the bloody morrowind times.

I'm stuck in my ways, a PS man all the way, I'll buy a PS3 when the price wars begin.

Hehe, no biggie. PS aint too bad. I prefer the hard drive...

I'm waiting for the price wars too...

 

[stazi]

I used to have a ps1, ps2. Then I got an xbox. Was playing both, but with time, my PS2 time became nonexistant. Then i got a modchip for my xbox, the HDD was also amazing. Play divx's etc on my TV instead of my monitor.

 

[stazi]

Somehow I think that Sony has too big of a userbase, for the xbox360's supposed gain by releasing first, to matter.

I disagree. Firstly, the xbox fanbase is huge (although agreeably not as big as playstation's). Next, lots of playstation users could be persuaded to buy an xbox360 for the sake of playing halo 3, morrowind, final fantasy, the next rpg by the final fantasy creators, project gotham, splinter cell, gears of war, perfect dark (a very strong pre-ps3 release schedule with some surprises yet to come).
Games at launch will never be as strong as games with an extra year's development.

So what's going to happen is PS3 is released, at the same time xbox360 drops its price by $150 under that of Sony, Halo 3 comes out in a special pack with the 360, in Japan that much hyped RPG comes out.

Whilst I do think Sony may still win the next generation of gaming in terms of market share, I'm willing to bet that the gap will be closed to (hypothetically) if, say, xbox is currently 35%, ps is 50%, nintendo is 15%. The next gen will likely be:
xbox 40%; ps 50%.

 

[RanyofuKenyan?]

Somehow I think that Sony has too big of a userbase, for the xbox360's supposed gain by releasing first, to matter.

I tend to agree with that .

 

[pinkelephant]

Yeah, same here... although I love my xbox to death, and will be thoroughly devoted for life, I think that PS3 will probably win out.

 

[RanyofuKenyan?]

I disagree. Firstly, the xbox fanbase is huge (although agreeably not as big as playstation's). Next, lots of playstation users could be persuaded to buy an xbox360 for the sake of playing halo 3, morrowind, final fantasy, the next rpg by the final fantasy creators, project gotham, splinter cell, gears of war, perfect dark (a very strong pre-ps3 release schedule with some surprises yet to come).
Games at launch will never be as strong as games with an extra year's development.

So what's going to happen is PS3 is released, at the same time xbox360 drops its price by $150 under that of Sony, Halo 3 comes out in a special pack with the 360, in Japan that much hyped RPG comes out.

Whilst I do think Sony may still win the next generation of gaming in terms of market share, I'm willing to bet that the gap will be closed to (hypothetically) if, say, xbox is currently 35%, ps is 50%, nintendo is 15%. The next gen will likely be:
xbox 40%; ps 50%.

U R a techno game geek staz.

 

[Capitalist Pig]

Somehow I think that Sony has too big of a userbase, for the xbox360's supposed gain by releasing first, to matter.

Yeah because everyone who owns a sony's gonna totally shun the xbox by default

 

[stazi]

You're forgetting that the biggest market is not Australia or America or Europe, it's Japan. And the xbox only had a market share of 15% in Japan in 2004. I dont own either as consoles are shite compared to PC's, but it's obvious that Sony still has the upper hand over xbox. And halo isn't powerful enough to move millions of customers. Also, the ps2 has always had the larger game catalogue, and holds more deals with developers than any platform in the world. Sorry, but the xbox360 will just be a new entry into an already saturated market (just as the xbox was).

I was using the European-American-Australian market as an example. I would like to see you to back up your claims regarding Japan being the biggest market. I would make the assumption of America being the largest, but could be wrong. The global market though, one would also think, would outdwarf Japan.

If the market share is 15% in Japan right now, this is good. I would;ve thought it'd be much higher, after MS' stuff ups at the beginning (as well as the difficulty of establishing MS as a company appealing to japanese consumers). This time, microsoft is managing their marketing strategies to japan correctly and polls reveal that japanese consumers are genuinely excited about the xbox360 (as well as the final fantasy game, and the chronno trigger/cross-squaresoft etc produced game that they're making).

Halo is powerful enough to move hundreds of thousands. Maybe not millions, but 'alone' no game is. Halo worked a wonder for the japanese market it seems, as well (Halo 2 in particular). Console sales greatly increased after halo 2 for xbox (and this was during a time in which the product was in maturity!)

The market isn't saturated? There are only three major players. Only two of those players have good potential and strategies. Does Sony really have more deals for the PS3? I'd be interested to know by how much, considering the number of xbox-exclusives that are coming out for that console. Sony seems to have lost a number of it's exclusive deals as well (Squaresoft, if I'm not mistaken).

And the stupidest mistake Sony are making? Not creating hype during this month for their console. Where are the teasers, the trailers, gameplay footage, indirect comparisons to the xbox360, etc? I just can't fathom how stupid the marketing department of sony is! Their main goal should have been to make people second-guess themselves before buying a 360.

 

[Collin]

If I was to get a console, I would be going PS3. The XBOX to me personally seems to be more of a competitor to the PC. Now being a massive fan of first-person shooters, it would be completely non-sensical of me to ditch the king mouse/keyboard combo for a controller.

Now it's been established that the PS3's Cell/RSX GPU system will pretty much conquer over the XBOX360's Xenon/Xenos GPU system, and with the PS3's RSX also lauded to be perhaps, at best slightly better than an nVidia 7800GTX.. makes sense, since it does share the same parent architecture as it (now 256MB.. not even the 512MB 'Ultra' I should add), I would be making a mistake as a graphics whore. Also, obviously the graphical capabilities of consoles are obviously fixed. 3 years down the track, the RSX is going to look rubbish compared to current technology from PCs. But from an XBOX vs. PS3 point of view, the RSX would display higher longevity. Combined with Cell, it will provide an astounding two teraflops of floating point horsepower from 300+ million transistors.. wowz0rs. From my point of view, I just don't see the overall flexibility with consoles in respect to PCs.

Now speaking of hardware, there are a few things I'm worried about concerning the XBOX 360. One example, we know that the Xenon processor is a 3 core CPU. Now the 3 cores share a meager 1MB L2 cache, which will be fine for single-threaded games. This is gonna become a problem as developers move towards multi-threaded titles. Assuming we have a title of such, the worst case scenario would be 2threadsx3cores = 6 threads splitting a 1MB L2 cache. Ouch.

XBOX 360 also doesn't support 1080p. Although I'd be willing to say that a game will still internally render at 720p and rely on either the Xbox 360’s TV encoder to scale the output to 1080i.

One final thing: Nintendo has lost the plot for good. I had a good laugh reading about the Revolution.

 

[equiski]

I see the console wars being alot closer this time around. Not that it matters to me, I doubt i'll have enough (expendible) money to buy a next generation console for quite some time :[

 

[stazi]

U R a techno game geek staz.

I'm a marketing geek, not a techno geek

And the techno geek dragon guy who replied - it has been said that although on paper the ps3 seems much better, technologically it's not too big a difference. Whilst the ps3 will be technologically better, in terms of the output, there won't be much differentiating them (although I'm guessing in the later stages of it's life cycle the ps3 will 'pwn' the xbox

 

[Collin]

Pfft, you are a geek stas.

Output right now, probably not much difference due to the single-threadedness of most incoming titles, but yes later.. PS3 can end up pwning your smelly butt.

Technogically speaking, I would say the PS3 can be regarded as somewhat considerably more advanced due to mainly it's processor. The PS3 Cell's on-die memory controller is gonna give it a kick-butt performance advantage over the Xenon's external one. Even a bigger cache on the XBOX wouldn't be able to offset the reduction in memory latency thanks to the on-die controller.

The Xenos is practically a 24 pipe R420 and the RSX an architecturally modified G70. However I should mention the Xenos boasts a unified shader architecture aswell as free 4xAA ('free' as in, no ramifications on performance due to the enabling of it.. quite ingenius on how this was implemented may I add), so this is quite good for the XBOX.

Either way, like I said I ain't be gettin' one of these new consoles. By the time they come out, ATi's R580 should be in the works and decent dual core AMD64s will become quite cheaper. I.e time to build a new PC.

 

[RanyofuKenyan?]

Pfft, you are a geek stas.

Output right now, probably not much difference due to the single-threadedness of most incoming titles, but yes later.. PS3 can end up pwning your smelly butt.

Technogically speaking, I would say the PS3 can be regarded as somewhat considerably more advanced due to mainly it's processor. The PS3 Cell's on-die memory controller is gonna give it a kick-butt performance advantage over the Xenon's external one. Even a bigger cache on the XBOX wouldn't be able to offset the reduction in memory latency thanks to the on-die controller.

The Xenos is practically a 24 pipe R420 and the RSX an architecturally modified G70. However I should mention the Xenos boasts a unified shader architecture aswell as free 4xAA ('free' as in, no ramifications on performance due to the enabling of it.. quite ingenius on how this was implemented may I add), so this is quite good for the XBOX.

Either way, like I said I ain't be gettin' one of these new consoles. By the time they come out, ATi's R580 should be in the works and decent dual core AMD64s will become quite cheaper. I.e time to build a new PC.

Yeah, I agree with everything you said, ps3 rocks cock.

 

[Timesplitter 01]

Import a paper wieght ( Xbox360) , you got to be kidding.

I am waiting for the PS3.

Rumours have it will be around $600-700

 

[RanyofuKenyan?]

Import a paper wieght ( Xbox360) , you got to be kidding.

I am waiting for the PS3.

Rumours have it will be around $600-700

So...you split time for a living? Must be interesting.

 

[stazi]

Pfft, you are a geek stas.

Output right now, probably not much difference due to the single-threadedness of most incoming titles, but yes later.. PS3 can end up pwning your smelly butt.

Technogically speaking, I would say the PS3 can be regarded as somewhat considerably more advanced due to mainly it's processor. The PS3 Cell's on-die memory controller is gonna give it a kick-butt performance advantage over the Xenon's external one. Even a bigger cache on the XBOX wouldn't be able to offset the reduction in memory latency thanks to the on-die controller.

The Xenos is practically a 24 pipe R420 and the RSX an architecturally modified G70. However I should mention the Xenos boasts a unified shader architecture aswell as free 4xAA ('free' as in, no ramifications on performance due to the enabling of it.. quite ingenius on how this was implemented may I add), so this is quite good for the XBOX.

Either way, like I said I ain't be gettin' one of these new consoles. By the time they come out, ATi's R580 should be in the works and decent dual core AMD64s will become quite cheaper. I.e time to build a new PC.

Of the 20 or so first gen games coming out this year, I got letters from two of the teams. The first was from David Wu, President/Director of Technology at Pseudo Interactive, and they are doing a game called Full Auto. His response to the threading issue was as follows:

We are developing Full Auto for XBOX 360 and it uses all 3 cores (and all 6 threads). It will be released in the launch window.

Short but sweet. The next one was from a programmer on the absolutely astounding looking title Oblivion from Bethesda Softworks. He said:

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, being developed for XBox 360 as well as PC, is HEAVILY multithreaded and definitely takes advantage of Xbox 360’s multiple cores (and on PC, will benefit from multiple CPUs and hyperthreading as well.) Unfortunately your information source is incorrect.

also from that same article they said a lot of the launch games are multithreaded.