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Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a big gamer, but at this point it seems like Microsoft and Sony are just selling the same hardware. There are very minor differences, but I remember when N64 was such a vastly different experience from the PlayStation. Even the original Xbox was differentiated - it had a hard drive and an Intel Pentium III and Nvidia graphics. Now, they're basically identical hardware. Maybe the PS5 will load games a little faster and maybe the Xbox Series X will have a little more power, but there's nothing radically different.

In a lot of ways, it feels like I should be able to buy one and then just buy a license to play games designed for the other system. Why should I buy (basically) the same processor, same RAM, same graphics, etc. twice?

N64 and PS1 could do very different things and the consoles felt very different and led to very different games. With XSX and PS5, I'd rather throw Sony some money so I can play PS5 games on an Xbox Series X (or Microsoft to play XSX games on the PS5) than create a lot of e-waste buying an undifferentiated platform twice.

Am I missing something about the consoles (other than the whole business/market aspect)?

View on HN

Just to inject a bit of history.

The previous eras of consoles had a design complexity that made it hard for developers to get anything done or tap the potential of the hardware. This mostly includes the fifth through seventh generation of video game consoles, so PS1-PS3 era, roughly 1993-2010.

The “radically different” architectures are sure a bit more exciting, but as a developer it’s gonna take a few years to really figure out how to use these different architectures to a reasonable semblance of their full potential. The Atari Jaguar had this crazy bus with a 68000 plus two custom CPUs on it, and to unlock the full potential you have to reduce bus contention which means paying attention to what data is local to the SRAM available to each processor. Maybe you need to rearchitect your game to really unlock the potential of the Jaguar. Fast-forward to 2006 and the PlayStation 3 has this fancy new Cell processor where… guess what… you need to pay attention to what data is on the local SRAM for each core and it was a nightmare to figure out how to really use that.

Honestly, I think that console manufacturers were in danger of getting strangled by game developers if they kept up these radical architectures.

Exclusivity, on the other hand, is a key tool in Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo’s arsenal. Good luck prying that away from them.

I definitely concur that the radically different architectures weren't good for developer productivity. There was a lot of crazy going on.

I guess it just seems like we're now wasting money on duplicate consoles. It feels like it would be better if Sony and Microsoft created a "standard" for manufacturers to build to. Zen 2 3.5GHz with a specified level of Radeon graphics and 16GB of RAM (with a bit more specifics). You could still have exclusives to your platform - Microsoft has DirectX, Xbox Live, and other exclusive software features. Developers would still want access to a platform for their games.

Don't they usually lose money on the actual hardware?

Nintendo is doing a slightly different thing with the Switch, but the PS4/XBONE and PS5/XBX it seems like they're just making people pay twice for the same hardware just because they've locked up some exclusives.

What's the business model there? 1) Lose lots of money selling a console; 2) We'll pay to develop first-party games that we'll sell to fewer people because they're exclusive; 3) We'll pay third-parties to make their games exclusive to our platform (as compensation for the lost sales due to exclusivity); 4) charge huge licensing fees for access to the platform for non-exclusive developers.

It just seems like there are a lot of money-losing (and consumer-happiness-losing) steps to get to #4. That's a lot of loss to society just to get to #4.

I guess the reason why they can charge such high prices for licensing is that developers know that consumers will likely only purchase one system. If people had access to both systems on a single box, then developers could negotiate them against each other. Now, developers can't negotiate them against each other unless they want to lose out on a lot of potential customers.

> It feels like it would be better if Sony and Microsoft created a "standard" for manufacturers to build to.

You're talking about two companies notorious for ignoring existing APIs and standards, coming up with their own proprietary systems, using marketing and FUD to knock down and strangle existing and emerging standards, and then spending the rest of their effort locking customers into their proprietary stuff. And they're not alone. It's the standard tech company mentality: Deliberately make your product different and incompatible with everyone else and compete instead of cooperate. Best case outcome is monopoly and customer lock-in. Most likely case is no one solution gains enough traction and you end up with 15 incompatible chat apps. Worst case is you emerge from the fight as HD-DVD.

This is basically what the "steam machine" model was. Standardized controller, hardware specifications, OS, available from multiple vendors. It was unfortunately a bit of a flop.

Not really, Steam Machines were just a PCs running Linux at a time when Linux was in a far worse state for gaming than they are now (and almost all of Steam Machines produced either had weak Intel-based graphics or AMD GPUs when their drivers were still woefully broken). There was never any standard for hardware or even controller and most machines were overpriced, ugly, huge or all of that.

So of course they flopped.

Steam Machines should have used standardized hardware (even if it was in terms of "levels" like "entry level" or "high end level"), software and peripherals the developers could rely on and Valve should have made sure that the hardware actually fit their respective levels.

But Valve never did that and while they still slowly update SteamOS, they have been long sidetracked by VR so there are low chances for them trying a second time.

They'd have been better off defining a standard with something vaguely like a year, or pinned against a console generation as a reference point.

That could help some but IMO the most important part would be to have stable drivers and standardized hardware. What sort of hardware that would be and when they'd updated it isn't that important (though i disagree about the year part - updates should be much less frequent than yearly, otherwise it defeats the purpose of having standardized anything as a year is too short of time span).

My impression of "steam machine" and SteamOS was that they were at least intended as a hedging strategy, at a time when Microsoft was seriously considering becoming a games distributor on Windows PCs. In that, it seems to me that Valve succeeded, in that there is now good awareness of SteamOS and Steam machines that Valve can start to refocus on should Microsoft start considering locking down on Windows apps again.

I still think that with more investment, Steam machines and SteamOS can become a moderate success, but until push comes to shove it seems to me likely that Valve thinks concentrating on traditional OSes and PCs is far more lucrative, while maintaining work on Linux (see: Proton) so Steam machines and SteamOS always remains a feasible backup platform.

What you're describing is a PC.

To be fair, it’s more about the PC that itself became a gaming console. (Try buying a non-“gaming” motherboard or monitor or even RAM these days.)

I almost got kicked out of a local HW retailer for asking "where can I find the parts for grown-ups wanting to get work done?". I did it to provoke, of course, so I probably deserved it.

Even the threadripper motherboards have RGB and are branded as gaming motherboards, despite being beaten by $300 processors any day of the week for games.

it makes me sad.

I always wondered who thought it was a good idea to make a gaming console with seven cores in 2006. iirc, most pc games at the time barely used more than one thread. even in 2020, most games have a main thread that pegs one core at 100% and creates a hard ceiling for fps. what were they thinking?

Maybe they took some cues from the people who released an eight-processor system in 1994? Granted, only two of those are CPUs.

The PS3 originally planned to run the game on the PPE and shaders on the SPEs; you could think of it as a single-core CPU with a 7-core GPU on one chip. At some point they realized this wasn't powerful enough so they added the RSX but that left the SPEs with no particular job to do. It was too late to redesign Cell so they just shipped it and punted the problem to game developers.

In retrospect, a G5+RSX with unified memory probably would have been much better.

> In retrospect, a G5+RSX with unified memory probably would have been much better.

Which is not _that_ far from what the 360 ended up with. The 360 CPU is basically a triple-core variant of the the Cell without the SPEs, and it has 512MB unified memory.

I'll throw out there that a G5 was never in the cards from a count count budget perspective.

*from a gate count perspective

It was supposed to have two Cells, with one of them focused on rasterization (sort of like larrabee). To meet that, they were expecting to clock it to 4GHz. It's really one of the first casualties in the end of Moore's law.

And I'd say that the SPEs were fantastic, and in a lot of ways was the only thing making up for the anemic GPU. It took a while for game devs to orient their thinking from "this thread is the render thread, this thread is the physics thread" to "this is the dependency graph of work that needs to be done, have all the (even heterogeneous) cores picking work off of that graph and completing them as fast as possible in order", but that was the right direction to go either way. That's about the only way to take advantage of the PS4/Xbone effectively too.

I hadn’t known about the jaguar’s hardware complexity until that article that was on HN a few days ago, it’s really fascinating. I think a lot of the complexity comes from needing to cram what’s essentially a high end gaming PC into a <$500 price point. You can do it by creating specialized hardware and putting developers face to face with the metal, but that comes at a cost of complexity.

The complexity is only an issue at the beginning, having standardized hardware without having to deal with hardware fragmentation and driver issues, is usually seen in the community as positive.

Hasn't NUMA support improved in the last 14 years though? Surely someone will try again.

> The previous eras of consoles had a design complexity that made it hard for developers to get anything done or tap the potential of the hardware.

I thought the developers that did figure out how to tap the potential of the hardware did quite well?

Do you want your game creators focuses on twonking around in the guts of an obscure, probably poorly documented and understood one-off architecture, or worried about creating an interested and enjoyable game?

This is a false dichotomy. If anything, I could see arguments that having to squeeze out capability it's a filter to only get things in the game that pass a development budget. Not just all you can throw at it.

I don't agree that it's a false dichotomy.

You have a limited budget and a limited number of employee-hours with which to create and ship a game.

Every hour spent fighting with the platform itself is very literally an hour spent not creating cool and fun stuff.

That time investment would only be worth it if a "novel" platform delivered huge gains in return for time invested. However, IMO we've long passed the point where that's feasible. CPUs and GPUs are very mature at this point: they are the result of decades of evolution and trillions of dollars of R&D.

Inventing your own radically-different, competitive, bespoke architecture for a game console at this point would require an investment orders of magnitude beyond the expected earning potential of these systems.

It also wouldn't be guaranteed to work.

Agreed I used too strong of language. I should have said it could be a false dichotomy.

My perspective is colored by being a huge fan of the demo scene and loving older games. A large part about what made some of them fun was understanding just how hard they were to do. Is also, I feel, why so many games did not have as much in game help. Couldn't put it in. There is something to be said for that.

My hunch is there was a selective pressure such that only really amazing things survived. That said, how many potentially amazing things were killed fighting the platforms? Could Daikatana have been amazing with more powerful tools? I honestly don't know.

Ars is running a series of game developer interviews.

All of them have a common theme, fighting with the platform is what made all of those classical games a success.

Demoscene and game development communities have a different point of view about "fighting the platform".

I've watched them -- they're great!

Those developers succeeded despite the struggles inherent to their given platforms.

If you watch (and pay attention to) the videos you'd see what many of those struggles were. Hardware bugs. Missing/bad documentation. Bugs in the software toolchain.

Those things don't make standout games better. They make every other game worse.

(And even the standout games would have been better -- or at least developed in less time -- had the developers not been forced to heroically struggle through those problems...)

They make them better, because had those obstacles not been there in first place, the game design decisions to be creative in spite of them would have not been taken.

For example, the shadow character in Prince of Persia.

Also, I am talking out of experience here, started coding in 1986 and was into portuguese demoscene PC/Amiga.

Having watched that I would agree that the memory limitations of the Apple II directly lead to the creation of that brilliant game feature. =)

However, I was responding to the comment chain below this comment:

   "Do you want your game creators focuses on 
   twonking around in the guts of an obscure, 
   probably poorly documented and understood 
   one-off architecture"

This was not about hardware limitations like the RAM limits Mechner faced while writing PoP. This is about bugs and other such things.

The XOR instructions used to draw the shadow-man weren't a "wonky" feature of the Apple II hardware... it was a pretty standard and well-documented feature.

In fact, in the video, if I recall correctly, Mechner specifically mentioned seeing the XOR instruction in the documentation. It was not "poorly documented." The Apple II was quite well documented.

    Also, I am talking out of experience here, started coding in 1986 
    and was into portuguese demoscene PC/Amiga.

I am always in awe of the demoscene... props to you.

However even though I am not a demoscene or game developer I am speaking from 20+ years software development experience. Nearly as long as you. I did not start doing this yesterday.

They can do both. Often the constraints of the hardware allow for some very unique games.

The PS2 was where this peaked. It has a weird multi CPU architecture with multiple CPUs and coprocessors, but was popular enough (dominant, really) that devs really invested in some cases. Shadow of the Colossus is a good example.

They tried the same playbook again with the PS3, but paniced when they realized how hard the cell SPEs would be to program to execute shaders effectively and added an Nvidia GPU. The PS3 was not sufficiently more popular than the Xbox 360 to justify the level of investment to really capitalize on the unusual architecture.

Well the panic was when Toshiba started slipping on their 100 SPE coprocessor design.

Yeah, Xbox and PlayStation are basically differentiating on services and exclusive IP at this point. Things like ability to cross play, online services, etc. Xbox Live used to be huge, and then Sony caught up. Microsoft tried to shift the Xbox One into a home entertainment center and that failed miserably. Sony has stuff like the PSVR.

Nintendo's really the only one really trying to do something different and not just go for the latest and greatest hardware. They have the benefit of having a lot of beloved IP and ability to make great games around them, so raw computing power is less of a focus.

What Nintendo is doing is different, but not that much anymore. They're using a ARMv8 cpu and a Nvidia Tegra GPU.

They're pretty close to what you'd find on a top tier smartphone really

>> They're pretty close to what you'd find on a top tier smartphone really

A top tier smartphone from a few years ago, maybe. My not-so-top-tier phone has better specs than my Switch.

I held off from getting a Switch until this past November, and it was a weird product called Ring Fit Adventure that ultimately made me pull the trigger.

How have you found that? I've been debating the same purchase.

You have to commit to it and have a bit of self discipline like any other exercise regime. But if you can do that it's a lot more fun than just running on a treadmill and lifting weights. The game inside is actually pretty good, and has some depth (but that depth kinda slowly unlocks as you play).

I run ~3 miles every day on the treadmill and dislike just about every minute of it. If i can get a fun gamified workout in the same amount of time that sounds way better.

I like it a lot. I mix it with Just Dance and Fitness Boxing. I only have fitness based software on my Switch.

I assumed just dance was awful for the longest time (motion controls, dancing, yearly releases, tacky box art - no way this could be any good right?). But then I played it at a party and was blown away by how much goofy fun it is, especially when everyone's inebriated.

It also gets your heart rate up to cardio levels (according to my fitbit at least)

it's very hard to buy right now, there's been a run on them due to coronavirus, and the rings are manufactured in China so supplies may not be replenished. They're going for hundreds of dollars.

Same as me. But looking forward to fight sim 2020; just starting getting the gears for xplane 11

> A top tier smartphone from a few years ago, maybe.

Well the switch was release several years ago, so it makes sense.

It wasn't top tier when it was released either.

The 2017 Gen 1 switch was using a variant of the X1 chip that had been around in other devices since 2015.

> Nintendo's really the only one really trying to do something different and not just go for the latest and greatest hardware.

At this point, that version of “different” is basically “sell a mid-range phone with a gamepad attached to it”. Don’t get me wrong, the Switch is great, but it’s very boring on the inside.

> Don’t get me wrong, the Switch is great, but it’s very boring on the inside.

That's been their strategy almost every console generation since the NES—that was a 8-bit console when 16-bit processors were common. I think maybe the N64 had some exciting hardware on the inside (at the time), but that's pretty much it. They look for excitement in the controller.

No, that wasn’t really true during the third and fourth generations (NES, SNES). Other consoles contemporary to the NES also used 8-bit processors. The definition of 8-bit depends on how you look at it, but I think we can agree that the Z80 is pretty similar to a 6502.

The SNES and Genesis continued the trend. You took a decent but cheap processor (65C816 or 68000), made a custom chip to draw sprites on the screen, and paired the whole thing with a dedicated processor to handle audio. You might call the 68000 a “32-bit processor” but however you label it, it’s not so different from a 65C816 which both have 16-bit ALUs and 24-bit address busses.

It wasn’t until later that we got people adding MORE CHIPS to make it go MORE FAST, and Nintendo stepping back from the race.

I did a homebrew project for the NES and before I started, I spent a long time sitting down analyzing how these consoles worked so I could choose the console I liked. The 6502 and Z80, despite their design differences and different clock speeds, end up being fairly similar in terms of performance (although I think the SMS is slightly faster).

You're right about the controller, but I don't know ... IMHO N64 is where they started to get less exciting as far as their internal hardware, but capabilities were getting more exciting overall.

The NES's CPU was a 6502 without decimal mode and certainly not exciting, but it's PPU wasn't too usual. 64 sprites, 56 colors, and a 2x2 screen virtual tilemap. I don't think any system had a big virtual tilemap quite like that at the time

SNES is definitely unique. Rotation and other transforms on a huge tilemap in hardware. No programmable sub-CPU or DSP is pushing pixels at all, you literally program 8 registers on the video chip to set the scaleX, scaleY and other parameters and the graphics chip outputs transformed pixels.

32x brought similar capability to the Genesis but it had some SH-1's performing transforms on textures I think, it was more similar to SuperFX than the SNES.

IIRC N64 was pretty much an upgraded PS1 polygon engine (hardware was SGI dervied like the PS1): one with a higher clock rate and a separate DSP for calculations instead of the GTE, but hamstrung by cramped cartridge ROM instead of a CD and really low texture cache.

After that Nintendo started using ATI for graphics hardware and adopted an IBM-designed PowerPC-arch CPU (as did Xbox 360) that lasted until the Will U.

The N64's RSP was quite exciting for the era because of the high degree of programmability. As it turned out, though, almost nobody did anything to program it. They used the microcode that shipped with the devkit. And since the N64 was the odd one out of the pack in other respects, it never really took off in terms of developer support.

So Nintendo's biggest lesson from the N64 was, in fact, that they needed to make boring hardware, because weird stuff wasn't going to be adopted anymore.

Sony learned the same thing almost a decade later with the PS3.

Education is funny. Sony should have learned that they had a killer feature with the PS2 if not ballooning price. And hanging the value add that old games would still work! Just amazing.

I dunno, the NES was pretty unique due to CPU selection, but generally in line with other 8-bit computers and systems of the era. Key developers even ported lots of games almost 1:1 from some home computers like the MSX.

The SNES was basically a mid-range Apple II with some slightly different hardware. The scaling and rotation hardware was getting to be pretty common in arcades and had been around for quite a while in Sega and Taito games. Nintendo focused on tilemaps instead of sprites, and later games quickly added more hardware in the carts to overcome the limitations beyond what F-Zero and Pilotwings could do.

I agree with you on the N64.

Sega had a completely different philosophy, theoretic backwards compatibility all the way back to the beginning. The SG-1000 was a spec revision of the Coleco and MSX specs, the Mark III was a rev of the SG-1000. The Genesis/Mega-drive had the same hardware, but then added an entire other console's hardware around it (IIR Master system compatibility was just a pin adapter). The Sega-CD was a console wrapped around the Genesis. The 32X was a console plugged into that.

The Saturn dropped the 8-bit stuff, but kept theoretic compatibility with the Mega Drive (it had a 68000 in it and a cartridge slot and was rumored to be geared up to be fully compatible at one point IIR).

Sony more or less followed suit for a while as well. The PS2 basically contained a PS1 in it.

> The SNES was basically a mid-range Apple II with some slightly different hardware.

I assume you mean the IIgs with the 65816 like the SNES.

This made me dive into what the IIgs video hardware was like. I know it had an Ensoniq chip for 32-voice sound but didn't know too much about the graphics. Looks like it could do 640x200 with 256 colors.

The Wolfenstein 3d port is interesting even if it does need an accelerator card to run decently. I'm not sure how that was pulled off on the SNES (I don't think Wolf3d had the SuperFX).

This high-level difference is really interesting, thank you. Do you know of any good more in-depth resources? Or even a book? I have tried to search but my DDG-foo just gives me dodgy emulator websites with none of the type of content I'm after.

I don't know of a great resource that compares one platform to another like that excellent parent post up there.

However, if you want to know more about individual platforms, you may want to look for:

1. Homebrew coding tutorials for various retro platforms

2. "War stories" from devs who pulled off these tricks.

Gamehut is fantastic, with some of each: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfVFSjHQ57zyxajhhRc7i0g/vid...

Ars Technica also has a "war stories" video series that is quite good!

> N64 was pretty much an upgraded PS1 polygon engine (hardware was SGI dervied like the PS1)

N64 was literally SGI derived, but PS1 was at best "SGI inspired". This comparison overstates the similarities.

> After that Nintendo started using ATI for graphics hardware

Nintendo was using the ArtX designs before ATI bought them. It was a very different design than the native ATI line.

"Lateral thinking with withered technology", mate. It's a long-standing Nintendo philosophy.

And with MS saying that exclusives would be for XBox and PC it makes more sense now to have a gaming PC and a PlayStation.

yeah anyone serious about gaming has a pc and will go with ps5 this gen

with microsoft and sony getting into game streaming even someone without a good pc will be able to play xbox games, xbox exclusives are worthless and the library doesnt have any real competitive ip

xbox console is essentially doa

For the developers and third-party publishers, it's a really big deal to have a standard of some kind. It means that they don't have to spend their time making the market: the console makers do that, and then they just sell into it. There is always grumbling about the various overheads of consoles, but as long as it results in unique experiences that people pay for, this state of affairs probably isn't going away either.

And the differentiation of special case acceleration like what we're seeing on these architectures is less exciting on its surface than strapping a high nominal spec to some wild programming model, but it's also a more sane way of achieving next-gen performance.

Cerny's PS5 talk put it this way: The PS1's "time to triangle" (i.e. the basics of the asset pipeline are proven and real development can commence) took 1-2 months, the PS2 doubled that, the PS3 doubled that again, and everyone protested so much that they got it back down to 1-2 months for PS4, and with PS5 they are aiming for under a month, which is actually really ambitious for any development platform!

Also, I sense that the special-case approach also has neat goodies in store down the line because console devs always end up abusing hardware features to get results beyond the original requirements. There's stuff in the PS5 arch intended for DSP code, for raytracing, for decompression, and probably other things too, but most of these things are a little bit more open than just being an accelerated single-task function. I haven't seen what they're doing on the XBox end yet but I wouldn't be surprised if it has some good details to geek out over too. These functions are uniformly win-wins since they give an immediate result that accelerates something common, and then we find out what else they're good for later. Sometimes they aren't, but it's common that they surprise.

Anyone who writes for a platform other than x86 is going to significantly complicate cross-platform ports for their platform. The other competitor would retain commonality with PC. So the days of POWER or Cell or whatever are done.

Once you accept x86 as a given, there’s only two companies of any significance on the market. You could hypothetically do an Intel CPU and an NVIDIA or AMD discrete GPU but then you don’t have an SOC and that increases system integration costs. You’d have to talk two competitors into licensing you their IP for integration and it’s just not really either easy or something those companies really do lightly or often.

AMD is basically the only game in town for a fast CPU core integrated with a fast GPU on a single package, at least for now. After Intel starts getting serious about XE you could hypothetically see a high performance SOC.

As in many areas, the world would be drastically different if patent law didn’t protect a processor’s “API” and x86 could be freely implemented by many companies. For some reason it’s (probably) legal with a software API but not a hardware one, despite the “magic” all being in the actual implementation and the instructions just being “function calls”.

Non-technical people can't begin to appreciate this problem, much less bother to solve it or even know how. Engineers need to lobby. Have you considered meeting your senator and creating a powerful coalition of interested parties to bring about legislative change? You can even recruit an economist to estimate the annual loss in economic surplus due to hardware API lock-in. Politicians often cave to narrowly interested groups that complain about a very tangible grievance (e.g. a NIMBY screaming "that building would block my view and increase traffic!") or very large corporations with a lot of resources. It doesn't have to be that way.

You might be able to get the average person on board if approached from a repair specifications angle.

What a given part does, what size it does it within, where it links up to other parts (with what sort of links), and how well it does the thing are all facts. After knowing those facts a 'cleanroom' implementation of a generic part shouldn't infringe on anything.

Convince the average person of that, and then extrapolate that to making a machine that responds the same exact way to a 3rd party's recipe.

Often, given physics and current or near possible tech, there's only a small number of possible answers, and for a given set of criteria one is going to be 'the best' answer.

Physics and Math are tools that express how nature works.

>AMD is basically the only game in town for a fast CPU core integrated with a fast GPU on a single package, at least for now. After Intel starts getting serious about XE you could hypothetically see a high performance SOC.

Intel could have done it with there Iris Graphics as well if they wanted to. The problem is Intel doesn't like low margin, the are too focused on their high margin they let slip the iPhone SoC and Consoles SoC.

Not saying this is a bad thing, financially Intel is still doing great

>There are very minor differences, but I remember when N64 was such a vastly different experience from the PlayStation. Even the original Xbox was differentiated

Did it ever matter though? I played a lot of video games and owned nearly every system. I played the systems that had the games I liked, and I don't recall anyone I knew doing differently. Games sell consoles, not specs.

That said, I can think of one counter example: Sega Genesis and their "Nintendon't" campain, as well as the subsequent "blast processing" marketing push. I remember kids talking about "blast processing" during our console holy wars at lunch. The genesis was also initially targeted at the NES.

And specs make games, specially in what concerns game design.

No they don't. Gameplay, story, character development... these things make games. Specs can enhance the experience, but a good looking piece of crap is still a piece of crap.

The XBOne is more powerful than the PS4, but it got murdered last generation. The 3DO and Jaguar both had specs that topped the competition at the time, but they didn't have the games and they failed.

Specs isn't about teraflops or triangles per second, rather what experiences the hardware allows to deliver, or what constraints it imposes on game design that have to be worked around to deliver a good experience.

Most are discussing this here from the point of view from gamers, I rather see it from game development point of view.

Sure, but ultimately there are things more important than visuals and load times. Look at the switch right now; it's basically a high end phone, but there are some amazing games being developed for it.

If I were making video games I know I'd get excited about developing for a platform which lets me do more than I could before, so I get it, but I don't recall any console in history winning their generation because of specs.

Again misreading what I write, specs go both ways, as limitation or as liberating, it is all a matter of what the platform provides and making games in fuction of what they allow.

In no moment have I equated specs to super computers on the bleeding edge of hardware engineering.

>In no moment have I equated specs to super computers on the bleeding edge of hardware engineering.

Don't know how you came to the conclusion that I implied that, but I guess I'm just completely missing the point you're trying to make here. You said:

>And specs make games, specially in what concerns game design.

And I'm saying that specs mean very little in relation to gameplay and story. Yeah, obviously you wouldn't be successful releasing the NES today, but no one would do that.

The switch has been beating the crap out of the XBOne since release. The reason is that it has better games. At the end of the day, consumers want fun games. All talk of specs and pretty graphics fades away if your console doesn't have those. It's like web devs who get all excited about their framework of choice. No one else cares.

Maybe I just read too much into that single sentence you first replied with?

So I guess we have been talking past each other.

That is exactly my point Switch specs lead to the game designers targeting it, to create game designs that would accommodate a more interesting experience, given the target platform.

Had the same team started with XBOne and the gaming experience would have had a completely different design.

I disagree, each company has a different take on a similar set of hardware, but the results are quite divergent. In particular Sony is pursuing some interesting, unique angles such as the new 3D Audio stuff, and the high performance SSD.

I found this comparison quite interesting, it goes into more detail about each platforms differences: https://kotaku.com/playstation-5-versus-xbox-series-x-the-te...

It is definitely not the same hardware, just because it has a couple of AMD CPU/GPUs on them doesn't mean programming is anything like a PC.

You are missing the way the CPUs, GPU, audio controllers and DMA channels are actually layed out, the low level programming aspect (console OSes are pretty much like bare metal programming), and how their GPUs offer capabilities and shading languages differ from mainstream hardware and hardware agnostic 3D APIs.

Agreed - I anticipate the experiences made possible these technological choices will be novel:

- Instant feeling gameplay: startup, load next, and world density, speed not seen since the Vectrex-era (1980's). - Uhhh, hopefully more than just that.

To the gamer, all that shouldn’t matter besides the game experience that are possible, the controls allowed and the exclusives. If the developers cannot utilize he API to properly handle the power nothing matters. The only spec you can care about is the SSD speed, that most can relate to.

> Am I missing something about the consoles

They are just PCs with shitty OS and lockins now

I don't think its fair to say its a shitty OS. They're single purpose PCs with an OS tuned for single app performance. One is NT based and the other will probably be BSD based. I believe the Switch is a fork of Android.

Apparently there's a bunch of FreeBSD code in it as well.

Switch uses a micro kernel OS, it has nothing to do with Android.

It makes a bit more (business-)sense thinking of those consoles as hardware-dongles to play certain exclusive games, the same way coffee-machines have become hardware dongles for certain types of coffee capsules, etc...

Thankfully the PC as a gaming platform has survived despite being declared dead for the last 20 years, and more and more console games are making the jump and are also available on PC (there's also exclusivity deals on PC, see the Epic Store, but those are usually limited to a few months).

The whole situation sucks for users, but unfortunately it's the business model everybody is following today.

If they keep going this way, it's probably only a matter of time before a common "gaming box" standard is set and these companies just become manufacturers against this standard.

It's happened before to various levels of success.

It was tried at least a couple of times (3DO and Steam machines) but it failed for various reasons, I think mostly because the result wasn't very cost-competitive with proprietary consoles.

Yeah, and others: MSX, Nuon, and the modern PC compatible systems.

However, outside of gaming (and even computing), it becomes very common once it's no longer a differentiator to build your own version of a thing. Consider VHS, DVD, shipping containers, standardized faucet fixtures and so on.

Already tried by Steam with SteamOS and Steam machines [1]. They even developed a custom controller. I haven't heard much about it since its launch roughly 5 years ago, however I would assume it is all but dead now.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(hardware_platfo...

> In a lot of ways, it feels like I should be able to buy one and then just buy a license to play games designed for the other system

This is slowly becoming the state of reality for Xbox, at least in regards to PCs. They've dropped exclusivity for all of their titles, meaning every game Microsoft produces will be also released for PC. And for many of those, if you buy the game, you get it for both the Xbox and PC.

It remains to be seen if the trend continues to grow outside Microsoft though, and it seems unlikely that it would occur between Xbox and Playstation.

From a systemic perspective, it never really made sense for lots of consumers to be buying multiple consoles. Sure, the N64 and PS1 were good at different things, but you could have built a super-console with most of the advantages of both for less than the combined cost of an N64 and PS1. And then games could use both N64 and Playstation features simultaneously.

The reason for owning multiple consoles, then and now, is to play exclusives. And yes, it totally creates e-waste, but what are you going to do about it?

Exclusives have always been anti-consumer.

That's been the case forever though. How many systems used the 6502 chips? Vic-20, C64, NES, 2600, Apple IIe? It was often the same chip, with slightly different (rarely significantly higher powered, just different) memory and i/o around it.

Despite only having 2 (ok 3) popular CPUs (Z80, 6502 and the 6809), 8-bit home computers had massively different hardware.

The CPU only played a very minor role in those machines and mainly was used as a controller for the video and audio custom chips which did the actual hard work.

I agree with you, and am having a hard time talking myself into a new console purchase. I have a gaming PC, which is what these consoles have become with the added insult of paying subscription fees for online play.

Aren’t most games available for both major consoles?

Most games are, but the exclusives tend to be very good.

Most, but I will be buying a Playstation just because of FFVII. I so wish they have made it an PS5 title launch I would have brought both together.

it's true

the older you go back the deeper they were in a way, there's a book about Nintendo with a chapter on how Nintendo hardware team managed to add (or free) a kilobyte of ROM then told the software team. Everybody stopped because that kilobyte meant making a whole new level.

Today even with 2x the TFLOPS I don't think it will make a difference

Yeah I think you're right, but the main way to differentiate is probably the exclusives. Halo -> Xbox, Resident Evil etc. -> PlayStation.

you just described a PC

If you can’t install Linux on it, it’s not a PC.

so the ps3 was a PC?

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