RT is a joke but what's wrong with XBox One?
So for the first time in XBox's history, the XBox is launching with strictly weaker hardware than its closest competitor. (XBox 360 at least had a GPU that was 2x stronger than the PS3 GPU, and the XBox 360 also had faster RAM. PS3 won on CPU power... but lost out on everything else.)
There is terrible, terrible press across the whole internet about the XBox One-Eighty. Video Gamers overall have a negative impression on it.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/12 http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/21
And did it matter at all? From what I remember of this current generation's history, if games looked any different on the PS3 than the 360, the developers blamed it on the tools and how difficult the PS3 was to program for, not on the weaker hardware. Developers made cross-platform titles for the Xbox first and ported to the PS3 because Xbox was easier.
When I was 16 years old I argued console hardware specs. These days I don't hear many experience gamers mention it at all, because when it comes down to it, minor differences in specs doesn't really matter.
Certain memory transfers on the PS3 are just straight up broken: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1007286/ps3-hardwar...
The XBox was "easier" to program for because it was a more balanced system. Overall, the XBox360 was both simpler and more powerful.
By making XBox360 more powerful, previous soft-exclusives like Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid made their way to the XBox360. Sony lost a lot of publishers because of the boneheaded hardware they shoved into developer's faces.
It is Microsoft that has made this mistake in this generation. Not only from a policy stand point against indie gamers (ie: Oddworld moving to PS4 exclusive title. As well as SuperGiant Games making Transistor PS4 exclusive), but also by launching with weaker (yet paradoxically more expensive) hardware.
The PS4 will be easier to program for, it has a simpler more unified architecture, and Sony's policies are more friendly towards developers.
While it barely matters for the end consumer, it is easy to see which systems producers will prefer in the coming generation.
The architectures seem near identical--the only big difference would seem to be that the XBO will have dedicated framebuffer memory, probably hidden behind a system call anyways.
As for being more friendly to developers, Microsoft has always had the best tools and documentation for developers (long live SGI, poor bastards).
I don't really see where you're getting this from.
It is dead obvious which console has won the support of indie developers.
Microsoft may have superior documentation... but when you _require_ indie gamers to find a publisher before they're allowed to make an XBox one game, the number of titles on your system will suffer significantly.
A number of PS4 indie developers want to program for the XBox One, but they can't due to Microsoft's boneheaded policy. It doesn't matter how good the XBox One development kit is, if Microsoft fails to hand it off to innovative developers.
Again, XBox One _POLICY_ is bad for indie developers.
Eh? Where are you getting that? The Xbox 360 Xenos GPU was based on ATI's R520 and the PS3's RSX was based on Nvidia's G70 architecture. They were roughly equivalent to each company's flagship Radeon X1800 and GeForce 7800 lines at the time.
The real design win for the 360 was a shared memory pool instead of a split CPU/GPU memory architecture, but I've never seen anything to suggest that the 360 had a GPU anywhere near "2x stronger."
2x faster Triangle Setup rate, 4x faster Vertex Shader processing, 50% faster pixel shaders, 2x faster Anti-Aliasing...
The PS3 makes up for it as they use all of those Cell processors basically as a GPU. But in terms of pure GPU Girth, the XBox360 was just straight up easier to use and more powerful.
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Basically... despite all the major press about the PS3 "supercomputer", XBox360 was a simpler, better designed gaming machine. In in this upcomming generation, PS4 out-xboxed the XBoxOne. The PS4 is a dead-simple straightforward architecture that simply throws more hardware at the problem. (while somehow being cheaper...)
Xenos has a unified shader architecture while RSX does not. That means that during microbenchmarks, it can dedicate all of its shaders to that task, and put up relatively impressive numbers. In reality, that means that those shaders can't be used for anything else, meaning your real world performance will look nothing like the microbenchmark. AA performance is almost entirely due to the on-package EDRAM. While that was a smart design decision, it's not indicative of some huge overall power advantage.
Look, Microsoft made a number of very smart design choices with the 360 that have allowed developers to squeeze a lot out of the hardware, there's no doubting that. I think it's also fair to say that Xenos is a bit faster than the RSX -- as was the case with that generation of discrete GPUs from ATI and Nvidia -- but throwing around things like twice as powerful and "crushes" is getting into hyperbole territory if you're looking at actual performance from the hardware.
I don't know it this will have much impact on the actual sale numbers, the release date is still quite some time in the future and the PS4 despite all the love it currently gets from the gaming scene also requires a Sony account you have to pay monthly to be usable.
I am pretty sure it will play out like it always does: lots of complaining and in the end it will get bought nevertheless. [1]
http://www.idigitaltimes.com/articles/18620/20130701/xbox-18...
Don Mattrick is now fired.
However saying that the Xbox One will fail like the WinRT did is very premature; the PS3 had a slow start and still made a respectable showing this generation, and the 3DS was considered a debacle until a price cut and the right games came along and it suddenly exploded in popularity.
But Earthbound on Virtual Console, and Pikmin 3 coming out make it a compelling buy already IMO.
Edit: OP does not like the XBox One ... my bad. :)