Quote: "Of course for all I know this could be industry standard procedure. And let's not forget XBOX360's CPU is, a PPC, and what do Mac's run on, surprise surprise, PPC's."
Both use the same CPU, even down the actual model.
The Alpha Hardware runs Dual G5 904 Processors, 256MB PC2700 RAM, ATI X800 XT (Special Shader 3.0 Edition R421 or something); finally X-Box hardware even in the original was just a modified USB port.
So it's very little wonder, that what was being used was the Alpha Hardware. Especially given at Rare, the actual finish console hasn't arrived yet.
All there is, is a Xenon Developer Box. Much of the bulk from the G5 is mainly cast away but effectively it's the same thing. The reason it's being said it's running at 30% the speed of the final machine is because it is.. no one said that gamers WERE running on the official hardware, in-fact the explicit comments about running at 30% of the speed were to say 'this ain't the final console'
If they'd put a G5 on display though, you can imagine the comments from the Sony Fanboys 'Oh Microsoft haven't even finished thier console yet.. HA-HA'; this isn't true at all. The fact is that no-one has had time to develop on it yet. You have the Sony guys in thier PR conference saying 'oh it took us 2 weeks to put this demo together of Unreal 3 for the PS3' ... but I would bet my bottom dollar that they weren't running on Playstation 3 hardware. Especially given it has another 12month of development to-go.
The guys at Rare were given an option to try to convert as much as we could in-time for E3; or to run with the stable Alpha and add specific demo content.
The decision was unanimous really. Go with the Stable Alpha.. no one wanted to risk porting issues and then NOT be able to show up at E3 at all; or even worse, display something with bugs.
Really the best decision would've been to put a Mac G5 into one of the boxes, but again can you imagine what Sony would do if that was found out too?
At the end of the day, Microsoft WERE showing games that everyone was impressed with, and it was atleast on relatively similar hardware.
Technical specs wise, well I greatly doubt either the PS3 or X-Box 360 are capable of what the manufacturers are claiming.
both machines CPU over 200 GFlops when the current quickest Dual PC Solution is only 20 Glops?
Graphics card wise we STILL have no way to physically test this. There's no such thing as a Whetstone or Dhrystone benchmark for Graphics Cards.. even if there was, it would be limited by the CPU. Meaning it could never rise above what the CPU can push.
How could you possible test something like that?
