The price is indeed steep and the launch games will most likely not stomp the opposition.
I did buy an Ati 1900XTX at € 631 first day the retailers (blame the EU vat) had it this year but it\'s probably the first time i\'m not going to pre order a next gen console like i used to. Eventually i do plan on getting the 60Gb PS3 though.
However, Tim Sweeney\'s future vision does favour PS3\'s architecture. When asked :
Interviewerten years from now do you vision that we will see... GPU\'s handling graphics, and PPU\'s handling physics, CPU doing A.I. and that kind of thing or do you think we will see some kind of blend of the 3 technologies or maybe 2 of them?
SweeneyLooking at the long term future, the next 10 years or so, my hope and expectation is that there will be a real convergance between the CPU, GPU and non traditional architectures like the Physicx chip from Ageia, the Cell technology from Sony. You really want all those to evolve in the way of a large scale multicore CPU that has alot of non traditional computing power as a GPU has now. A GPU processes a huge number of pixels in parallel using relitevly simply control flow, CPU\'s are extremely good at random access logic, lots of branching, handling cache and things like that. I think really, essential, graphics and computing need to evolve together to the point where the future renders I hope and expect will look alot more like a software render from previous generations than a fixed function rasterizer pipeline and the stuff we have currently. I think GPU\'s will ulimately end up being... you know when we look at this 10 years from now, we will look back at GPU\'s being kinda a temporary fixed function hardware solution, to a problem that ultimately was, just general computing.
Looking at it that way.. one could say that Sony\'s setting steps to hardware & software development now... instead of doing full player control interface
innovation right now.
A decade is a longterm vision though and maybe too long for the current videogame industries bussiness models.
The one who\'s really doing carpe diem is imo, Microsoft which is also evident from the Peter Moore interviews. They\'re pushing the envelope to sell as many units as possible now. This reminds me indeed of Sega\'s years ; management decissions which imo were focused on \'right here, right now\'.
