longest thread title by me... ever...

Quote Originally Posted by Shigeru Miyamoto
"You know, in regard to the power of the Nintendo Revolution versus, say, the Xbox 360, we're looking at making a small, quiet, affordable console," he said. "If you look at trying to incorporate all that, of course we might not have the horsepower that some other companies have, but if you look at the numbers that they're throwing out, are those numbers going to be used in-game? I mean, those are just numbers that somebody just crunched up on a calculator. We could throw out a bunch of numbers, too, but what we're going to do is wait until our chips are done and we're going to find out how everything in the game is running, what its peak performance is, and those are the numbers that we're going to release because those are the numbers that really count."
Speaking of the Sony vs. Microsoft graphics horse race, the most common criticism that developers have leveled at Sony's and Microsoft's next-generation consoles is that their PPE-based designs perform poorly on physics, AI, and game control code. These allegations are borne out by my own analysis of the actual console hardware, which lacks dynamic execution and is relatively short on branch-prediction resources (compared to something like the PPC 970) and cache. The PPE is ill-equipped for the kind of branchy integer codes that make up the physics, AI, and control portions of a game. The emerging, prelaunch consensus is therefore that these two next-generation consoles will give us a raft of games that are visually stunning to look at but lacking in the very areas that Nintendo claims that their own next-generation console will revolutionize.
Microsoft has already, by all accounts, won the dev tools battle. Everyone from John Carmack to Hideo Kojima has said that Microsoft's XNA toolchain is superior to the PS3's development environment in terms of getting games out the door quickly. That Microsoft can put together a great development environment should come as no surprise, given that the company is the world's largest software vendor.

Sony, on the other hand, has historically not been so developer-friendly. For years, the number-one developer gripe about the PS2 was poor documentation, and indeed I've heard from more than one developer that my own articles on the PS2 were often used as English language introductions to the console. (The documentation situation must have been dire, because those articles weren't even written as developer documentation, and I can't imagine using them as such.) It's too early to say how quickly the PS3 development situation will improve, but it almost certainly will because it has to. Nonetheless, Microsoft currently appears to have the jump on Sony in this crucial area.

As for Nintendo, all the Nintendo developers are raving Revolution as a development platform. One expects a certain amount of this out of loyalty, but it is likely that it's quite easy to develop for. Its hardware is probably the most conventional of three, so that alone will make developers' lives easier.
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