Have Next Gen Killed The PC?

[matthew]

I believe to see the PC versus consoles as X360 versus PS3. The X360 clearly has more efficient hardware design, but its specs are somewhat below the PS3, it can still compete with it very well due to the poor hardware design of the PS3 (though the specs are higher).
The PC will indeed get better than consoles, but its architecture, or hardware, will remain flawed.
Also, though consoles use "PC parts," it's just that all parts are the same: they are computer parts and fit wherever. But the PS3 & X360 is more like a PC architecture rather than a console architecture (that is; both are flawed).

I have always wondered... is it just that Microsoft and Sony are bad at making hardware or is it that Nintendo are geniuses? I mean, Nintendo clearly make suprior hardware and quality (hard to break). By this I mean that the console performs good, draws little power and is not too big and bulky.

Not sure on bad at making hardware but if they use parts that are already available it just means that they have to work less.

Nintendo is an innovator they aren't afraid to try new things but thats also a double edged sword

 

[matthew]

Could a "gaming OS" be made?

Hmm I just browsed on something very interesting.
The Lindbergh hardware used by Sega for their Arcades

System 16 - Lindbergh Hardware (Sega)

Sega Lindbergh - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


I supposed since that is based on PC technology it sort of shows the gaming OS theory in motion

 

[swaaye]

I don't think 360 is flawed so much. It's hardware is not PC componentry at all. It is all custom stuff. PS3 has a GPU very similar but not identical to 7900/7600. Cell CPU sure is not PC related at all. Both, however, are pretty tough to program for. Harder than previous consoles perhaps other than Saturn.

As for a gaming OS, look to the old PC games that used bootable floppies. They ran their own OS too basically. I don't mean a DOS bootdisk either. Though, DOS might as well have been a gaming OS. There was little OS overhead, just driver overhead. The game had full hardware access.

The problem is that PCs have too wide a range of hardware possibilities and so this was an awful nightmare. Consoles don't have varying hardware and so it's much safer to allow full hardware access, and much easier for the programmers to optimize (or just get working at all). Eventually driver libraries showed up, like the Miles Sound Drivers for sound cards and VESA VBE for video. Attempts to standardize.

Then Win9x came along with DirectX. They solved compatibility headaches by creating an API that allowed drivers to control the lower levels of the hardware and DirectX provides the calls to the drivers. All cards need to support a standard set of features. Before this there was no guarantee that all cards would support needed capabilities. It limits low-level access but increases ease of programming and debugging immensely.

Basically to make it possible to create games that work on as many machines as possible, it's necessary to remove low-level access. That's why PC hardware never really gets fully utilized. The APIs may never take advantage of parts of hardware. OpenGL gets around some of this by allowing custom extensions. But, game programmers can't sit around optimizing for a GeForce 6 instead of generalizing for all hardware.

Also look to 3D APIs like Glide, RRedline, Speedy3D, etc for more low-level PC programming examples. And sound APIs like A3D. They are both good and bad.

 

[Doomulation]

I don't think 360 is flawed so much. It's hardware is not PC componentry at all. It is all custom stuff. PS3 has a GPU very similar but not identical to 7900/7600. Cell CPU sure is not PC related at all. Both, however, are pretty tough to program for. Harder than previous consoles perhaps other than Saturn.

Oh no, it's flawed. Awfully flawed. The CPU is a stripped down PowerPC processor with multiple cores to make up for the speed loss for thing like no branch prediction and all that.

 

[matthew]

I don't think 360 is flawed so much. It's hardware is not PC componentry at all. It is all custom stuff. PS3 has a GPU very similar but not identical to 7900/7600. Cell CPU sure is not PC related at all. Both, however, are pretty tough to program for. Harder than previous consoles perhaps other than Saturn.

As for a gaming OS, look to the old PC games that used bootable floppies. They ran their own OS too basically. I don't mean a DOS bootdisk either. Though, DOS might as well have been a gaming OS. There was little OS overhead, just driver overhead. The game had full hardware access.

The problem is that PCs have too wide a range of hardware possibilities and so this was an awful nightmare. Consoles don't have varying hardware and so it's much safer to allow full hardware access, and much easier for the programmers to optimize (or just get working at all). Eventually driver libraries showed up, like the Miles Sound Drivers for sound cards and VESA VBE for video. Attempts to standardize.

Then Win9x came along with DirectX. They solved compatibility headaches by creating an API that allowed drivers to control the lower levels of the hardware and DirectX provides the calls to the drivers. All cards need to support a standard set of features. Before this there was no guarantee that all cards would support needed capabilities. It limits low-level access but increases ease of programming and debugging immensely.

Basically to make it possible to create games that work on as many machines as possible, it's necessary to remove low-level access. That's why PC hardware never really gets fully utilized. The APIs may never take advantage of parts of hardware. OpenGL gets around some of this by allowing custom extensions. But, game programmers can't sit around optimizing for a GeForce 6 instead of generalizing for all hardware.

Also look to 3D APIs like Glide, RRedline, Speedy3D, etc for more low-level PC programming examples. And sound APIs like A3D. They are both good and bad.

They did run their own "OS's" but where they say as monolythic as windows or fully fledged as Linux.

Most likely they were used as an api to program for or provide "multimedia" functions and frontend for gamesaves etc