Fud, fud, fud...

MS has really been on the warpath against the PS3, both in public and from the shadows. The latest has been this particular bit of FUD that restates many of the same things that MS has been saying all along and Sony has been disputing all along. Sony isn’t entirely innocent of firing back though. The PSM magazine had this bit of FUD in it as well: ….particularly when it comes to ease of development for the system: how it compares to PS2, and more importantly, Xbox 360. “The *****ing this round sounds opposite of the last. Both are friendly, but the PS3 may actually be friendlier,” reports one of out PS2 and Xbox 360 development sources, who wished to remain anonymous. “People are finding that the [xbox] 360 has some stupid bottlenecks.”

MS bashing the Cell chip (Link dead)

Now the thing to remember about MS saying this system isn’t the best for gaming is that the dominant console of this generation actually uses 2 VU processors that are very similar to the SPE processors. This means there are thousands of developers familiar with using this style of chip for gaming. The PS2 developers are going “7 Vector processors instead of 2? SWEET!” and “A unified architecture for the IO processors? Awesome!” They no longer have to code in 3 different architectures to develop a game. The MIPS32 bit chip for general purpose IO, the VU’s for graphics output, the MIPS128 for general purpose processing? Nope, just the PPE for General purpose and the SPE for all IO, physics, math/vector, and Graphics processing. Much simpler. 

As for the rumors that there will be more exclusives due to the PS3 and Xbox’s different archs? That didn’t stop them from porting to the PS2, GC, and Xbox last generation despite the fact that the PS2 was hugely different from the other two and very similar to the PS3.

As for the 256MB of Memory, this is still higher than average compared to PC cards, and it’s 128 times as large as the PS2’s memory. Again, there are thousands of PS2 developers out there that are really good at streaming textures into the PS2’s 2mb graphics memory as needed. It will probably never be an issue. 

Besides. Unified memory arch? What the heck? The GDDR memory in the 360 is slower than the XDR ram in the PS3 to begin with, now you’re forcing two separate chips with 4 separate processors to timeshare their reads from the slower memory? I wonder if this is part of the “stupid bottlenecks” they’re talking about?