After countless rumors regarding the next Xbox and the PS4, NVIDIA dev Timothy Lottes has gone out on a limb to explain things in a way that we can all understand.
According to the post, which he has since been taken down, Lottes claims that if Eurogamer's reported Xbox 720 and PS4 specs are true, key differences in the operating system and system libraries of the new hardware could make PS4 the more appealing platform for developers. More importantly, the alleged hardware makes the idea of making console-exclusive games much more appealing:
"If PS4 has a real-time OS, with a libGCM style low level access to the GPU, then the PS4 1st party games will be years ahead of the PC simply because it opens up what is possible on the GPU. Note this won't happen right away on launch, but once developers tool up for the platform, this will be the case."
"I could continue here, but I'm not, by now you get the picture, launch titles will likely be DX11 ports, so perhaps not much better than what could be done on PC. However if Sony provides the real-time OS with libGCM v2 for GCN, one or two years out, 1st party devs and Sony's internal teams like the ICE team, will have had long enough to build up tech to really leverage the platform."
Conversely, Lottes says he's concerned that the next Xbox's spec will keep developers from pushing the PS4 and high-end PCs to their limits:
"On this platform I'd be concerned with memory bandwidth. Only DDR3 for system/GPU memory pared with 32MB of "ESRAM" sounds troubling....If this GPU is pre-GCN with a serious performance gap to PS4, then this next Xbox will act like a boat anchor, dragging down the min-spec target for cross-platform next-generation games."
Of course, there's a similar gap between the PS3 and Xbox 360. The PS3's grandiose specs, including Sony's propriatary Cell processor, led to the console's initial $500-$600 price tag and slow adaption rate. Lottes notes that the next Xbox's specs seem to made with backwards compatability in mind, despite rumors that the platform may not offer such a feature:
"There are a bunch of reasons they might ditch the real-time console OS, one being that if they don't provide low level access to developers, that it might enable a faster refresh on backwards compatible hardware. In theory the developer just targets the box like it was a special DX11 "PC" with a few extra changes like hints for surfaces which should go in ESRAM, then on the next refresh hardware, all prior games just get better FPS or resolution or AA. Of course if they do that, then it is just another PC, just lower performance, with all the latency baggage, and lack of low level magic which makes 1st party games stand out and sell the platform."
While Lottes is essentially making a series of educated guesses, it's an interesting window into how the minute details of a console imply sweeping technical and philosophical differences between the two consoles. Sony could be on the verge of "winning" the next-gen console wars. We'll know more details once Sony unveils the PS4 on February 20th.
