True story about this interview:
I made poor Adam wait for me for like 20 min. I had totally underestimated the fact it was going to take me NEARLY AN HOUR to find parking at PAX. So I was totally frustrated, had been in a car in traffic for over 90 minutes, and was RUSHING into the convention center. I had just walked in, and had been keeping him and his crew waiting. So I sat down, and we rolled – no prep or anything. I’m surprised I didn’t come across as a complete buffoon given how cold I came into this.
I also found out this was going to be on-camera, which I’m not a big fan of, because, well… look at me. I have a face for Radio.
Anyway I appreciate the kind comments.
I’m not going to get into this PR thing again. There are clearly people who understand, and people who don’t. I’ve been a GAF member for a while, and was a reader long before that. I’ve been in gaming my entire professional career, and a player since videogames EXISTED. I come on GAF because I want to. I don’t get paid to post here or any other silly nonsense. Occasionally, the PR team will roll me out to do official interviews, which I’m not really a huge fan of doing.
Regarding the Kinect video I was talking about. There are several, but the one I like best is this. Also – this is now several months old. Latency is even better now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi5kMNfgDS4
Disc install – Turns out, at this point the speed and throughput of the consoles exceeds the transfer speeds of the disc. I don’t have the exact numbers, but the reason BOTH CONSOLES do mandatory installs is because you’d be actually giving up a ton of potential performance by bottlenecking the systems at the read speeds of the disc. Even on 360 games like GTAV are mandatory HDD installs – at this point reading from disc is just too slow. On top of which, the instant game switching feature goes away…
Performance: I’m not dismissing raw performance. I’m stating – as I have stated from the beginning – that the performance delta between the two platforms is not as great as the raw numbers lead the average consumer to believe. There are things about our system architecture not fully understood, and there are things about theirs as well, that bring the two systems into balance.
People DO understand that Microsoft has some of the smartest graphics programmers IN THE WORLD. We CREATED DirectX, the standard API’s that everyone programs against. So while people laude Sony for their HW skills, do you really think we don’t know how to build a system optimized for maximizing graphics for programmers? Seriously? There is no way we’re giving up a 30%+ advantage to Sony. And ANYONE who has seen both systems running could say there are great looking games on both systems. If there was really huge performance difference – it would be obvious.
I get a ton of hate for saying this – but it’s been the same EVERY generation. Sony claims more power, they did it with Cell, they did it with Emotion Engine, and they are doing it again. And, in the end, games on our system looked the same or better.
I’m not saying they haven’t built a good system – I’m merely saying that anyone who wants to die on their sword over this 30%+ power advantage are going to be fighting an uphill battle over the next 10 years…