The Jux Entente

Feature online. I’ve got something planned for tomorrow, too, although I’d like to get our now massive amount of back commentaries done while I’m at it. Time to get the Froggie Stick out of retirement. Do you like thorns, boys?

Have you ever wondered what P.T. Barnum could have done with modern technology? Isn’t it scary?
Well, my weeks of hell at work have come to an end. I am free again. Not only that, but my sanity might just be recovering from the severe hits that spending two days this week reading shelves for four hours dealt to it. Do you know what reading shelves is? That’s where you put the entire library in proper order, by reading all the spines. All of them. With my free time back, I’ll be writing more of my written features for the site, instead of resorting to doing the Picasso updates like I have recently. In fact, I was thinking of doing a certain…something…and the fact that someone mentioned it in an email lately has made me sure I will do just that. Zen has also promised me that he will finish his feature tonight, although I’ve heard that one before. I’m not sure if the long ass news post below is going to be archived in any way, although I might think of some way to do it. I sure as hell don’t want to turn it into a feature. Perhaps I’ll toss it into a Surly Guy and Jesus or something. And just to show you I have a sense of humour about the whole thing, even though I maintain my position of rooting out and destroying ignorance wherever it may take hold, I have created the following image with the el cheapo webcam for your enjoyment.
Pictured: NES, SNES, N64, GameBoy, GameBoy Advance (Glacier), GameCube (Jet), two NES controllers, one second edition Zapper, two SNES controllers, one SNES mouse, one N64 controller, one Rumble Pak, two GameCube controllers (Jet, Indigo), one WaveBird.
Not Pictured/Visible: First generation Zapper, memory card 59, memory card 251. Metric buttock load of games.
Sure, I also have the Sony consoles, a few Segas, and the ancient megalith of the Atari 2600, but those wouldn’t be funny to show, would they?

Okay, I’ve removed the original newspost that was here with just a link to the new Picasso feature that’s online and a bunch of profanity. I’ve decided to talk about something. The new feature is still online, of course, and it’s “hidden” message there everyone else here is lazy is still mind numbingly true. But, I have a rant for you. I wasn’t planning on addressing this here, but it’s been bombarding me from everywhere lately, and a recent rant over at Penny Arcade has driven me to it. Go what read Gabriel said and come back. Why? Because I’m in complete agreement. Usually, if I have any sort of connection with those funny bastards, it’s with Tycho, since our game tastes are much more similar. But, Gabe is spot on this time baby. Ever since one of my own friends became an Xbox fanboy (note: it is NEVER, EVER good to be a fanboy of ANYTHING…except Final Fantasy), my rage at this stupidity has been growing. Xbox games suck. It’s that simple. Halo had repetitive, boring levels. Dead or Alive 3 had no gameplay, but hot chicks in less than amble clothing. Morrowind is better on the PC in the first place. And, here’s the kicker, that’s the entire roster of decent games for the system right there. Panzer Dragoon Orta is coming up, but I don’t think we have to worry about it or any of Sega’s other games remaining exclusive to the Xbox for long. Why is this, you ask? Because they sell like ass on the Xbox. That’s right, the only decent developer the platform has, and they get lazy sales. You’re dooming your own platform there, guys. They’ve already made Sonic, their biggest franchise, a Nintendo exclusive. Expect more to move soon.
So why is it that with no decent games, or at least no must-own games, on the system, people keep buying it? It’s because of this illusion of it being the most powerful console out there. This “buy the best” American attitude has been manipulated quite successfully here. This is also why the console doesn’t sell as well in nations where the average person doesn’t have an ego the size of a decent blimp. Now, not to remove credit where it is due, the Xbox does have more raw computing power than either the GameCube or Playstation 2. But if you know anything about computers, you know that end results don’t boil down to who has the highest clock speed. Ever. Here’s some specifications for you.

1. The GameCube uses 1TSRAM as its main memory, the Xbox uses standard PC DDRRAM for its main memory. 1TSRAM is the same RAM that’s used as on-board caches in CPU’s. It is much faster than DDRRAM. Also, in the Xbox, all the memory is shared between the system and the graphics. This results in a performance loss since the graphics card is using the main memory all the time, sucking up bandwidth. That’s not to say that the graphics used by the GameCube don’t occasionally store information in the main memory, but this has to be done far less often, not resulting in the continuous performance hit.
2. The GameCube can render 8 textures in one pass. The Xbox can do only 4. I’m not going to toss the math out here for you, but it all but makes games like Star Fox Adventures impossible on the Xbox. If you’re still scratching your head, go make a pile of 100 very heavy rocks. Carry them to your house 8 at a time. Then, carry them back to their original location 4 at a time. Fun, isn’t it?
3. Likewise, the GameCube has quad layer bump mapping. The Xbox has only dual. See the rocks example above.
4. The Xbox’s CPU runs at a clockspeed of 733 MHz, the GameCube’s at 485 MHz. Here is where people start to envision that clock speed means everything. However, the Xbox CPU is an x86 spec just like you can buy over the counter anywhere. The GameCube’s CPU is a specially designed RISC processor. It also has twice as much onboard cache as the Xbox’s CPU, resulting in a nice performance boost right there. What the two different design specs end up meaning is that the GameCube CPU can do much more work at a lower clock speed than the Xbox’s could at the same speed. You have to remember that the MHz rating only shows you how quickly the CPU cycles, and not how much work the processor actually does in one of those cycles. That’s how come a 900 MHz Macintosh is just as fast as a PC, and why my AMD 1.53 ghz system will out benchmark a P4 2.0 ghz.
5. The Xbox uses a modified GeForce 3 for it’s graphics processor. Another, essentially, over the shelf component. The GameCube’s graphics card was specially designed by ATI for use in the GameCube. I’ve already gone over the extra hardware effects that this component is capable of without resulting to draining the main CPU, all of this evidence of the chip’s newer design.
6. The fact that the Xbox is based entirely on PC architecture is readily apparent above. It even uses a modified version of DirectX. This means that programmers already know the system inside and out, which is what has resulted in the graphics you see in games now. This also means they aren’t going to get much better. There are few if any new tricks to learn here folks. You can get power cheap by using PC components, but as the good people at ASCI White found out recently, you inherit all of its problems as well. The GameCube was designed to be a gaming machine first and only. It has no bottlenecks. It’s also not using parts that were originally meant to run Excel really fast. While the GameCube’s games will continue, much like the Playstation 2′s, to grow more impressive as time goes on, all of your Xbox games are basically 40th generation right off the bat.
7. And finally, while the mini-DVD format holds less data than the full-sized DVDs used by the Xbox, it also has much lower seek times and faster data transfer rates. Load times practically don’t exist on the GameCube.

I have rested my case at this point. If there is a power gap, it’s not going to mean jack shit. Perhaps you will be able to render an extra 30 polygon beetle. Meanwhile, you’re still playing graphically enhanced versions of PS2 games that come out months later, while I’ve already played those on my damn PS2 and moved on to Zelda.