The Xbox 360 will ‘not’ get any faster, neither will the PS3, or the Wii. So they become ‘BETTER’ at maxing out every bit of performance, and yes ‘trickery’ and ‘ingenuity’ to get the systems to run faster.

Sometimes they pull of tricks that the manufactures didn’t see coming. (I loved this back in the Amiga days with the demoscenes!)

It’s a difficult argument for a non-programmer to understand. A programmer/coder knows that there are a variety of ways to get to 2 + 2 = 4. A non-programmer thinks it’s 1 problem, 1 solution. A programmer knows that it’s a multi-dimensional problem with several solutions. How fast can I calculate 2 + 2? Will is scale with other calculations if I have to do this a million-times-a-second? Can I cache this result once and just retrieve the rest of the time? etc. Console developers just simply become better and better at this over the years, discarding inefficient methods as they go along. PC developers (And notoriously enough, WinMobile developers) often just take the shortest route.

STANDARDS are a big part too. You ‘cannot’ almost as a rule, release a game that doesn’t run at 30-60fps on your target console platform. No one will play your sucky game, period, it will fail. So a lot of work is done to make sure the console experience is smooth. PC Games lack the same standards, and even when the standards are self-imposed. It’s the nature of the beast it seems. For those who can remember playing Wing Commander on a 486, it was the same deal back then.

I have a quadcore Intel PC with and Nvidia 9600 card, but is it great for gaming? More like so so. My XBOX 360 rocks though hehe. So no complains.

PC for work, XBOX for games!

I’m not slamming PC developers (and in this case, PC = Windows/Mac/Linux, any “normal” computer architecture), I was just pointing out the nature of the business. The priorities of the two camps seem to really differ, and I wanted to raise the question of what it would be like if PC developers were allowed to devote the same amount of effort to efficiency as console devs.

If you look at everything your e-mail client does, you realize that it’s doing a lot more than just text. It basically has to have an HTML rendering engine embedded in it so it can read today’s e-mail’s (who uses text only e-mail’s anyways?). You can also sort the e-mail in any arbitrary field in any folder in a second or two, which I doubt you could do with older e-mail clients. Just look at every feature that your e-mail client has in its options dialog, I’m sure you’re going to be very surprised in how many it has compared to e-mail 5 years ago. And grammar / spelling corrections? Those have only improved in the past decade which adds to a memory footprint.

Sure, I’m not saying that it has to take as much memory as it is, and I completely agree that if we were in a fixed hardware platform, it would probably be taking up less memory and less CPU power. The problem is, is that the PC market demands new features – not better performance. So when the business folks look at the cost of improving performance vs adding new features, it’s a no brainer to them that they need to add new features.

You make a good point of PC developers vs game developers, but I’d argue it’s from experience. I’d argue that PC programmers are more experienced in creating software that can adapt to new requirements, and at making the architecture as flexible as possible. For a lot of long-living applications, we have to live with a product that has 10 years of legacy code, so when we write new code, we better be sure that it’s being architected correctly.