So it appears that there's now a big fallout over the whole pageantry of E3's glitz and glamor. So earlier today we ran an article about the Xbox One games at E3 actually running on high-end PC hardware. Well, a few of Sony's first and second party developers have stepped forward to comment how Sony wasn't all about smoke and mirrors...the games were running on actual PS4 development hardware.
The dev kits for the PS4 are apparently a lot more complete than what Microsoft has to offer for the Xbox One, as PlayStation Lifestyle caught comments from various developers working on games for the PS4 who were also attending E3, and The Witness' Jonathan Blow Tweeted that...
“It is not true as the article says that “all E3 demos run on hi-end PCs”... The Witness was running on PS4 dev hardware, and it looked to me like all the other PS4 games were running on dev kits as well.”Dev hardware is the hardware that will be in the final retail box, but in a less consumer-oriented package.All the indies I know were running on the PS4.We worked very hard to get our game running on the actual PS4 hardware and operating system in time for the show. As did many other devs. [[ br. br ]] That is kind of crazy considering consoles are supposed to be on the shelves with these games in 5-6 months.During Microsoft’s press show I was impressed by how good the games looked given the console’s specs. But if they weren’t running on those specs then it becomes pretty questionable.I actually don’t want XB1 to fail because we need competition to keep things healthy.
Well, I stand corrected. Bravo to you for not pulling an Aliens: Colonial Marines.
Blow wasn't the only one who chimed in on the E3 shenanigans, though. Sucker Punch's Jason Connell corroborated Blow's statements, saying “Yup, we were definitely on a dev kit. [For inFamous: Second Son]”
Exophase also has a neat article explaining how the PS4's exclusive Knack crashed to the system's OS and not Windows 7 running on a high-end Nvidia GPU.
Just to clarify this for people who aren't entirely tech savvy: Development kits are basically a set of programming and design tools to help developers make a game run for the designated platform. It contains instruction sets and code so that developers have an idea of how to fine-tune and optimize the game for the console's hardware. Usually early development kits, shortened to dev kits, have slightly higher or similar specs to the final hardware.
Now, the reason there's a lot of controversy over the news about the Xbox One games running on high-end PCs with a Windows 7 OS is because first of all, the Xbox One's core OS is based on Windows 8 and second of all, the CPU/GPU APU combination for the final hardware set is being provided by AMD, hence all the butthurt from Nvidia in their public statements knocking the consoles [via Computerworld]. The hardware at E3 were running high-end Nvidia GPUs. A bit of a far-cry from actual dev kits given that the instruction sets would be all wrong for optimizing a game for hardware that won't even be present in a retail SKU.
Anyway, this is just more free marketing buzz for Sony. And honestly, it's not like at this point we're trying to go out of our way to dig the grave deeper for the Xbox One...it was just the haphazard situation of real-life information working against Microsoft and the Xbox One.
Sorry for foiling your plans!
Oh yeah, and Windows 8 still loves you Microsoft...even if you prefer Windows 7.
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