This May 18-20 was arguably the largest E3 expo in the event's 11-year history. With all three major console manufacturers debuting their next-generation hardware, it's no wonder the show sold out 547,000 square feet (that's over 11 football fields) in record time. And over 70,000 people attended the show. Now that the hoopla is over and the attendees have had a chance recover their hearing, step back from the avalanche of hype, and catch their breath, I thought I'd share some of my notes.

This is by no means meant to be objective, all-inclusive coverage of everything. For that, head to 1UP.com. It's just one analyst's take on perhaps the biggest media circus in the country. Continued...

Microsoft ditched conventional protocol when it offered a "sneak peek" of its next-gen console to MTV viewers on May 12. If you tuned in, you know what I mean when I say I think I'm actually stupider for having watched it. If you're a gamer and you want to see something targeted at you, check out the vastly superior ourcolony.net video.

On Monday, before the Expo even started, Sony held a press conference in the afternoon to reveal the PS3, while Microsoft followed suit just hours later with a far more entertaining conference followed by a bash headlined by The Killers and the Chemical Brothers. For more on those conferences, see my E3 conference report. I'm actually quite annoyed by these so-called "press conferences." What press conference doesn't allow the press to ask questions? They're carefully planned, scripted, and meticulously delivered media dumps.

Microsoft is in a weird place right now. It's got "most" of a system. All the games running at the show were on alpha dev kits, which consist of a PowerMac G5 (dual-processor) with a 256MB Radeon X850 card. That's significantly less powerful than the final hardware. So some games looked better than others, but none of them looked like they will on the real hardware. Kameo was brilliant, despite the hardware limitations--chalk that up to the power of great art. Epic's Gears of War looked awesome as well, but I asked Cliff Bleszinski what it was running on, and he admitted it was a PC with two GeForce 6800s in SLI.

Perhaps most interesting are all the non-gaming facets of the 360. Those who thumbed their noses at Microsoft and installed mod chips on their Xboxes have been raving about running third-party Media Center type software on it for some time now. Sure it doesn't record TV, but it does lots of other stuff, right? Now Microsoft has built that right into the box. That, along with all the new Xbox Live features, is really very cool. I saw a demo of all this stuff running live--not some canned video--and it really works. It's just plain cool. It's clear that, even though no developer yet has a dev kit that closely resembles the final Xbox hardware, Microsoft is simply much further along with its system and game development. There are at least two dozen titles coming during the system's first couple months, and they'll have 40 to 50 on shelves by the time PlayStation 3 launches in Spring 2006, many of them big franchises.

Microsoft is simply doing a lot of things right this time around, and it's hard not to be excited once you realize that the somewhat lackluster games on display were running on vastly underpowered alpha dev kits. Consider this: How good did the playable PS3 games on display look? Oh that's right, there weren't any.

Check out my Xbox 360 interview with the hardware VP Todd Holmdahl for more, and a report that reveals more details on the radically different ATI Xbox graphics chip.

My main annoyance? The Xbox 360 will not come with WiFi built in. It's an add-on. I plan to use the regular Ethernet jack anyway, but built-in WiFi would have been nice for a lot of people. At least the add-on supports the a, b, and g standards. Some have expressed concern that the system will only use a standard DVD drive, and that's understandable, but with the war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray far from over, I don't know that picking sides (and putting in a far more expensive drive to do it!) makes sense.

You can download some hi-def video trailers of Xbox 360 games from Microsoft's site. These aren't great representations of final games, but they'll give you some idea. Continued...

To be brief: What PlayStation 3? Sony did what they do oh-so-very-well. They offered up fantastic technical specs and then showed a bunch of tech demos and videos to a group of people who were so eager to get a glimpse of next-gen glory that they tossed all skepticism and reason out the window. Sony started with a flood of useless specs--the kind that assume your code is perfectly efficient and the games will keep every register on a nine-core Cell CPU and big huge Nvidia graphics chip busy in every cycle. This is, of course, ridiculous. It was followed by tech demos that don't resemble real games. Square Enix reps came out and showed off the intro to its Final Fantasy VII, rendered in real time on the PS3, and it looked gorgeous. Just like its real-time demo of original content on the Xbox 360 looked gorgeous a few hours later at the Microsoft press conference.

The real whopper was the video reel. It was introduced with a statement like "Here are some franchises coming to PlayStation 3," with no mention that what we would see actually resembles the games in any way. Game journalists flipped out. The 800-pound gorilla of these demo reels was a video of Killzone 2. It has been the subject of much contention whether or not this video was pre-rendered or made in the game engine. Game journalists who should know better insisted that it was real gameplay footage. Then Sony came out and claimed it was, too. Killzone 2 wowed everyone at the Sony conference so much, they forgot to question whether it was pre-rendered footage or not. It was.-->

Of course, it's not. It was way too good for real-time, and would have represented a game that's much further along in its development than any PS3 game I know of. It turns out that Axis Animation, the guys who did some video for the original Killzone, made the video. We've since found out that all that supposed game footage--almost the entire game demo reel at the end of the presentation--was pre-rendered video "made to spec." That means rendered in LightWave or 3ds max or something, but limiting yourself to the polygon count or texture memory of the final platform. We've heard this all before, and we know that the final games never look even remotely close to the "rendered to spec" videos.

Where was the journalists' skepticism? Isn't this the same Sony that promised that PS2 could do 70 million polygons a second? The one that showed impressive tech demos of facial detail and features made possible by the Emotion Engine chip that were far superior to anything we've ever seen on the PS2? Doesn't the company continue to say that the PSP runs at 333MHz, when it has since come to light that it's artificially limited to 222MHz? If all this stuff was supposed to be in-game footage, how come there wasn't a single playable PS3 game anywhere on the show floor?

I'm not saying the PS3 won't be powerful, because it will. It might even be more powerful than the Xbox 360, but I suspect most of that will come down to how you choose to bend the numbers. At least it has built-in WiFi. But what's with the lack of a hard drive? The PS3 only has a "slot" for a hard drive at this time, and a hard drive cache is an invaluable tool for game developers. It's a sleek-looking device, too, albeit larger than the PlayStation 2. The concept design for the controller looks god-awful, but there's plenty of time to remedy that. The PS3 is a nice-looking box, but slightly larger than the original. The controller, on the other hand, looks terrible. -->

The PS3 has a Blu-Ray drive, and that's pretty cool. If Blu-Ray ends up being the next-generation high-definition movie standard, then Sony has a definite leg up, since Microsoft is stuck with standard-definition movies using a DVD drive. Sure, Microsoft could offer HD-DVD or even Blu-Ray in future Xbox 360 variants, but who knows when that might happen? Sony's taking an expensive gamble here. Blu-ray drives are going to cost the company a lot more than DVD drives, driving up the cost of the system and reducing its capacity to manufacture them en masse. If HD-DVD wins the hi-def movie battle, Sony has effectively made its system more expensive without delivering an HD movie playback device.

Sony said that the system will be released in Spring 2006, but is that just in Japan, or in multiple territories? With Microsoft planning a three-territory launch before Christmas, a Japan-only launch of PS3 in the Spring could give Microsoft a pretty big head start in other territories. Continued...

Right now, the raging message board wars about next-gen consoles seem centered on which is more powerful. Is having the most powerful console a recipe for certain success? I don't think so. Is coming out first enough to do it? Not if the Dreamcast has taught us anything.

There's an update on the blog of Xbox Live's own Major Nelson, with a Microsoft-prepared counter-argument that "proves" the Xbox 360 is in fact more powerful than the PS3. It's an interesting read, even if many of the arguments are flawed. It brings up a good point: Either system can be made to look more powerful than the other, depending on how you want to bend the specs.

In truth, the systems aren't entirely comparable. The 360 has a single, unified 512MB bank of GDDR3 memory. The PS3 has 256MB of GDDR3 connected to the graphics chip and a bank of 256MB XDR connected to the CPU. That's more total bandwidth in the PS3's favor, but what if there's some penalty for the graphics chip accessing the XDR? Then there's the issue of the Xbox 360's "smart EDRAM,"--10MB of embedded RAM that stores the back buffer, z-buffer, and stencil buffer. It performs a bunch of useful blending and z-compare functions right within the RAM so that the graphics chip doesn't have to. It's also got an insane 256 GB/sec of bandwidth to the GPU. The PS3's graphics chip is a traditional PC architecture, with separate and discrete vertex and pixel pipelines. The 360 uses a new unified shader architecture with 48 ALUs, each capable of performing multiple shader operations per cycle and fed by a scheduler intended to keep them fully utilized all the time. So when it comes to graphics, it's simply not possible to tell, simply by looking at the numbers, which one is more "powerful."

The CPUs are a similar story. The 360 uses a three-core PowerPC derivative with a shared L2 cache, where each core can process two simultaneous threads. It's got SIMD floating-point units similar to SSE3, and is certainly no number-crunching slouch. The PS3 uses the Cell, which has a single PowerPC core and eight "synergistic processing units" optimized for particular tasks. What these SPUs are good at and what they're not is a point of contention, even among programmers working on it, because it's no small task to get the Cell CPU firing on all cylinders, if you will. Is it more powerful than the 360's CPU? Well, it certainly has a higher peak "gigaflops" rating, but that doesn't really mean it's going to be better for games. Games use operations like load/store, and perform logic functions that need to access memory in a random, rather than streaming, fashion. That's not necessarily the Cell chip's forte. As with the GPUs, the raw numbers don't tell the whole story here. It's simply not possible to look at the specs and say "this one is more powerful for what game developers need to do."

Right now, there are no developers working on kits that include hardware resembling the true final production Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 systems. It's not until they start banging on that final silicon that we'll really know which is more powerful, and I suspect there will still be disagreement. At the end of the day, in a general sense, I think both systems are going to be able to get about the same quality stuff on the screen.

So if hardware horsepower won't determine the winner, what will? It will come down to the following criteria:

Manufacturability Demand will outstrip supply at first. Which system can be more easily manufactured in large quantities, have production scale up more quickly, and ramp down the price more easily? I think Microsoft has an advantage here. It's using somewhat smaller chips, and less exotic components (like XDR RAM and Blu-ray optical storage). Still, Microsoft is building in a hard drive, so that's one more thing to worry about.

Development ease Which platform makes it easier, faster, and less costly for publishers to bring out impressive next-generation titles? With neither system shipping final dev kits, this one is still up in the air. Nvidia's involvement with the PS3 is a big boost in this area and will make the graphics side of game programming much easier on PS3 developers than it was on the PS2.

Business deals Who's greasing the right palms and working the deals necessary to secure gotta-have-it games exclusively for its system? Who's going to grab the next Grand Theft Auto, or the next GTA-like phenom? It's hard to pick a winner here. Both companies have very deep pockets and good relationships with lots of third-party publishers.

First-party titles One way to get exclusives is to make them yourself. Will Microsoft Game Studios' stable of franchises beat out Sony Computer Entertainment's? You used to be able to hand this one to Sony, but Microsoft has built some well respected and popular franchises in the last few years, it's finally delivering games from premiere developer Rare, and has a little something called Halo.

Services and non-gaming features Both systems are flaunting online play, online community features, and media features. Sony has a lot of catching up to do to compete with the universally praised Xbox Live, and Microsoft is able to show off some really impressive services and media features for the 360 already. That they can't demo any of this stuff for the Playstation 3 speaks volumes about how much further ahead Microsoft is on the development of this side of the system. Will the media capabilities of a particular console work with your devices and with the file types and formats of all your data?

Right now, it's too early to call a "winner." Each system has its strengths and weaknesses. Fortunately, you don't have to decide which one to buy just yet. Prices and exact release dates haven't even been announced yet. You can wait a few more months, and read more about the games as they move from development to final hardware, before you make a buying decision. Continued...

No, it's going to be just fine. There were plenty of great PC games on display at the show. Alan Wake is definitely intriguing, and gorgeous. Battlefield 2 should come out real soon, and it will change PC multiplayer play for the better. Call of Duty 2 looked just as good on the PC as it did on the Xbox 360, and you don't need a high-definition TV to truly appreciate it. Plus, it's the kind of shooter we'd all rather play with a mouse and keyboard. The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion may be the prettiest, most interactive and reactive role playing game ever. A group of guys from Blizzard left to make their own company, and they're bringing PC gamers a sort of first-person shooter version of Diablo that just reeks of fun with Hellgate: London. And what PC shooter fan isn't waiting for Serious Sam II?

It's really saying something when, for all the next-generation console talk, the "game of the show" buzz all centered on Will Wright's Spore, a PC-only title.

Perhaps the most exciting thing in PC gaming is something I don't even really know about. I ran into a senior exec from the Windows Graphics and Gaming Technologies group's Xbox 360 party. He told me that something really big is happening over there with regards to PC gaming. It's something that he's been pushing for a long time and is perhaps the main reason he joined Microsoft in the first place. It just got the full stamp of approval from Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and other top-level executives, so he was really excited. He couldn't tell me what it is, but it sounds big. I would guess that it has something to do with Longhorn, but we probably won't hear anything for months.

All those next-gen consoles sure sound like they have some ripping hardware, and they do, but PCs aren't going to be left in the dust. Nvidia and ATI both had next-gen graphics cards working at the show, even though they weren't really unveiling specifics just yet. In fact, the Alan Wake demo at ATI's booth was running on its next-gen card, the R520. By the time the Xbox 360 comes out, we'll have these next-gen graphics cards. By the time the PlayStation 3 is 2 years old, hardly halfway through its life cycle, we'll have graphics cards 4 to 6 times as powerful, and CPUs 2 to 3 times, not to mention four times the RAM on standard PCs.

Let's not forget about new hardware innovations like the physics chip from AGEIA. Cards will hit the market late this year in the $250 to $300 price range, and will only become more affordable from there. One of those cards can deliver physics simulations far greater than any next-gen console.

As Microsoft drives toward Longhorn next year, I think we'll see a greater push toward PC games. Next year, when Longhorn is on the near horizon and PS3 and Xbox 360 launches are behind us, I bet the PC will be a particularly strong platform. Continued...

Nintendo announced its next-gen system, Revolution, and then proceeded to say almost nothing about it at all. It showed the main system hardware (but not the controller), which is quite a bit smaller than either the PS3 or Xbox 360. It's also significantly less powerful: Though Nintendo didn't reveal full specs, it is reported to be "only" about 3 times as powerful as the Gamecube. Revolution has some neat features, including backward compatibility and a download service that will let gamers purchase hit games from the Nintendo 64, SNES, and NES, storing them on an internal bank of 512MB of flash RAM. The system just doesn't have any "buzz" going for it. Nintendo will support it with its own stable of fantastic games, but the third-party developers don't seem to care about it in the slightest.

Nintendo also revealed the new Game Boy Micro, a totally pointless product that takes the Game Boy Advance and makes it smaller. Too small, in fact, to be very comfortable. Way to use those engineering resources, Nintendo! E3 micro.jpg TITLE Game Boy Micro Why even bother to make a version of the Game Boy Advance that is simply smaller – too small for many gamers? -->

Let us not forget, that as much as the game media and hardcore PC enthusiast press likes to harp on about E3, it's really not that important a show in the grand scheme of things. The hardware and software releases, marketing campaigns, and continuing press coverage throughout the year carry far more weight. It's a compressed marketing dump that's unrivaled in sheer bombast, but it doesn't always pick the winners.

But hey, it's got Booth Babes, right? Yes, okay, fine. Here are your Booth Babe photos.

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Copyright © 2005 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in ExtremeTech.