Ist von einem Bungie Mitarbeiter und zeigt die Vorteile einer X-Box gegenüber eines PC's:
Why can Halo run really well on hardware that is now about 2-3 years old? There are a few reasons:
1. Extremely lightweight OS. Since the Xbox is a gaming machine first, the OS doesn't need a lot of things that are necessary for a full fledged PC that's used for things besides gaming. That means the Xbox OS can fit into about 150 kB, which leaves the rest of that to the game. It also means that the game has ultimate control over the execution of the game. Plus, the game runs at the same level as what the operating system normally operates on a consumer PC, which means less time spent transitioning between OS and application code.
2 & 3. Unified memory architecture and no drivers. Yes, there is a programmatical interface similar to DirectX. However, it's a very thin layer to communicate with the hardware. On the PC, there are many steps to render a model. Here's an extremely simplified list:
1. Allocate memory to hold the model and textures.
2. Submit the memory to the video card.
3. Tell the card to render the model.
Steps 1 and 2 are the slowest, and most subject to driver quality. On the Xbox, we can take care of 1 and 2 ourselves, which is better than leaving it up to the driver in the specific case of a fixed platform. Note that due to hardware diversity, this is not really a good idea, but it's great for the Xbox.
4. Fixed hardware. We know that what we develop on at work will be the exact same platform and hardware configuration consumers will have at home. This let's us pull off some tricks that wouldn't be as easy to implement on the PC. Things like precompiling a memory image of the game that we load at a fixed address, pretty much eliminating loading times beyond that of copying the image off the hard drive. (The loading screens you see on the Xbox version of Halo come from copying data from the DVD to the harddrive, not from loading the game data from the hard drive.) We can also make saved games work much faster, by reserving a hard-coded chunk of memory to hold all the necessary data to save and restore a game.
In short, Xbox development is a much less complex beast compared to PC devleopment. What you give up in raw power you make up with fixed hardware and ease of development.
Konsolen werden in der Hinsicht immer überlegen sein.