Distributed Playstation

withinavoid writes "News.com has a story up about the next generation Playstation 3. Apparently the game developers are asking for a 1000 times performance increase and that's just not possible, so they are looking at distributed computing as a possibility. "

Comments

How would this work?

[martinmcc]

Its always good to see technology being pushed, but I really can't see the need for '1000' times the power for games. There is so much untapped power in the current generation consoles at the minute - compare early playstation games with the most recent, tekken 1 comparred to tekken 3 for example. In a year or so time when developers have much more experience with the hardware, I expect to see the same sort of leap. developers wanted the hardware sped up so much just sounds to me like laziness.

My other concern is how would they achieve the distribute network. The thing I like about my consoles is that I stick in the disk/catridge and play, no pissing around. I hack on my PC, I play on my console, and thats the way I like it. If I have to start into configuraing and debugging (which as it gets more complex is bound to happen) then the whole reasn for the console goes out the window.

it's not the net, dude.

[s4m7]

I've heard way too much talk about consumer applications of distributed computing lately. The trick is they are not really consumer apps at all, but merely a front. If you have a distributed network with an installed base of 10 Million machines, that's a lot of idle time you can sell off to other companies. And you can bet that that's exactly what Sony has in mind.

Think about it: the memory bandwidth on the PS2 is at least twice as fast as the FASTEST network connections available. That's nothing to say for the pitiful 2-3Mb cable pipe that is available to most people.

The graphics are what the developers want to see the improvement in. I don't think you are going to see any improvement in performance in this area brought about by distributed computing. If it's possible, I'm really curious as to how.