Slashdot Mirror
More PlayStation 3 Grid Computing Details
gwernol writes: "Redherring has a good article on Sony's forthcoming PlayStation 3: not too many technical details but good background to the Xbox/PlayStation wars. Sony are touting the use of massively parallel 'cell computing' to get a 1,000 times performance increase over the PS2. This plan, also known as grid computing is also discussed here."
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
relying on other playstations on the internet to do 3D rendering for you?
How is that possible even if there were gigabit ether internet connections?
I want 30+fps games here not 1fps because at 9pm everyone is playing their ps3 and theres no processing power left to be used
this is completely worthless read. IT just throws out a bunch of buzz words and make no sense at all.
"Buoyed by so much processing power, consumers will be able to interact with these worlds without worrying about hackers, viruses, or lost connections."
What the hell are they talking about? I want to say some clever comment but I am not so much stupider having read that first sentence of the paragraph that I can't think of a thing to say.
Seriously, why do we need a 1000x performance increase in a gaming console? What additional features or technologies would this allow developers to implement?
--dambert
I expect that there will be tight controls on where they are exported to, based on that processing power.
...at least read the first paragraph of the article you're submitting. It says the stated goal is to run at 1000x the speed of the ps2, yet the actual increase will be around 200x. Fucking tool!
Putting 1000 computational "cells" onto a chip is not difficult considering as we should be into the hundreds of millions of transistors a chip by then.
The difficulty is how to most effectively organize and utilize these units.. just imagine a 1000 machine clustor but on a chip, you've still got the same problems to sort out.
I am sure all of the l33t programmer who program ultra linux will be able to write l33t softwares for this
Oh yeah. No fucking way.
Look, I think the chips themselves will probably be great, and with 500 million transistors, they'll probably kick ass, do massive anti-aliasing (to get rid of them PS2 "jaggies"), and render Final Fantasy XIV chicks so realistic that 14 year old masterbation fantasies won't be realized by the CGI scenes, but by the game engine itself.
But. I don't believe that broadband will be far enough into the market - even by 2005 - for distributed computing to take off. Let's ignore my own home firewall and the like, where there's no way in H-E-double-hockey-sticks I'd let another computer "borrow" some of my processor power so they can play Grand Theft Auto 5: The Leiberman Censored Editition.
Powerful chip? Sure. Distributed computing for games? I'm not buying it yet.
Then again, if the product shows up and works with the distributed net and all, I could be proven wrong, and I have no problem admitting that. For now, I'm waiting for it, hoping it's PS2/PSOne backwards compatible, and keeping my fantasies just to Selphie Tilmitt. (Nunchucks...rowr!)
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
There's no point in pretending to argue against any of this because it doesn't say anything.
This is like being presented with the statement 'in ten years, men will fly like birds!'
You just can't say it's not true because it doesn't particularly carry any meaning in the first place.
that until they design a system that is upgradable, consoles will NEVER be able to compete with PC's. Most computer users don't by a new PC every 4-5 years just to keep up with the latest technology. They upgrade their CPU next month, get a new video card in a year, and stick in a bigger hard drive when they need it. This way a user is always pretty much keeping in pace with technological advances without being left behind. With a console, unless I purchase one as soon as the new one comes out, I'm screwed. Obviously this is on purpose, but now that both Microsoft and Sony are shifting their focus to a Do-Everything box, they're going to have to implement upgradeability as well if they ever want to compete. Now the issue of using a low resolution TV-set for this will have to be tackled at a later date ;-)
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
1000x better than PS2? that will be enough power to generate basically broadcast-quality FMV in realtime. game systems have gotten to the point where they are powerful enough to show you ANYTHING that the developers want. no more blocky ping pong balls or pixellated cars. let's hope it get's put to moral use (i.e. disney games, not grand theft auto.)
They can have all the multi processing power they want. Not having anti-aliasing just sucks.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
how many people will really want their bandwidth getting chewed up by a console that they are not playing, so that others can play? especially with all the talk of providers going to a capped model that allows you to transfer X number of gigs per month before incurring additional fees.
personally if they could even make the sucker work, i would just yank the cat-5 out of the thing whenever im not playing
peer to peer routing wireless connection between them with wired fallback to ensure the ability to share....have it work with 802.11 hubs and we can get rid of a few big business "solutions" for accessing the internet.... One real problem with internet content is that the discouragement of individual web servers practically guarentees that the data you want is going to be "out there" instead of close to home, driving up traffic.
I don't usually respond to trolls, but this just hit me as incredibly stupid. Your posting on this saturday afternoon to complain that people are posting on saturday afternoon?
Now I know why they call you trolls.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
it's to hot out there dude
as far as i can tell they want to make a gaming console that will be able to surf the web, check email and play movies etc.
well, can't a PC already check email + browse the web and play movies? and a PC can already play games!
as far as i'm concerned the PC already IS the media center/all in one box for the modern home, with a vast pool of development resources behind it. Why are these companies trying to reinvent the wheel?
Yes, 1000x the power to make Britney lifelike in every way!
Mod me up! Macs are painfully great!
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." - George Orwell, 1984
Maybe someone else can help me out here, but the bigger problem I see here isn't bandwidth so much as latency. Even if they have enough bandwidth to send a super-realistic rendering of the whole world in parallel what good does it do if I get it 20 frames later? Last time I checked you can move anything faster than the speed of light. Maybe we'll use tachyons instead of electrons......
The only console company of any interest is Nintendo as they concentrate on churning out quality games like Mario, Zelda and the like. Sony and Microsoft are trying to turn their consoles into PCs which is pointless because since they are cheaper they are inevitably not as good (also the lack of decent upgrades makes them out of date in a year). So I'll be sticking to my GameCube and PC thank you very much.
"Madness is something rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule." -- Nietzsche
Bad in practice. Who leaves their playstaion on all the time? Who would be willing to share their bandwidth so that other playstation users can use their extra cycles?
It is more likely that when a playstaion is on it is actually in use and competeing with the rest for the extra cycles.
Add in the issues of communication overhead/latency, parallezation and fault tollerant distribution of computational work, and say security and you have several very hard if not intractable problems.
I would personally love to see Sony pull this off. However, I don't think massively distributed computing lends itself to the production of near real time 3D. Now if you can wait a week or a month for your graphics I am sure it will work famously.
Wouldn't you consider buying the new console a form of upgrading? Think about it. If you buy a new console at each new one for around $200 every 4-6 years, that's not amazingly expensive at all. I mean, how much do you spend on computer upgrades to "keep pace" every year?
Debian 4.0 or PlayStation 3?? Let the race begin! (falls asleep on keyboard...)
It's interesting. I havent heard much mention of it, but supposedly Hiroshi Yamauchi's replacement, Satoru Iwata stated in a press conference that ...
... "No matter what great product you come up with, people get bored. I feel like a chef cooking for a king who's full."
"We can't be optimistic about the game market,"
For anyone interested, it's on Page 26 of issue #112 of Game Informer (GameSpot's review mag)...
Not much mention of it otherwise, appearently they thought he was refering to the fact that M$ and Sony really aren't upgrading graphics or sound so much as making them "trojan horses" for downloadable media.
Nintendo isn't really leaving the market, just won't be developing new hardware all of the time.
Anyhow, now that it looks like Nintendo is voluntarilly getting out of the hardware race, wonder how this will effect Sony and M$ and moreso, who might take the "3rd spot"???
The name for this technology is "grid" (formerly called "cell") and appears to be targeted squarely at the possibilities of parallel and distributed computing over the internet.
Imagine a bewolf cluster of those! Oh wait...
Someone had to say it!
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
It's just the Sony hype machine again. Remember what they wanted you to believe about the PS2?
Of course PS3 is gonna be faster than the PS2. No, it won't be 1000 times faster.
-jfedor
you haven't seen anything yet.
In terms of scalability, the uber-parallel-processing-pipelined PS2 makes a lot of sense, and will continue to get more powerful in the future as its software improves. In terms of usability though, the PS2 has irked a lot of console developers because it's an entirely different beast and doesn't behave like a PC when you get down to performance bottlenecks.
The PS3 and beyond can only continue this trend. Sony hopefully won't make the same mistake ease-of-use wise, but the PS3 will be getting tantalizingly close to the "do everything you ever cared to do in a game" performance.
The future of this technology is hugely dependant on software capability to make sense of and utilize it. This will be the biggest hurdle, and clearly nothing like it really exists today.
One of the next big steps may be carbon-nanotube based computing, because it will enable architectures with massive hierarchical processing power and near limitless involatile stupidly fast memory, all embedded everywhere. Carbon (and other) nanotubes will be used for both logic and memory (as well as actual display surfaces), and ultimately be laid out more like a brain than a serial system.
I look foward having a complete system in a display where you push morphing procedures in one end which ultimately get streamed into content on the output side.
The networked aspect will be important too, but not how it's colored in this article. Your games will ineveitably run graphics processing on your local machine, with non-realtime and background tasks offloaded to others on the network. However, distributed simulation of gaming environments will only really make sense when players become the content producers and the worlds expand procedurally to simulate whatever ideas of interest their imaginations have conjured.
Then I just have to ask, when game consoles power the realization of our imaginations, whose world are we going to be living in? [hint: this is rhetorical, don't answer, just think about it]
With the wireless networking push that Microsoft is trying to make they can just leverage an already existing PC platform for all the additional non-graphics tasks that the PS3 will have problems with. That way they will provide cheaper more robust set-top boxes while also keeping and even increasing the Windows software strangle hold on the desktop PC.
Why is Everyone so negative? I mean who isn't going to try and get setiathome (and other distributed computing projects) to work on ps3, I mean thats the only realistic application of Broadband based Parrallel computing. My Duke Nukem Forever Platinum Titanium 3000 won't work with a 250ms lag time for borrowed cycles...
Anything this wierd will require some kind of distributed OS to manage the thing. (Obligatory "Beowulf cluster" remark might actually be appropriate here.) Operating systems like that are hard to do and not, historically, easy to use.
The hype is totally out of sync with the hardware concept. "If Sony's aspirations succeed, then the Playstation 3 will not be a pure video game console, but rather measure the amount of milk left in the fridge, record TV programs to hard-disk, automatically download new software..." Huh? For this we need massively parallel computing?
Note that the last IBM press release on this was 16 months ago.
This has to be a bad description of what Sony, IBM, and Toshiba are up to. Those are real companies that do real innovation; they have to have a clearer vision of where they're going.
What? Check magic box, in Japan the Xbox is being outsold about 3:1 by the obsolete PS1!! I mean, seriously, how many people are buying a PS1 these days when the PS2 isn't *that* much more expensive and plays all the PS1 games as well. GameCube is killing the Xbox in Japan, which in turn is being killed by the PS2.
In the US Nintendo's GameCube and the Xbox are selling about equal (GameCube was selling better, but the recent price drops helped SOny and MS more than Nintendo). Both are far behind the PS2. In Europe the GameCube is outselling the Xbox.
In fact the worldwide sales of the GameCube and Xbox combined don't equal the sales of the PS2 in just one of the three major sectors (Japan, US, Europe).
There are no Xbox/PS2 wars. The PS2 is the clear winner. Maybe some GameCube/PS2 wars. Definatly some GameCube/Xbox wars. The Xbox is stuggling to keep up with the GameCube for the distant 2nd in terms of market share.
Could this mean that they're intending on rendering their games on servers and streaming just the video over to the console? This would make them using the grid-computing concept more reasonable. I mean, I wouldn't want to waste any of my cpu cycles just so that the kid next door could get a few more polygons on FFXV chicks' breast. If I was playing a game myself I probably wouldnt have much unused processor power to contribue, and when I wasn't playing a game, my console would most likely be off.
What if the consoles wouldn't use their computing cycles on anything locally displayed, but would merely act as a part of the world biggest rendering farm and a dumb client for recieving the distributedly-rendered video stream of the game they are playing?
If they think they can stream movies, as mentioned in the other articly, could they also stream games? Would this be technologicly possible, in 2005? Would it even make any sense? I find it an interesting thought, nonetheless.
I usually don't respond to idiots, but this just hit me as incredibly stupid. You're posting a response to my troll to tell me how you usually don't respond to trolls?
Now I know why they call you idiots.
Instead of using a mouse or game controller, players might wave their hands in front of a Web cam, showing what they want to do through gestures.
Sony...where half the fun of a game is watching someone else try to play it.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Wow... I can't believe Sony is planning a worse development nightmare than PS2 is. I can't speak from personal experience, but from many developer interviews, the general consensus seems to be that it's a pain. As games become larger and larger and more and more complex, developers will want to spend _less_ time fighting with the hardware. The trend is definitely moving away from this very low level hacking and more towards using standard API's (e.g. id is using C++ and OpenGL).
It took almost a year to see any decent apps on PS2 because of the extra development time. Where XBox shares titles with PS2, they typically look as good or somewhat better, and only a few months after launch. Throw out some massive parallel/distributed monster and it'll sink like a stone.
Why is PS2 alive and well today? Because PS1 was traditional architecture, quickly had lots of good apps, and bought them tons of brand loyalty. I don't think that's going to work for them again on the next iteration.
that's all fine and good, but will it play ps2 and ps1 games?
Or maybe Brilliant Digital? *shudder*
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
i;m not sure about you, but i don't think its skynet that will be running the world over with machines....
It's gonna take one hell of a lot of PS3 Minesweeper players for me to get the kind of framerates in my 3D games that they're speaking of...
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
that article was the biggest load of bullshit I've read in a while.
Nothing else to say really. If I want a console it is for games. My PC is my entertainment workhorse. The console is convenient because its just for games and usually games that aren't as well suited for PC. PC games are in a league of their own and I like it that way
Its raining out there right now. Though I do plan to hang out with some friends and smoke some chronic weed later.
I usually don't respond to Anonymous Cowards, but this just hit me as incredibly stupid. You're posting a response to an idiot to tell him how you usually don't respond to idiots?
Now I know why they call you Anonymous Cowards.
If you ask me, they'd be better off investing their R&D money in developing better gameplay, or completely revolutionary types of games. Everything these days is a rehash of something we've already played before, except with newer/better graphics and spiffy little extras.
Furthermore, if they keep on developing new hardware at a rapid pace, game developers are going to be fucked because as soon as they develop for one platform, the same company releases something bigger/better and quit promoting the older platform. Oh, sure, they could throw in backwards compatibility, but you know all game companies want to be seen as bleeding edge so they'll shift development to whatever is most recent.
This sounds to me like a Marketing droid who knows jack about this stuff saying it will be a fast processor on a platform that is built for network games and applications.
Based on the other comments, that may be the closest thing to the truth from that article.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
When do we get those Play Station nano probes like in the commercial?
The only thing about using distributed gaming for consoles is that your bandwidth and computing power are never assured. And exactly how many people are just going to leave their Ps3 running so other people can use them? It's not exactly a PC... it serves no function when its idling. I don't know anybody that leaves their console on while their not using it for long stretches.
This will be about as popular as Super Nintendo's internet access X system or whatever it was.
A halfway decent description of the game...F -8&q=ico+%22playstation+2%22
and a search: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UT
Lets get something strait- It's homefield advantage that's killing the XBox, not hardware. I think we can all agree that Japan is the undisputed gaming captal of the world and it just so happens both Sony and Nintendo live there. With few exceptions, the Japanese is very hard for US companies to penetrate effectively. It's literally hostile territory in terms of importation and marketing, where the US is a lot more leanient in those areas, despite what you may hear. The fuss made over a small batch of XBox's scatching game DVDs is enough proof of that.
The biggest issue is the games, in my opinion. Not that they are bad (exceptions noted), just that I don't consider them nessisarily console games since the XBox seems to be leaning more toward American style PC games. Beyond Sega and one or two other popular developers, there's not a whole lot from the Japanese side of things. It feels more like a PC than a console now. If the Xbox wants penetration, it's machine needs to feel like a console and the Japanese have shaped a lot of what that feels is for just over 20 years. Those developers need to be a major presence to compete against the homefiled players.
Of course, MS seems very adept at viral infection of markets. Gates and company tend to have a very long view of their ultimate goals.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I usually don't respond to anyone, but this just hit me as incredibly stupid. You're posting a response to an anonymous coward who is posting a response to an anonymous coward to tell him how...
Oh damn, I just got lost. o_O
* Broadband, 8 Idle PS3's
* "Fantasy Freak" status in one or more of the following areas: - LOTR - D&D - Materia Magica or similar MUD
* No Boyfriend/Girlfriend/Wife (Recomend: Squaresoft FFXXI Divorce Kit). Note: Internet Boyfriend/girlfriends are OK
* Star Wars fanatic status (jar jar sucks) - Star Wars Stratego game owners +10 HP
* Active dislike for star trek fans
* Fanatic status for atleast two Anime series, one of which must involve robotic suits.
**** Requirements waved for The Dragon Master
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Um, yeeeah... Something like that...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Maybe you should tell me what shelf. As for it being a beautiful day out there... it looks the SAME out there EVERY FREAKING DAY...I'm kinda getting sick and tired of it... besides, better to stay in and play your console, where every single disk has a completely different world on it, and perhaps more than one. It's cheaper than a plane ticket, and nicer than going out into a world where nobody wants anything to do with each other.
Besides, it give you training to put an end to that increasingly insipid excuse for a world out there.
i bet you can't imagine a reason why people would want to have a computer at home. maybe they will sell, say, five in the world.
--
making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
Isn't the purpose of a game console to PLAY GAMES??? I don't know, but... if I buy something to play games, I'm not sure I'd like it to be able to record TV programs for me, take care of my refrigerator and all the other stuff this is supposed to do. I mean, let it do all that, and have a broadband connection, and you have consumer profiling. All this info about what you're watching, eating, reading, listening to, etc going into this gigantic database where you're just another number who likes options 13, 17 and 192. If I buy a CD player, I expect it to do just that.. play the ****ing CD, not tell me if i'm out of milk. So if I'm gonna buy a game console, I expect it to do just that. Play the damn game, and not flush my toilet. Anyhow.. I think the whole thing is stupid. I'm an electrical engineer, and I can tell you that they'll need a hell of a lot more time to pull off the hardware, and concerning networking, unless there's fiber in every single house that'll have this, you'll be playing quake 3, shooting someone, and 2 seconds later, the "extra" processing power will kick in, rendering the blood on the screen... cause we all know how realistic it is to shoot someone, and then have them die, only to have them start squirting blood 5 minutes later... ugh... pure idiocy...
I don't know anybody that leaves their console on while their not using it for long stretches.
I personally know several. Some people play old NES games that take hours to beat yet do not have a save feature.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I know Sony must have some engineers, or they could never have built the PS2. The engineers must know that everything that's been written about the PS3 so far is hype and fluff, but they must also have a non-stupid idea in mind. So the question is, can we extrapolate from the hype and fluff what the non-stupid idea is? Two thoughts come to mind.
1) The PS3 processor will be composed of many small, simple computing elements which will make it possible to keep a lot more of the silicon busy if programs can be parallelized, which in the case of world simulation, which is what gaming is converging into, maybe it can. You can just assign individual processors to individual components of the world.
2) Future PS3s will be joined together into some kind of virtual computing grid, where the grid as a whole will simulate the gaming world. Using a grid to do rendering won't work. Even if ping time was 50 msec and processing time at the remote node was 0 that would set a limit of 20 frames per second. Before someone thinks I'm stupid, that's only one of the reasons it won't work. Meanwhile, GPUs are getting so powerful that there is no need to offload rendinging to remote processors.
However, what if a portion of the processing capacity of each console was used for shared world simulation? You could have a peer to peer MMORPG game. It would require that the consoles be trusted and that the world state be saves as consoles joined and left the game, but if it could work we might be able to have MMORPGs where you just have to buy the game but not pay a fee to someone else to run a server for you. Not that that would be good for Sony since they make tons of money running the servers, but it would be great for gamers.
Anyway, this is the best I can make of the utter nonsense that's been written about the PS3 so far. Bother very futuristic, but not outside the pale of possibility. Meanwhile, maybe someone can explain to that reporter that a fast computer does not protect you from hackers and viruses, any more than a fast car protects you from car theives and catching a cold.
Would hackers figure out how to suck up unused cycles from other people's game machines while not sharing any cycles on theirs? If this does work, and if enough people buy into it you could have the makings of an interesting doctoral dissertation in political economy on the collective action problems that could arise.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Yeah... this is a great idea. </end sarcasm>
I can see it now...
*phone rings*
"Hello?"
"Joey, are you playing your PS3?"
"Yeah, why?"
"I'm trying to watch the cutscreen. Would you mind turning it off for a while? And call ___ (insert other names) and tell them to not play now either"
Good idea.
"PS3: A great game! Just play it in off-peak hours..."
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
I usually don't get lost, but this just hit me as incredibly stupid. You, who normally doesn't respond to anyone, are posting a response to an anonymous coward who normally doesn't respond to idiots who is posting a response to an idiot who normally doesn't respond to trolls who is posting a response to a troll to tell him how incredibly stupid it was that on a Saturday afternoon he posted a troll about how everyone should go out on a Saturday afternoon and get a life from Wal-Mart.
Now I know why they call you Lost in Pants. *yawn*
Well, if broadband was widespread and cheap, and actually fast without too much capping...
...then it might work. But I don't see this happenning until the ps4 or maybe even ps5 becomes a reality. The ps3 will probably be redesigned at some late stage, and will most likely look like a game system of today.
And if we as programmers could find a simple, easy way to apply distributed computing to tasks that require absolutely fast super-low-latency real-time results...
And if there was some way to ensure that such games would still work on a ps3 acting alone, unconnected to any network...
With better graphics, of course.
--R
The big story about Playstation 3 is that it's still 3 years away. That's a century in home entertainment years. They will not be able to maintain market share if they don't improve the hardware (already less powerful than the competition) very soon.
Before the end of the year, you'll see the number of units sold dive while Xbox and Nintendo take the lead. Especially now that developers for the other platforms are learning how to use the extra juice...
And the thing about Xbox is that it's very easy for Microsoft to revamp it. Since all parts are somewhat generic, it would be simple to include a new GeForce 5 by the end of the year. Or put a 2GHz Pentium inside. You name it. As much as I hate the idea of a world dictated by Microsoft (we're almost there), I have to admit they planned for the long haul. And they have deep pockets to stay afloat until they get yet another monopoly.
Sony better move quick.
Nerds in Iraq don't fantasize about Beowolf Clusters of things, but rather Playstation clusters.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Sure, "better graphics" provide the motivation -- but the difficulty in coding for the more advanced processors tends to work against them.
By the time developers really master the art of coding for the new platform, it's already "outdated" anyway, and they're just struggling to make it appear as good as whatever the new "latest and greatest" technology is.
When I look at my collection of PS2 games, I see that the vast majority of the titles released in the first year or so have decidedly poor graphics. (Fantasy of Flight, for example, or Real Pool) These things look like 4+ year old computer games. They certainly don't look any better than most "respectable" PS1 titles.
The graphics details they're trying to address in new platforms are miniscule problems compared to many issues they've *never* really fixed. (EG. Graphics glitches that draw black space instead of the side of an object when your character walks to just the right place and angle.)
I don't even play SSX Tricky that often, but I've managed to "fall into" graphics screw-ups twice now. One time, my snowboarder kept getting redrawn over and over on top of a glitching, flickery backdrop that looked like it was stuck between updating two different frames. Finally, I pressed enough buttons that he "fell out" of the "trap" somehow and back onto the snow.
Even in Grand Theft Auto III, I've had at least one instance where I managed to walk "through" the side of a building partially.
To me, these experiences completely ruin the game's atmosphere - and are far more serious issues than the fact that some object doesn't cast the right shade of colored lighting onto a surrounding item.
That article was all fluff. Remember all the ps2 hype, how George Lucass was supposedly impressed and he said that ps2 could render episode 1 in real time or how Sony said we'd be playing interactive movies that looked like toy Story....remember how they said it would give you a blowjob while you played? How many of their promises did they fulfill? Backwards compatibility is about the only promise they made good on. Geez even some Dreamcast games look better than the supposedly more powerful PS2... where's broadband or even narrowband play for ps2 right now...Today.... sony can't even deliver on yesterday's promises... how can they deliver on tomorrow's???
Won't it be grand when we get this ubiquitous home net thing down? When my refrigerator isn't sending reports to the local supermarket about which groceries I am out of, it can help my PS3 with some intensive graphics rendering.
Wouldn't it be creepy if they got into squabbles and started reporting to you like a parent.
Imagine getting this email at work:
Dad! PS3 is hogging all the bandwidth and keeps making me do his chores when I am trying to mind my own business and compress some old recipes we don't use anymore! Tell him to stop and that he should stay on his side of the house (network)!
~the fridge
yoinks!
Why does this sig rock so hard?
Sony had this set up at the Game On exhibition in London (still on at the Barbican if you're here in the next few months) - camera pointing at you, with some software that lets you 'grab' a control and do something on screen by waving our hands in front of it. You could get some nice effects such as rippling water, flames, etc, but I'm not sure it would work for precise control of a game. Interesting idea though, and Sony are planning to put it into future games, according to the video that went with it.
Kenshi Manabe, senior vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment Semiconductor division, said the Playstation3 will need memory with incredibly high speed and tens-of-gigahertz bandwidth.
Nothing to see here. The Playstation3 is dead. Time to start looking for articles about Playstation4 (or 2.5).
grid computing in this sense will never work. You may (and do) get something like it with seti@home and some of the genome stuff - that's cool tech and maybe you will own the comp that finds evidence of life. grid computing within an intranet will probably be a reality. Donating bandwidth and compute cycles so someone can play grand theft auto 5 faster won't. To use one of the examples I have heard that I like - "your not using your toothbrush right now, mind if I have a go with it?". Simply put I will never pay a fee (bandwidth, computing resource) so some game company/oil company can make tons of money, and many other people will not.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Hmm. That's very odd.
The PS2's geometry engine is a 4x4 arrangement (16 pixel pipelines in total), so the fastest possible render is irrespective of 4x4 or 0x0. Given that a 4x4 triangle at least possesses triangular nature, I'm surprised that they would go for 0x0.
The PS2 also doesn't use co-ordinate space of 0,0 to be anything special - the hardware has automatic scaling from an abstract 4096x4096 space into whatever resolution you happen to be working in. Typically (at 640x480), the co-ordinate (0,0) is at (1728,1808). Why then does it matter where you render the triangle ?
Whether you draw the buffer to the screen or not is also not relevant - you can't "draw" to local memory - it's drawn to RAM with a 2048-bit bus on the same chip as the video processor. There's no reason why displaying the screen would slow that down, so why open yourself to criticism if that were the case. Odd behaviour to say the least...
In short, I think you're wrong.
There are detailed figures for different types of draw operation in the GS users manual. The 75 million/sec is for no-texture, flat-shade, no-anti-alias. It drops down to 16 million/sec for textured, gourard shaded, fogged, anti-aliased triangles.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Actually your the idiot, I posted to tell you that your an idiot, not that I don't usually respond to trolling morons. That was just a side note to let you know how incrediblt stupid you are.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
"If Sony's aspirations succeed, then the Playstation 3 will not be a pure video game console, but rather measure the amount of milk left in the fridge...(snip)"
Is there a point at which I can say my life is digital enough? Maybe I don't want PS3 to monitor my fridge, sharing the milk inventory with sony, spamming me with ads from 5 vendors who want to bring me milk, telling a data mining service how much milk I drink in a year, telling a doctor I need more milk, telling many people things that are NONE OF THEIR FUCKING BUSINESS!!!!
Confuses cell computing with network distributed networking.
And like what games will be available? Huh?
The same old boring round of fight, racing and crappy third person shoot em ups. Whoopee I can't wait. Ooh, ooh, but wait, some of them may even be networked, WOW! Darn I think I just wet my pants.
I think a 1000x increase in the imagination of the games designers might be more useful, don't you?
BTW, can someone please explain why Silent Hill 2 is supposed to be "scary"? Thanks.
I doubt the average user ever opens the box, let alone realizes that they need a new video card (as opposed to a faster CPU, more ram, etc). Not only do people not posess the knowledge to upgrade, but with crappy PCs, it's pretty hard to upgrade, anyhow (few slots, etc). I assume that most people who buy HPs/Gateways/etc just buy a new computer every few years, and give the old one to their kids or to their grandma.
It always amazes me how out of touch /. people are with the non-geek reality that a large number of people live in.
there is no thing
what else could you want?
to be on. I bet it'll be like PS2. It won't actually turn off, it'll just go into Stand-by.
The original gameplan was use the first generation EE/GS for the PS2. The next generation, EE2/GS2, would be used for graphic workstations and would have "100x the power" of the original EE/GS combo (or something like that, Sony PR). Then, the EE3/GS3 would be used for the PS3, giving it "1000x the power" of the PS2.
Distributed processing for console games (or games in general) is not a good idea. People want their games to work all the time, not only when peak bandwith isn't occuring. It doesn't sound good on paper, and definately wouldn't look good for actual processing and rendering.
Maybe if the game required you to find an actual extra-terrestrial, then you might have a reason for distributed processing on a game. Otherwise, I can't think of any reason Sony would do this. It would be a headache to keep maintained and wouldn't really bring in the cash considering the slower-than-expected broadband invasion.
This article isn't really a great read.
"the PlayStation 3 will thus be able to use its broadband Internet connection to reach across the Internet and draw additional computing power from idle processors."
what happens during peak hours? framerates drop? i hope that games written for ps3 wont be made to DEPEND on that extra computing power, because it seems to me that it wont always be there.
and it seems kind of silly to think that a single-player experience could depend on weather or not the network is busy.
but maybe im just not understanding correctly
Gentlemen...BEHOLD!
-Dr. Weird
Stupid people think that idle PS3's will be doin the leg work. Smart people realize that huge stations located in different parts of the country with a large amount of super computers will be doing all the computations and sending them to YOUR console.
PolyStation 3 has been out for awhile.
3 interesting things I see about this.
1. maybe they could make some money off selling you additional processing resources in the aftermarket, so you don't have to keep getting incompatible hardware and developers can build satisfying worlds. Supercomputers for business are expandable.
2. Sounds like they're trying to build a second world wide web on a proprietary protocol which would suck in a Burning Chrome / JM kind of way, and your game playing would slow down maybe when people come to visit. More like people asking your machine to render rooms for them or send graphics commands to be shaded on their own PS3. Though if it was totally opened (protocol and code) it would be very cool. Totally open except to M$ is also okay.
3. Someone is going to have to add some secret code to the PS3 like they did for the PS2 which lets you ignore regionality on DVDs or otherwise kill the DRM features.
Unfortunately, the rest of the article is vapor ^ 3.
Forgive me for being arrestingly ignorant, but the best ping I've ever seen over the net is 30 milliseconds. Even on LAN I've only seen 5 milliseconds. Wouldn't that throw a bit of a wrench into rendering 3D scenes in real time?
And then there's the issue of bandwidth. As I understand it even with 4GB/second or more pouring through data pathways on video cards and motherboards there are still gaps while various processors are forced to wait for data. I think I read that the Internet 2 is hopeful of achieving 1Gb/second. How, then, will 1,000 other processors manage to feed 4TB of data per second to your PS3? And last I heard 1000:1 compression doesn't exist in real time...
- Wondering
Maybe you should look that definition up for yourself.
ironic Pronunciation Key (-rnk) also ironical (-rn-kl)
adj.
Characterized by or constituting irony.
Given to the use of irony. See Synonyms at sarcastic.
Poignantly contrary to what was expected or intended: madness, an ironic fate for such a clear thinker
Your post was in no way ironic. Evidence of your lack of cerebral capacities. you probably think everything in Alanis Morisette's stupid ironic song is ironic too..
"The fact that you're still taking my bait doesn't say much for your intelligence."
Bait? What are you some pedophile necropheliac or something? My posting to your post only shows that I reply to people the reply to my comments. Your reply to my initial post which wasn't "bait" doesn't say much for your intelligence.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
YHBT again, and YHL
Christ, man. Give it up.
I think that idea of sharing spare cpu cycles is awesome, it will revolutionize the way we play games. i mean just do the math and you'll see in pure numbers how much it will boost performance.
say your new ps3 is 1 terahertz (THz) (1000x faster, right?)
you hook up to a network of 999 other ps3's
thats a combined cpu power of 1000 THz at your disposal for your games, and all you have to do is share that with the other 999 users..
thats a whopping 1THz for your games, i mean... just imagine it....
I don't know, whats the phrase about "Fool me twice" again?
Last time around they messed the Dreamcast over with this PR stuff about the "Emotion Engine" and talk about the PS2 being so massively more powerful than a PC at that time.
It was all nonsense. PS2 came out as jaggier looking than the Dreamcast. It certainly wasn't the great jump in technology they claimed it to be, but it had managed to destroy is main competitor without selling a console...
So I'd reckon it would be a slight jump in technology, but nothing close the competitors next console...
This is absurd.
First of all, Sony is famous for putting things into their Playstation 2 console that arguably have never really been used. Come on, how many of you playstation 2 owners (not counting the linux modded ones heh) are actually utilizing their built in firewire or USB ports?
Secondly, to think that even anywhere close to 50% of the owners of the Playstation 3 will even have a net connection is absurd. And of this fantasy 50% how many will be willing to leave it on 24/7 along with their playstation?
Come on, thousands of playstations attached together automatically sharing processing commands? This just SCREAMS out to be hacked (and it will be).
I go buy a playstation 3, hook it up to a T3 line so I can service thousands of other playstation 3 players, but this is the trick, I hack mine to INCORRECTY process the requested operations. Let's say they send me some complex collision detection routines to see if a player was shot by a bullet. Well heck yah my PS3 will say! Every time.
And does sony think game makers will create games that 'may' work 'if' you happen to have enough playstation 3's hooked together?
I can just see the warnings on the PS3 games, "Warning, this game will only work correctly if you are able to find at least 450 other playstation 3's to connect to."
This idea is nice, but it can't even come close to being a reality until much later.
What if my playstation 3 breaks down? Am I allowd to sue my next door neighbor for taxing it too much at 3AM while playing Baldur's Gate 7?
This whole idea might work in 2080 whem hopefully we'll have almost every home on the net 24/7 with some good broadband, but until then, if sony try's to actually tout this as the main feature of the console then Microsoft will easily be able to trump them with Xbox 2.
Does the parental admonition "Close the door! I'm not paying to heat/air-condition the whole neighborhood!" ring a bell? How many parents are going to allow their kids to tie up a phone line or leave the console on 24-7 to allow complete strangers all over the world to use their PS3?
Anyone here on the SETI or other simalar project? Ok, people will leave their systems on for others to use if it's the same type of people keeping it on. Also look at Kazaa and other P2P services, they all rely on people leaving their systems on- which really, a ton of people do.
The only reason that I wouldn't leave mine on would be if it sucked a ton of electric. 400 watts would just be unacceptable (however for some reason I don't mind leaving on my AC all the way, as well as the 6 computers in that room...)
For a gaming system 400 watts would be too much, but face it, no game system currently takes that much that I know of- so it's not really an issue.
As for tying up the phone, I don't think that's gonna be an issue. Alot of people playing PS/3 will be college students with always on connections or people at home with always on connections. I have had over 30 computers at home connected, I don't think a Playstation in the mix would really hurt anything.
I guess though, that this makes the prospect for the 'mobile' PS3 nonexistant (unless wireless national networks ever happen)
Tibbon
tibbon.com
One of the reasons why Xbox often kicks PC butt is the negligible overhead of the custom built WinCE in it. Plus, game developers know (exactly) what hardware they are targeting, and (less exactly) how to max it out. The PC world is a zoo compared to that simplicity.
;-) ]
[Linux is efficient, of course, but I gather we were discussing gamming not geekdom here... If you want the latter, get the ~$200 Linux kit for PS2