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Sony Presentation Reveals Further PSP Details
Thanks to PSPInsider for pointing to a Sony Technology Group information page, where they've recently posted the slides for a presentation on developing for the Sony PSP (PDF) given at the Australian Game Developers Conference last month. The slides re-iterate Sony's claim that the recently announced PSP will be "the Walkman of the 21st Century", and note the UMD optical disc format is "cheaper and faster to manufacturer than ROM", and thus "publisher-friendly". PSPInsider has extracted several of the more interesting slides, including an example of the hardware-assisted surface tessellation the handheld will be capable of, and pictures of the PSP emulator/debugger alongside some sample code.
may not really make it to the final product...remember when Sony announced the PS2? They claimed progressive scan support....and that has finally been delivered...a few years after the original machine was launched... take the PSX for example, no MP3 support and other crippled specs make it to the final machine under the guise that they will be added later through a firmware update...same thing they said for the PS2 (progressive scan support via new firmware), yet now Sony wants you to buy a whole new PS2 (Model 5000).... I won't beleive the Sony's specs till I see the final product...this may just be marketspeak for PocketStation 2...
http://chrono.posterous.com/
Wait, what? So your PSP is about as good as a PS2?
No, Sony boasted that the PS2 was capable of spitting 75 Million Polygons / second. Now they boast that the PSP is capable of 33 MPS. Considering that the max resolution of the PSP is 480*272, I'd say the PS2 is roughly 3 times more powerful than the upcoming PSP.
It's kind of funny that Sony says the PSP "favorably compares" to the PS2. It seems to me that they want to spin it that way so that people won't associate it with the PSX the same way people associate the GBA with the SNES.
It's also interesting to note that they compare the cost of this UMD format to ROMs instead of mini-dvds (which would be considerably cheaper to manufacture).
Sony successfully raised a lot of press about the inclusion of NURBS compatible hardware with their original PS2 announcements (Ooh! Such a powerful machine!) and are just trying to recreate the same hype around the PSP.
The PS2 supported them all this time as well, but NURBS are inefficient and not the best for real-time 3D. I still have yet to see/hear of any PS2 games that use NURBS either, but correct me if I'm wrong.
It may be cheaper for the publisher, but will it be cheaper for the consumer, or will they use a comparable price to GBA games (or more)?