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Smaller Networked Sony "PStwo" Officially Announced
Asriel86 writes "Tokyo Game Show has
just kicked off, and with quite a bang. Sony just
officially
announced the PStwociting a stateside release date of November 1st, 2004. The
system will be 25% smaller than the current model, will feature a sleeker
design, and a built-in Ethernet port (no adapter required). Sony also says that
there will be 120 new Playstation 2 games with online compatibility by the end
of the year. That equates to thirty games per month or about one game per day
for the rest of 2004."
Thats 75% smaller, not 25%. Its top loading as well. Check Gizmodo.com or engadget.com for better coverage.
I want 2D games back.
To the 50 - "blah blah blah how will they make 120 new games in 3 months, blah blah blah".
9
Here is a copy of the offical press release: http://www.gamegossip.com/pressrelease.php?id=995
And if you don't want to RTFA:
"During the year-end peak-selling season about 80 online game titles are expected to be available in Japan, with 120 titles and 65 titles respectively in North America and Europe. With the launch of the new network-ready(*2) PlayStation 2, the company expects to continually expand the world of online gaming in this generation."
I almost prefer people just copying other peoples work when submitting a story to reading something out of context and passing it along to the masses.
A better development kit isn't going to fix that. PS2 developers can code in C++ and a higher level graphic sdk, but that isn't going to get them anywhere near good performance.
a tions/PSP/HowFarHaveWeGot.pdf
The problem is the very ambitious architecture of the PS2. The GS (graphic synthesizer) got just 4mb of very fast ram. While that enabled Sony to have extremely high theoretical fill rate by embeding the RAM into the GS and connecting it with a 2560-Bit bus, it is also not nearly enough to store all the textures and the framebuffer. That results in the PS2 having to spend a lot of time transfering textures between GS and regular RAM. Because changing out the texture takes a lot of time, you need to order your triangles in a way that minimizes the texture changes, which is a lot of trouble and hurts performance for sure. The PS2 EE (the main CPU) also got just 16kb cache, which is clearly not enough. Memory access to stuff not in the cache is extremely expensive and the Rambus RAM with its high-bandwidth but also high-latency access profile isn't going to help. Because of that a PS2 coder needs to spend a lot of time on optimizing algorithms for ordered local data access and rewriting stuff in assembler to be able to fit the whole routine into the cache.
A interessting document from Sony about PS2 performance is here: (PDF only sorry)
http://www.scee.sony.co.uk/sceesite/files/present
While marketing said 66 million polys/second, even after all these years the fastest real world Sony seems to know about is 125k polys @ 60 Hz, which translates into 7.5 million polys/second while the average recent game seems to do just 3 million polys/s
Better SDKs aren't able to help here. The problem are hardware limitations. And while the hard-to-optimize-for design will sure enable programmers to squeeze out quite a bit of additional performance, but it will never be able to reach the real-world performance of XBox and Gamecube.
And Sony even has better DevKits now, but as you can see their feature isn't C++ or something similiar to DirectX but instead tools to analyse how the cpus is stalled by cache misses etc.
Imho the PS2 is similiar in design to the first Pentium 4, ambitious, marketing-driven design with very high theoretical peak performance but low real world performance.
BTW: Gamecubes marketing is exactly the opposite, Nintendo claimed 7-12 million polys/second while one of their launch games 'Rogue Leader' was pushing 15 million polys/second in some scenes.
Jan