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PlayStation 3 Unveiled
The PlayStation 3 was unveiled yesterday afternoon in a press conference at Sony Pictures Studio. The event was full of beautiful demonstrations, specifications, and talk of the games of tomorrow. The machine is certainly impressive, with backwards compatibility, support for up to seven Bluetooth controllers, multiple HD signals, and intimate interactions with the PSP. Coverage, screenshots, and specs available from 1up.com, Gamespot, Joystiq, NYT, Voodoo Extreme, Gamespy, BBC, GamesIndustry.biz, Engadget, Anandtech, Kotaku, Gamasutra, and CNN Money. The only downside I see so far? The controller. Update: 05/18 21:35 GMT by Z : Gamespot has up a comprehensive look at the console based on what is known so far.
7 bluetooth controllers? Why 7? not 8? even the current Playstation 2 lets you have 8 controllers!
Seems a step back... 8-way FIFA games are awesome!
This will get Blu-Ray players into peoples home like the playstation did with dvds.
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Interesting to compare tatics, as MS is ending xbox games development this year and Sony is continuing for 2 more. Nintendo is also continueing development.
Also playstation will be backward compatable. This is great, because there will be a huge library of working games for it. Also they get that games are not just about the graphics, so HD will not be requires
From NYT
"
While every Xbox 360 title must be developed in high definition, Sony officials are playing down that aspect of the new PlayStation. "Blu-ray technology guarantees the highest graphic quality," said Jack Tretton, executive vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment America. "HD is not the be-all and end-all," Mr. Tretton said, noting that the depth of game play could be more important.
Microsoft executives have decided to end internal development of games for the current Xbox this year, but Sony will continue to create titles for the PlayStation 2.
"We'd be crazy to abandon them," said Mr. Tretton, speaking of PlayStation 2 owners.
might look crappy...but it might work out fine...
I like the old PSX controllers, except for one point: the grips are too small for my hands; after a couple hours of intense gameplay, my hands ache from trying to squeeze something so small. The XBox controllers, on the other hand, fit my hands quite nicely (although I don't really like where the buttons are), and everyone seemed to pick on the controllers back when the XBox was released.
There's a utterly spectacular Killzone video doing the rounds, along with some rather pretty screenshots.
Except they look a bit too good. Almost, dare I say it, pre-rendered. Has Sony done the ultimate and presented a completely non-PS3, non-game 3D animation as actual gameplay?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
I have a logitech dinovo blouetooth keyboard/mouse combo and I do not use that mouse for gaming. It's way to laggy, I think bluetooth has maximum update of 80hz or something. Have they worked around that?
I don't know about boomerang... looks more like a banana to me.
It's pretty sad when I can look at an Xbox 360 Controller and say it looks better than this one.
I won't finally judge it until I actually hold one, but I dont understand why Sony would screw up a good controller design for what looks more like an asethethic change rather than a functional one, unless they had to make it bigger to hold the wireless circuity.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
You don't play specs, you play games. And I'm not sure why you think the PS3 GPU is so much better than the 360's. Care to enumerate?
:)
At the debut of the PS2, Sony claimed it was 10 times as powerful as the Dreamcast, but it took quote a while before any PS2 games looked/played any better than the Dreamcast games. Now they're saying the PS3 is twice as powerful as the 360 -- in marketing speak, I'd call that a wash.
1080P, so that's 1080 lines right? Right now on my desktop I'm doing 1280x1024 for all the games I play. So this would be just a hair above that, non?
I've got a 6600 GT, which is able to keep that 1280x1024 filled with data, no problem. So if the card on the PS3 is equivalent to an SLI linked pair of 6800's, it's got more than enough power to pull that off with insane levels of detail.
It seems to me that the XBox is an evolutionary step, taking the XBox, making it a better performing system, and including the obvious enhancements. The PS3 seems to be trying to set the ground work for the next level. Sony is thinking way beyond being the next generation game platform and media hub here.
While XBox can play on HD, what formats does it support? It's just a DVD player, non? The PS3 does Blu-ray, and that will allow it to play high definition movies. Of all the features on the PS3, this is the key piece of the pizzle. Now you may be thinking, nobody has high def movies, but Sony knows that too. Why have a format war over the next high def format when Sony can pre-empt that by having millions of PS3's that already do blu-ray? Expect Sony to begin releasing a lot of their films on Blu Ray when PS3 launches.
This is the first time I've seen Sony really take advantage of all their pieces. I mean Blu Ray has no obvious benefits over HDDVD, but if I've already got a PS3, it has a huge benefit. No matter what people think of the 360, the PS3 will sell millions of units, and that will give Sony it's foot hold. From there, they make money on:
1) Selling games
2) Royalties on the Blue Ray format
3) Selling everybody their favorite movies all over again in high definition
4) Selling TV's that take advantage of all of these capabilities
Very very smart, IMHO. Microsoft has a serious problem here because they can only make up their hardware losses on game licensing. Sony has a lot of channels they can use and it actually will create markets for them that do no currently exist. Microsoft will just sell more games but otherwise be doing the same thing they have done.
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You don't play specs, you play games. And I'm not sure why you think the PS3 GPU is so much better than the 360's. Care to enumerate?
Generic Racing Game:
Graphics...
X-Box:360 - 6 stunning cars on a track.
PS3 - 12 stunning cars on a track.
AI...
X-Box:360 - 6 cars fighting it out for their share of 3 PowerPCs.
PS3 - 12 cars each running their AI on a separate sub processor that's optimized specifically for that task.
Flight Sim:
X-Box:360 - 10-15 planes filling the skies.
PS3 - 20-30 planes filling the skies making for truly chaotic dogfights.
Space Sim:
X-Box:360 - The original cut of StarWars with maybe six X-Wings and six Tie Fighters shown at any one time.
PS3 - Return Of The Jedi with waves of them coming in.
Shooter:
X-Box:360 - A platoon of enemy troops charging your squad.
PS3 - Two enemy platoons trying to flank your allied squad while you try and find a way to out flank them.
If I'm playing a WWII game, I want occasional set piece massive battles not constant squad action because the system can't handle making that number of troops look good. If I'm playing a world war two flight sim, I want to defend a thousand bomber formation not be one of two planes guarding a six plane flight of B-17s. If I'm playing a racing game, I want all the other cars of a big race, with constant jockeying for position, not an arbitrary six needed to keep the framerate decent.
I could go on. The point is, we play games, not specs. But double the amount of processing power means developers have the ability to put double the amount of content on screen at any one time (assuming they don't simply increase detail on existing numbers). Double the amount of adversaries etc. makes for much better, more realistic games.
So, directly, I don't care that much about the tech specs. I care about the games. But the tech specs give the developers far more freedom to make the games I want to play.
As for proof of that power differential: I could argue about how [only when well coded] massively parallel simple processors can blow the crap out of only a couple of very powerful, highly generic processors. You build a processor that can do hundreds of different complex multimedia tasks - great - but half that silicon isn't getting used for any given specific instruction whereas it's all getting used in massively parallel simpler units and, because they're simpler, they can be optimized to cycle faster.
Regardless of theory though, there's a far simpler solution - take a look at the demos. The X-Box:360 demos look good. Great even. They're definitely an incremental improvement over the current generation. The PS3 demos, however, look like something a movie studio rendered. It's like the difference between companies doing better and better stop motion animation and what Weta did with huge numbers of troops in Lord Of The Rings. That is why I'm tending to believe the PS3 claims. They may just be tech demos, not real games. But what tech demos they are.