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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.
guess we wont be taking any servers down on this article...
By reading this, you have given me brief control of your mind.
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!
I think it is shaped that way, so that if you get really mad because you lost for the 100th time, you can throw the controller away and it will come back to you as a boomerang. You don't have to get up anymore to get te controller.
The top five reasons why Sony might want to rethink the controller design:
1) Players would use it as a boomerang to exact revenge on their opponents outside the realm of the PS3
2) A certain religious group might object to the "crescent" shaped design and might get their panties in a knot.
3) The controller ends up being a tool to massage your pressure points and used less for gaming
4) Female Players take it further and use it to simulate two spots at once. Oh goody!
5) It looks like one of those guns in Battle Field Earth
Rapid Nirvana
The console also boasts a new graphics chip from Nvidia, which Sony claims can create movie-quality images in real time in games.
Sure there was something said about the Playstation 2, Toy Story and realtime graphics quality that never turned out to be true......
Actually what you can see is Sony and MS really putting a design effort into their products (whether they succeeded or not is of course an other question and would make great flamewar material.)
But in the vain light of iPod popularity? No, not really when you look at them.
The only thing where the iPod might actually have played a role is in reminding tech companies that design does indeed matter, which btw. is a good thing.
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.
I hope they either provide a way to connect old PS2 controllers (bluetooth device with controller ports?) or release a 'classic' controller identical to PS2 model as option.
Since it is supposed to be - quoting TFA - "backward compatible all the way to the original PlayStation" - it will be obviously possible. Backwards compatibility was the key factor for me to chose PS2 instead of XBox - I just would miss Syphon Filter and my kids would miss Crash Bandicoot games too much to scrap all our old collection of our favorite games. PS2 even reads PSX memory cards, so we could move even our saved game profiles. I hope this will be possible with PS3 too. If it will - and it looks like it will - then Microsoft has nothing to offer me. Again.
that is a really disturbing post. perhaps "girlfriend" or "wife" or "partner" instead of sister would make it a little less...uhh...wrong...
I highly doubt that Microsoft would risk such a leathal blow as to slip the all-important holiday season. They'll need all the help they can get now that the PS3 has announced they're full backwards compatible, with some nifty features that the Xbox 360 doesn't have (Bluetooth, 1080i).
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 took the time out to compare and contrast between the Xbox 360 & PS3 and I came to to this conclusion.
Xbox 360 has a CPU FPS of 45 GFlops*
PS3 has a CPU FPS of 218 GFlops
Xbox 360 has a GPU FPS of around 955 GFlops**
PS3 has a GPU FPS of 1.8TFlops
Xbox 360 has a combined FPS of 1TFlops
PS3 has a combined FPS of 2.18TFlops
Xbox 360 has a DVD-ROM
PS3 has a BD-ROM
Xbox 360 is WiFi ready
PS3 is WiFi built-in
Xbox 360 has 3 x USB 2.0 ports
PS3 has 6 x USB 2.0 ports
Xbox 360 has support for 4 wireless controllers
PS3 has support for 7 wireless (Bluetooth) controllers
Xbox 360 uses Memory Units
PS3 uses MS Standard/Duo/Pro, SD standard/mini & Compact Flash Type I/II
Xbox 360 has support for select Xbox1 games
PS3 has support for PS1 & PS2 games
Xbox 360 has support for 1 720p & 1080i display
PS3 has support for 2 480p, 720p, 1080i & 1080p displays
Note:
* Derived from CPU Game Math Performance of 9 billion dot product operations per second
** Derived from subtracting published Overall System Floating-Point Performance of 1TFlops with derived from CPU Game Math Performance of 9 billion dot product operations per second
Source:
Wikipedia's PS3 Tech Specs
Official Xbox 360 Fact Sheet
Formula for Dot Product Operations Per Second to GFlops
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?
What I want to know about the controllers is their battery life. Bluetooth sucks up a decent amount of power. I don't want to be replacing batteries every day.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
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!
Here is a better comparison, taken from CNN.com:
Revolution will be "two-to-three times more powerful than GameCube," according to Nintendo, which also acknowledges that the next-generation race isn't solely about new technologies. By contrast, Microsoft's Xbox 360 console is 13-15 times more powerful than the first, according to the publisher. And Sony says it's PlayStation 3 is roughly 35 times more powerful than PlayStation 2.
What does it all mean? Absolutely nothing. Statements like this show how it's all marketing b.s. that can't be believed. When we see how the technology is used in an actual game, then it will matter. In the meantime, I'm about four-to-five times more excited for this generations console launch then I was last time.
I heard each controller comes with a utility belt, a 300-lb. zipline and gas pellets.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
And if you look at the new one, it's really not very different at all from the existing ones.
The only thing that really seems to have changed are the 'arms' or whatever.
I don't think judgement can be passed on the controller until it's been tried in person.
No Comment.
Yes, it's called Bluetooth. 79 frequencies available cycled 1600 times a second (23 frequencies in the Japanese spectrum). Once a piconet links up (which is what a given console and set of controllers will be) they cycle frequencies in sync. Unless you plan on having more than several dozen systems within about 10 meters there won't be a problem. Bluetooth was designed to be ubiquitous.
"Nintendo never gives what I call "pissing contest" specs, even when asked for them."
That's because it's been *years* since they've been in the technological lead. They used to tout the SNES' scaling and rotation over the Genesis every chance they could. Even with the N64 they constantly talked about their fog effect even though it was really nothing more than a way to hide the system's horrible performance at drawing scenes at a distance (where you could see the background being drawn in on racing games, for instance).
Nintendo still makes a great system with some great games, but they just don't compete with Sony or MS technology. They have to win with great games.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Back in the Xbox 360 article I said that Nvidia is probably putting the most powerful silicon they can in the PS3, and at 1.8 TFlops They didn't disappoint, and either did sony with the Cell. This thing is almost 2x+ the Xbox 360 in just about every stat but RAM.
The SDK however, has got me a little concerned. Sony is notorious for having bad SDK's for their hardware, specifically the PS2 at launch. Although it's unclear what the Xbox or PS3 SDK is like, my guess is that Xbox 360 dev kit is going to be easier than the Sony one, simply because it's what Microsoft does; make software and programming tools.
Nvidia in the PS3 is definitely going to make it a lot easier for devs since it's probably going to be documented by Nvidia, and will most likely use hardware calls that are similar to their PC counterparts. The only question left is how easy is it to program the Cell, and how will Sony's SDK stack up to the MS one.
Overall if these specs are attainable, Sony's got something here, and it's Developer base will see to it that it trounces the Xbox 360 with it's sheer power, it just might take a year for it to show it's full potential. Nintendo, on the other hand, better show off something that truly lives up to it's "revolution" name.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
...would be "my hot, lesbian, identical twin sister".
You never used the Wavebird for Gamecube did you? It is controller perfection. Gets excellent battery life, doesn't lag, and has excellent range. I blame your issues on crappy third party controllers.
Cool, the PS3 supports 1080p... the obvious irony being that only Bill Gates can afford an HDTV display device that can handle 1080p.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
I watched the whole press conference on gamespot. The battery life of the controllers was stated as 24 hours many time by the presentators.
What isn't being explained to the uninitated is that line for the Cell on '7 x SPE @ 3.2Ghz'.
The Cell isn't a single core: it's 8! The CPU (or PU as it is called) is a POWER5 core. It is connected to 7 APUs/SPEs (Attached Processor Units/Single Processing Elements (whatever you want to call them)). Each SPE is a limited CPU in its own right with its own local caches and memory. The PU acts as a controller, dispatching work to the APUs.
Each APU is essentially a very fast CPU optimized for moving data streams and calculations. Cell was designed to chew on large amounts of similar data very, very fast. It isn't a general purpose core like the POWER or Intel cores found in Xbox 360 or the original Xbox (or your PC for that matter).
Caches aren't everything. PCs and XBox depend on caches to maintain performance levels as in a mixed instruction stream it is tough to know what's going on. A cache miss in a general purpose core can (and is) expensive in terms of cycles. Cell (and the original PS/2) get around caching issues by simply not having them (or just enough to feed the processor) and rely heavily on moving data across a very wide and fast memory bus on demand, as needed and repeated as necessary. Dramatically simplifies the architecture and permits much more focused optimization of code. Programmers for PS/2 had to learn to live without caches and learn a new way of development since PC experience doesn't translate over into the PS/2 world and clearly not into the PS/3 world.
A big part of this contest between XBox 360 and PS/3 is seeing how programmers managed to take advantage of that parallel power. Multiple cores in XBox will be useless if they can't be taken advantage of. Same goes for Cell.
I think PS/3 has the advantage and will eventually win. I'm surprised at the specs as original discussions on the machine had indicated it would be fitted with FOUR Cell processors, not one. Perhaps the initial round of prototypes are single Celled (forgive the pun) to permit development and gaining familiarity with the hardware. Perhaps inside are empty slots for more chips.
Don't confuse PS/3 with a PC because it's not. It is designed to be a very fast SIMD media machine focusing on graphics, video and audio. It may suck as a general purpose server and perhaps a PC can hammer it on some benchmarks but if Cell performs half as good as the information on it speculates in the media realm, there isn't a PC (or Xbox) out there that can hope to keep up with it.
I'd like to know how much they weigh.
I don't use wireless controllers because I like my controller lighter than a can of soup if I'm going to hold it for a few hours.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
According to the specs sheet, they are using Bluetooth 2.0+EDR which fixes the refresh rate problem, amongst other things.
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...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
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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Did they design this controller so that when you got mad at the game and chucked the controller that it would come back to you?
While we know there is marketing hype involved, at least one demo was shown to be real-time. From the Gamespot article :
Why is it hard to believe that Sony, working on this project for the past 3 years or more, might just be able to best Microsoft's 18-month project? It should not be. While the specs might be a tad inflated, it's probably safe to say that the PS3 is a more graphically and computationally capable machine than the Xbox 360. What that means for market share remains to be seen.
Both MS and Sony are going to be pulling out all the stops. Nintendo is likely to step up to the plate as well. You know what? Competition is good.
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.