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Blu Ray Drive Will Cost $100 Per PlayStation 3
fembots writes "The Inquirer is running an article detailing how Blu-Ray drives for the PlayStation 3 will cost Sony a small fortune. It turns out that at the release of the console in the first half of 2006, Sony will have to pay more than $100 per drive which will dramatically increase the unit cost of the PS3."
That I'm going to be paying even more than the $300 pricetag that was on the PS3 before this spec was released? That just makes me wonder why I'd even get one in the first place, especially with the performance statistics and upgradeability of current PCs. If you ask me, console gaming is pointless if you have a worthwhile PC. If the game isn't on the platform, run an architecture emulator. Like the controller? Buy an adapter. Consoles are a waste of money.
sony does think the same way. It's a current tactic in the console business when launching a new box to sell it at a loss and make it back on the games, this has been going on for years.
Promote Charity on Myspace, Show Your Colours!
It does cost money to make the optical mechanism, it's a little more complex than the DVD mechanism, and blue lasers are harder to make reliably.
Still, $100 more is still better than a $1000 separate machine. Some companies are announcing HD disc machines and $1000 is what the cost will be price for the first ones.
I wouldn't trust The Inquirer regarding PS3 news.
G PU-Less-Powerful-than-GeForce-7800/
G PU-More-Powerful-than-GeForce-7800/
They were the ones who spread false PS3 news last week based on a message board post saying that the Nvidia 7800GTX was faster than the PS3's RSX. It turned out that the person on the message board misread PSM magazine and it really said the RSX is FASTER than the 7800GTX. I don't think that they do any fact checking. Likelyhood is that Sony manfacters the Blu-ray drives in house and it won't cost more than adding the DVD to the PS2 and they would likely be able to leverage economies of scale in the long run(which were very expensive at the time of the PS2 launch).
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25838
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25862
http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/9126/PlayStation-3-
http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/9132/PlayStation-3-
Even though a nearly-identical story is being run on a number of online news sites (not just The Inquirer), I'm not convinced it's at all valid - none but one of them has a source attribution (the article on Addict3d points to a source on FlexBeta, but that goes nowhere).
I can't find anything in Sony/SCUS/SCEA media releases about it.
The word you're looking for is "moot," not "mute."
Moron.
Nintendo's president will be at this years TGS and will be making an announcement about the revolution though. ;p It's been on a lot of the major gamesites.
Please give a citation for the proposition that Sony sold the PS1, PS2, and PSP at a loss. I am willing to believe it, if I see numbers. But I have never seen an authority say Sony is selling its units at a loss. In fact, I have seen dissections of SEC filings showing the profits that Sony makes from its consoles, on a per-unit basis. The most I have seen that would support you is jealous guesstimation from outsiders who don't vertically integrate production.
With great power comes great fan noise.
the current DVD format is not HDTV spec. While some of the newer players can up-convert the output to 480p, 720p, and 1080i, the original DVD source is not HDTV spec.
This would be like taking the RF (coax) signal from my Atari 2600 game system and up-convert it to S-Video. While I might get a more stable imagine for the TV to work with (depending on the hardware doing the up-converting), the resolution of the source still sucks ass.
Life is not for the lazy.
"You said tripple the size. As I said, can you explain how bump maps could be larger?"
:: This is the color image for the surfaces. The warning sign and the "DO NOT BLOCK ENTRY" sign both use images made in Photoshop to look like that. Those vents on the back wall are also simply photographs. (I'm starting to wish I made a render of this cannon without the textures to give an idea...)
:: This generates a 'bump' on the surface by adding an embosed looking shadow to the texture. The tiles on the floor in this image us that process.
:: This controls how much 'shininess' is reflected from the surface. It is hard to see in this pic a great example of this process, but it's fairly subtle in this pick. Take a look at the tiles in the floor, though. There is some roughness on the floor from the specularity image, the bump image, and the glossiness image.
:: This affects how 'big' a specular highlight is on a per-pixel level. This is great for making metal or something look 'smudged' when light hits it. The floor also uses this technique. Unfortunately, you'd have to see it animated to really get an idea of what effect it has on this scene. Basically, if the camera were to slowly truck to the right, you'd see a sort of 'shimmering' effect as the light hit the different areas of the glossiness map, causing the specular highlights to change in size. That's really the main reason I put that in there, I thought it'd make it look a little more like a real set.
:: This texture controls how much light is reflected from each pixel of the surface. Sort of a poor man's HDRI. The floor just under the cannon uses this effect. It's sort of bluish in this shot. If the light dimmed a bit, the cannon would still be quite visible, but the blue floor beneath it would be black. The seams between the tiles are also almost black in the diffuse channel.
:: I did not use normal maps in this scene. If I had, the bump would look a little more convincing. (Although, for a scene like this, it would have been hard to tell.) These are full color images that represent bump in 3 axes instead of just one. I could have made those vents in the background appear to have more depth to them if I had known about normal maps at the time. To be honest, though, if I did this shot again, I probably would not use them. I would, however, if I were trying to simplify the geometry. There are 1.2 million polygons in this scene. The main reason there are so many is that every edge is rounded. A normal map could have done effectively the same trick at the cost of texture memory. Unfortunately, this would have been painful, as it was this scene took most of my gig of memory to render. As it was, I had dithered down the color textures to 8-bits each. (yes, those are 8-bit images and not 24. I wasn't sure whether to mention that or not... Hard to tell, iddn't it?)
I can offer a little detail. Have a peek at this image I made here. No, this is not an in-game mesh, but it's the sort of graphic that game consoles are rapidly approaching the ability to do in real time. There are a lot of photographic textures in that scene. Each texture is 2048 by 2048 in size. Here's a breakdown of the data involved:
- Color texture. (24-bit)
- Bump texture (8-bit)
- Specular Texture (8-bit)
- Glossiness Texture (8-bit)
- Diffuse Texture (8-bit)
- Normal Map (24-bit)
Assuming I had used normal maps and didn't use an 8-bit image for the color channel, each texture in that scene had 80-bits of data. If I could only have used 24-bit color textures, then I would have seen at least a doubling of the assets. (But not quite tripling..) If I had come from using 8-bit textures... well the numbers turn a lot worse. Unfortunately, I do not know if game companies typically use 8 or 24 bit color t
"Derp de derp."
No. We really can't.
I worked on one game that had a lot of textures. I think it may have been something around 30gb of textures before compression, if not more. After compression I was able to cinch this down to about 7gb (blah blah "jpeg can do better" remember these had to decompress in realtime on a PS2 at very high speed. The decompression algorithm had to be about the same speed as a simple Huffman lookup. It was, and got better compression besides.)
I'm told the PS2 turned out to have curious problems with dual-layer discs, so the sequel's going back to a single-layer disc, and we're cutting a lot of the textures thanks to that.
So, no. We really can't fit all the game data in a dual-layer DVD. 8.4gb goes damn fast when you want modern graphics.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Oh yeah, the DRM stuff shouldn't bother many people either. XBox Live already prevents mod chipping. Don't get me wrong, I don't have an XBox partially because of that reason and that might the reason for me to choose Revolution or XBox 360 over PS3, but don't act like it is anything new.
Or you can have both - Gamecube games that are mature rated and are actually not bad.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
With Id Software (Doom, Quake) and Epic (Unreal) as well as a few other developers porting their games to Linux, linux gaming isn't non-existant, just limited. Valve is the last holdout of the big three of FPS, and they have no plans to support anything but Windows and consoles/arcades. Still, I understand Cegeda (Formerly WineX) runs Valve products decently (They actively release updates when Valve's STEAM updates cause trouble), so it is still possible to play their stuff without paying "the Microsoft tax", as you put it.