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HD Era Doesn't Start Till Sony Says So

Posted by Zonk on from the what-do-they-drink-over-there? dept.

GamesIndustry.biz is reporting on comments from Phil Harrison, who says that consumers looking for an HD experience should wait for the PS3. From the article: "The true definition of HD is the three elements of the HD value chain - the display, the content and the hardware to play back that content ... and PlayStation and Sony is the only organisation that has all three bits of the value chain together."

7 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. HD Chain by 77Punker · · Score: 2, Informative

    The true definition of HD is something along the lines of "a tv set that's more than 640x480." You could say an HD chain is any old thing that can do HD plus any old HD TV. So, why is this even an article?

    1. Re:HD Chain by /ASCII · · Score: 4, Informative
      Why is there an article? Because Sony says so!

      There seem to be two claims in the article, though they are both kind of vauge.

      The first one is that 720p is not true HD. 720p is 1280*720 @ 60Hz, which is roughly 5.3 higher than SD as used in DVDs, i.e. 720*480 @ 60/2 Hz. 1080p is 1920*1080 @ 60 Hz, another 2.2 times more than 720p. So the step between 720p and 1080p is much smaller than the one from 480i to 720p. It should also be noted that 720p and 1080i contain roughly the same amount of information. It is very unclear to what degree Sony will support 1080p. While the PS3 itself will support it, that does not mean all games will. Sony has made no such statements. Sonys consumer level projectors that are sold today use 720p resolution internally. Blu-ray will support both 720p and 1080p. While many movies will probably be released in 1080p, they are originally shot at 24 FPS, which means they will actually contain less information thatn a full 720p signal, i.e. less information than the 'not HD' Xbox 360. I don't know if there are any tv-series shot in higher resolution than 720p, but I'm sure there aren't many. So there will be very little content for Sony to release that can outperform what the Xbox 360 does today.

      The second claim is even more vauge. You need three things for HD:

      1. A HD compatible TV-set
      2. Something that can generate an HD signal (like a HD reciever, PS3, a PC or a Xbox 360)
      3. Some HD material (Like a game for the Xbox 360, a HD cable signal or a HD-resolution video file)


      What Sony seems to be implying is that while there are lots and lots of different providers that can give you any one of the above, no single provider is currently providing all three. This is true. Sony is also saying that if you aren't using the same brand on all three parts, you aren't using HD. This is false.

      By extension, that would imply that once the PS3 arrives, you won't be doing real HD unless you are playing a Sony game and using a Sony TV-set. So you best forget about playing Resident Evil or buying that Panasonic plasma. Otherwise you won't be doing HD. Says Sony.
      --
      Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
  2. Re:Oh, THAT HD. by Xerxus · · Score: 2, Informative

    Generally, in console gaming, the Harddrive is shortened to HDD.

  3. Re:Oh, THAT HD. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    HDD=hard disk drive
    HD=high definition

  4. Sony said so- the "Year of High Definition" by tm2b · · Score: 2, Informative

    Too bad Sony already said so, when Sony President Kunitake Ando announced on stage with Steve Jobs that this would be the "Year of High Definition."

    --
    "It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
  5. Re:Right... by ivan256 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Uh, what? You clearly have no idea what NUMA means.

    NUMA means that memory access times are non-uniform. In other words, longer for some addresses and shorter for others. Unified memory architecure means that all the memory in the system shares a common address space. You can't compare NUMA to UMA because they don't have anything do do with each other. A system can be NUMA and unified at the same time. It can also be non-unified and non-NUMA.

    There is no documented evidence that I can find that the PS3 doesn't have a unified memory address space, dispite the NUMAness of it. In fact it looks like it probably *does* have a unified memory architecture. Also, from what I can tell of the architecture diagrams, it's only NUMA due to the necessity of cache coherancy between the cells (all cells talk to one central memory bank through a switch, cells accessing the same memory need to coordinate before accessing thus slowing down access to shared regions while non-shared regions will have one-step access), and a well written application will not experience the NUMA behavior very often.

    That has to be one of the most arbitrary and stupid ways to distinguish between future gaming platforms. Pick on the quality and quantity of the games, and not on the specs that you don't understand anyway.

  6. Re:Right... by ivan256 · · Score: 2, Informative

    That still doesn't have anything to do with whether the architecture is NUMA or not. Neither of these platforms are going across multiple busses to hit their memory. Don't think of NUMA as a performance hit for some addresses in the cell architecture. Think of it as a performance boost for memory that's only being used by a single cell. All accesses go through a single switch fabric that (depending on the internals that Sony hasn't told the public about) could easily be faster than the bus model that the intel FSB in the 360 uses. Depending on how many transistors they were willing to dedicate to the problem, the switch architecture could theoretically be the superior interconnect in all respects.

    Both of these boxes are powerful machines. The PS3 is a little cooler, but mostly because it's something new and interesting while the 360 is more traditional. At the end of the day, the games are going to look the same for the most part though.