A PS3 Hands-On Report?

Via a Joystiq post, a story on the site Kikizo which claims to have hands-on experience with the PS3. From the article: "Firstly however, the box. The stylish PlayStation 3 casing design that SCEI boss Ken Kutaragi revealed last year is, and always has been, empty - and no signs of a final, tangible casing solution appear to be in sight. 'I think to fit everything that Sony wants in there AND leave space for a 2.5 inch hard drive,' explains one senior developer working on a final kit, who will be our guide for much of this report, 'the machine would have to grow. The models they're showing off are way too small for what they want.'" Please view this with the appropriate amount of skepticism.

Comments

Regardless of the Unit

[republican gourd]

... If they go through with the 'purchased content is locked to a specific player' trick, I won't be buying one. I don't care how many formats it will play or how many Metal Gear's come out. The horribly low sellback value of videogames etc already makes me feel like I've been taken advantage of, I'm not going to support anything that makes that market worse.

1080p pointless anyway, except on projectors

[Namarrgon]

Of course, no-one was realistically expecting the PS3 to have the required 2.25x in pixel/shader/bandwidth horsepower to play Xbox360-level games at 1080p. And given a choice, developers would always rather do impressive-looking fancy graphics than plain, seen-it-before graphics at a higher resolution. But this may not matter anyway.

The human eye has limited resolution, and there's little benefit to be had by exceeding that, so unless you have a very large screen (or you like to sit unusually close), you simply can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p at "normal" viewing distances on an average-sized HDTV. Some numbers:

The average eye is capable of resolving one minute of arc, a sixtieth of a degree. This equates to roughly 300 dpi, when viewed at a distance of one foot. Let's say the average distance from a couch to a TV is 7 to 10 feet. At 7 feet, you can resolve 300/7 = 43 dpi, at 10 feet it's 30 dpi.

So in order to fully resolve a 720p picture (1469 pixels diagonally) at 7 feet, the TV would have to be at least 34 inches diagonally to make out all the detail. At 10 feet you'd need a rather large 50 incher. For true 1080p, even at 7 feet, anything under 50 inches and you're missing out - and at 10 feet you'd have to get a whopping 74 inch TV!

Of course, for computer monitors, where you sit much closer (say 18 inches), it's a different story - optimal resolution really ought to be 200 dpi (for a 24" widescreen monitor, that's an amazing 4183 x 2353, or one of these). But if you're on a couch, you probably don't need true 1080p unless you're watching a projector on an 80" screen, or unless you spent so much money on your TV that you can't afford a decent-sized loungeroom.

Console manufacturers are out of step with

[Anonymous Coward]

the times. A true NextGen console would have had used a 64bit Intel or AMD CPU, a Linux based OS, dev tools open to all developers, a choice of Nvidia or ATI graphics hardware, a modular casing that allows for hardware upgrades and expansion cards, et cetera et cetera et cetera.

Whats the point of having three completely proprietary platforms with virtually identical hardware specs, zero compatibility between them and no hardware upgrade path? Games just 2 to 3 years from now will need more RAM, beefier graphics chipsets and quite possibly hardware physics accelerators and the like. What do you do with your PS3/360/Revolution then? Throw it away? Buy a NextGen II console? What?

Sorry, but what Sony, MS and Nintendo are doing seems very 90s-thinking-applied-to-mid-00s-tech. Difficult to get excited about three proprietary consoles with no cross-platform compatibility.

Re:Console manufacturers are out of step with

[Zantetsuken]

To reinforce the point of the direct parent of my post, he forgot to add a few extra things (most of it is directed to inform the grandparent "with the times" poster)...

Consoles make improvements in leaps and bounds - back when the first edition Playstations came out, games like Metal Gear Solid (Metal Gear #3, MGS 1) had literally state of the art graphics.

PS3 Graphics (GPU) - It'll be using what is currently top of the line NVidia graphics, the RSX is supposed to be faster than even the holy 7800 GTX - or at least on par with it.

Processor (Teh Cell) - upgrading from my AMD 64 Athlon 3400 to an IBM/Sony Cell processor would be like going from a Pentium 3 to at LEAST a first generation Pentium 4 (in comparison). Much as I love my A3400, as far as gaming physics engines and graphics go - Cell is the future (fars I can see, anyway , for the next few years)

Linux/Console OS - if you had been following more of the gaming industry than just your Linux gaming WINE type emulators and recompilers, you would have read that CELL IS DESIGNED FOR LINUX

Re:Caddies?

[MBCook]

Portable CD players are much more tolerant of scratches (because they are CDs, not DVDs as UMDs are (that's a lot of letters)). Plus Sony built the PSP so small I would assume a much smaller distance between the discs and the laser than you would see in a standard CD player.

The main reason for the PSP caddies are probably so they can be put in a pocket or something like that. They are still open, but they would survive better than a "naked" disc.

I've always been surprised that we haven't been using CD or DVD caddies for video games since the start. But that's just me.

PS: The contest is rigged. You'll never win the bear. *bwahahahaha*