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What's Known About the PS3

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the devil-in-the-details dept.

1up has an expansive piece up exploring everything they know about the PlayStation 3. They cover rumours, prices, technology, and the limited information currently out there on upcoming games. From the article: "While the hard facts are still tough to nail down, the general consensus is that the PlayStation 3 is the most powerful of the three next-generation systems, although probably not by as much of a margin as Sony would like us to think. The arguments for the technical strengths of the PS3 go into CPU floating-point capabilities and the difficulties surrounding programming for parallel architectures, but the long and short of it is that whether or not the advantages of the PS3 are apparent will depend on developers' ability to utilize the PlayStation 3's unique architecture."

2 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. It's what's inside the box that counts by wuffalicious · · Score: 4, Informative

    I was under the impression that the original Playstation 2 took a while to come out as well, and did just fine on release despite the dreamcast being available long before it (and, in some ways, being a superior piece of hardware). I look at all the hype that's being slung around, and I wonder why people obsess so much about the systems themselves. Ultimately it's going to come down to a matter of games - it doesn't matter what your system is capable of if no one developes for it. The Dreamcast should be proof positive of that.

    Release titles are what will matter - how many people would have picked up an xbox had it not been for Halo?

  2. That's without the PS3's NVidia GPU by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative
    I went to a talk at Stanford where the lead architect of the Cell processor described that demo. That's running on a Cell processor which is actually doing the rendering. Sony's original plan for the PS3 worked that way, but they eventually put in a conventional NVidia chip.

    So in the PS3, the Cell processors aren't doing the rendering. The Cell should render about as well as everything else with a current NVidia part.

    Flyovers are easy if you have enough RAM and a GPU. How much RAM did the demo rig have?