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High-end Computer or Game Machine?
ghibli writes "A New York Times article on the Sony PlayStation II describes it as a high-tech computer that will rival Wintel PCs. It's virtual reality CPU, dubbed the "Emotion Engine", claims to be more powerful (and expensive) than anything on the market. "
for several reasons.
:). But they've certainly carved out some hard work for themselves.
a) Performance: the numbers I've seen on these things suggest 20million polygons per second. But this has to be taken with a grain of salt. The current leader is almost definitely the Voodoo3, which claims to be capable of 6-8million polys/sec. But our benchmarks of a V3-2000 indicate it gets about 500k best case in the real world. But fine, PsxII will be extremely impressive if it can actually do 5-10million polys/sec.
b) Obsolescence: this thing will be out in Q1'00 in Japan, and not in the States till probably Q4'00. And that's the introductory price -- they will have to keep selling this thing for years (as Nintendo still sells the N64, which came out in like '95?'96? only now is Nintendo making money on the hardware...). But that's an absurdly long time to keep a computer -- we expect them to be obsolete at the best every 2 years.
c) Competition: this thing goes head to head with the current leaders in game performance, nVidia and 3Dfx. But 3Dfx will have their new Napalm boards for this Xmas -- 1st completely new architecture board yet. All kinds of spiffy features (they talked about it at their developers conference at GDC this year). Cycle time in 3D hardware is 9 months, forget Moore's law. N64 & Psx are pretty pathetic now, and they didn't have any 3D hardware competition till partway thru their product lifespan. PsxII will enter a madly competitive, established field.
d) Price: Sure, new computers appear more expensive than Sony's announced price targets for PsxII. But remember, computers right now have a lot more functionality. The wholesale (or pricewatch.com) price of a computer without HD or monitor starts to push Sony's targets, and when you consider that OEM's always have to be making a profit on their machines, since they can't sell the same configuration for very long, a computer is decently price competitive.
This is not to discount what Sony is doing. It's interesting, and I'd be fascinated to know more about the hardware in there (yeah right! Japanese technology...we may never know. Be easier to get an account on the NSA's supercomputer
- Storage? Sorry, need to buy it. Recall the (justified) flap about the iMac?
- Exapandibility? Yeah, like a laptop. We all know how often THEY get expanded. Keep in mind the difficulty of expanding what will still be a GAME machine too... if you start creating games that require expansions, things are going to get complicated. Enough expansions, and now you've got a PC level of complexity, without true PC expandibility.
- Display? Nifty cool, it can pump out millions of polygons... to a TV screen. Wowie. Can it still do that to a real monitor?
- Believe it or not, browsing the web is not the be-all, end-all of computing. Can you write a paper? Balance a checkbook?
- Price? Look around. A $700 computer is already reasonably capable. Do you think that this is going to be any less true 6 months from now? And by the time this thing is out, we may be looking at the first breed of graphics accellerators that do geometry mapping as well.
If everybody would get over the excitement of having a video game console work as a computer (oh my!), we'd see this for what it is: A cheap computer, in both senses of the word. It tries to be a computer, with video-game console ideals. Thing is, the computer industry isn't some kind of idiotic mindless stuck-in-the-ruts industry that everyone who seems to be excited about this seems to think it is. Being all the things Sony thinks the Playstation II can be means being a very complicated product, and I seriously doubt there's anybody at Sony who really understands the computer industry, who has to deal with that kind of complexity on a routine basis. "Does this game run on all the thousands of possible Playstation configurations there are?" is a question Sony has NEVER had to answer, and it's the biggest advantage the consoles have. The video game industry is quite bad at answering that question; see Sonic CD for a great example. (Also, Sonic R has many problems on my Riva 128, which I haven't heard a hint of from anyone of a fix... which should be simple)If yes, then why on earth are you doing it on a game console?
I think the Sony will do reasonably well at the beginning... with its name power, it can hardly fail to. What happens after that is always difficult to tell. But Sony is hardly the first video game manufacturer to try to break into the computer buisness (Even the Intellivision tried that stunt!), and nobody else has come even close. That's because for all the video game industry (and its fans) thinks that the computer industry is somehow inferior, and not as difficult to be in as the computer industry, it is not easier and Sony has no experience there. Playstation-as-computer will go the way of the "Entertainment Computer System".
My 2 cents, after reading a few of the opinions on this thread...
Sony is very forward thinking, I believe. They have a very strong base, with the PSX, and plan to grow it even further with the PSX2. For the longest time games and consoles were for kids, and it was the era of SNES and Genesis. Enter Playstation, alongside the Jaguar, N64, and Saturn... Of all of them PSX is the biggest slice of the game market now, 5 years later, and by the time PSX2 comes out, will be positioned exactly for all those teens who bought into the PSX, and co-incidentally will have gone through college and are now young adults; they can afford a 300$ gaming device, I think.
Sony can and will definitely leverage its advantages, the large installed user base by utilizing the current games and controllers in their PSX2, while also embracing a new range of technologies. It is not rare to see 2 or 3 CD games now, so DVD will be a welcome addition to their arsenal. Likewise, the PSX is *finally* getting pushed to its limits, and even if Sony has overestimated their performance figures by an order of magnitude, and can only provide 7 million polygons per second, comparable to a V3 system, it will be more than enough; developers like Square will sell the system, and not the number of polygons per second the system pushes.
People complain about the price and such; Sony will probably PLAN on losing money per unit, as long as there remains strong sales of software/games for the unit, and as all the teen-aged gamers of today grow up into consumers of tomorrow, there will be no shortage of buyers for quality games.
DVD movie support is a plus, and will leverage Sony's own DVD market, likewise the FireWire support and their own line of FireWire devices.
It would surprise me if Sony seriously marketed this towards anything other than the home market, as a functional integrated home entertainment device, for movies, games, email, web browsing, and minor computing tasks.
There exists and will not exist anything in the market that will compete at this target price range; Come on, a bunch of Cyrix CPUs and Rage Pros currently inhabit the 300$ PC market, and 2 years from now we will see 300MHz Celerons and Savage4s in that price range; they would still suffer from the complexity of the PC architecture, unless Intel manages to push something drastic through the channels, and they would still suffer from the performance bottlenecks of EIDE drives, low small busses to shuttle data around, and the generally unoptimized nature of their hardware for high performance.
On the flip side, I really doubt Sony will even come close to producing a device that can push 75 million polygons per second, or whatever they are quoting, without the significant help of giants such as Intel or IBM; AMD, NVIDIA, etc and all the other companies have problems manufacturing to high specs, how can I be expected to believe Sony and Toshiba can do so?
Likewise, their sails may be seriously deflated by Dreamcast, esp if Sega has really gotten their act together... The lure of the DC is that it is WinCE compatible, and games targeted towards the DC is much easier to retarget towards desktop PCs than the usual...
Still, Sony has guts and balls, grabbing the market away from Nintendo, with a device that will fit perfectly in the homes in many consumers in the next few years...
I'll probably get one, just so I can play Xenogears2 on it or something =)
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I don't think anyone is really claiming that businesses will have PSX2's at the worker's desks. (Although I'd be happier coming to work) I think what is possible is using the Emotion Engine chip that they were refering to and using that as part of a pc. Kinda like using the StrongArm in the netwinder. The new PSX2 chip seems very well suited for things like medical imaging, CAD programs, VR schtuff, etc...
Word processing is probably not its strong suit. Complex molecular visualizations though would probably be well done on it.
-cpd
reports of the network computer's death have been greatly exaggerated. This looks like it will do email, possibly web surfing, and play games as well as or better than any pc. That sure seems to cover a good share of the PC buyers out there. They will just need some kind of printer support and a word processor and this could be a category buster. Maybe Larry Ellison wasn't so crazy after all?
I have used the Playstation 2 (no kidding), and I can tell you this : a celery 500 and Voodoo 3 doesn't even *approach* the PSX2. When they say 66 million triangles/second, they aren't lying - the PSX2's graphics are *amazing*, real-time bezier tesselation and modifications (used for such kick-ass effects as morphing) is incredible. Seeing as the Playstation 2 has over 3x the floating point performance of a Pentium III-500 (and the FP is well-optimized for vector and bezier calculations, unlike the P3), which is critical to 3D graphics performance, your combination won't even match.
However, the PSX2 has Firewire, PCMCIA, and USB connections. So, add a firewire hard disk, a USB keyboard and mouse, and a PCMCIA ethernet connection, and for under $1000 you have a machine with integer performance equal to a P2-300 and floating point performance equal to a quad Xeon-500. And the PSX2 has VESA, DTV, and NTSC output capability, to boot, so you wouldn't be limited to 60hz interlaced.
Yes, all my information came straight from Phil Harrison - I'm not pulling this out of my butt.
First off, I'm looking forward to the Dreamcast more than the PSX2. Yes, I hear you say, the Dreamcast's specs are inferior. Yes, I hear you say, the last console Sega put out here (the Saturn) bombed. Second point first. Does nobody remember the glory days of the Genesis? At one point, it was the most popular system in America. OK, I will freely admit I spent more time devoted to my Super Nintendo, but the point remains that Sega has been on the top before.
Now to address the first point. Even if inferior, the DC's specs are pretty damned good in their own right. Second, it's already out (at least in Japan), and the US launch is just a scant four months away. Compared to the PSX2, whose launch still isn't until December in Japan and godknowswhen here. So, months ahead of time, titles are being released for the DC in Japan which I am already eyeing.
Moving on to that point. These are gaming systems; they would never replace my computer. Why would I want to get them if they didn't have the games I wanted? Right now, I know the following titles are out/will be out for Dreamcast, and I know I'm going to want to get a hold of them: King of Fighters '99, Marvel vs. Capcom, Soul Calibur, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, House of the Dead 2, and so on. On the other hand, I don't have a clue for what's going to be for PSX2, because the developers have been really tight-lipped.
Moving on to developers. In a survey of 20 major gaming companies conducted by Weekly Famitsu (a Japanese gaming mag) on April 14, 1999, (being ArtDink, ASCII, Atlus, Bandai, Capcom, Data East, Enix, From Software, Game Arts, Hudson, Imagineer, Koei, Konami, Namco, NEC, SNK, Square, Taito, Takara, and Warp), all but *three* of those companies are committed to Dreamcast development. Enix is undecided, and ArtDink (who I have never heard of) and Square have said no.
Now comes the Square gambit. Some people are going to get a PSX2 only because Square is developing for it and not DC. Personally, in my opinion this gambit is simply not what it used to be. Square has put out some titles which have been the most enjoyable gaming experiences of my life (Final Fantasy 1-7, Secret of Mana 1-3, Parasite Eve, and Xenogears especially). However, and this is a big however, their insistence on using only the highest-grade technology available to them has caused them to lose sight of how to make good games and their core audience, in my opinion. Final Fantasy 8, while visually stunning, is a flat game. It's either too hard or too easy, depending on what features you abuse; there is no middle ground anymore. Saga Frontier was just far too nonlinear and far too confusing fr a console game; it probably would have worked better as a computer game. Then there are the myriad games coming out based on the chocobo mascot. I don't care for this much. I appreciated the chocobo for transportation, not to explore dungeons while looking cutesy (Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon) or participating in a Mario Kart ripoff (Chocobo Racing). On top of all this, they're producing a movie which is going above George Lucas's self-imposed limit: making fully polygonal actors who are indistinguishable from normal people! (Lucas has stated that he will never use CG to render humans, since humans aren't humans if they're not human. Or something like that.) Which brings me to my next point.
(Before that, though, a quick loopback to the support bit. On PSX2, of the above companies, only ArtDink, Atlus, Capcom, Enix, From Software, Koei, Namco, and Square are committed. Warp has said no; of the rest, they are all either interested or undecided.)
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I truly believe that we in the USA are currently being forced to evolve from 2D to 3D. I am an appreciator of drawn art, animation especially (my home page is proof enough of that; devoting a section to reviewing fan fiction based off of a perticular anime is probably the 5th level of fanaticism right there). I collect pictures. I collect posters. I even try to draw sometimes. There is a certain charm in the drawn art form which appeals to me; and very few of those pictures are 3D renderings. Soul Calibur is about where I draw the line; the characters are gorgeously rendered, but I notice in each of them just enough of the drawn style of art to fully appreciate them. Animation isn't animation to me if it looks far too real.
Well, this is getting probably long-winded of a read as it is, so I'll just reiterate the main points: so far the DC has the games *I* want to play, has plenty of third-party support (which the Saturn didn't have), and is far from selling out to the 3D-obsessed crowd. I may make a post later on the technical non-gaming aspects, but for now I want to hear what the /.ers have to say.
Navaash