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High-end Computer or Game Machine?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the games-people-play dept.

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. "

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  1. Don't count on Wintel topping the PSX2 soon... by Gary+C+King · · Score: 5

    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.