Indeed, and that linked Ars article goes on to say:
the report suggests that Hollywood isn't exactly happy with the situation, and could very well renege on the agreement, such that it is
which I fully believe. More convincing to me than the consoles' lack of HDCP is that virtually all PC gfx cards and monitors are in the same boat, which pretty much eliminates any future HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drives purchased by these owners from the ICT market as well, for a long time to come - and they still won't care.
The only thing that will make a difference to the studios is a few high-profile media backlashes to the initial ICT titles, followed by a general drop in sales. It (eventually) did the trick with Sony's rootkit.
as you know HDMI is just combining encrypted DVI with audio
There's no requirement for HDMI to use HDCP (though many implementations support it, not all do), just as with DVI. It's really HDCP you have an issue with, not HDMI of course.
I don't find it that much of a convienience personally though since audio generally goes to a receiver, and video to a display.
Home theatre receivers that switch HDMI are becoming common, and it's a great way to connect AV equipment to the receiver. Less necessary for connecting the output of the receiver to the display, but it's still a smaller, more convenient plug than DVI.
If you buy HDMI enabled quipment you let them turn on the flag anytime they like.
Buying HDCP enabled equipment might encourage them to turn on ICT, yes. But I think that will be increasingly hard to avoid. Not buying ICT-protected media (which must be clearly marked) will be a lot easier to do, and a lot more obvious to the studios (of course, if you don't have HDCP, you'll be doing that anyway).
If enough people simply do not have the interface there is no temptation and the flag is certain never to be enabled.
That's a very optimistic viewpoint, IMHO. Pretty much every HDTV being sold today has one, and those numbers will rise rapidly, especially with HD media available. You can't avoid the risk, and Sony have already demonstrated their willingness to slap DRM on their media without regard for the consumer.
I'm not sure where you get the 2010 date from, there's certainly been no official commitment. If you want to buy the PS3 as a games machine anyway, and you're happy to get Blu-Ray playback as a bonus then great. I think it's a mistake to buy a PS3 primarily as a movie player, unless perhaps you're a hard-core early adopter that is planning to upgrade in a year or two anyway. Personally I'd rather wait until the format wars (and prices) settle down before investing any real money (though I'd commit mayhem to get a really crisp 1080p copy of Baraka).
Actually, DVI can also support HDCP. HDMI is just DVI signals with added digital audio lines, in a more consumer-friendly plug. A cheap physical adapter is all you need to convert between them. HDMI is just more convenient for AV equipment.
Personally, I'd rather buy HDMI equipment and vote with my dollars by not buying ICT-enabled media. That way at least I have a choice when the crunch comes.
Speaking of myths, that Westinghouse LCD you mentioned (the LVM-42W2) does indeed support 1080p, but not over its component input (despite you & others insisting it does). 1080i max - see the specs for yourself. That Barco 1209S projector might or might not do 1080p through its component connection (can't confirm), but it sold for $35K! I've not seen mention of any consumer TVs that will do it.
And herein lies the problem. The component standard supports 1080p, but almost no consumer equipment does. And I recall reading somewhere (sorry no link) that the low-end PS3 won't either, as its analog encoder isn't capable of it. Nowhere has Sony claimed that the low-end PS3 could do 1080p in any way.
Not that it really needs to. 1080i still looks pretty good for most things, and most game developers would opt for 720p & fancier effects over a plainer 1080p picture. Even movies will look fine, a 1080i segmented-frame signal is as good as 1080p, for a progressive-frame source like film at least.
The one real problem is the ICT, the "flag of Damocles" the studios hold over us. That's enough reason to avoid any non-HDMI movie system IMHO, unless you're OK with also buying a real HDMI player when they inevitably bring it in.
But you can't claim that you need to defend a viable market when you have not provided one.
You make a good point, but there's another distribution method you've not mentioned: rentals. Now you can watch Gigli for only $3-4. Yeah, you have to wait, but that's not so hard, it's Gigli we're talking about. Wait a bit longer and it'll be even cheaper.
Another option that might work for less-popular movies is to auction them. Then people only have to pay what they're prepared to pay, the studios make more sales on B-grade movies, everyone's happy (until they see how bad the movie really is of course).
Does a studio want to release on a platform with 10,000 players, or 3 million players?
A valid point, but you're assuming that only 3,000 more HD-DVD players will sell by the time Sony sells 3 million PS3s, which they *may* be able to do by Christmas? Very unlikely, IMHO.
Blu-Ray might get larger installed numbers early on due to gamers buying PS3s, but that doesn't necessarily translate into movie sales, especially with the general uncertainty and limited releases about the new formats. And as the cost of standalone players declines, the PS3 will become less & less relevant - DVD players far outnumber PS2s these days.
given that Sony is a major movie studio in their own right with some decent clout, I don't see them shooting themselves in the foot.
Heh, you've forgotten the rootkit fiasco already, where their DRM sabotaged their customers?:-) Sony are capable of anything. And while you may be more trusting, I believe the ICT will be brought back as soon as the market has grown a little - every time the MPAA releases another "piracy cost us $99B" report, the executive pressure will grow. Unless I see real commitment in the form of a press release from all major studios promising no ICT until 2010, I'm not going to put my money on any HD movie-player without HDMI (I do have an HDMI TV).
I think Nintendo will regain some market share on price-point alone, but I don't know that I will buy one unless I see games that truly warrant it.
Fair enough, but I find myself (having never bought a Nintendo product) considering one myself, for the first time, as a second console. The price point looks better in comparison to the nextgens, but the Wiimote is the real distinguishing feature for me. Even my wife, a total non-gamer, is intrigued.
In terms of how much hardware you get for your money, sure. Consoles are usually subsidised and get good economies of scale, so they're usually excellent value for money. If you just want the hardware for the hardware's sake.
OTOH, most (non-fanboi) people buy hardware for what they can do with it, not for what it is. If you just want to play games, Wii or 360 or is better value than something that makes you pay for HD movie hardware too. If you want HD games and movies, the low-end PS3 is a good option - but only so long as the studios stick to their "gentleman's agreement" - if it even exists - and leave off the ICT flag.
Fact is, unless you get a high-end PS3, then at the whim of the MPAA you could suddenly find your "value" games+HD-movies PS3 becomes good for games+DVDs only, and not such good value as you thought.
Personally I'd rather wait a while, and buy a standalone player in whatever HD format eventually wins. Prices will be cheaper then anyway, so I'll save money, there'll be more movies available and I'll feel a lot more secure about my purchase too. Putting oneself at the mercy of the MPAA is just begging for trouble.
BTW, buying a PS3 as a cheap Linux homebrew media box I can understand - but not until when/if those homebrew media apps actually exist. Until then, it's just a box of spare parts.
That whole argument is predicated on a number of things that simply aren't true for most people.
First off, you'd probably have to have an HDTV, or be planning to get one very soon. In the US, that's a small percentage, but in most other countries, it's miniscule.
Second, you have to actually want a Blu-Ray player. A lot of people are wisely staying away from all that until it's all settled down, or someone releases a universal player. Could take a year or two.
Third, you have to want that Blu-Ray player *straight away*. Right now, that's no-one, because there's no movies, no content. When PS3 is released, there will be a few movies, but how many will be ones *you* really want so much that you'll buy into the VHS/BetaMax war this early?
Third-party Blu-Ray players will rapidly drop in price, partly to make them more appealing to consumers faced with $500 HD-DVD players (and $500 PS3s), partly because the studios will quickly realise that they're not going to get the usual numbers of early adopters this time round (see above). And when those players get cheaper (they're a lot cheaper to make than a PS3), your PS3 won't seem like quite such a good deal anymore.
I can understand rabid, well-off gamers buying a PS3 just so they can play <exclusive_game>, but it's not smart to rationalise paying so much extra up front for an uncertain feature you're hardly going to use in the short term. Better to wait until that same feature will be available in a cheaper, more convenient & higher-quality standalone player (or BD-ROM drive for your PC), at which time there might be a decent range of actual content to use with it, and some assurance that your money isn't disappearing into a BetaMax-hole.
No-one (outside the Sony troll "community") claims "16 terraflops", but it's not uncommon to see claims that the Cell can pump out a solid 2 teraflops. However, this is inaccurate too, and is based (surprise) on Sony marketing.
Each SPE in the Cell can manage a more humble 25.6 gigaflops, when running at 3.2 GHz, and that only if it's doing nothing but matrix multiplication. Similar for the PPE, giving a total of 204.8 GFLOPS for the PS3's 7-SPE Cell. Reality, of course, usually involves fetches, stores, branches and pipeline stalls, bringing the useful total down to a rather smaller figure, and that's assuming you actually have 8 separate things to do all at once.
The difference between the Cell's performance and Sony's claimed 2-TFLOPS figure for the PS3 is of course mostly made up by the RSX GPU. Since it has 48 pixel pipes each bristling with shader ALUs, texture samplers, blend units, depth comparators etc, it's total theoretical performance is around 1.8 teraflops. Not that it's particularly useful for anything except rendering 3D graphics, and likewise never gets fully utilised in reality, rarely even faintly close.
Fact is, any single PC with a modern high-end GPU has a total compute capacity similar to the PS3, but if that was actually useable, universities everywhere would be tossing out their expensive supercomputing clusters in favour of a couple of quad-SLI machines.
Seems to me that both the 360 and PS3 are overpriced but a lot of folks are buying 360's at $500-$700 on ebay so there's clearly a market for expensive game machines.
Why do people keep trotting out those ebay prices, as if they were statistically significant? How many people actually paid $700 for their $400 hardware? 1000, out of 3,000,000 so far, if that? 0.03% isn't much of a market.
If Sony were to launch at a price that wasn't artificially low, they'd have an extremely disappointing launch and a consumer backlash that would make the current price flap look like a raised eyebrow.
Sony's motion sensing is actually copied more from a product like this than from Nintendo. Fine for tilt & simple motions, but since it has no absolute position sensing, you certainly can't aim with it like a Wiimote, or swing it, or block or nearly any of the intuitive gesturing that the Wii will enable.
I agree with you that they should really just have kept quiet about it a bit longer, since it suffers in comparison. Personally, I'd rather have the missing rumble back.
All this is largely beside the point, though. People will forgive a lot if the price is right, but if you price yourself over the norm, then perfection will be demanded, and any slight lack will be seized upon regardless of the features or overall value.
Basically, Sony may have significantly misjudged the Western market's price tolerance, and might as a consequence lose their lead in most of their markets (not Japan, of course).
Ask yourself why the PS2 launched here in Australia at AUD$780 when it sold for only US$299 at the same time. Yeah, the exchange rate was lower then, but around US$0.63 not $0.38!
Now, the PS3 is double the PS2 launch price.
You have to remember that a) US prices don't include tax, whereas Australian prices do, and b) we're not in North America. In fact, the Sony guy lumped Australasia in with Europe, at a price of 499-599 euros.
Allowing for the tax differences, expect about AUD$799 for the base model, and $949 for the full banana. This lines up nicely with the Xbox 360 prices over here (AUD$499 and $649). Add a $79 second controller and a couple of $110 games, that's $1248. Too rich for my blood.
I know I've personally run 1080i out through component cables, and believe I've read about 1080p also over component
1080i, sure, but 1080p60 is twice the frequency of 1080i60. It can be done, it is an allowed standard - but no consumer equipment I've ever heard of supports it. All 1080p-capable displays I'm aware of only accept 1080p signals via HDMI.
if you want to transfer any data off the hard drive (like the £50 worth of SingStar songs I'll probably want, along with all my saved gamestates)
Oh, I expect Sony will be happy to sell you some sort of USB-based PS3-specific flash drive to save your games onto, for only $40. For downloaded SingStar songs, you'll be able to re-download them.
a developer for the 360 cannot assume the presence of a hard drive and a PS3 developer can. That's a pretty huge difference as far as actual game features and design go
Well, not really. If the HDD features are incidental to the game play (such as caching), they just get dropped in the absence of the hardware. If they're necessary, the developer will just mark the game as requiring the HDD, as we've seen in a couple of titles already. After all, how many Xbox-1 games couldn't be made to work without the HDD? A few at best.
The important thing is, unlike the PS2 HDD, there's such a high penetration of HDD models in the 360 market that developers will take some advantage of them if they're there, and aren't afraid to require them when necessary. Will that be the case for 1080p output on a PS3? Probably a moot point.
You're forgetting tax - US$ prices are quoted ex-tax, Australian prices are all inclusive. If you take that into account it's somewhat closer. Also, the US$ was stronger when those prices were set.
We're actually pretty close to the European price, if you convert it over from 399 euros. Not that that's good, but you don't have to feel we're being ripped off like we initially were with Xbox original.
Well sure, if you boil it down to "they all use polygons, float shaders and have similar process technology", then yeah, the next-gen consoles are going to look & perform more or less the same as a PC (for now).
My point was that they (Xenon at least) aren't that similar to PCs in any but the more superficial sense. Xenon (like Xbox original before it) is capable of some neat tricks with its shared-memory architecture that a PC can't do at practical speeds, such as complex vertex & texture modification on-the-fly by the CPU.
This sort of cleverness can come in handy towards the end of a console's life, when developers have figured out how & where to use it. Thus we see some playable games & effects on an Xbox that we never saw on a regular GeForce3. By contrast, PC games tend to rely on improving their visuals by installing a whole new generation of hardware rather than getting clever with what's already there.
The 360 is more or less an ATi X1900, the PS3 will be more or less an nVidia 7900.
Not at all. The PS3's RSX chip is fairly conventional, but it will only have a 128bit bus, compared to the 7900's 256bit bus. The memory is clocked fast, but it's still almost half the bandwidth. This is going to hurt texturing & AA speeds particularly, relative to a real 7900.
The 360's Xenon chip isn't remotely the same as an X1900. For one, it has a unified shader architecture, and can dynamically devote all 48 shader units to processing vertices, or to pixels, or any mix that suits the game. Secondly, it has 512MB of 256bit memory shared with the CPU (as with Xbox1), so it can read/write direct to CPU memory. Third and not least, it has 10MB of 256GB/s eDRAM with on-die blending & AA logic, which makes AA nearly "free" (at 720p).
In practice, most people consider them reasonably similar, edge to the Xenon perhaps - but characteristics will be different to PC chips. Xenon may take longer to fully utilise, due to its non-standard architecture.
which is why i've decided to leave it and go into film and advertising
Speaking as a software vendor to both industries, yes, Hollywood FX artists can get a bit more money than a game artist. They also get insane deadlines, tons of tedious work, little control over idea because it came down from the VFX Supervisor, no room for advancement, and it sucks the life out of them too.
And then there's the downside. As an AC already pointed out, in an established industry, especially a perceived creative one, everyone else's opinion is far more important than your own - egotism is rampant.
I think you'll find that the density Hitachi are claiming is "230 gigabits per square inch (Gb/in2)". Best to check the source before you assume a misprint.
230 GB/in2 would be enough to make an 8 TB 3.5" drive. As it is, they're only hoping for a mere 8 Tb drive.
Dunno about the others, but TFA claims "20 Mbps transfer speed", which would be about 40x slower than an average HDD.
From what little I know about holographic storage, write speeds are a lot slower than read speeds. Though if it could actually read at 160 MB/s like this article claims, why didn't they say that?
TFA says "515 Gb/sq.inch" (64 GB) and "300 GB per disc", so they seem to understand the difference. If so, "20 Mbps" is indeed 20 Megabits/s - which would take 33h 20m to read or write completly.
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the report suggests that Hollywood isn't exactly happy with the situation, and could very well renege on the agreement, such that it is
which I fully believe. More convincing to me than the consoles' lack of HDCP is that virtually all PC gfx cards and monitors are in the same boat, which pretty much eliminates any future HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drives purchased by these owners from the ICT market as well, for a long time to come - and they still won't care.
The only thing that will make a difference to the studios is a few high-profile media backlashes to the initial ICT titles, followed by a general drop in sales. It (eventually) did the trick with Sony's rootkit.
There's no requirement for HDMI to use HDCP (though many implementations support it, not all do), just as with DVI. It's really HDCP you have an issue with, not HDMI of course.
I don't find it that much of a convienience personally though since audio generally goes to a receiver, and video to a display.
Home theatre receivers that switch HDMI are becoming common, and it's a great way to connect AV equipment to the receiver. Less necessary for connecting the output of the receiver to the display, but it's still a smaller, more convenient plug than DVI.
If you buy HDMI enabled quipment you let them turn on the flag anytime they like.
Buying HDCP enabled equipment might encourage them to turn on ICT, yes. But I think that will be increasingly hard to avoid. Not buying ICT-protected media (which must be clearly marked) will be a lot easier to do, and a lot more obvious to the studios (of course, if you don't have HDCP, you'll be doing that anyway).
If enough people simply do not have the interface there is no temptation and the flag is certain never to be enabled.
That's a very optimistic viewpoint, IMHO. Pretty much every HDTV being sold today has one, and those numbers will rise rapidly, especially with HD media available. You can't avoid the risk, and Sony have already demonstrated their willingness to slap DRM on their media without regard for the consumer.
I'm not sure where you get the 2010 date from, there's certainly been no official commitment. If you want to buy the PS3 as a games machine anyway, and you're happy to get Blu-Ray playback as a bonus then great. I think it's a mistake to buy a PS3 primarily as a movie player, unless perhaps you're a hard-core early adopter that is planning to upgrade in a year or two anyway. Personally I'd rather wait until the format wars (and prices) settle down before investing any real money (though I'd commit mayhem to get a really crisp 1080p copy of Baraka).
Personally, I'd rather buy HDMI equipment and vote with my dollars by not buying ICT-enabled media. That way at least I have a choice when the crunch comes.
And herein lies the problem. The component standard supports 1080p, but almost no consumer equipment does. And I recall reading somewhere (sorry no link) that the low-end PS3 won't either, as its analog encoder isn't capable of it. Nowhere has Sony claimed that the low-end PS3 could do 1080p in any way.
Not that it really needs to. 1080i still looks pretty good for most things, and most game developers would opt for 720p & fancier effects over a plainer 1080p picture. Even movies will look fine, a 1080i segmented-frame signal is as good as 1080p, for a progressive-frame source like film at least.
The one real problem is the ICT, the "flag of Damocles" the studios hold over us. That's enough reason to avoid any non-HDMI movie system IMHO, unless you're OK with also buying a real HDMI player when they inevitably bring it in.
I think you're overestimating Sony. See "Rootkit fiasco", above.
You make a good point, but there's another distribution method you've not mentioned: rentals. Now you can watch Gigli for only $3-4. Yeah, you have to wait, but that's not so hard, it's Gigli we're talking about. Wait a bit longer and it'll be even cheaper.
Another option that might work for less-popular movies is to auction them. Then people only have to pay what they're prepared to pay, the studios make more sales on B-grade movies, everyone's happy (until they see how bad the movie really is of course).
No wonder it took Unisys so long to dig it up.
A valid point, but you're assuming that only 3,000 more HD-DVD players will sell by the time Sony sells 3 million PS3s, which they *may* be able to do by Christmas? Very unlikely, IMHO.
Blu-Ray might get larger installed numbers early on due to gamers buying PS3s, but that doesn't necessarily translate into movie sales, especially with the general uncertainty and limited releases about the new formats. And as the cost of standalone players declines, the PS3 will become less & less relevant - DVD players far outnumber PS2s these days.
given that Sony is a major movie studio in their own right with some decent clout, I don't see them shooting themselves in the foot.
Heh, you've forgotten the rootkit fiasco already, where their DRM sabotaged their customers? :-) Sony are capable of anything. And while you may be more trusting, I believe the ICT will be brought back as soon as the market has grown a little - every time the MPAA releases another "piracy cost us $99B" report, the executive pressure will grow. Unless I see real commitment in the form of a press release from all major studios promising no ICT until 2010, I'm not going to put my money on any HD movie-player without HDMI (I do have an HDMI TV).
I think Nintendo will regain some market share on price-point alone, but I don't know that I will buy one unless I see games that truly warrant it.
Fair enough, but I find myself (having never bought a Nintendo product) considering one myself, for the first time, as a second console. The price point looks better in comparison to the nextgens, but the Wiimote is the real distinguishing feature for me. Even my wife, a total non-gamer, is intrigued.
OTOH, most (non-fanboi) people buy hardware for what they can do with it, not for what it is. If you just want to play games, Wii or 360 or is better value than something that makes you pay for HD movie hardware too. If you want HD games and movies, the low-end PS3 is a good option - but only so long as the studios stick to their "gentleman's agreement" - if it even exists - and leave off the ICT flag.
Fact is, unless you get a high-end PS3, then at the whim of the MPAA you could suddenly find your "value" games+HD-movies PS3 becomes good for games+DVDs only, and not such good value as you thought.
Personally I'd rather wait a while, and buy a standalone player in whatever HD format eventually wins. Prices will be cheaper then anyway, so I'll save money, there'll be more movies available and I'll feel a lot more secure about my purchase too. Putting oneself at the mercy of the MPAA is just begging for trouble.
BTW, buying a PS3 as a cheap Linux homebrew media box I can understand - but not until when/if those homebrew media apps actually exist. Until then, it's just a box of spare parts.
First off, you'd probably have to have an HDTV, or be planning to get one very soon. In the US, that's a small percentage, but in most other countries, it's miniscule.
Second, you have to actually want a Blu-Ray player. A lot of people are wisely staying away from all that until it's all settled down, or someone releases a universal player. Could take a year or two.
Third, you have to want that Blu-Ray player *straight away*. Right now, that's no-one, because there's no movies, no content. When PS3 is released, there will be a few movies, but how many will be ones *you* really want so much that you'll buy into the VHS/BetaMax war this early?
Third-party Blu-Ray players will rapidly drop in price, partly to make them more appealing to consumers faced with $500 HD-DVD players (and $500 PS3s), partly because the studios will quickly realise that they're not going to get the usual numbers of early adopters this time round (see above). And when those players get cheaper (they're a lot cheaper to make than a PS3), your PS3 won't seem like quite such a good deal anymore.
I can understand rabid, well-off gamers buying a PS3 just so they can play <exclusive_game>, but it's not smart to rationalise paying so much extra up front for an uncertain feature you're hardly going to use in the short term. Better to wait until that same feature will be available in a cheaper, more convenient & higher-quality standalone player (or BD-ROM drive for your PC), at which time there might be a decent range of actual content to use with it, and some assurance that your money isn't disappearing into a BetaMax-hole.
No-one (outside the Sony troll "community") claims "16 terraflops", but it's not uncommon to see claims that the Cell can pump out a solid 2 teraflops. However, this is inaccurate too, and is based (surprise) on Sony marketing.
Each SPE in the Cell can manage a more humble 25.6 gigaflops, when running at 3.2 GHz, and that only if it's doing nothing but matrix multiplication. Similar for the PPE, giving a total of 204.8 GFLOPS for the PS3's 7-SPE Cell. Reality, of course, usually involves fetches, stores, branches and pipeline stalls, bringing the useful total down to a rather smaller figure, and that's assuming you actually have 8 separate things to do all at once.
The difference between the Cell's performance and Sony's claimed 2-TFLOPS figure for the PS3 is of course mostly made up by the RSX GPU. Since it has 48 pixel pipes each bristling with shader ALUs, texture samplers, blend units, depth comparators etc, it's total theoretical performance is around 1.8 teraflops. Not that it's particularly useful for anything except rendering 3D graphics, and likewise never gets fully utilised in reality, rarely even faintly close.
Fact is, any single PC with a modern high-end GPU has a total compute capacity similar to the PS3, but if that was actually useable, universities everywhere would be tossing out their expensive supercomputing clusters in favour of a couple of quad-SLI machines.
Why do people keep trotting out those ebay prices, as if they were statistically significant? How many people actually paid $700 for their $400 hardware? 1000, out of 3,000,000 so far, if that? 0.03% isn't much of a market.
If Sony were to launch at a price that wasn't artificially low, they'd have an extremely disappointing launch and a consumer backlash that would make the current price flap look like a raised eyebrow.
And for parents still living with their kids...
AU$830 / $999. Ouch.
I agree with you that they should really just have kept quiet about it a bit longer, since it suffers in comparison. Personally, I'd rather have the missing rumble back.
All this is largely beside the point, though. People will forgive a lot if the price is right, but if you price yourself over the norm, then perfection will be demanded, and any slight lack will be seized upon regardless of the features or overall value.
Basically, Sony may have significantly misjudged the Western market's price tolerance, and might as a consequence lose their lead in most of their markets (not Japan, of course).
Now, the PS3 is double the PS2 launch price.
You have to remember that a) US prices don't include tax, whereas Australian prices do, and b) we're not in North America. In fact, the Sony guy lumped Australasia in with Europe, at a price of 499-599 euros.
Allowing for the tax differences, expect about AUD$799 for the base model, and $949 for the full banana. This lines up nicely with the Xbox 360 prices over here (AUD$499 and $649). Add a $79 second controller and a couple of $110 games, that's $1248. Too rich for my blood.
1080i, sure, but 1080p60 is twice the frequency of 1080i60. It can be done, it is an allowed standard - but no consumer equipment I've ever heard of supports it. All 1080p-capable displays I'm aware of only accept 1080p signals via HDMI.
if you want to transfer any data off the hard drive (like the £50 worth of SingStar songs I'll probably want, along with all my saved gamestates)
Oh, I expect Sony will be happy to sell you some sort of USB-based PS3-specific flash drive to save your games onto, for only $40. For downloaded SingStar songs, you'll be able to re-download them.
a developer for the 360 cannot assume the presence of a hard drive and a PS3 developer can. That's a pretty huge difference as far as actual game features and design go
Well, not really. If the HDD features are incidental to the game play (such as caching), they just get dropped in the absence of the hardware. If they're necessary, the developer will just mark the game as requiring the HDD, as we've seen in a couple of titles already. After all, how many Xbox-1 games couldn't be made to work without the HDD? A few at best.
The important thing is, unlike the PS2 HDD, there's such a high penetration of HDD models in the 360 market that developers will take some advantage of them if they're there, and aren't afraid to require them when necessary. Will that be the case for 1080p output on a PS3? Probably a moot point.
We're actually pretty close to the European price, if you convert it over from 399 euros. Not that that's good, but you don't have to feel we're being ripped off like we initially were with Xbox original.
My point was that they (Xenon at least) aren't that similar to PCs in any but the more superficial sense. Xenon (like Xbox original before it) is capable of some neat tricks with its shared-memory architecture that a PC can't do at practical speeds, such as complex vertex & texture modification on-the-fly by the CPU.
This sort of cleverness can come in handy towards the end of a console's life, when developers have figured out how & where to use it. Thus we see some playable games & effects on an Xbox that we never saw on a regular GeForce3. By contrast, PC games tend to rely on improving their visuals by installing a whole new generation of hardware rather than getting clever with what's already there.
Not at all. The PS3's RSX chip is fairly conventional, but it will only have a 128bit bus, compared to the 7900's 256bit bus. The memory is clocked fast, but it's still almost half the bandwidth. This is going to hurt texturing & AA speeds particularly, relative to a real 7900.
The 360's Xenon chip isn't remotely the same as an X1900. For one, it has a unified shader architecture, and can dynamically devote all 48 shader units to processing vertices, or to pixels, or any mix that suits the game. Secondly, it has 512MB of 256bit memory shared with the CPU (as with Xbox1), so it can read/write direct to CPU memory. Third and not least, it has 10MB of 256GB/s eDRAM with on-die blending & AA logic, which makes AA nearly "free" (at 720p).
In practice, most people consider them reasonably similar, edge to the Xenon perhaps - but characteristics will be different to PC chips. Xenon may take longer to fully utilise, due to its non-standard architecture.
Speaking as a software vendor to both industries, yes, Hollywood FX artists can get a bit more money than a game artist. They also get insane deadlines, tons of tedious work, little control over idea because it came down from the VFX Supervisor, no room for advancement, and it sucks the life out of them too.
And then there's the downside. As an AC already pointed out, in an established industry, especially a perceived creative one, everyone else's opinion is far more important than your own - egotism is rampant.
Yes yes, very clever of you.
230 GB/in2 would be enough to make an 8 TB 3.5" drive. As it is, they're only hoping for a mere 8 Tb drive.
From what little I know about holographic storage, write speeds are a lot slower than read speeds. Though if it could actually read at 160 MB/s like this article claims, why didn't they say that?
TFA says "515 Gb/sq.inch" (64 GB) and "300 GB per disc", so they seem to understand the difference. If so, "20 Mbps" is indeed 20 Megabits/s - which would take 33h 20m to read or write completly.