Get a PS3 then. Yes it costs $600, but then there is no online sub, it's quiet, it looks stylish (very large but so shiny), it plays DVDs, Blu-Ray, CDs, MP3s, AACs, ripped movies, photos, has excellent HD support (HDMI 1.3) and it has a large hard disk. Oh, and it also plays games, browses the web, and helps cure cancer. Sooner or later Sony will stick an IPTV / downloadable movie feature into it too. Yes $600 is twice the price of the iTV, but then again you don't need to buy a PC to use it and it does so much more.
Personally I think iTV is a pretty weird device. The 360 and PS3 have the model right - a PC should be optional to the setup and it should be possible to use the console / player standalone by default. I think Apple's movie service as well as this iTV offering are pretty weak compared to what the 360 and PS3 offer and I don't see the service taking off until the PC is taken out of the equation.
People aren't buying into it in droves, because the previous thing they used works well enough for them and the new features offered by it aren't enough of an incentive to 'upgrade'; on the other hand, it is laden with DRM that the previous thing wasn't.
The same could have been said of DVD at the time. Its obvious that HD discs are still in the early adopter phase and probably will be until Christmas at least when players get to be cheaper and the number of titles jumps. I expect there is also some lingering confusion because of the dual formats which might lead to a sales boost when HD-DVD finally gives up the ghost. The sooner it happens the better.
vista is no more than windowblinds+truecrypt except not as good as either
Not true. Vista happens to be a very nice desktop experience that grows on you. I agree that there isn't much else to it that should justify a purchase but the Aeroglass UI combined with other enhancements make it a very nice and productive environment. I'd pick it over Aqua any day.
As for TrueCrypt - there is a Vista version and it works like a charm. I wouldn't trust any kind of OS based crypto, simply because I think that there is too much complexity in implementing it properly, let alone what backdoors or other issues it might contain.
What scares me most about Vista has nothing to do with the UI. It is the DRM or potential for it in the OS. I have to say I haven't seen any such issues but I fear I that I will once Blu-Ray discs and other HD content becomes prevalent.
I don't know about in the US, but NOBODY in Europe would pay $600 for a phone when virtually all network subsidized phones for under 200 and sometimes as low as zero depending on the price plan. Even pay as you go phones can be had for 60 often with call credit that effectively renders them free.
Even for the minute number of people who buy unlocked phones, $600 is still pretty absurd. The same amount of $$$ would buy you any number of nice PDA phones and still have change left over. An unlocked Treo costs $400 for example leaving people $200 to buy an iPod Nano if they had to.
Apple is going to tank in such a market. No matter how "cool" their phone claims to be, it is too damned expensive for most people. Their only hope of surviving is to cosy up to a network provider for the subsidy and that means crippling their phone and relinquishing a large chunk of their revenues through exclusivity and the network providers slice. And they'll have to do this in every single territory as well as negotiate the various protocols and standards that distinguish the US from Europe from Japan etc. As such I truly wonder if Apple will make any headway.
Sony's machine costs $800 and putting pressure on them to lower a price point could hasten any future demise... if it's in the cards.
I seriously doubt it costs Sony $800 to make them. The iSupply estimate that stuck that price tag on the PS3 was done even before it was released, during a blue laser diode drought. So iSupply stuck a $125 price tag on the Blu-Ray drive alone and high prices on other components too. Six months later and blue lasert diodes are not in short supply, and neither are PS3s. Clearly their production issues are sorted and they're even reducing costs in other ways such as the recent move to software BC which chops several chips.
It really would not surprise me if the PS3 were at breakeven or close to it right now. Once 65nm Cell happens that is another reduction in costs, not just for the processor but also in the heatsinks, weight and possibly even the case size.
It does seem weird that MS aren't trying to put the boot in right now since they must have more leeway to do it. Shoving out a modestly revamped Elite version seems a peculiar way to compete with Sony when it still misses things like wifi or HD playback which people are starting to take notice of.
Actually I am a developer. IBM's own libspe (and libspe2) are even modelled after the pthreads API because SPUs are essentially specialised hardware threads. If you can program threads you can program the Cell. The challenge is not the Cell but in factoring your game to keep the SPUs filled with work to do. This concept is little different than keeping multiple threads filled with work to do. Either way you still need to think how to parallelize your work, how to break it down into jobs, how to dispatch it, how to wait or asynchronously receive results, how to collate it, and how to do all of this 30 or 60 times a second.
If people can manage it for the 360, then they can manage it for the PS3.
That's fine however localization is NOT a major space concern. Not many games are close to breaking dvd-9s limits. At least not as many as Sony would like to tell you. Oblivion which is a freaking enormous game that is not even topping out. Those who believe they can't fit a game on a dvd isn't doing it efficiently or just are looking for excuses.
And how much larger is Oblivion than its predecessor? How much larger is Oblivion if you tossed in Shivering Isles? Could Bethesda even produce a 360 "Gold Edition" of Oblivion with all the expansions tossed in? If they can it must be getting pretty tight. Did you know that Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind fit on a CD? What a pointless argument it would have been when Morrowind appeared to claim no other game needs more than a CDs worth of space. What a pointless argument it is today when a quick trip to a torrent site will show that 360 games are already close to the DVD-9 limit.
Are you freaking kidding me? I'm not talking about edges I'm not talking "which is better" I'm talking, we ran simulations of streaming and in every test the PS3 drive is SLOWER. This has been confirmed by almost every report out there.
No it hasn't. I've seen comparative studies which say the opposite, that since the BD drive has a constant data rate it is sometimes faster and sometimes slower than DVD drives, but overall the transfer rate is comparable. The difference however is so slight that it makes no odds, especially when the PS3 has the BD capacity to repeat data (thus making it faster because seek times are lower), and even a hard disk that any game can use as a cache or for preloading data.
As you mentioned Oblivion, duplicated data is an obvious way to speed it up. Assuming you have the space. The game uses enormous archives (think.zip files) containing all the meshes and textures within the game. Meshes are in one file, textures in another, sound in another etc. So to load a scene means hopping from one archive to another, extracting the data, all of which incurs a seek penalty. Rearranging the data in the way it is most commonly used could have a marked impact on load times. Assuming the disk has the space to do this, and possibly not something which might be afforded when you're stuck with DVD-9. For example, Oblivion players spend a lot of time hopping in and out of houses, so it would make sense to duplicate all the house models and textures and put them in their own file as well as in the general archives so they get loaded without all the seeking. And caching common textures on the hard disk too of course.
Yeah potential. Potential gets you nothing in the real world., when you can't use all 8 cores. The PS3 is an amazing crunching machine, it's built for Folding at home, but for game programming it's not the best machine, especially if you're looking at something like an open world game, the Ps3 just isn't built around branching paths.
Yes potential. Do you think a new console should have its potential realised in its first released titles? What a silly thing to say. Developers get better, SDKs get better, code gets written that can be incrementally improved. I know there will be a lot of dross for the system (and lots of lazy 360 ports), but there will also be plenty of games which optimise for the Cell or use APIs like Havok or Unreal Engine which have been optimised for them. Games like Resistance and Motorstorm show quite clearly that the potential is there.
I guess our company completely sucks then. Except we don't, the system itself has a huge amount of problems (and no we arn't the only ones), whether it's the fact that out of the 6 active cores, one's dedicated to graphics card, and another 4 only has access to 128 megs of that 512 megs or ram (before you have to start doing DMA calls, which anyone should tell you will kill your frame rate). Yeah the cell programming is easy, if you make a game specifically designed for the cell processor. We are game programmers, we make games on platf
It would be interesting if the guy was from Bethesda. Oblivion was something like 5 times the size of Morrowind which came before it. I wonder what Oblivion would have been like if it had been constrained to fit on a single CD.
(2) The 360 has symmetric multiprocessors--3 dual-core PPC chips that use the same memory heirarchy, caches etc. That's 6 in-order execution pipes. Compare that to the PS3 which has *one* general processor pipe and *7* (not 8) SPUs which are
Correction, the 360 has 3 multi-threaded cores (think hyperthreading), and the Cell has 1 multi-threaded core plus 7 SPUs. That means the optimal arrangement for the PS3 is to have one general execution thread and perhaps another thread responsible for farming out work to the SPUs. The 360's optimal arrangement is to have 6 threads running at once.
Either way the programming challenges are pretty similar - feeding all the threads / SPUs with data and collecting the results. Ultimately the differences are interesting but not really that important compared to the number crunching that a typical game requires. Any game which is heavy with shading, transformations or physics will perform better if written for the Cell than it will for the Xenon processor, simply because SPUs are basically number shovels.
The combination of these things means the Xbox360 is MUCH easier to program for, MUCH easier to port existing console or PC graphics engines to, and in general easier for developers to extract the power from.
I suspect that DirectX has more to do with the ease of porting PC titles than anything else with the devkit. But as most games sensibly choose to abstract their rendering behind an API (e.g. Renderware, Unreal or proprietary in-house engines), I doubt it makes as much difference as Microsoft would wish. More important to good performance is ensuring that these middleware APIs are properly optimized for the platforms they run on. An example of that might be the PhysX engine which claimed 10x speed improvements in some areas when they released 4.5 which was SPU optimized.
The people who are hurt the most by this are the JRPG companies who just explode with FMVs, blue dragon is a 3 dvd game, other then them I've heard no complaints about the size of the media. Hell, The only reasons they are filling up Blu-rays are they are using "stupid" tricks like uncompressed audio for Metal gear solid.
No, there are plenty of other reasons. Localization for example - being able to offer the same game in multiple locales from the same disk. Something which is very important in the EU, or even when considering US / JP titles. Aside from that extra capacity means more content, levels, or if you prefer just the ability to duplicate data to lessen seek times and ensure it loads faster.
Simply put, companies don't have to use that extra capacity, but neither is there some barrier blocking their path when they get close to DVD-9's limits. Which many games already manage to get close to.
I just have a simple question. Now that both systems are out, and we already have seen that the 360's dvd has a higher read speed then the ps3's blu-ray device (overall blu-ray SHOULD be faster, but in these two actual system the 360's drive is faster).
So says you. Most other people appear to think that Blu-Ray has a slight edge but both systems are mostly comparable.
Why are you using larger files sizes rather then using the "extra" power of the ps3 to uncompress these files? The simple answer is no, the ps3 isn't that powerful (Insomniac today claims you have 8 cores? funny we only have access to 6 cores).
Insomniac did not say that. It said "The PS3's eight parallel CPUs (one primary "PPU" and seven Cell processors) give it potentially far more computing power than the three parallel CPUs in the Xbox 360". What is incorrect about that statement?
As for compression, compression only gets you so far. Sure you could zip everything up or make textures and sound more lossy. Lots of games probably do it already simply because it may work out slightly faster than reading uncompressed from disk. But there comes a point where with all the compression in the world you still have more content than you can fit on the disk. What do you do then? Do you cut levels, or textures, or models, go multi-disk or expect people to do sizable downloads to get the content?
In the end blu-ray isn't going to be the answer. Sony's system has some good marks, but blu-ray isn't necessary, and the Cell processor is doing more to hurt the developer than it is helping it.
There is nothing particularly hard about programming the Cell. Any software engineer worth their salt (i.e. the kind responsible for writing game engines, optimized code etc.), should be able to master it easily enough and the people doing periphery stuff like menu systems shouldn't have to care. SPU programming is little removed from multi-threading and most of the principles can be carried over to it.
My understanding is that the PS3's scaling limitations are at least partially a result of it's digital output, HDMI. The Xbox has an analog scaler, but is introducing HDMI only going to cause it to be prone to the same kind of issues?
I think its more because the PS3 doesn't automatically scale from the game resolution to the televisions natural resolution. If a game supports 720p and your TV doesn't support 720p, the game will use 480p instead rather than scaling 720p to 1080i (for example. So the PS3 assumes that modern TVs are quite capable of scaling for themselves. Which is mosly true in the US except for some small edge cases and 100% true in EU where 720p & 1080i interoperable support is the standard. The PS3 does have some kind of scaling functionality, but it must be explicitly supported by the game. Beyond3D described how it worked in detail but it didn't seem too useful.
So it probably it boils down to Sony not wishing to throw another chip onto the PS3 just to deal with a few edge cases. I have no idea what Microsoft will do with their switch to HDMI but they were using an analogue scaler previously and the switch might see them take a similar stance.
I don't think the availability of Linux for the PS3 is a major selling point, but it's one I appreciate the option of having. I already have Yellowdog installed on my PS3, so I'm looking forward to playing around with it, and ultimately running VLC or MythTV through it. Unfortunately my SD TV set is no good for programming so I have to set it up with VNC or a remote desktop first. I only installed it yesterday so lots of tinkering to do.
On a broader point I think a lot of people get very defensive when they see the PS3 can do a lot more than just play games. You see a lot of arguments starting such as "I wanted a HD-DVD / Blu-Ray player..." or "I don't want to play music..." or "I just want to play games..." etc. As is a console being able to do more is somehow a bad thing. Fact is that every console including the underpowered Wii can do more than play games if it wanted to, and indeed the Wii & 360 offer non-gaming functionality.
Microsoft and Sony are taking it a step further and trying to extend into downloadable content - games, movies, IPTV etc. The problem for MS is that existing 360s are terrible for downloadable content. One SKU can't download content (and a bunch of other things) and the other has a paltry file storage. I see the upgrade as a long overdue revamp to make the console suitable for the download content, but even then it is missing things it should have such as wi-fi. It's almost as though MS crippled their device (perhaps so it wouldn't compete with Windows Media Centre) and now have to uncripple it as much as possible to compete with the PS3.
While the revamp is long overdue, when you consider the cost of adding wi-fi, or HD-DVD (or Blu-Ray), or XBox Live sub the price difference between the 360 and PS3 disappears completely. Then it boils down to what service both products offer and what the games are like. The 360 is in the lead at the moment with more games, downloadable movies and XBox Live Arcade, but Sony really seems to be gaining a head of steam.
there is no benefit to using HDMI instead of a component-cable
Seems a rather peculiar thing to say. Do you think the same thing when comparing VGA to DVI-D too? Even the best analogue signals is vulnerable to ghosting or slight interference.
As for the HD, it's feature the 360 should have had since the beginning. Too bad that MS are still using a proprietary casing and circuitry to force people to buy their drive rather than allow them to buy and fit any that they like.
So basically some people are prepared to damn them if they can't get enough stock to meet demand and others are prepared to damn them if they do.
Is there any way they can possibly win?
Re:This whole article is an embarrassment to Slash
on
AppleTV Hits the Streets
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· Score: 2, Informative
It does *nothing* and I mean *nothing* else.
Which makes me wonder why the hell anybody would want one. It doesn't play DVDs, it doesn't play DVDs, it doesn't offer any significant online service, and requires a computer to stream / cache from. What is the point of this thing? Who is insane enough to buy one of these just to be able to watch iTMS purchased movies on their TV. If you're going to fork out $300 + the price of a computer, I can think of much better ways to do it. An XBox 360 for example is more than capable of doing everything the iTV does AND it plays games, videos, DVDs. Or go a bit higher and you have the PS3 which does Blu-Ray and higher again Tivo Series 3 which is a PVR.
The current PS3 is simply too little, too late (it's still not launched yet here in Britain!) and too pricey. The British price for a PS3 without game is more than the price of a Wii with game + a core Xbox 360 with a game put together.
Utter nonsense. Cost of a Nintendo Wii - £285, Cost of XBox 360 Core - £199.99. Hmm, that appears to be £484.99 even without buying a game for either platform. The PS3 is £425. Expensive? Sure, but cheaper than your scenario, and a with a lot more functionality than a XBox 360 Core has.
Vista does live updates. Not only in thumbnails when you hover over the taskbar, but in the 3d window browser and the Expose-like tiled preview mode. The system requirements are pretty horrible, but it does look very nice when its running properly.
And UT isn't and neither is RTCW, BF1942 or a number of multiplayer games including most MMOs you care to mention. Sure some of them have "please insert disc" requirements, but not all. And I bet you that if their users had the choice, they'd choose not to have to insert a disc everytime if given the choice.
Hence why I think Warhawk might actually prove quite popular. Assuming the game is any good, I believe the low barrier (say $20), plus fast game loads ensures it will become enormously popular. Substantially more popular than if ever it were stamped out as a disc that people had to buy.
Wolfenstein ET, America's Army and UT2003 have zero or not significant single player modes. They have no issues attracting players. I reckon a good multiplayer game can sell itself if its any good. Even better for console users is that Warhawk doesn't even require a disc meaning you can fire it up in half the time. Which is no bad thing.
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Personally I think iTV is a pretty weird device. The 360 and PS3 have the model right - a PC should be optional to the setup and it should be possible to use the console / player standalone by default. I think Apple's movie service as well as this iTV offering are pretty weak compared to what the 360 and PS3 offer and I don't see the service taking off until the PC is taken out of the equation.
The same could have been said of DVD at the time. Its obvious that HD discs are still in the early adopter phase and probably will be until Christmas at least when players get to be cheaper and the number of titles jumps. I expect there is also some lingering confusion because of the dual formats which might lead to a sales boost when HD-DVD finally gives up the ghost. The sooner it happens the better.
Amongst the 8 people running Linux on their iPods.
The best policy is probably to ignore it. If the king is so reveered in Thailand it isn't like many people will want to view the clip anyway.
Not true. Vista happens to be a very nice desktop experience that grows on you. I agree that there isn't much else to it that should justify a purchase but the Aeroglass UI combined with other enhancements make it a very nice and productive environment. I'd pick it over Aqua any day.
As for TrueCrypt - there is a Vista version and it works like a charm. I wouldn't trust any kind of OS based crypto, simply because I think that there is too much complexity in implementing it properly, let alone what backdoors or other issues it might contain.
What scares me most about Vista has nothing to do with the UI. It is the DRM or potential for it in the OS. I have to say I haven't seen any such issues but I fear I that I will once Blu-Ray discs and other HD content becomes prevalent.
It has as much weight as when Scientologists vote L Ron Hubbard to be the greatest author of all time.
Even for the minute number of people who buy unlocked phones, $600 is still pretty absurd. The same amount of $$$ would buy you any number of nice PDA phones and still have change left over. An unlocked Treo costs $400 for example leaving people $200 to buy an iPod Nano if they had to.
Apple is going to tank in such a market. No matter how "cool" their phone claims to be, it is too damned expensive for most people. Their only hope of surviving is to cosy up to a network provider for the subsidy and that means crippling their phone and relinquishing a large chunk of their revenues through exclusivity and the network providers slice. And they'll have to do this in every single territory as well as negotiate the various protocols and standards that distinguish the US from Europe from Japan etc. As such I truly wonder if Apple will make any headway.
I seriously doubt it costs Sony $800 to make them. The iSupply estimate that stuck that price tag on the PS3 was done even before it was released, during a blue laser diode drought. So iSupply stuck a $125 price tag on the Blu-Ray drive alone and high prices on other components too. Six months later and blue lasert diodes are not in short supply, and neither are PS3s. Clearly their production issues are sorted and they're even reducing costs in other ways such as the recent move to software BC which chops several chips.
It really would not surprise me if the PS3 were at breakeven or close to it right now. Once 65nm Cell happens that is another reduction in costs, not just for the processor but also in the heatsinks, weight and possibly even the case size.
It does seem weird that MS aren't trying to put the boot in right now since they must have more leeway to do it. Shoving out a modestly revamped Elite version seems a peculiar way to compete with Sony when it still misses things like wifi or HD playback which people are starting to take notice of.
If people can manage it for the 360, then they can manage it for the PS3.
And how much larger is Oblivion than its predecessor? How much larger is Oblivion if you tossed in Shivering Isles? Could Bethesda even produce a 360 "Gold Edition" of Oblivion with all the expansions tossed in? If they can it must be getting pretty tight. Did you know that Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind fit on a CD? What a pointless argument it would have been when Morrowind appeared to claim no other game needs more than a CDs worth of space. What a pointless argument it is today when a quick trip to a torrent site will show that 360 games are already close to the DVD-9 limit.
Are you freaking kidding me? I'm not talking about edges I'm not talking "which is better" I'm talking, we ran simulations of streaming and in every test the PS3 drive is SLOWER. This has been confirmed by almost every report out there.
No it hasn't. I've seen comparative studies which say the opposite, that since the BD drive has a constant data rate it is sometimes faster and sometimes slower than DVD drives, but overall the transfer rate is comparable. The difference however is so slight that it makes no odds, especially when the PS3 has the BD capacity to repeat data (thus making it faster because seek times are lower), and even a hard disk that any game can use as a cache or for preloading data.
As you mentioned Oblivion, duplicated data is an obvious way to speed it up. Assuming you have the space. The game uses enormous archives (think .zip files) containing all the meshes and textures within the game. Meshes are in one file, textures in another, sound in another etc. So to load a scene means hopping from one archive to another, extracting the data, all of which incurs a seek penalty. Rearranging the data in the way it is most commonly used could have a marked impact on load times. Assuming the disk has the space to do this, and possibly not something which might be afforded when you're stuck with DVD-9. For example, Oblivion players spend a lot of time hopping in and out of houses, so it would make sense to duplicate all the house models and textures and put them in their own file as well as in the general archives so they get loaded without all the seeking. And caching common textures on the hard disk too of course.
Yeah potential. Potential gets you nothing in the real world., when you can't use all 8 cores. The PS3 is an amazing crunching machine, it's built for Folding at home, but for game programming it's not the best machine, especially if you're looking at something like an open world game, the Ps3 just isn't built around branching paths.
Yes potential. Do you think a new console should have its potential realised in its first released titles? What a silly thing to say. Developers get better, SDKs get better, code gets written that can be incrementally improved. I know there will be a lot of dross for the system (and lots of lazy 360 ports), but there will also be plenty of games which optimise for the Cell or use APIs like Havok or Unreal Engine which have been optimised for them. Games like Resistance and Motorstorm show quite clearly that the potential is there.
I guess our company completely sucks then. Except we don't, the system itself has a huge amount of problems (and no we arn't the only ones), whether it's the fact that out of the 6 active cores, one's dedicated to graphics card, and another 4 only has access to 128 megs of that 512 megs or ram (before you have to start doing DMA calls, which anyone should tell you will kill your frame rate). Yeah the cell programming is easy, if you make a game specifically designed for the cell processor. We are game programmers, we make games on platf
It would be interesting if the guy was from Bethesda. Oblivion was something like 5 times the size of Morrowind which came before it. I wonder what Oblivion would have been like if it had been constrained to fit on a single CD.
Correction, Havok 4.5 engine, not PhysX.
Correction, the 360 has 3 multi-threaded cores (think hyperthreading), and the Cell has 1 multi-threaded core plus 7 SPUs. That means the optimal arrangement for the PS3 is to have one general execution thread and perhaps another thread responsible for farming out work to the SPUs. The 360's optimal arrangement is to have 6 threads running at once.
Either way the programming challenges are pretty similar - feeding all the threads / SPUs with data and collecting the results. Ultimately the differences are interesting but not really that important compared to the number crunching that a typical game requires. Any game which is heavy with shading, transformations or physics will perform better if written for the Cell than it will for the Xenon processor, simply because SPUs are basically number shovels.
The combination of these things means the Xbox360 is MUCH easier to program for, MUCH easier to port existing console or PC graphics engines to, and in general easier for developers to extract the power from.
I suspect that DirectX has more to do with the ease of porting PC titles than anything else with the devkit. But as most games sensibly choose to abstract their rendering behind an API (e.g. Renderware, Unreal or proprietary in-house engines), I doubt it makes as much difference as Microsoft would wish. More important to good performance is ensuring that these middleware APIs are properly optimized for the platforms they run on. An example of that might be the PhysX engine which claimed 10x speed improvements in some areas when they released 4.5 which was SPU optimized.
No, there are plenty of other reasons. Localization for example - being able to offer the same game in multiple locales from the same disk. Something which is very important in the EU, or even when considering US / JP titles. Aside from that extra capacity means more content, levels, or if you prefer just the ability to duplicate data to lessen seek times and ensure it loads faster.
Simply put, companies don't have to use that extra capacity, but neither is there some barrier blocking their path when they get close to DVD-9's limits. Which many games already manage to get close to.
I just have a simple question. Now that both systems are out, and we already have seen that the 360's dvd has a higher read speed then the ps3's blu-ray device (overall blu-ray SHOULD be faster, but in these two actual system the 360's drive is faster).
So says you. Most other people appear to think that Blu-Ray has a slight edge but both systems are mostly comparable.
Why are you using larger files sizes rather then using the "extra" power of the ps3 to uncompress these files? The simple answer is no, the ps3 isn't that powerful (Insomniac today claims you have 8 cores? funny we only have access to 6 cores).
Insomniac did not say that. It said "The PS3's eight parallel CPUs (one primary "PPU" and seven Cell processors) give it potentially far more computing power than the three parallel CPUs in the Xbox 360". What is incorrect about that statement?
As for compression, compression only gets you so far. Sure you could zip everything up or make textures and sound more lossy. Lots of games probably do it already simply because it may work out slightly faster than reading uncompressed from disk. But there comes a point where with all the compression in the world you still have more content than you can fit on the disk. What do you do then? Do you cut levels, or textures, or models, go multi-disk or expect people to do sizable downloads to get the content?
In the end blu-ray isn't going to be the answer. Sony's system has some good marks, but blu-ray isn't necessary, and the Cell processor is doing more to hurt the developer than it is helping it.
There is nothing particularly hard about programming the Cell. Any software engineer worth their salt (i.e. the kind responsible for writing game engines, optimized code etc.), should be able to master it easily enough and the people doing periphery stuff like menu systems shouldn't have to care. SPU programming is little removed from multi-threading and most of the principles can be carried over to it.
I think its more because the PS3 doesn't automatically scale from the game resolution to the televisions natural resolution. If a game supports 720p and your TV doesn't support 720p, the game will use 480p instead rather than scaling 720p to 1080i (for example. So the PS3 assumes that modern TVs are quite capable of scaling for themselves. Which is mosly true in the US except for some small edge cases and 100% true in EU where 720p & 1080i interoperable support is the standard. The PS3 does have some kind of scaling functionality, but it must be explicitly supported by the game. Beyond3D described how it worked in detail but it didn't seem too useful.
So it probably it boils down to Sony not wishing to throw another chip onto the PS3 just to deal with a few edge cases. I have no idea what Microsoft will do with their switch to HDMI but they were using an analogue scaler previously and the switch might see them take a similar stance.
On a broader point I think a lot of people get very defensive when they see the PS3 can do a lot more than just play games. You see a lot of arguments starting such as "I wanted a HD-DVD / Blu-Ray player..." or "I don't want to play music..." or "I just want to play games..." etc. As is a console being able to do more is somehow a bad thing. Fact is that every console including the underpowered Wii can do more than play games if it wanted to, and indeed the Wii & 360 offer non-gaming functionality.
Microsoft and Sony are taking it a step further and trying to extend into downloadable content - games, movies, IPTV etc. The problem for MS is that existing 360s are terrible for downloadable content. One SKU can't download content (and a bunch of other things) and the other has a paltry file storage. I see the upgrade as a long overdue revamp to make the console suitable for the download content, but even then it is missing things it should have such as wi-fi. It's almost as though MS crippled their device (perhaps so it wouldn't compete with Windows Media Centre) and now have to uncripple it as much as possible to compete with the PS3.
While the revamp is long overdue, when you consider the cost of adding wi-fi, or HD-DVD (or Blu-Ray), or XBox Live sub the price difference between the 360 and PS3 disappears completely. Then it boils down to what service both products offer and what the games are like. The 360 is in the lead at the moment with more games, downloadable movies and XBox Live Arcade, but Sony really seems to be gaining a head of steam.
Seems a rather peculiar thing to say. Do you think the same thing when comparing VGA to DVI-D too? Even the best analogue signals is vulnerable to ghosting or slight interference.
As for the HD, it's feature the 360 should have had since the beginning. Too bad that MS are still using a proprietary casing and circuitry to force people to buy their drive rather than allow them to buy and fit any that they like.
Except of course this article is talking US sales where Casino Royale was never given away.
Is there any way they can possibly win?
Which makes me wonder why the hell anybody would want one. It doesn't play DVDs, it doesn't play DVDs, it doesn't offer any significant online service, and requires a computer to stream / cache from. What is the point of this thing? Who is insane enough to buy one of these just to be able to watch iTMS purchased movies on their TV. If you're going to fork out $300 + the price of a computer, I can think of much better ways to do it. An XBox 360 for example is more than capable of doing everything the iTV does AND it plays games, videos, DVDs. Or go a bit higher and you have the PS3 which does Blu-Ray and higher again Tivo Series 3 which is a PVR.
I simply see no point in this device.
Utter nonsense. Cost of a Nintendo Wii - £285, Cost of XBox 360 Core - £199.99. Hmm, that appears to be £484.99 even without buying a game for either platform. The PS3 is £425. Expensive? Sure, but cheaper than your scenario, and a with a lot more functionality than a XBox 360 Core has.
And Vista does live updates. So I'm not sure what the point is trying to be made.
Vista does live updates. Not only in thumbnails when you hover over the taskbar, but in the 3d window browser and the Expose-like tiled preview mode. The system requirements are pretty horrible, but it does look very nice when its running properly.
Hence why I think Warhawk might actually prove quite popular. Assuming the game is any good, I believe the low barrier (say $20), plus fast game loads ensures it will become enormously popular. Substantially more popular than if ever it were stamped out as a disc that people had to buy.
Wolfenstein ET, America's Army and UT2003 have zero or not significant single player modes. They have no issues attracting players. I reckon a good multiplayer game can sell itself if its any good. Even better for console users is that Warhawk doesn't even require a disc meaning you can fire it up in half the time. Which is no bad thing.