What you are also not taking into consideration is that Sony have made so many arrogant claims over the past 2 years. This is just another, Karraker, has to be on his mettle to make sure nothing else comes out of the Sony camp that can be construed as being arrogant.

So Sony' s PR person should stop bragging about their products?

I always feel companies go wrong when they make something they want to sell, and then spend millions trying to convince people they need it. Much better if they spent that researching and making what people actually need, and let people decide for themselves whether they want it or not.

If something is truly great, you wont need to advertise it. It' ll just spread via word of mouth. That vocal minority that Sony is so keen to gag. Take Google for example.

So yea, Sony should stop bragging, and just say ' hey, we' ve made this cool product, we hope you like it...' That would make a big difference imo.

you arse, marketing is one thing, being darn right arrogant and saying " The Next Gen starts when we say so." is another, it is obvious you love Sony hence the reason why you are defending the comments made in this thread so vigourously, I like many others are sick and tired of the continual bollocks that Sony keep spouting about how they are the leaders when at the moment they quite clearly are not.

Oh and before you spout the bollocks of I am an M$ fanboy, I will put you in the picture, I currently own 2 PS2' s and until recently a working PSP, both machines I happen to think were great, that would have been the fact regardless of which company had made them, I am a gamer pure and simply that, but at the moment the PS3 is not something I am looking to buy as there is nothing in it' s current catalogue that makes me feel I have one right now.

HDMI does not make for better gaming, it makes for watching movies better.

Well, to give some examples of were HDMI 1.3 usefull in gaming; in graphics you could achieve allmost the same with a DVI + component as HDMI 1.2, but PS3 got the new updated 1.3, so if your TV support it, you get access to the deep colour palette, so if you write the code for a colour in the deep colour pallette the signal will be sent as the correct colour, that must be usefull.
But the most difference in HDMI 1.3 wich people will notice, is with the sound, the current game with the highest technical audio-quality is Resistance - Fall of Man, there isn' t even a PC-game, wich has the same quality, I think.
You know TV' s with virtual surround, the sound will be very different with HDMI compared to component, atleast my KDL-40X2000 Bravia had alot of difference before I moved it over to my real surround-system.

Same goes with Blu-ray.

Blu-ray is more storage space, that allways means alot.
If you playd Resistance you' d have to change DVD' s, but that' s not the most important thing.
When THQ makes the next SVR-game, they can' t excuse missing wrestler' s with, there weren' t room for it.. :-/
And that the modellers will get a bigger art-budget for their models, I' m not thinking money, I' m thinking bytes when they make the model.

As for Cell, it is yet to be shown how big of a difference it will make over the 3.2PPC processor the 360 has.

Well, I' m not a coding expert, but I do know that it is opening up for much more calculations at the same time, i.e. I don' t know that if the usage of the Hailstorm-weapon in Resistance for instance, wouldn' t slow down the action, or cause lag on the 360-processor.

So if you are going to talk strictly about a gaming console, then don' t mention all of those nice extra features Sony put into the PS3.

But I believe that these extra features are relevant for making a game console better. Forinstance, as a gaming device, it will play Gears of War with the chips badly connected and helped with epoxy, but I' m pretty sure that most people who get red rings of death, that MS had built with similar quality as Sony' s motherboard would have made it a better gaming device.

Forinstance, the internal PSU wich can be used all over the world, or the giant car-sized cooling-fan standing inside the PS3, making it quiter then a small one, wich need much bigger speed.. :)
It' s nice features, and it' s something people apreciate is there, could probably be done otherwize alot cheaper, but I prefer it this way.

you arse, marketing is one thing, being darn right arrogant and saying " The Next Gen starts when we say so." is another

Yeah, Kuturagi were abit out of line when he did say that..
But that were a statement made by Kuturagi, the lead designer of PS3.
And the thing I am defending is this interview with Dave Karraker. You guys are actually lying saying that he said things that he didn' t do, and portrays their marketing guy in the same light as Kuturagi, that' s the thing I' m reacting to.

Yeah, I' m obviously of a different opinion that the rest of you, about the benefit' s of the hardware, and I don' t mind discussing that, but the thing I really dislike is that you guys are lying about what Karraker said.

HDMI 1.3 means fuck all to 98% of current HDTV owners. Yes it allows for 30, 36 and 48-bit colour depths but implementing them costs more and since the majority of HDTV' s in peoples homes only support 1.2 then i can' t see many developers going to the extra lengths as far as the colour palette is concerned.

1.3 also allows for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD, but again, for games it' s not something that many will benefit from.

Blu-Rays' s storage advantage still has to be proven usefull. You may get developers talking about the advantages of extra space and saying " this wouldn' t be posible on DVD9" but it' s a load of bollocks. The only reason Resistance is 16GB (?) is because it uses uncompressed audio and uncompressed HD encoded video for cutscenes. There' s nothing whatsoever that couldn' t have been done on DVD9 if Blu-Ray hadn' t been forced on them.

That reminds me, i need to ditch Resistance. I haven' t played it for a while, with it being terrible and all...

As for CELL, ...it' s impressive to say the least, and when middleware developers put together some kickass tools, and when the better developers come up with their own multi-threaded renderers (UT3 should be a good example) then we' ll see some impressive results. However, unless Sony can scale back the amount of main memory used for OS access the results while impressive won' t be superior to what we' ll see in 360 games using multi-threaded renderers.

Would the Hailstorm in Resistance cause slowdown if Resistance was running on 360? Don' t be a fucking goon. If you don' t have a clue then don' t throw dumb hypotheticals about. Moron.

Fuck off back to Tataouine you pissant bitch.

You are wrong about 1.3, with the exception of MS, every major consumer electronic device manufacturer will migrate to the new standard, so more and more new TV' s will contain 1.3, wich is the new standard HDMI.

As for the uncompressed 7.1 PCM sound, it' s the best option available today.
True-HD is rumoured to not loose quality from uncompressed 7.1 PCM, and require less bandwith than 7.1PCM, you still need 1.3 HDMI to use it, and basically it will allow 7.1 HD-sound to be used more, since hopefully more audio-gear will support it then. :)

The video in Resistance is compressed btw, however there are several types of video, to make sure the gamer gets best experience no matter if he plays on SDTV or HDTV.

Sure you could do similar cutscenes to the ones in Resistance by realtime-rendering, and save some space, but how often do you see as long and as many realtime-rendered cutscenes, as the pre-rendered cutscenes in Resistance?, it' s much harder to code a animation, rather than render it.
In the end realtime animations, are basically allways shorter, and also alot fewer, and I believe that' s the main reason why the story in todays games nowadays suffer, compared to the old days.
Take a look at the difference on the story in the last Wing Commander-games compared to the story in todays popular space-shooters.
Besides, it' s not like realtime-rendered assets do not take up storage-space..

Anyway, you do take away a alternative option from the game-producer, so clearly it really does take away something for the gamer with less storage-space.

The majority of gamers have a SDTV, that dosn' t mean that higher definition consoles like PS3 or 360 can' t give the gamers anything extra, compared to the gamers with a Wii.
Catch my drift? The less hardware your console is having, it' s less certain that the game-producers will take the opportunity to use it.

As for reserved OS memory to affect calculations the calculations I mentioned, I would think that those processing calculations like that on 360, would use a PPC and it' s L2 cache, while a PS3 could use a SPU' s and it' s own memory bank. :-)
I can' t see how that would be affected by the OS memory, please explain, then I' ll go back to tattoine. :)

Kong, you ****ing indiot. Why the hell are you using a shit game like Resitance as your example.

I GOT TWO WORDS FOR YA!!!

MASS EFFECT!!!!

You come on here talking about how much better the PS3 is compared to the 360, and yet you have stated before that all you currently own is PC, PSP, and PS3. You sound just like the monkey up in Sony' s PR department spouting off about Cell and blu-ray almost as if you believe unless a console has these features it' s not a next gen console. Talk about a load of shit.

And going back to Mass Effect, this game is a perfect example of why the extra space on a Blu-ray disc is not needed. Just like Nitro has pointed out before, if you get competent devs who know how to use compression techniques properly, then you can put a game the size of Mass Effect onto a DVD 9.

For shit' s sake. Again I will say the same thing I stated in another thread. There are going to be lots of games to come out on all 3 consoles that all " real gamers" are going to want to play, and that all " real gamers" are going to love and hate. Fucking Cell and Blu-ray are not going to make a difference in this. Sony should have offered Blu-ray as an option which would have cut down on the cost of the console, which in turn means that a lot more " real gamers" wouldn' t say, " oh yeah I want one, but I am going to wait for a price cut" . If you ask me, this was a stupid move on Sony' s part, and one that blatantly shows that Sony wasn' t too concerned about putting out a great console for this gen, but rather more concerned with getting a new format of DVD out to the public. Can' t say I blame them for that, but as a gamer it fucking makes me mad as hell.

So for your next post, which I am sure there will be one, try telling us how Cell and Blu-ray are going to make gameplay so much better than gameplay on the 360 or gimp, and not just mention about how much prettier everything is going to look.

Kong, you ****ing indiot. Why the hell are you using a shit game like Resitance as your example.

Because it' s a realworld-example with alot of technical feats done well, and the fact that it' s the first FPS since Duke Nuke' m I really enjoyed long enough to play through the single-player campaign dosn' t hurt either..

I GOT TWO WORDS FOR YA!!!

MASS EFFECT!!!!

I told my friend with a 360 to bring over Mass Effect, and bring it over.
He said it' s not released before september. :-/
So it' s not some kind of perfect example, Q-bert on PSN is a better example right now.
Mass Effect is very hyped, I know that, so is Killzone II, but we won' t know anything until we see the games..

However since you seem to know so much about it, I googled ' mass effect' and ' dvd' tough.. This is what' s said in IGN developer blog:

Does “Mass Effect” fit on one disc?
Yep, but just barely. This is a monstrous game. In fact, there was a time – not too long ago – when we pretty much scoffed at the idea of fitting onto one disc. But, there’s an art to optimizing the data that goes on a disc – plus we have a few programmers that seem to pull off magic tricks right when we need them.

What concessions have been made during the art of optimization, and what kind of magical tricks? Did they lower the bitrate on the voice-over samples, did they drop texture quality on select textures, or can the 360 really perform magic - if so what happens when you run out of mana?
Could they have used the time spent on optimizing compression techniques on improving the game, and so on?

I' m asking you, since you clearly knows so much about it... Afterall you say it' s the perfect example on why Bluray is not needed, so what exactly do you mean by that? :-/
No games will ever need better/more textures, or better/more sound, or other things wich require more storage space, ever again?
Mass Effect is the technological peak ever for the forseeable future, perhaps with the exception of major leaps in lossless compression techniques?

The idea is to be unconventional.

Now aside from the fact that Resistance is a boring and poorly designed game, the developers used conventional methods of storing data. No fancy compression algorithms, no " magic" as you call it, ...because uncompressed data is the future. Right?

Fine, ...if you can tell the difference between the sound in Resistance and the sound in Gears of War or Rainbow Six: Vegas (and i have all three games), then good for you. I can' t, and i' m guessing most other people can' t, either by default because they don' t have the hardware required to make the most of it or simply because like me they' re not attune to it.

So on one hand you can take your uncompressed audio and your uncompressed video, and your uncompressed level data etc... (and the fact that it' s uncompressed goes part way to rectifying the slow drive speed), and you will end up with a situation where a few top developers do crazy epic cool as fuck things with the additional space, but the rest get lazy and do nothing with it, content that they have space if they need it. Or...

...you can adopt somthing like procedural generation (used in Oblivion) and cut your asset size drastically.

There' s a German project currently in beta, and the entire game takes up just 97,280 bytes. Regardless of things like texture resolution, mesh detail or level size, disk content that would normally take up hundreds of megabytes, takes up just a fraction of a single megabyte.

More HERE and HERE

With that kind of solution you could still have your uncompressed audio and still fit your game on DVD9.

Don' t get me wrong, i have nothng against Blu-Ray. I' m sure it' s uses will be proven necessary further down the line. It' ll mean that Kojima wil be able to fit all the extras in the special edition of MGS4 one the one disc, or with any luck, games coming with playable demo' s of other games on the disc...

Also what' s wrong with games spanning multiple discs? Blue Dragon is on 3 right?

I don' t think there is anything wrong with games spanning multiple disks, however developers often excuse themselves with that they had to drop X and Y because they couldn' t fit it on the DVD.

You also get double pressing costs, lisencing costs and similar when using more disks, so the problem is that consumers loose on it in the end, if the game is close to single disk-size.
Games on Bluray however, it' s only the pressing-time wich is the only cost-factor wich increase as the use of storage increase.

It' s a drop in the bucket compared to the development-costs of the game, but it' s still another checkpoint you have to get a ' OK' from your publisher, or whoever pays the bill. And the people who pays the bills isn' t allways as easy to deal with.

The reason you don' t hear the difference on the sound quality in Resistance and Gears, is probably because you hear it in the exact same compression, however if you should decide to upgrade your sound system, you' ll be able to turn on the uncompressed PCM on Resistance, since they also have it available for use if you should ever decide to get a better sound-system wich again will make you hear the difference, it' s a nice thing to have! :)

farbrausch has been amongst the top contestants in the demoscene, especially during the 64k intro-competitions the last few years, and their definately very good at optimizing code, and Chaos is a very known name within the demoscene the last 15 years, it' s the same person who used to be part of Sanity when he were busy on the Amiga, I think. :)
However license for the texture-library is needed, and no it' s not free to use if you' r going to use it in a comercial product.

And it' s also begs the question on how things made with werkzeug integrates with imports and exports to the current toolchain wich the game-creators use.
Say you load up Maya, and spend a week to render a level for your generic hack' n slash game, what' s the time-factor for moving those assets into werkzung, make them smaller, and if possible export it back into Unreal engine?
Is it really only to say abracadabra-procedurally-generate-kabim, and it' s all magically much smaller?
I don' t know, but I doubt it. :-/

The procedural generation in Oblivion I didn' t care that much for, even tough it' s seems to be something wich seems to be popular amongst most gamers, I ended up feeling that every dungeon there, were basically identical.
I' d much rather prefer, that each dungeon-level, or oblivion gate if you wish, were rendered and loaded in, or parts of the dungeons could change more than they did, so you' d feel more that each gave you a different experience.
In Oblivion I ended up exploring three or four oblivion gates, after that I allways knew where to go, whenever I entered the dungeon I just switched into my super-run-speed armour and ran to the top, 60 seconds after entering the dungeon, I were picking off the sigil stone, so I could close the gate. :-/

I don' t mind grinding, or levels with identical walls i.e. Eye of the Beholder games, but in Oblivion even the routes you had to walk, were identical each time, with only a few minor changes, it gave me litle, I assume this is because of the procedural generation. :-/

However there were alot of good gameplay within the city, and alot of quests and similar, wich afterall weighed up for alot of the lame oblivion gates.

Kong, I apologize for coming off the way I did.

I own all 3, the Gimp, 360, and PS3, and right now I keep thinking to myself, " how long will it take devs to start producing games for the PS3 that will show off supposedly how much better than the 360 it can be" . The same answer arises all of the time. Well maybe we have to wait for devs to get a better grasp on how to program for the PS3 to take full advantage of what they have to work with.

Now I will say right now that I am not as technical savvy as you are, but I will ask you one question and I want a real answer. At the end of this gen, do you really think that there is going to be that much of a gameplay and graphical difference in PS3 games over their 360 counterparts.

I always feel companies go wrong when they make something they want to sell, and then spend millions trying to convince people they need it. Much better if they spent that researching and making what people actually need, and let people decide for themselves whether they want it or not.

That' s exactly right.

If you are in the position of having to ' educate' consumers about why your product is better then you have already screwed up.

Consumers will decide for themselves which benefits they want - if your product has benefits that the consumer wants then there will be no need to ' educate' them.

Right now consumers are making it loud and clear that Blu-ray, HDMI, 1080p etc are not features that are worth $600 and no amount of ' education' is going to change that fact.

So, you' d rather have downgraded the PS3' s with DVI instead of HDMI 1.3, 720p instead of 1080p, DVD instead of Bluray, normal 3.2PPC-processor instead of the expensive cell, optional HDD, and optional wifi, just so it can come under the magic 500$ pricepoint, during the launch-window?
I think it' s alot of cool stuff to get, and don' t feel that it' s a problem paying extra for all those things, just like you probably find it OK to pay MS for the ability to hosting your multiplayer-games on your own console. :)

I assume that is the flaws you have the most problems with, since that were some of the things you mentioned in your original message.. :)

If I could redesign the PS3, I would leave most of it the same. I would even leave in the BluRay player, I consider it one of the best things going for the console and one of my main motivations for buying a PS3. Which I will do, probably when MGS4 comes out.

With the benefit of heinsight this is what I would change to benefit the consumer:

-Firstly I would chuck the 60Gb model and only leave one model based on the 20Gb. So no built in wi-fi, media card reader etc.

-I would chuck CELL and have something similar to the 360 except with four symetric PPC cores with double the cache.

-I would chuck the ram forget about XDR completely and have 768mb of unified GDDR3 ram with a 512 bit width, giving it double the bandwidth over 360 and 50% more memory.

-I would also throw out the legacy PS2 chip to rely on emulation.

This would all cost roughly the same as the 60GB PS3 model. You could imagine the difference this would make for gaming.

CELL is the biggest design flaw in the PS3. It' s not even an accident, Sony did it diliberately. They knew it wasn' t ideal in a console. It' s difficult to tap out all the performance out of it and it' s limited in how it can be used. The price/performance ratio is shit with CELL for gaming code. I' ve said this before, CELL is not designed for general purpose, it' s specifically designed for specialized code. This is not good for a console. The only reason CELL is in the PS3 at all is due to the fact that IBM and Sony have a joint deal developing CELL for the HPC market. However they need to cost reduce CELL before it' s ready for this. Look at the performance of " Folding@Home" . This is a perfect example of the type of code CELL is designed for. There' s a reason why Sony is supporting that distributing program, it' s to showcase CELL' s ability for this type of program.

Sony overestimated brand loyalty, and were over-reaching with CELL and BluRay in there at the same time. They should have just went with BluRay and put CELL in something else. Maybe even do what Agia has been doing with the Physics cards, and make their own. Or have CELL in some consumer electronics.

I always feel companies go wrong when they make something they want to sell, and then spend millions trying to convince people they need it. Much better if they spent that researching and making what people actually need, and let people decide for themselves whether they want it or not.

This is very true, One thing Nintendo' s done extremely well with ( DS / Wii )


I love my DS, have too many games to play on it than to burn time posting if i' m a real gamer or not.


edit:

BTW, Mass Effect?? Why are people hyping this game? i don' t understand?

I think that in a half year we will see a difference in PS3 and 360, not so much in graphics. But in the rest we' ll see a big difference I think, levels in PS3-exclusive games will be bigger than the 360 games due to streaming them of the bluray disk.

I think we' ll even see games beeing one huge level streaming directly from the bluray, only giving us loadtime during startup. :-/
Personally a story in games is important to me, so I actually hope that they' ll cram into as much FMV as possible too. :P

I also think that we' ll start to see better animations, and characthers in general moving better on PS3. On still screenshots I don' t think 360/PS3 will show a big difference. :-/
Physics will be done better on PS3, simply because of Cell, AI all depends too much on the developers to say for sure.

I don' t think that Cell is a design-error, it' s making sure there is enourmous power available at a extremely low power-consumption.
Cell does general purpose code just aswell as most year old PC' s, calling it bad at it is a overstatement, I think.
But it' s having alot more power available for the developers for vector-code and similar, wich can be done much better on a SPU, than on a PPC, where it would be done much slower. :-/

It will never be as good as a PC for office-applications wich is basically all general purpose code wich thrive on PPC-cores, but for game-applications were most of the code isn' t general purpose, you can offload it to a SPU chances are it will pay off really well.

A quad-core PPC would probably be just as expensive as Cell to put into PS3, and it would loose alot of the benefits.

I assume many of us can remember the time when PS2 launced..
Emotion Engine in PS2 got all the same crap back then, as Cell is getting today, even from the same people.
But EE didn' t turn out that badly, did it? It turned out to do a decent job for videogaming, afterall it' s a 300 mHZ processor, with some vector units wich supposedly were real hard to take advantage off.

I could be wrong, but I see alot of EE in Cell. :)
However you do not have to learn a new programming language like VU-basic, to take advantage of the SPU' s this time. :)

Ahh, I did it again.
How come I end up writing a chapter when all I want to say that Cell isn' t a design error? :P

ORIGINAL: KongRudi

How come I end up writing a chapter when all I want to say that Cell isn' t a design error? :P

I' d probably blame Beyond3D if i were you.

In terms of physics, AI and animations there isn' t much that CELL can do that the three PPC' s in 360 can' t do. Especially when considering how crippled the PS3 is with memory. If PS3 games have better animations it will only be due to BluRay along with the possibility to store a larger variety of scripted events. Both the PS3 and 360 are bottlenecked with bandwidth and memory space so proccessing power is not really an issue.

Hence why I said improving the memory would be more beneficial than CELL, shit even if it had only three PPC cores.

BTW, Mass Effect?? Why are people hyping this game? i don' t understand?

Because it appears to be a fun game .... we could just hype up the gimp and DS instead

I think, levels in PS3-exclusive games will be bigger than the 360 games due to streaming them of the bluray disk.

Level design isnt as much storage problems, as it is development costs. The details needed is making it a big time consumer, i dont think Blu Ray will affect that at all. I dont think Blu ray will affect game content in anyway, just the amount of music and FMW that are in the titleS