News Orange Box on PS3 largely unplayable

I think that just about hits the nail on the head

the PS3 is loads of reasonably fast cores, but source is pretty sucky using multi-core (currently atleast) so its not a well suited platform

 

Ha!

 

The PS3 is far from a dying console, in fact, sales are better now than they have ever been, and growing. It's even out-sold Wii in Japan the last two weeks in a row.

 

True, but that's primarily because the Wii can't be made fast enough to sell. They had to ramp up production six months in advance for christmas and can only make 1.8 million for the whole world, every month. That means they've already sold out completely in Japan.

 

There is no reason the PS3 should be bad for Source, Source engine doesn't take advantage of multithreading well at all on PC therefore I doubt its much different on console so CPU wise Xbox and PS3 should be identical, the GPU used in PS3 is equvalent to a 7800GTX but with lesser bandwidth, Source games play well on much lesser GPUs, if you can make it work on the Xbox it should be able to run on the PS3 the only reason Orange Box could be bad is because the port was given to a bunch of muppets.

 

One thing with PS3 which is constantly banded around is that the PS3 cannot be ported to from Windows applications easily because it's new architecture,.

 

I'de agree if not for the fact that Wii sales have slowly been falling in Japan, while the PS3 was continually rising. You can't blame a shortage when sales drop by 20,000 while the Wii had already been in a shortage. Sales were high during summer, and they still sold out, now they fall, and it's a shortage when Nintendo is trying to ramp up production and get more out the door?

 

They weren't high world wide, the demand for the Wii in the UK went up massively just over a month ago

 

Isn't the PS3 basically an array of control chips handling a huge multi-core array of specialized processors ? Its been my understanding that programs written for the PS3 have to be have many specialized threads made up to run well at all, which is one of the main reasons that developers complain it is hard/time consuming to program for, compared to the PC/360 which have standard general purpose cores.

 

The core CPU of the PS3 is the same dual threaded 3.2Ghz PPC core that the 36o has, of course the 360 has 3 of them rather than one in PS3 which are supported by its SPEs, the SPEs can't do general purpose computing but are very good number crunchers but you don't have to use the SPEs at all and a lot of developers at the moment don't in much the same way that they don't do well with multithread just yet so both consoles have a lot of untapped potential.

 

Yeah the UK doesn’t seem to have any, and a lot of European shops are denying orders to the UK

They may be shipping fewer consoles to Japan now, trying to meet higher demand in other areas (like the UK where they rip people off more)

Still, I wouldn’t say the PS3 is a dying console, in fact, due to the rip off prices of the Wii currently, the PS3 is generally cheaper, and it’s available

 

I would suggest you check that, the Wii is one item where the price is fair in all countries.

$249 + tax
£179.99 inc tax
25,000 yen~ + tax

all works the same

 

Have you tried getting a wii @ 180? I don’t know if ninty have ramped up the price, or suppliers, but either way your looking at £240 min really (maybe 170 if you go to Argos) but it’s practically impossible to buy one anyway
And Nintendo is indirectly responsible anyway; they really should be able to cope with the demand a bit better, a full year from the release

 

The Wii including tax actually puts it equivalent to £133 in the US so the Wii is like any other product you buy here, it is also subject to the ~40% bump for the UK, s'pose it depends on how you determine fair.

 

I have my doubts to valve releasing something as bad as described no matter what the platform is.

 

Valve aren't releasing it and haven't worked on it at all. It's being ported by EA and sold by them only as part of the contract for retail distribution.

 

Actually, 1.8million wiis a month is one heck of a lot in terms of production, I don't think Nintendo expected it to be so much in demand (and remember they have to produce the DS, the Gamecube, the gameboy advance, and all the cartridge games aswell). But it's resellers that are raising the prices for you, you can easily get the Wii at RRP if you find stock. So please don't say that it's unfairly priced.