News PS3 hardware could be hobbled

LOL... I would've enjoyed this even more if I wasn't past caring. I wouldn't buy a PS3 even if these rumours did turn out to be false.

-ed out

 

ever seen mtv cribs? ps2 has become a status symbol. yure not cool without one. with the new price premium, i am afraid we may see a new class division among kids, ie.. rich/cool kids get ps3 with high def tv; poor/uncool kids get wii on standard tv

this may turn out to be a sad day for gaming.

already a poor, hapless girl i know, always insecure about her poor upbringing, after years of trying to save up, finally got a ps2 so she could be cool. four months ago?! she told a group of us and we all uncomfortably said thats great, while thinking, shes gunna cry when she realizes in six months, nobody cares about ps2 anymore and it will be another four years before she saves up to get a ps3.

 

The tec specs only matter to guys like us.

Think about it, gaming consoles used to be things that only geeks and nerd's were into.

But since all the sport games and violence got more real on the consoles, they have become more of a boy toy.

And the Playstation has been head of the boy toy image.

The Xbox was always clunky and didn't look cool, and the Gamecube was for kids.
The Playstation was always slim and looked sexy to the 32" tv that the chav community had been saving up for.

Also remember that Playstation has been the main gaming console for a while, the only other contender was Nintendo, and the short lived Dreamcast. Xbox has only been out for a short while, and anyone who knew anything about the real going-ons of a console of course went with the Xbox. I mean Linux on a fricking console, you couldn't see me line up quicker to buy one.

The main fact is that people are buying them as an icon and not as hardware.
You go ask most people buying a PS3 and they wont even know what Bluray is.

My 50 pence.

And yes I am an Xbox fanboy!

 

Personally in the short term I dont see this hurting the PS3 too much. Its the long run where we're going to see the PS3 suffer - unless they fix that problem. When the console nears the end of its typical life span (~5 years, though the PS3 was originally touted for 10...), the PS3 will be demonstrating its flaws. With the Cell known to be difficult to program by its nature, the painfully slow local memory and the substantially lower triangle rate than the Xbox 360, the PS3 will hit a graphical wall before the xbox 360 does, as things stand.

As such, the number of quality titles will go down if its more difficult to make a game for it, and inevitably, people will complain when the games dont look as good as their Xbox 360 counterparts.

 

One sec guys, how does it really affect performance ?

 

I knew there was something fishy about those "gameplay" videos from the PS3. I never saw any of them in high def but it looked more like on of those in game benchmarks than someone actually playing. This could explain it if the console can't process things fast enough to have that quality in game.

Hopefully there will be some kind of saving grace for this console or these figures are wrong. Still the PS3 will always be just another way for Song to push its proprietary crap on us.

 

Indeed.

Just been reading about Heavenly Sword, Sony claiming that the original E3 05 footage was realtime, and that the E3 06 demonstration proved it.

Anyone who has seen both demonstrations cannot fail to notice that the 05 footage was entirely CGI. And while the 06 realtime demo looked impressive, it was absolutely light years away from 05.

The same can be said for Warhawk.

 

I wont claim to know enough about console architechure to reel off a load of 'OMG sony r teh sux' and 'Wii iz teh roxx0rz' but it does seem like sony have been fudging the ps3 up so far and it raises some questions...

- does it get released even later with a bigger price tag to cover the cost?
- will all the launch titles suffer from the last minute changes?
- will they release it relatively buggy and fix it with the inevitable silm ps3?
- is this obscure technical stuff actually going to affect the games anyway?

 

Ghee...this "I'm a nerd so I know better than you what is what you have to buy" attitude seems to be all en voge lately on every single console thread I read...

Actually, what matters most to most people is what games can you play on it, how do they look like and how fun they are.

Memory speed timings and whatnot are irrelevant to the general public. As long as it gives me a good gaming experience, I could care less about the inner workings. The same way that nobody is going to care if the RXS can render half as many triangles than the Xenos or how many threads can a single CELL procesor use... That's stuff for nerds and fanboys (so whenever they find themselves in any kind of forum they can use statistics and technical data wich they don't really understand as amunition on their flame-wars)

If the graphics look shinier, more realistic and cooler than XBoX360, PS3 will have the graphical advantage (and viceversa) and all the technical mumbo-jumbo in the world is not going to change that.

If PS3 gets enough number of influential exclusive games (like, you know DMC, MGS, FF), it will sell well, despite SONY's hard earned bad reputation among nerds (the rootkit scandal, for example, is still pretty much confined to nerd-space, not something so widely known as to hurt PS3 sales a bit). And PS3 being 1st or 2nd this time, will have lots more to do with those exclusives, price, marketing and Microsoft movements than anything technical.

And by the way...before strting those bold predictions about how much are PS3 going to suck and how manipulated we'll be by SONY (unlike Microsoft and Nintendo, who aren't in business to make money), perhaps you people should...you know, SEE THEM first?

Ghee...I haven't yet made my mind about wich next-gen console I'll get (it may well be a X360) but all this SONY bashing / Microsoft-Nintendo praising is becoming truly ridiculous...

 

let us not forget that the ps2 was the weakest graphically in the last round of the console wars and it came out on top. THe ps3 being 2nd or even 3rd graphically won't be the end of the world. Let us remember that compelling games and other perks (like blu ray players and online stuff) are usually why people buy a console. There will always be that strained penny pincher who can't make up his mind between the two but that's not a significant market. It's far too early and too reactionary to know how this will play out. I'm console neutral right now and will be waiting a bit into the lifespan of the next gen consoles before I buy one. The revolution looks good just from my broke college kid perspective though

 

Good! i hope sony goes down the tubes, due to the fact that they CONSTANTLY insist on developing their own proprietary formats and systems, for their own good, regardless of the inconvenience it causes customers.

betamax, minidisc, duo, atrac, UMD, blu-ray and now cell.

too many strikes in my opinon, *stabs sony repetedly*

 

I hope this a bit tech type

Umm 20GB/s write, 16MB Read, That has to be wrong, seriously, even a HDD can push out 80MB/s sustained
Are you sure its not 16GB/s ?

Edit
Looked at the article, Bit tech, you got it wrong
You compared main memory to local memory

16MB/s Read (Local Memory)
4GB/s Write (Local Memory)
16.8GB/s Read (Main Memory)
24.9GB/s Write (Main Memory)

So really, dont use the local memory, use the main memory
But seriously, why the hell is the read speed so stupidly slow

 

@Iago: Are you saying that people won't wonder why their $500 PS3 has worse graphics than their mate's $350 X360? Or that they won't wonder why their mate is having more fun with their Wii? Or why there are fewer big releases on the PS3?

The way I see it, if you want good, cheap fun you get the Wii. If you want cool graphics and online fragfests and a different selection of games, you get the X360. I don't see where there is room for the PS3. It's overpriced, underspecced and frankly, quite insulting. Unless Sony do something quick, the PS3 will become a badge of shame not only for Sony, but for the people who buy it. As for M$ praising, check out some of my other posts - I have been *less than kind* to them in the past. However, I beleive that MS have a good product in the X360 as does Ninty with the Wii.

-ed out

 

Thats the conundrum that people are pondering. The local Cell memory read is horrifically bad, and thats part of the reason the article was written in the first place. The Local memory was supposed to be there to function like better than L2 cache, but is essentially useless with its horrible read speed. And no, the 16MB/s isnt a typo, as illustrated by it being present on every slide on a Sony presentation to game devs. Its not so simple as "just using main memory." Remember the original Celeron? Those had NO L2 cache - this is essentially what Cell is (relative to its intended design) as a result of its piss poor read speed.

 

if you looked at my edit i found out the actual speeds, which are more acceptable, 4gb/sW, 16MB/sR vs 20GB/sW. 16MB/sR

Anyway, 16MB/s is piss poor, and after reading the article, it looks like not using local memory will cause a bottleneck in the "FSB" (or whatever it is in a cell chip)

So in all, it looks like the PS3 is about to crash and burn, and i had some hopes for Sony

 

Not quite - if I understand things correctly, the issue is not directly bandwidth-related. The Cell<->RSX interconnect is going to be extremely high speed; the problem is likely to be a large amount of contention on on the main memory bus despite its efficient Rambus design, as well as latency through having to perform operations via RSX. I've not really found anything on Cell's memory control, so this is just an assumption.

What confuses me is why writes have to be performed through RSX in the first place - I was under the impression that Cell had an on-die memory controller (marked MIC) that was connected directly to an XDR RAM bus. Is the memory controller simply sending instructions to RSX for operations on main RAM or am I missing something? I suppose that it's possible - with each of the units able to communicate with each other, the system would be less sensitive to latency as there is plenty of on-chip storage. Provide it with enough bandwidth to stop stalls and it can chew through a lot. That's how I see it, anyway...

Either way, I see the inability to write to the local memory in the SPEs as a massive blow for Cell adoption outside the PlayStation 3. The set of SPEs made the chip (which I still think is very clever) very appropriate for DSP - for example, decoding a video stream. Without any high-speed onboard for the SPE units then this is effectively rendered void... not good news.

How it'll affect games is something else, though - I'm sure with some clever programming they will be able to patch it up to a decent performance level. Despite how it may seem, Sony have some very clever people working for them and I don't think they'll let this work go to waste.

 

No. I'm saying that it's still a long call to say that X360's graphics are going to be better than PS3's. Or the other way around, for that matter. We haven't yet seen any true and significant footage of PS3 gameplay, but people are already bashing it and tearing it apart on some dubious and obscure technical data that is irrelevant to anybody not developing games for the PS3.

It's funny...geeks love to bash SONY on the basics that they build up a huge amount of hype and their hardware doesn't live to it, while at the same time, those same geeks enjoy spreading lots of baseless FUD. I haven't seen/read any developer half worried about PS3 specs. Those who are working on games are saying more or less the same thing that is allways said when a new console is coming (harder too program, lots of potential, blah blah blah). But that seemengly doesn't mean anything when "theinquierer.com"' anti-PS3 crusaders come to town...

Now that you say it...we don't know how FUN will Wii games be. For what I've seen, the Wii is still in "gimmik" state. It hasn't show me anything I'm dying to play.

I know, i know..."it's going to revolutionate gameplay"...know what?, revolutions like that are overrated. Console games have a great handling scheme (much easier for anybody than, say, driving) that's been kickin for 30 years. Most people of 30 year or less that have had acces to a game console are perfectly capable of using them. But suddenly, we need Nintendo to redefine gaming 'cause it doesn't appeal to mainstream consumers? Gimme a break...

Using my previous car analogy. I see that cars have been giving us the same "driving experience" for 100 years, only refining it. I don't see anything inherently bad in games doing the same. So I don't really belive that in the end, Wii's new control scheme is going to make it much more desirable than a product that gives us the same experience we all love (only, again, much more refined).

Says who?.

Final Fantasy? check.
Metal Gear Solid? check.
Grand Theft Auto? check.
Resident Evil? check
Devil May Cry? check.
Gran Turismo? check

Plus all the Guitar Hero-like games, plus exclusives like (at this point) Assassin's Creed (the most exciting game of the E3 for me and with the hottest game Producer i've ever seen)...

Sorry, SONY's line seems as strong as ever.

OTOH, we have XBox360...how many exclusive and exciting franchises does it have?
Halo? Will be on PC.
Bioware's Mass Effect? Will be on PC (yeah, I know...they say it won't...just like they said of Jade Empire...go figure).
Alan Wake? Coming to PC
Alone in the Dark? Coming to PC

See a trend here? Except for Gears of War and Bioshock 2, the XBox is going to be strong on games that will appear on PC (if only, to capitalize on that Live Anyware! thingy ) and that play better on PC, like FPSs.

I understand the appeal, if you don't want to go through all the hassle of PC gaming or don't want to keep with the upgrade cicles...but if you already are a PC gamer like I am, the PS3 announced line is way, way more appealing.

Well, the way I see it, If I want good, cheap fun, I'll bang my girlfriend. The Wii doesn't seem to have anything going for it, except a low price tag and some funky controller that I have yet to see how fun really is. For much less than the Wii, I could buy a second hand Dreamcast or Gamecube, and have a similar powered hardware, with strong game lines at a fraction of the price and with a game control I know and love (and more importantly, is FUN). And for a little more (and sorry...250€ over 6-7 years a console may last is just a little more)than a Wii, I can get one of the others.

Is the PS3 expensive? Sure. Does it have a place? The games will say. No the geeks, not Gamespot, not theInquirer, not Bill Gates.

And anyway, I'm afraid you underestimate SONY. The PS3 may look outrageous to you, as did to me the first week I knew of the price. But now, specially in the wake of ICT not activated until 2012 and HDMI unnecesary to wath BD movies, it makes much more sense.

For 400€ I can get a XBox360, wich looks tempting but as I said, I'm not leaving PC gaming just yet, and it worries me that a XBox in my house would fastly become redundant. OTOH, for 500€ I can get a combo of PS3 and Blue-Ray player and be assured that most of what gets my attention about PS3 games isn't going to be available on the PC (at least, not fast nor soon).

As I said, I haven't yet made my mind. The XBox IS tempting...after all, it could well allow me to ditch PC gaming and save loads of money in upgrading cicles. On the other hand, the PS3 and it's strong line are tempting too, and a BD player to go with the HDTV I want to get (wichever the console I end up getting) is just the icing in the cake.

What I don't think is that things are so black-and-white as many web sites and posters everywhere are trying to make them.

greetings,

 

I'm sure Sony, IBM and the other people working on the cell project are working on this, maybe the Cell2 or something
They cannot let all this work and ingenious work go to waste, it would be a massive blow to all the company's involved

 

I’ve got a headline...

"The Inquirer publishing yet more 'non-stories' as headline news (they like to do this with new GFX chips as well) to generate hits."

But that might be a bit long and not a snappy as "PS3 hardware slow and broken"

 

Hummm....

Final Fantasy Sequal? check.
Metal Gear Solid Sequel? check.
Grand Theft Auto Sequel? check.
Resident Evil Sequel? check
Devil May Cry Sequel? check.
Gran Turismo Sequel? check

Thats better, nothing new. You might as well play on a PS2...