News PS3 hardware could be hobbled

i agree with Iago:

the console will be like the PS2 when DVDs were the new "fashion" like HD formats these days, most of my friends that have a PS2 have 1 or 2 games and the PS2 is in the living room or in their room working as a DVD player, they bought it because it was cheaper to buy a PS2 than a standalone DVD player. history will repeate it self for sure and the PS3 will sell like hotcakes. the Dreamcast failed around here because it had no DVD player.

the only little problem is, and anyone can aprove my point of view, what will happen if BD die and HD-DVD become the standard? yes it has been a highly researched format, and it is realy cool, but what happended with the UMD and the minidisk? Why did it not perform to the expectations, no one i know has a single film on UMD and i have some friends with PSP, the sony shop at the one of the local comercial centers has had realy low number of UMD movies sold, about minidisks, they were great and still are but now they are almost extinct around here.
Imagine that PS3 would work with betamax cassets and XBOX360 with VHS cassets, what would happen?

i hope the PS3 and XBOX360 will have an accessory to play FPS like on the pc i hate aiming with the controler.

as for the PS3 hardware, it can change anytime before it is lauched so only time will tell.

 

Hi, first post on Bit-Tech forums...

Anyway, from my understanding the local memory is the on die cache which is why this is a crippling blow. They have told programers to bypass this as much as possible and only use the system's RAM. The XDR and GDDR3 can be read and writtern very easily as shown below.



Local memory is the on die cache as shown below. Imagine running any CPU without a L1/L2 cache nowadays (I know it is LS cache on the co-processors)... Basically the Cell is bu99ered... The co-processors have no data capabilities anymore where they used to have 256k. This can't be written to at a slow 4GB/s but only read at 16MB/s... Which means all you are left with is a single core PPC CPU which has been heavily cut down.



The lovely RSX (modified 7900GTX + sound card) is a good part but with half the power of the R500 it is stuck in 2nd place. Renders are going to be limited and 1080i is going to be difficult let alone 1080p! Image quality wise the R500 has 'cheap' AA which is a wonderful addition. The way the RSX opperates it is impossible to implement something similar.

Overall the PS3 is now so hard to program that many are not going to bother.

For one I'm happy... Take that PS3 fanatics, you are going to end up with a lovely, erm... Empty box? LOL

PS. Both the Cell and RSX are tapped out in large quantities so it would require destroying the lot to fix this problem.

 

Have you read the thread? It's pretty much been established that the slide was from a presentation about RSX. Local memory refers to the VRAM attached to this, hence the slow Cell read speed.

 

That would explain a lot... For some reason only 2 pages loaded here several times so I couldn't read the whole thing...

 

In case anybody cares:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=17547

It appears that top PS3 developers are already saying what many here had said before...that theinquierer's article was pure garbage.

greetings,

 

@Iago

Thanks for the update. No surprise really, however I wonder how many, if not all, of the developers quoted were first party?

 

thats pretty much what we concluded, it would be nice to hear from sony themselves, but getting information out of them would probably take 5 years and 500 forms

 

heavenally sword? new? check
assasains creed? new? check
motorstorm? new? check
fall of man? new? check
8 days? new? check
naughty dog project? new? check

among other's

this is a stupid argument both consoles will have old and new francises on them. wheter u pick wii, ps3, or the 360.

 

Probably none of them. Third parties are much more inclined to talk to journalists than first party developers.

Is this a first party? From a developer at Pandemic Studios, regarding Mercanaries 2:

http://www.gaffer.org/archives/mercs2com-goes-live#comments

Doesn't exactly sound like Cell is "hobbled".

Anyway, don't know if it's already been mentioned, but the 16MB/s read bandwidth is for Cell accessing RSX's GDDR3. That is all. That slide is looking at things from RSX's perspective. 'Local memory' in this context is GDDR3 as you can see from the other figures, the 22.4GB/s read/write for RSX in the same column. It's not referring to XDR or Cell's local stores in the SPUs.

The Inquirer can be great for leaked data, but the interpretation they apply themselves to that often can't be trusted!

 

why sony dont just explain, make a statement or whatever, its stupid, it wouldn't cost them much, and the bad publicity they get would be stopped, but then again, if there is a problem, then they wont want to comment on it, which just makes it looks worse .. marketing and physiology (physcology - spell checker, im not sure what the right spelling is) is a Pain in the arse

 

China? they don't buy games in china, they steal them.
Japan?
System - Weekly sales (2006 sales)

1. DSL - 135,614 (2,056,107)
2. PSP - 24,595 (823,958)
3. PS2 - 18,513 (671,928)
4. GBASP - 4,364 (151,234)
5. GBM - 1,270 (97,487)
6. 360 - 1,245 (51,838)
7. NDS - 1,159 (868,537)
8. NGC - 798 (51,374)
9. XBX - 43 (1,553)
10. GBA - 30 (2,747)

This year sony sold over 30 times as many systems and nintendo 62 times as many.
The truth is that microsoft will not sell in japan ever.

the US numbers for May don't look good ether
PS2 - 232,000
360 - 221,000
GBA - 158,000 (approx)
NDS - 147,000 (approx)
GCN - 33,000
XBX - 26,000

a little know fact is that project gothom racing is at a lower resolution then up scaled to 720p

pc monitors are always in progressive scan so 1080X1900 is twice as graphicly intensive. The 360's best resolution is 1080 i or 1 mega pixil per frame.Thats lower than 1280x960 but higher than 1164x665 the average resolution for gamers 1080 P is higher than 1600x1200 and only the high end pc and ps3 can do that.

Now as for the bluray, games are taking up more and more space. Dvd can't hold some of the new games. First off hdr textures take up 16 times more space than normal. on top off that you have normal mapping, bump mapping, specular mapping, transparancy mapping, light mapping, displacment mapping, incandesinace mapping, all these textures and they are getting larger in size as games get better looking. With bluray they also plan to put all of the world regon audio on a single disk. and if you don't think thats a lot of data then take a game like xenosaga with 60 hours of pre rendered cut senes and bump that resolution up to 1900x1080 and a 50 gig dual layer bluray disk is seeming very small.

i will say that microsoft did one thing good and thats x-box live.

 

Off the main topic, I'd be interested if you have figures for US sales for the DSL. I do find it quite interesting that going off the 2006 figures the DSL has outsold both PSP & PS2 in Japan, and that the NDS outsold the PSP. I know the PS2 is right at the end of it's lifetime, but those are definitely interesting stats.

On the main topic, and just my 2 cents, the PS3 is being marketed as the biggest, best, most expensive thing for this generation. Which is precisely the sort of thing I don't buy, preferring best value over best performance for fiscal reasons. I know we're on a tech enthusiast webpage here, but surely you havn't all got preorders in for the 7950GX2...?

 

"no sortage of studios (PC sacred cows like Epic included) queing to have their mayor releases on PS3..."
Hmm so epic releasing UT 2007 on the PS3 is more important than NEW IP - Gears of War on the 360. Don't think so.

Assasins Creed is 360 and PS3 - was shown first at XNA '05 - that was the worst kept secret of E3.

Iago - I respect your opinion but it would be nice for you to get your facts right or a few more (plus your spelling) if you want anybody not to flame you or call you a Sony Fanboy.
Just my 2c

 

I haven't said it's more important. I haven't said the PS3 line is better nor worse than any other. I just said that SONY's game catalogue seems as strong as ever. You may disagree, of course. Perhaps you should reply to what I said instead of what you wanted me to have said so you could look smarter.

Now, if what you mean is that UT2007 is not a mayor release for Epic...whatever floats your boat pal...but you couldn't be more wrong.

Not so far. It may be coming to X360 (emphasys in may), but as of today, PS3's is the only confirmed version. But don't take my word...just get to the official Ubisoft forums, gamespot or any of the other miriad of sites that have already reported so.

http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/5251069024/m/5411032934

It may be an exclusive, it may be a timed exclusive, it may not be an exclusive at all...but as I said, so far there's no other version announced.

First, my facts so far have been pretty accurate. Second, I already said that english is not my mother language...I try to check my posts but it's unavoidable that I'll make many spelling and grammar mistakes. No, I'm not going to feel ashamed for it. But hey, if you think those cheap shots makes you look cooler and your inane points any more relevant, go on...perhaps you'd rather have this conversation in spanish so I can take a laugh at your syntax.

Sony fanboy? Naah. SEGA fanboy, indeed. I've had a Sega Master System, Sega Megadrive (Genesis in US), Saturn, Dreamcast and GameGear. Since SEGA left hardware business, I've yet to found any corporation that I can give my unconditional love. It seems to me, that you don't belive that people could be interested in the PS3 not because of brand loyality, but by it's merits alone.

 

No es fácil aprender el español

 

Lol!

Not so? Hey, you even placed correctly the "fácil" accent...If I told you how many spanish people I know (either at school, uni, or office) that wouldn't had done so... Spanish is pretty easy, once you can cope with the irregular verbes and 6 personal forms...at least, compared with your miriad of phrasal verbs

 

Thanks

I'm trying to learn Spanish at the minute before I go to Lanzarote old town in October, I hate going to places not having a basic understanding of the language, I find it detracts from the experience.

 

neh they should all speak English - lol
Well i would say joking, but really I'm not, however i probably wont be liked for saying it, English is really becoming the biggest language, and mainly due to computers, personally i find Spanish and all that really really complicated, at least with English a word is a work, in Spanish (and french) the ending seem to change depending what you talk about - my mind doesn't work that way
But i was brought up speaking English, so its bound to be easy for me

P.S. Iago
If you use firefox, download the google toolbar (easy searching) it has a spell checking feature, and it works great, i think its built into the next beta of firefox too

 

Well, at least in spanish words are written as pronounced And you don't get a thousand new acronyms and phrasal verbs each week...specially on hardware forums. By the time I think I've got the hang on the new expression of the week, there are alreay 3 in it's place. It took me like a month to get what the hell "FUD" meant, lol!

But you are right...it's just a matter of what you were brought up with. Txs for the firefox tip, btw...I'll take a look.

Good luck with the people from Canary Islands...I sometimes find hard to uderstand what they are saying There's a guy from Tenerife at my office and for the first week, it was as if he spoke another language.

 

Thanks.

I'm a bit worried though that I'm learning the American Spanish (Mexican), which I know is quite different when pronouncing.