If you haven't already seen it, here's my coverage of Sony's Playstation 3 announcement today. I wrote the story while sitting in Sony's press conference, so it was a bit rushed but I wanted to post some of my additional thoughts that didn't make it into the first article.
Let me start first with the design; to me, the Xbox 360 is very Apple-like while the PS3 is very clearly a Sony product. Personally I prefer the looks of the Xbox 360, but the PS3 doesn't look bad at all in real life.
Although I've yet to use it, the PS3's controller scares me. I'm going to try my hands at it this week, but I really have no idea where that design came from.
The demos on the PS3 were absolutely *amazing*. I wouldn't call them "movie-quality" yet, but the things I saw came very close. Words really can't describe, the demos just looked amazing.
Virtually all of the games/demos on the PS3 had some degree of aliasing, some were unacceptably bad for a console with this sort of power. Don't get me wrong, about 95% of the games looked great, but those that had aliasing looked great...with jaggies. I'm not talking PS2 level of aliasing, but far too much aliasing for this level of hardware.
Without a doubt, ATI and NVIDIA are on very diverging paths with these two consoles. ATI went with a strictly unified memory architecture while NVIDIA used a combination of local graphics memory and GPU addressable system memory. ATI is backing their unified shader architecture, while NVIDIA doesn't appear to have embraced that on the hardware side. I will know more about ATI's GPU later this week, so stay tuned.
The dual HD output feature of the PS3 is very interesting; I'm not sure how many folks will take advantage of the 32:9 aspect ratio mode. I'm wondering whether this feature was put in to support sending different content to separate TVs (e.g. stream video to one display while gaming in another). Then again, I'm not sure how many people have that many HDTVs within close proximity of each other.
Sony clearly wants the PS3 to be much more of a media center style device. The demos weren't only about games, they were about decoding HD streams, navigating through video and picture content, they were about the entire picture. With built in blu-ray, I think the PS3 will have a huge advantage over the Xbox 360 as it should be able to act as a HD-DVD video player as well as a game console.
The 1080p output of the PS3 isn't that big of a deal for me. Given that basically the entire installed base of HDTVs right now only support 1080i, I seriously doubt we'll see a push to 1080p only all that quickly. That being said, I don't doubt that there will be an obvious difference between 1080p and 720p games. Given that it is essentially a resolution change, I see no reason for all developers to offer both 1080p and 720p options in PS3 games unless there are frame rate limitations. I did notice that some demos played much smoother than others, but I think it is far too early to make any calls on performance a full year before the console's release.
I'd say that Sony has the more powerful CPU on paper, but I'm curious to see how much of that gets taken advantage of in the real world. Difficulty of programming aside, the fact of the matter is that console development houses are very much of the write once, compile many mindset. Given the similarity of the Xbox 360's cores to the PS3's PPE, I'm afraid that the array of SPEs may go relatively untapped on the PS3.
From the very start I felt that Sony couldn't possibly bring the Cell to market in the PS3 as a 90nm chip. Disabling one SPE is a particularly interesting move, but one that makes a lot of sense. And the loss of a single SPE isn't a huge deal as I don't foresee the PS3 really being bound by the number of threads its SPE array can execute.
Overall, the PS3 looks to me to be the more complete package. The hardware is a bit more complete than Xbox 360, but at the same time given that it won't launch for another 6+ months after the 360 launches I'm not too surprised. Sony didn't really play up a competitor to Xbox Live, although it is very clear that the PS3 will be a net-enabled box. I have a feeling that Microsoft may bring to the table a much more complete on-line play package, while Sony brings a more powerful, more complete console.
Sony's strength with the PS2 has always been its game library, which I think will continue to be a strength with the PS3 (especially with full backwards compatibility all the way back to PS1). It's just that this time around, Microsoft appears to have a much stronger game library than with the original Xbox - and it's that key difference that will make the 360 and the PS3 worthy competitors.
I will be reporting from the show all week, but for now it's time to enjoy 24 a full 3 hours later than I normally would - how do you west coast folks do it? :)
Take care.
Let me start first with the design; to me, the Xbox 360 is very Apple-like while the PS3 is very clearly a Sony product. Personally I prefer the looks of the Xbox 360, but the PS3 doesn't look bad at all in real life.
Although I've yet to use it, the PS3's controller scares me. I'm going to try my hands at it this week, but I really have no idea where that design came from.
The demos on the PS3 were absolutely *amazing*. I wouldn't call them "movie-quality" yet, but the things I saw came very close. Words really can't describe, the demos just looked amazing.
Virtually all of the games/demos on the PS3 had some degree of aliasing, some were unacceptably bad for a console with this sort of power. Don't get me wrong, about 95% of the games looked great, but those that had aliasing looked great...with jaggies. I'm not talking PS2 level of aliasing, but far too much aliasing for this level of hardware.
Without a doubt, ATI and NVIDIA are on very diverging paths with these two consoles. ATI went with a strictly unified memory architecture while NVIDIA used a combination of local graphics memory and GPU addressable system memory. ATI is backing their unified shader architecture, while NVIDIA doesn't appear to have embraced that on the hardware side. I will know more about ATI's GPU later this week, so stay tuned.
The dual HD output feature of the PS3 is very interesting; I'm not sure how many folks will take advantage of the 32:9 aspect ratio mode. I'm wondering whether this feature was put in to support sending different content to separate TVs (e.g. stream video to one display while gaming in another). Then again, I'm not sure how many people have that many HDTVs within close proximity of each other.
Sony clearly wants the PS3 to be much more of a media center style device. The demos weren't only about games, they were about decoding HD streams, navigating through video and picture content, they were about the entire picture. With built in blu-ray, I think the PS3 will have a huge advantage over the Xbox 360 as it should be able to act as a HD-DVD video player as well as a game console.
The 1080p output of the PS3 isn't that big of a deal for me. Given that basically the entire installed base of HDTVs right now only support 1080i, I seriously doubt we'll see a push to 1080p only all that quickly. That being said, I don't doubt that there will be an obvious difference between 1080p and 720p games. Given that it is essentially a resolution change, I see no reason for all developers to offer both 1080p and 720p options in PS3 games unless there are frame rate limitations. I did notice that some demos played much smoother than others, but I think it is far too early to make any calls on performance a full year before the console's release.
I'd say that Sony has the more powerful CPU on paper, but I'm curious to see how much of that gets taken advantage of in the real world. Difficulty of programming aside, the fact of the matter is that console development houses are very much of the write once, compile many mindset. Given the similarity of the Xbox 360's cores to the PS3's PPE, I'm afraid that the array of SPEs may go relatively untapped on the PS3.
From the very start I felt that Sony couldn't possibly bring the Cell to market in the PS3 as a 90nm chip. Disabling one SPE is a particularly interesting move, but one that makes a lot of sense. And the loss of a single SPE isn't a huge deal as I don't foresee the PS3 really being bound by the number of threads its SPE array can execute.
Overall, the PS3 looks to me to be the more complete package. The hardware is a bit more complete than Xbox 360, but at the same time given that it won't launch for another 6+ months after the 360 launches I'm not too surprised. Sony didn't really play up a competitor to Xbox Live, although it is very clear that the PS3 will be a net-enabled box. I have a feeling that Microsoft may bring to the table a much more complete on-line play package, while Sony brings a more powerful, more complete console.
Sony's strength with the PS2 has always been its game library, which I think will continue to be a strength with the PS3 (especially with full backwards compatibility all the way back to PS1). It's just that this time around, Microsoft appears to have a much stronger game library than with the original Xbox - and it's that key difference that will make the 360 and the PS3 worthy competitors.
I will be reporting from the show all week, but for now it's time to enjoy 24 a full 3 hours later than I normally would - how do you west coast folks do it? :)
Take care.
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Ghost - Thursday, May 19, 2005 - link
How many people are going to buy the console for the games and not bother with the specs? I have been waiting for the sequal to perfect dark since it was first realised, and I really enjoyed Halo/2.Anywho the problem I am seeing is what will happen if either company changes the specs even a mear 50mhz so ATIs chip 'runs' at the same speed of Nvidias, it could through the perfectly adapted games to fast. When ppl started to sell modified xbox boards with 1.4ghz chips and 128m ram, the games would run twice as fast, literaly, 2 seconds previously, became a second (in game play).
Really, both sound sweet, both are (lots)more powerful, my question is, why do you care for the specs so much? Its the game play im after.
DBLDREW - Thursday, May 19, 2005 - link
I have no doubt that the xbox will have no problem running at 1080p. It is listed as running at 1080i so we need to understand the difference between 1080p and 1080i. First off both 1080p and 1080i run at a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels. The p represents progressive and the I represents interlaced. So the difference between the 2 is that interlaced renders every other horizontal line and then the next frame it will only render the ones it missed in the last frame, while the progressive will render all horizontal lines every frame. So what we end up with while running on a ntsc system at 60hz is that the 1080i will have a resolution of 1920x1080 at 30 fps and the 1080p will run at 1920x1080 at 60fps. (pal systems will run at 25fps and 50 fps)So now we need to compare the xbox 360 with current technology to determine if it has the power to run 1080p. If we look at the ATI X850 and see what resolution that card is capable of running at, we can see that it can run at the 1920x1080 resolution at 120hz and the max resolution is 2048x1536@ 85hz. Now the x850 is significantly less powerful then the gpu of the xbox 360 so it is very safe to assume that it will have plenty of power to run at the 1080p resolution.
davidc538 - Thursday, May 19, 2005 - link
#102 Any smart or nongay person has decided to get ps3 or nothing buy nowdavidc538 - Thursday, May 19, 2005 - link
x360 will be gay and noone smart will buy itJimi - Thursday, May 19, 2005 - link
@98Just thought (you seem like a tech-head) you may be interested in this article. It reports of a possible revolution in PC architecture due to certain advantages of the cell processor (I honestly believed all the Micro$oft hype that you would never see a cell processor in a PC). This throws a little light on the matter;
http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.htm...
The great Xbox 360 E3 hoax - Thursday, May 19, 2005 - link
The great Xbox 360 E3 hoax:http://gamesradar.msn.co.uk/news/default.asp?paget...
bsectionid=1586
[19/05/05 03:52]
People think they're sampling Xbox 360, but they're not – can you guess what they're really playing?
Entering the Microsoft E3 stand is a wonderful experience – green and full of Xbox 360 activity. Activity we will be covering with some kind of ninja passion over the next few days – and you won't want to miss any of it, regardless of what PlayStation 3 fanboys are telling you on web forums.
However, all is not as it seems.
Despite the reassuring presence of an actual Xbox 360 unit locked away in a visible compartment in the demo stations, and despite the games being playable using an Xbox 360 pad, it's not an Xbox 360 people are playing.
Poking our noses around the side of the demo station and peering through the vaguely camouflaging air grills revealed the shocking truth: behind the Xbox 360 unit sat two Apple G5 computers.
So, are alpha-stage Xbox 360 games really so powerful they need a combined effort from two G5 machines to properly run Xbox 360 software? Quite possibly.
And, we were told by a man demoing Kameo that the game was only running at 30% of Xbox 360's capacity! Kameo featured pleasantly detailed next-gen graphics and, more impressively, hundreds of on-screen characters, all displaying individual AI routines – all at 30%.
It takes two Apple G5s to power a 30% capacity Xbox 360 demo? This may well be the case and if it's true then this console's only just started – this is just the beginning. Its games, once developers have sat down and spent a decent amount of time with full development kits, will just get better and better.
So, it seems there are a few more rounds to fight in the PS3 vs Xbox 360 match-up before the winner can lift up its gloves with any true confidence after all.
DCstewieG - Thursday, May 19, 2005 - link
"With built in blu-ray, I think the PS3 will have a huge advantage over the Xbox 360 as it should be able to act as a HD-DVD video player"This quote is a bit off. I understand you were trying to say HD video but using "HD-DVD" gives it a totally different meaning. Unless they come to an agreement soon, the PS3 will play Blu-Ray only, and NOT HD-DVD.
It also looks to be entirely possible to stream hi-def video from WinXP with Xbox360...I think that's a huge selling point.
acheleus - Wednesday, May 18, 2005 - link
There sure seems to be a lot of hostility around something that I think is very exciting. On the other hand I probably see things a bit differently than do most.First off I have no biases at all as I own an XBox, PSP, and a high end gaming PC. You will note that I only own what is technically the best of what was out there. I am an early adopter and have had an HDTV for 5 years so I only bought the console that supported HDTV and looked good to decent on my TV. The PS2 was not even an option for me as it plainly looked like crap on my 65" HDTV. My PC is an AMD Athalon64 3400+ with 1GB RAM 6800 Ultra and a 20" flat pannel. I mention the specs of my PC to make a couple of points: first is to show that I have a very capable machine and I still play Xbox, and second is to point out that my PC is a year old and is still a high end gaming machine in today's market. And yes I got one of the first very hard to find 6800 ultras and paid a premium.
The point I am making about the PC is that prior to my last upgrade I would typically upgrade my PC every 6-8 months to keep it current. However, with the latest Processor only about 15%-20% faster a year later and I have the top of the line Graphics card still minus going SLI, I just don't see the point in upgrading. There are only a few games that challenge my system and I can run them at 1600x1200 with everything on and still get good performance. With that in mind I am not sure you will see the performance of the proposed next generation consoles on the PC in 6 months (XBox 360 release) to a year (PS3 release). I have no doubts that we will have the GPU but I don't see us having the processor power at a reasonable price (Resonable for a CPU is less than $800 to me) with the supporting OS and games. Why? Well currently a dual core Opteron 2.2GHz is $1300 and AMD and Intels road map says we will not see this on the desktop until quarter 3 to quarter 4. And in my mind it will take the next gen quad cores from AMD and Intel to pass the tri-core 360 CPU and the PS3 Cell processor in performance which is not due out until post 2nd quarter 2006. Then, I would be surprised if you have the OS and software to support it until 2007. This will all have to be benchmarked to be proven out but remember a dedicated gaming machine with the same performance is always more capable than a generic PC. Try running Doom 3 on a P3 700 and a Geforce3. I just wanted to point something out for all of you to ponder a bit.
This is the way I see it going forward for me: I will buy the 360 this Winter for the Xbox live features and their exclusives like Halo3, DOL and probably online games when available. I think it will be better positioned as my multi-media device as well. I will then buy the PS3 in the Spring of next year for what I believe will be the better box technically that will have great games and features with a Blue Ray DVD player as a bonus. I think this may give Sony the edge in the HD-DVD world because everyone with a PS3 will have a Blue Ray DVD to play HD-DVD…..great idea and if it brings me HD-DVD faster, I am very happy. Then once I see the multi-core processor being taken advantage of in the gaming world I will upgrade my PC to the latest in greatest. As for Nintendo, I think they missed the boat and will die. I read the Revolution is barely an evolution in terms of performance compared to the 360 and PS3. Wake up Nintendo or die. But hey maybe they will wake up and if they have something worth adding to my collection I will have it too, but I am not holding my breath….
Also to the guy that thinks that investing $350 - $500 into one of the next generation consoles is a waste of money needs to have his head examined. Hell I spent more than that on my 6800 ultra alone. Yes I can upgrade my PC again but it will cost MORE THANT DOUBLE THE TOTAL COST OF A CONSOLE! The console has caught up and my bet is that it will take at least a year or more for the developers to even learn how to fully utilize the power in the next generation console.
Nothing to argue about this is going to be a great generation for us gamers!
Victor Jr. - Wednesday, May 18, 2005 - link
@94Are you trying to be an expert here? If you were really interested, you should study a little bit more and be quiet, when you dont know things. You said "there are basically no HDTVs on the market that will accept 1080p input stream".
Yes, there are some tvs that can accept 1080p.
No you dont need a Sony set. You can go, for example, to Sharp site and buy one (Sharp’s LC-45GD4U is a breathtaking 45" widescreen). Yes it is expensive, but we are not discussing price here.
I dont care which one will be the more powerful console, but it seems you never played anything in 1600x1200, 1920x1080 in a pc monitor and know nothing about 1080p and 1080i. We all know, and Sony too, that 1080p is not common or you think you are the only one? Sony is thinking ahead. Do you think that bluetooh is useless too?
Learn a bit more and get a life!
Anonymous - Wednesday, May 18, 2005 - link
By 2006 you'll definitely see a big drop in the price of CRT HD sets. Particularly from Samsung who is working on CRTs that are more shallow. Now that Sony and Samsung have a cross-licensing agreement I'm sure this will be the norm. Hopefully the popularity of the next gen consoles will speed up this transition to HD.Then perhaps we'll start seeing affordable TVs that can actually display 1080p. Otherwise it will be a luxury not many could afford.