Ps3

[Trithemius]

I guess it appeals to the native Australians,

Is this some clever comment relating to the treatment of the aboriginal people of Australia by the Powers-That-Be, or to do with the fact is looks like a boomerang?

but seriously... does the controller actually return to your hand when you throw it?

Oh.

[Trithemius]

Hahahaha... actually, modernist, yes, modern, no.

"Modern" always starts me off thinking about the Treaty of Westphalia; I dunno about you lot.

[b0b]

I think it looks pretty nice actually!

The controller is clearly weird, but not excessively so - it actually looks like it might be easier to hold in both analog-stick and d-pad positions..

And the game footage I've been seeing is really quite astonishingly sick.

I'm with the Eurogamer chap who said that Xbox 360 footage looks like really nice high-end PC stuff. PS3 footage actually looks like the next generation...

[manny_c44]

Yeah that Killzone bit was pretty amazing looking.

And there was one thing I'd forgotten about Playstation that automatically puts above the rest: Final Fantasy. As long as you have that franchise you will probably win in sales. I'm sure just the prospect of a remade, fully 3d FF VII will get people buying the hardware.

[Dingo Chavez]

a) In the words of the immortal Ali G: It's nice. I like it.

I just lost nearly all respect for you, Kingzjester. I respected you! You broke my heart!

Now for the topic, I'm surprised they even changed a controller, and I can't believe I'm saying this; I miss the old one.

I pretty much have now the same feeling I had when they unveiled the PS2; it's all boomerangs and shiny software, but what has it done for me lately?

[SoccerDude28]

Yeah that Killzone bit was pretty amazing looking.

And there was one thing I'd forgotten about Playstation that automatically puts above the rest: Final Fantasy. As long as you have that franchise you will probably win in sales. I'm sure just the prospect of a remade, fully 3d FF VII will get people buying the hardware.

You know that FF is coming to the XBOX right?

[lailoken]

I think the remodelling of the PS2 controller is a clear mistake. To me the PS2 controller was always the best one out there... As far as Final Fantasy VII is concerned that was (as was stated clearly) a tech demo. And good thing that is too, as much as I liked the game I wouldn't want to play through it again. The footage from FF XII looked nice FMV-wise as usual, actually I thought the quality of the footage looked better to me than FFVII-Advent Children about which I have yet to make up my mind.

There is a nice article concerning the power of the 360 on german news-site heise.de/newsticker where they go into details and discuss some of the shortcoming of the new hardware. For those who can't avail themselves of the german language (I pitty the foo's) the gist of it is:

-Actual Graphics performance is comparable with an ATI X700 and that makes it quite doubtfull that they will be able to guarantee 1080i support for all games given the fillrate of the hardware.

-The 1Tflops are actually only arrived at by cutting some corners : only using normal instead of double for the floating point operations and adding the power of the gpu which is not part of the cpu... obviously

The software will decide, but I find it quite disappointing that Microsoft decided to come out half a year earlier with hardware that is half as fast and is not fully HD contrary to their whole pitch (No Blu-ray-disc support).

With all this said, I have to say that all of the presenters (both at Sony and Microsoft) sucked soooo bad! It makes you appreciate MacworldExpo keynotes by Steve Jobs all the more!

[David]

I think the remodelling of the PS2 controller is a clear mistake. To me the PS2 controller was always the best one out there...

Yeah, losing lawsuits is a bitch.

[lailoken]

are you trying to suggest that due to the nature of technology used to create a rumbling effect in the great dual-shock controllers sony, in order to avoid any opening for further litigation is shelfing the most succesfull controller in the history of gaming? that does seem a bit excessive, non?

[David]

You will like what Sony tells you you should like. Also, I don't know.

[lailoken]

THAT... is true...

[EDIT] though the design really is awefull and the controller just looks like an afterthought...[EDIT]

[netmonkey]

It's like a remodeled and upgraded PS2!

They still put the dpad as the center of the controller and the dual analog sticks as the afterthought they added for the original PS1 controller, but with the boomerang extensions, it's now even harder to reach those sticks!

[Moosferatu]

bah, I was always thought the PS2 controller was the worst.

[BigJKO]

You know that FF is coming to the XBOX right?

And the Revolution.

[Roderick]

I second that. It bites.

[vimes]

I don't understand all the hate about this design, it's not like consoles have an history of being objects of art. None of the console I know can be proudly put next to a 20's style toaster.

It's a shame but it might not be an insult to humanity.

Anyway I don't care, I've never owned a console and I guess I never will.

[manny_c44]

Are these trailers for real? Everything seems mysteriously nebulous in terms of gameplay footage. Like:

I think that the Killzone footage was real though (judging from the boring gameplay), so maybe the above footage was too?

Oh and Xbox is getting Final Fantasy XI, you know...the one no one bought.

I'm talking about a single player-60 hour long-rotten script-fantastic graphics Final Fantasy that will make every salary man in Nippon smash open his piggy bank and run down to the store.

[Kolzig]

I think most of all the stuff is pre-rendered.

[Thrik]

I'm not sure. Bearing in mind that these consoles are a lot more powerful than your average PC right now, and the fact that they likely come loaded with all of the recent graphical innovations which PCs have had exclusively for a while now, it's not too unbelievable. I mean, all of the fancy motion blurring and such in the image above is perfectly doable with DX9.

Most PCs can't handle it to the extent above, using it more subtley like for the gas in Half-Life 2's case, but a console with hardware dedicated to pumping out visuals like that should have no problem at all. And, we already know that these consoles are packing ridiculous specifications, so I doubt that handling the polygons would be an issue.

This next generation of consoles is going to produce some incredibly pretty games, there's no doubt about that. The question that remains is how good the games which take advantage of it will be. I'm not expecting too much from the launch line-up, but there's no denying that later titles will be simply excellent. Hell, I'd love to see what Double Fine can do with all of this techology.

[BigJKO]

I'm talking about a single player-60 hour long-rotten script-fantastic graphics Final Fantasy that will make every salary man in Nippon smash open his piggy bank and run down to the store.

I'll go for the awesome, multiplayer Crystal Chronicles version on the DS and Revo, over that crap anytime.

[Graeme]

I took a look at the heise.de article last night via the Google language tools(I've not studied German for 15 years), and I think that they're barking up the wrong tree. The Xbox 360 graphics core (from the speculation that I've seen) is based on a totally different architecture to the X700 - many more pipelines (48 versus 8 on the X700) and a unified shader architecture. (Vertex and pixel shaders are part of the same pipeline, rather than separate on most other cards.)

With regards to the performance, I think that Sony are being hugely misleading when they claim that the PS3 is twice as fast as the Xbox 360. For a start, no comparative benchmarking has been carried out on both systems, and these are theoretical numbers. My suspicion is that both use massively parallel SIMD architectures in their chips, and these can be inefficient. (In effect, the way you implement an algorithm on one of these chips means that a large part of it can be idle - you win on there being a large number of processor elements on the go.)

Secondly, take a look at the specs of the current generation of PC graphics hardware. The current ATI X800 has 160 million transistors, the GeForce 6800 has 220 million, both are clocked at around 500MHz. Roughly speaking, the performance of a graphics chip is proportional to its transistor count, though the X800 and 6800 seem to be (more-or-less) on a par, suggesting that ATI have a more efficient design. The RSX is based on nVidia's latest generation GPU, which is claimed to be more efficient than the 6800 series, so it's probably somewhere around 1.5 to 2 times the performance of the 6800, as claimed. If heise.de are correct then we can assume that Sony's machine will be anything up to twice as fast as Microsoft's. But I don't think that they are right.

My guess is that the Xbox 360 and PS3 are going to end up in the same ballpark performance wise, but they'll have particular strengths and weaknesses depending on the kind of software running on them.

Graeme

[lailoken]

well the thing is that heise is THE german authority in terms of IT (they are the publisher of the leading IT magazine C't) and I think I'd rather believe them... than you...

[manny_c44]

Plus it looks like PS3 may retail for much more than Xbox2.

I mean Xbox360, whatever.

[Erkki]

"convex hull" just sounds cooler, so obviously the PS3 is the better console.

Have you seen the ducks / eyetoy / glasses demo? I downloaded the huge 1.1 GB video of the PS3 presentation at work and I've been watching some bits from it. That was totally awesome.

If you don't know what I'm talking about -- it was a physics demo with some rubber ducks and boats in a bathtub. Then they connected an eyetoy. A guy held two mulage* glasses (or something) in his hands which affected the movement of two glasses in the game. He could actually move them into the water and fill them and it all looked quite realistic.

Tactile interfaces my ass, this ruled!

[edit]* apparently the English language doesn't have the word 'mulage' (it should, though). What I meant was 'butafor' or something like that. Wait, you don't have the word 'butafor' either. Ok, 'fake' or whatever.

[Graeme]

Firstly, I misread Lailoken's post (and the Heise.de article) and thought that they were saying that the Xbox 360 has an X700 based GPU. My bad.

Secondly, Heise.de's journalists don't question Sony and Microsoft's numbers too much, and are basically performing analysis on what is, in effect, PR. They make a comment about the Top 500 supercomputers list, but, honestly, do you really think that a consumer level console is going to be powerful enough to match a 128 CPU monster?

Thirdly, no-one has pointed out the limitations of a SIMD architecture. They're great for mathematical calculations, so the PS3 is going to be a monster for processing physics and graphics. But they're terrible for any branch based code. (For the non-programmers, anytime the program has to make a choice between option A or option B.) So the PS3 will be less efficient than a PC or Xbox 360 at something like AI.

Briefly, SIMD means Single Instruction Multiple Devices, and is a form of parallelism whereby a CPU can execute a number of identical instructions at the same time. The reason that it's bad at branching is that if you get a statement like:

if ( x == 0 )

Do one thing...

else

Do something else...

Then it's possible that the SIMD processor elements could find themselves on separate execution paths, thereby violating the single instruction thing. The way around this is to execute both paths (if necessary), i.e.:

Activate PE if x == 0

Do one thing...

Activate PE if x != 0

Do something else...

Basically a SIMD architecture can be very inefficient, but picks up speed from being hugely parallel. There's a good chance that you won't see anything close to the peak performance in real world applications.

Edit: I'm a software engineer with an interest in computer graphics, and I've worked with SIMD architectures. Heise is staffed by journalists, who may or may not have an engineering background, and probably don't have a huge amount of practical experience in the industry.

Graeme