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This may just be me, but I think the idea of a motion sensing controlling doesnt seem as cool as it might initially seem. For one you dont get the same feedback that you do from an analog stick. You can tell how 'fast' 'tight turning' your going by the feeling of the analog stick, but with motion sensing who knows? The idea conjures up interesting images of people moving their arms eratically, we may possibly see new gaming related injuries.

The technology is there, free for game developers to implement. At least they have it, unlike the 360. I'm sure they will accomodate it to the user's preference. Possibly being able to turn it on or off via the options or even on the controller itself.

yeah, right, 500-600, whatever. Prices are going through the roof, for this garbage. $600 that is a entry level gaming computer. more so, 500-600 for a toy, that have yet to actually be playable, is kinda pricey.. yah blue-ray, = betamax to me.

I'm estatic about the price! 7 3.2 ghz cores and an Nvidia GPU far more advanced than what we got in PCs? all I gotta do is upgrade the memory, and stick linux on the box! presto... uber PC Gaming Machine for 500 bucks

i thought they were gonna have linux preinstalled?

probably would be a limited version though, i doubt that they would allow PC games on it?

Ara

yeah but if they are planning on putting linux on it, that means it CAN have it already... why crack the firmware when you can mod the OS sitting on top to do what you want.... mainstream people may not do the work involved theres plenty of people who will

8O 8O 8O 8O 8O 8O 8O 8O 8O 8O 8O

interesting

I honestly feel like people are afraid to say that Sony is buying way to much into their own hype.

$600 is the true price point here that should be focused on, because again a respectable gamer isn't going to settle for the intro model. Think of a possible $250 price for the Wii and a drop to $349 for a 360 and that's two systems for the price of one. I just don't see a $500 or $600 price as a smart move especially when you are toting a new format player that may and very well could wind up tomorrows UMD. 780p or 1080p whatever, at what point does the resolution out power the graphics and how our eyes percieve them. Truth of the matter is that at some point no matter how good the graphics or resolution may look it will become normal and you will stop noticing. Too much of what Sony is trying to do reminds me of the early Xbox days, late to the Prom, but with superior hardware. And this so called "Cell" thing hasn't posted any real test to show that it can out power anything, but they make really cool movies with it right? The PS3 price for a blu-ray player may be good, but why do care if I don't own a single blu-ray disc?


Let us see what the M and N have to offer.

I agree that it is a little shocking to see the $500-$600 price tag. However, like others have said, what you are getting is an AMAZING piece of hardware. If you were to build an equivalent PC for the purposes of gaming it would cost much more would not be possible.

I actually feel that the PS3 is a good value. The only downside is that it would be missing the functionality of a PC. However, I've already heard talks of putting Linux onto the PS3 and booting, so even that argument may be thrown out of the window.

I haven't been following the optical storage battle, but all these companies fighting over their own proprietary formats boils my blood. I'm just shocked that DVD are nearly obsolete after a brief reign as top media format. CD's and VHS lasted such a long time.

Well, I must say I'm not surprised about the 3D controller. (where's the "fourth" dimension coming from, anyway? I never understood people's logic for adding another axis that doesn't exist, just like claiming traditional input fare is "3D" when it's 2-dimensional) As I've stated some times before (but, oddly enough, I don't think once on the TG Forumz) Nintendo, regardless of their market share, somehow manages to be the "harbinger" of new controller types; most gamers, sadly, don't realize that the analog-stick based controller didn't really exist until 1996, with the introduction of the Nintendo64. Likewise, shoulder buttons first appeared with the SNES's controller in 1991, and prior to the NES, digital pads, for some reason, where only found on mobile devices.

What does surprise me, though, is the price. Not the $500US (we're not kidding anyone here; just round it) base model price, but that there's ANOTHER one, that's MORE EXPENSIVE. $600US is pretty darn steep for a gaming console; That makes it twice as expensive as the Playstation2 and Xbox upon launch, and three times the price of the Game Cube upon its launch, as well as three times the assumed launch price of the Wii.

Yes, I do see a lot of features; a larger hard drive to appease those looking for a "numerical difference," for one. (though in reality, I think the price difference between a 20GB and 60GB drive, even a 2.5" one, would be perhaps only $30-40US)

However, some things do catch me; for one, there's the all-important HDMI port; it's effectively a requirement for a true HD machine; component cables are really only capable of up to 720p or 1080i, and even then, they do appear to be slightly lossy. HDMI would imply that the console can actually run at 1080p, contradicting Sony's statements that suggested otherwise. Since HDMI is a digital input/output, and needs no RAMDAC, it appears that there'd be no reason for the console to not have full 1080p support. Perhaps what was implied was that the console wouldn't be able to count on rendering at 60fps @1920x1080. This is vastly different from not being able to do progressive scan; many Xbox 360 titles, for instance, are capped at 30fps regardless of the resolution, though there's still the imaging improvement with progressive scan displays; the lack of "tearing lines" (or whatever the popular term is for it) is a plus in just about anybody's book.

What perhaps REALLY hit me, and made me go back and check, was the comment on media support; the Playstation3 would be able to support not just Sony Memorysticks, but also SecureDigital and CompactFlash cards as well?!

Somebody wake me up, because this does not seem like Sony! Their name has, over the past decades, become synonymous with refusal to us generic formats, instead using their own proprietary ones, ones that with few exceptions went the way of the dinosaurs - And even in all those exceptions, of which I can name TWO (CD, DVD) that actually survived, but perhaps largely because Sony was far from the only creator; Phillips was behind the CD, and Sony, in working with the DVD, was more of jumping on the bandwagon that actually pionnering it.

Personally, I think that such support is good news. The cynical side of me suggests that, like perhaps their re-designed controller, they're "aping" Nintendo, whose Wii will have a slot for using highly standard (as well as vastly faster and cheaper) SecureDigital cards, rather than their own format. Either way, it can't really be bad; perhaps this will mean an end to the search and high prices of buying YET ANOTHER type of media card to support the new console. Rather, we can pull from whatever stack of cards we already have. It's even good to me to see the 10th device to actually use Sony's memorysticks. (yes, that is a facetous number)

As for the graphical power of the machine... I'll remain skeptical at this point, until I can see one of them myself. As unfortunately, I'm not a noteworthy person in "the industry," so that obviously won't be at E3. But needless to say, while I'll admit it's likely pretty impressive, I've found, over the years, that even those in the gaming/technology media often don't have a sharp eye when it comes to discerning what's at work to bring them their 3D imagery. Particularly if it's something that's, even in the slightest degree, in some ways, superior, or somehow better, than what they've seen before.

The CPU? I'm a bit ambivilant about that. It might turn out to be powerful, but as far as I've seen, the SPEs are highly limited in function, even though each appears to contain four independant floating-point units. Obviously, we've seen that they can be used for video encoding rather well; each unit can apparently handle a full HD MPEG-2 encoding stream (to laymen, this means turning HD video into aa form you'll see on a DVD) in real time. Impressive in some ways, but quite less than what you'd expect out of, say, any 3.2GHz x86 processor, with the identical (theoretical) floating-point muscle.

The graphics chip, of course, may be an entirely different story. Specs thus far give us the highest transistor count ever seen for an nVidia chip, at (correct me if I'm off) some 350 million transistors; by comparison, the 7800GTX's chip weighed in at 302M transistors (link) and the 7900GTX actually shaved off some transistors with a more efficient design, and came down to something like 290M.

However, regardless of the exact count, I would theorize that this suggests something of similar power. Not overwhelming, particularly compared to even today's PC cards, as the X1900XTX, and possibly even the 7900GTX, is likely more powerful, (note that the X1900XTX's R580 has roughly 381M transistors, and ~2.8 times the shader power of the entirety of the Xbox 360's Xenos) but still likely to produce a good ammount of graphics punch.

Coming back after all of these features, perhaps the $600US price tag isn't all that bad. After all, one should note that as of now, no HD-DVD players seem to exist for less than $1,000US. Perhaps the allure of getting, by a serious margin, the cheapest possible HD-disc movie player on the market might fuel sales even against the big, black mark that the price otherwise is. I've guessed for over a year now that such is perhaps Sony's bet, and I guess we'll see in the year to come if it was a wise bet or not.

(snipped from the previous, over-sized post, as I thought it made sense, and so that people might actually notice that I've replied to four posts, not just one)

I would take it you're a console-only gamer, then? Or perhaps more accurately, you've simply not given too much thought on the ideas of what input devices power gaming today?

In effect, all that these "motion sensing" controllers are, from both Sony and Nintendo, and with Microsoft to no doubt follow suit by the year's end, is simply incorporating a "3D mouse." These devices already exist in plenty, chiefly in use at universities, for things like lectures; they allow the speaker to walk about and speak naturally, while remaining in control of the projected presentation.

PC mice, in gaming, are controlled in effectively the exact same way, only they operate on two axes instead of three. It's pretty easy to tell where you are on each axis. And anyone who's played extensive in games using both analog sticks and mice will tell you, that although analog sticks, like their joystick parents, might be "calibrated" to get a center they naturally return to, but they cannot possibly beat the precision of a mouse. Not to bash anything here, but an analog stick is simply another finger-based input device; in effect, a 3D controller or mouse is a motion-capture device.

The (potentially) limited capabilities of the SPEs aside, you forgot the part that kills the "Cell" as for playing PC games.

It's that it's a PowerPC chip, wheras modern PC games are made for x86 chips. There are a bunch of other differences, which all also boil down to the same thing; it's a largely incompatible form, that will certainly not play any PC games without some modifications to the games, or the use of an emulator. In any case, you'd be effectively cutting a vast portion away from the Cell's power, as any processor benefits the most when software is written natively for it, rather than ported.

As for the memory, you're also forgetting that it's not built like a PC; if the Xbox 360's, or even the PS2's, construction is any indication, it's not upgradable; the chips, rather than being put onto DIMMs and inserted into slots on the motherboard, are simply attached to the motherboard itself. The PS3 also uses XD-RAM for its main memory, which is a rediculously proprietary format.

As I've commented above, even with a version of Linux made for the console, it would require more than that to play PC games, since the PS3 uses a PowerPC-based CPU, rather than an x86-based one.

All current Linux games, and for that matter, Linux applications in general, are made for x86 CPUs. I don't even think that, before now, any non-x86 versions of Linux exist.

3d controllers are so cool:

from the article on the nintendo wii:

besides, think about some of the newer "puzzles" they could put into games like resident evil, however, i don't think it would be a good idea in racing games... unless you could use the controller like a steering wheel? holding it facing you for example... (although you wouldn't get any force feedback, and wouldn't the "dual shock" mess up the motion sensors?)

and also, is it me or does anyone else here just hate wireless stuff? i find it so annoying... i think it's psychological, but i have never bought anything wireless (save remote controls) since the early days of wireless mice (and i have tried a few since then including the logitech mx1000). i would prefer that the miniUSB which is to be used for charging would also allow a signal through it.

one last thing: i find it strange that sony would release the PS3 with 6 USB ports, (to charge many controllers at once?) without having a major use for them (considering some of the ports are on the back) so i honestly think this hints to some sort of OS with decent driver support (for use with other USB devices)

Ara

I see a lot of complaining about prices for consols, and I can't help but shake my head. Every brand new consol that has ever come out has been more expensive at its release than the one that came before. At one point a $300 release was considered expensive, and now so many hail a $399 xbox as reasonably priced. At what point did gamers forget that inflation exists? And when did everyone begin ignoring that consol sales are not where these companies are making their money? All three lose money for each unit sold, and expect to recoup the costs in peripherals and games, not the core system itself. I wonder how many would change their tune if they learned how much money is lost on a PS3 consol.

Further when you say something like '$600 bucks? For 600 bucks I could build a gaming computer instead!', you're completely missing the point here. The PS3, Xbox, and Wii, are NOT gaming computers. The two (consol and PC) are different entities with different purposes. They have similarities, granted, but a consol was never designed to be a replacement for a PC, so such comparisons hold little water in my book. I really doubt any serious gamer would settle for a $600 PC to game with any way.

I'll always have a use for a consol and for a PC, and I'll always be having both because they have distinctly different features and uses, and because I love having choices. My advice to those that feel the need to complain is to either solve their problem by getting one for free somehow, or drop it and go and get your $600 'gaming computer'.