Playstation 3 pricing announced

[John Crichton]

This is a genius move by Sony. They won't be able to make these things fast enough. The Blu-Ray drive alone will make the thing sell out in Japan. The launch price of $600 (I am ignoring the lesser priced system as I won't be even considering one with a HD that small) is perfect for the early adopters, people who love Sony, those with too much money and the hardcore teen/early 20's gamers who are saving up now.

I'm on the fence about pre-ordering one for launch. It all depends on the games. If there is even one must-have in there I will be getting one, even if I have to buy it in a bundle. Why? It'll be great with my HD-DVD player, which I'll be getting around that time. After reading around, there is a definite upgrade in picture quality with the next-gen discs and players and there is only so long I'll be able to hold off. I held off for a year after DVD came out and that was for monetary reasons.

And the price can go nowhere but down and as soon as the first 6 million are gone they'll probably drop the price to get the people worried about the price on board. To further Sony's smarts is that they are still producing high profile and quality games for the PS2. I watched the whole 2 hour Sony press conference and they spent a good amount of time (read: more than I thought they would) talking about the PS2 and the support it will still be getting. So, they don't have to rely completely on the PS3 for revenue. They have the PSP (which is selling well for an expensive portable with an okay roster of titles) and the PS2, which is just a cash cow as the system is dirt cheap and has an unrivaled game lineup.

 

[John Crichton]

I still can't figure out why it needs 7 Gb of space "just because."

Regardless, if you aren't downloading new games or themes on the 360, what is the space for anyways? I still have over 50,000 blocks available on my old Xbox, and even with the large Oblivion saves, I'll never get close to filling my 360 drive.

Do you do any downloading from the Marketplace? That's what will eat up space quickly.

For myself, my TV looks really good displaying a 720p signal so I like to download movie trailers like X3, MI:3 and PotC2 that look good on my PC, but the picture is smaller and the audio not so hot. Those downloads are about a 1/2 gig each. Same with game downloads - I believe the GRAW demo was almost a gig. Same with the Tomb Raider: Legend demo. Yeah, you could just delete stuff as you go, but that's annoying.

And, the Xbox Live Arcade is a fantastic feature and must be a HUGE moneymaker for Microsoft. Nintendo and Sony would be fools to not follow suit and offer a similar service. Many of the games cost only a few bucks and are really fun. It is certainly the wave of the future and the way games will eventually be distributed. I can't wait until I can pre-order the newest Metal Gear game and it is downloaded to my PS3 so I can play it on midnight of the launch date. It worked for Half-Life 2 and a console has tons of encryptions and protections and is considerably harder to hack as you'd have to pop the case.

Bottom line: I can see wanting a larger HD for my 360 within a year. The fact that just a demo can eat up so much space and that games will be designed for discs that hold 40 gigs of space on the PS3 and I'll be wanting the larger HD for it after my 360 experience.

 

[John Crichton]

Why not just go PIII-733, GeForce 3 Ti200, and 128 MB of RAM for a comprable? That's almost exactly an Xbox (the Xbox GPU being something of a "GeForce 2.5"), and avoids messy comparisons (the PS2's CPU/GPU were really strange, even more than the PS3's). It doesn't quite work, because PC games are always designed to at least be playable on midrange (or even low-end) hardware, but the Xbox doesn't destroy the PC.

If the PS3 had been released last fall (with a DVD drive instead of a Blu-Ray drive, obviously), that would be true. But it's not being released last year, it's being released this fall. Last November, cheap CPUs were single-core 32-bit Celerons and Semprons. This year they'll be dual-core 64-bit Athlon 64 X2s and Pentium Ds (and possibly even E-series Core 2 Duos). Last fall, midrange GPUs were GeForce 6600s and Radeon X1600s; this fall, they'll be a half-generation beyond the GeForce 7600s and Radeon X1800s that are in that space now. By the time the PS3 has any kind of real availability (late spring of 2007, at the earliest), AMD's cheap CPUs will have clockspeed bumps and Intel will defitely have Core 2 Duos in the low-end/midrange space, GPUs will be a full generation beyond where we are now, and standard memory on PCs will be 2 GB.

Since I know diddly about computer components, power and all that I'll just quote this gamespot article that talks about how powerful the PS3 will be compared to modern PC's. I found it interesting.

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6125429/p-2.html

Supercomputer for Computer Entertainment

The PlayStation 3 will have a 3.2GHz Cell processor that consists of a single PowerPC-based core with seven synergistic processing units. The Cell is the result of a joint effort between IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. The primary PowerPC core has a 512KB L2 cache, and each SPE has 256KB of its own memory to work with. The CPU has an eighth SPE for "redundancy." IBM has stated that the first prototypes have weighed in with 234 million transistors each. To put things into perspective, desktop PC processor manufacturer Intel only broke into the 200-million transistor range with its dual-core Pentium Processor Extreme Edition chip, which was released in early 2005.

The Cell processor will also be powerful enough to drive a new class of gameplay physics impossible to run on older console hardware. The PS3 will be able to simulate cloth and fluid, as well as large-scale rigid-body interactions with hundreds and thousands of objects colliding on screen. Today's PCs in comparison will need a physics add-on card or find a way to tap the GPU for physics processing to run PS3-level physics effects. Additionally, developers will also be able to use the Cell's SPEs to give games new audio effects previously only available on the PC with dedicated audio processing.

The industry-wide shift to multicore processing platforms will have a major impact on developers in the coming years, since we're now moving into more-complicated hardware. A lot of the burden will fall upon the hardware manufacturers themselves to design systems and provide tools that will make it easier for programmers to write games. Sony has announced that the PS3 will use Open GL/ES, a specialized API closely related to Open GL, and programmers will be able to access the Cell's SPEs using C or C++ tools, instead of having to program on the assembly level as they did with the PS2.

Synthesizing Reality

Sony will pair the Cell with a very powerful graphics processor based on advanced Nvidia technology. You may remember that Nvidia did the graphics for the first Xbox system, but with reports of contract disputes between Nvidia and Microsoft, few were surprised when both companies chose to change dance partners for the next console cycle. Microsoft went with ATI for the Xbox 360, and Nvidia hooked up with Sony on the PlayStation 3.

The end result of that collaboration is the PlayStation 3 RSX "Reality Synthesizer" graphics-processing unit, a massive 550MHz, 300-million-transistor graphics chip based on advanced GeForce graphics technology. According to a written statement from Nvidia, the RSX transistor count is "more than the total number of transistors in both the central-processing units and the graphics-processing units of the three leading current-generation systems, combined." During the PlayStation 3 E3 2005 presentation, Nvidia CEO and founder Jen-Hsun Huang explained that "the RSX has twice the performance of the GeForce 6800 Ultra, the highest performance GPU in the world today. Each of these GPUs retails for $500. There will be two of them, equivalent horsepower, in the RSX."

The PS3 will jump out ahead in hardware performance, but the PC isn't far behind. Nvidia replaced the GeForce 6800 Ultra with the much more powerful GeForce 7800 GTX last summer. It turns out that the RSX and GeForce 7800 GTX share a similar architecture, but the RSX is still slightly faster. Nvidia has since released its GeForce 7900 GTX refresh part, but the PlayStation 3 still has an advantage in that the entire system is built specifically for gaming instead of general processing.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

The PlayStation 3 has 256MBs of Rambus XDR memory and 256MBs of GDDR3 memory dedicated to graphics. Nvidia also claims that the RSX can take advantage of the combined 512MBs of memory, since it is capable of writing directly to system memory, but the 256MBs dedicated to graphics memory should be plenty for now. The increased graphics memory bandwidth and storage space will let developers use high-resolution textures and enable antialiasing for incredibly detailed, jaggy-free graphics. The programmable shader capabilities greatly increase graphics efficiency, letting game developers create advanced effects such as subsurface scattering and other advanced lighting effects. We expect most game developers to target native 720p and 1080i HD resolutions, as 1080p screens are still fairly rare.

 

[Lazybones]

If I have understood the whole next-gen format mess, the downsampling would be to 720p, which is still better than DVD. I'm pretty sure that anything above that would not be visible on a normal TV (and, tbh, I'm not even sure about 720p being noticeably better than DVD on a normal TV).

According to Wikipedia, it's 540p, which is only slightly better than the default from a progressive-scan DVD.

I remember when consoles came with not one but TWO controlers and a game packed in with it. IIRC, the Atari 2600 cost like $150.00 when it first came out. I thought that was the bomb when I was little.

It was $199 in 1977, which is $645 in 2005 dollars. Video games are actually a bargain today, when adjusted for inflation.

And RE the hard drive; I've been DLing e3 trailers and demos like a madman this week, and I've all but filled up the drive. Ripping music (in case you don't have your machine networked to a Media Center PC) also takes up a lot of space (I'm not sure what codec the 360 uses, and the box doesn't tell you how big the files are, but just a handful of albums took up almost a gig of space). Even the little LiveArcade games take up a surprising amount of space (couple of 10s of MB each).

With the demos coming in at 400-700MB each, I've been deleting the short/lame ones quickly to make space for more content.

 

[LightPhoenix]

The problem with toting Blu-Ray, or HD-DVD for that matter, is that is completely reliant on have a good television in order to take advantage of that. There are diminishing returns when you have a two hundred dollar television. The difference between BR/HDDVD and current DVD is minimal on a lower-end television... much less so than VHS to DVD. Figure at least a grand for a television that can take advantage of these technologies... well, if you're balking at six hundred, another grand on top of that doesn't sweeten the deal.

 

[John Crichton]

The problem with toting Blu-Ray, or HD-DVD for that matter, is that is completely reliant on have a good television in order to take advantage of that. There are diminishing returns when you have a two hundred dollar television. The difference between BR/HDDVD and current DVD is minimal on a lower-end television... much less so than VHS to DVD. Figure at least a grand for a television that can take advantage of these technologies... well, if you're balking at six hundred, another grand on top of that doesn't sweeten the deal.

Your pricing is way off, man. Two years ago I bought a Sony 30' CRT for $800 that has an HDMI input and 2 component inputs at Circuit City. Yeah, it was on sale ($100 off that week) but it was brand new, in the box from a reputable store. I actually saw it online at the time for as low as $700. That was 2 years ago.

These days, a TV that can take a component/HMDI/DVI signal can easily be found for $500 or less. May not have a 60' screen but that's okay. And the prices on these TVs is dropping monthly. By this holiday season you'll be able to have a huge choice of TVs that can take a signal produced by a BR or HD player.

Have you looked at Circuit City or Best Buy's prices for HDTV's between 30-39 inches lately? The notion that you have to spend over a grand to get a setup worthy of next gen tech is outdated and flat-out wrong. You could go out right now and put together a complete home theater for $1000 and still have a few bucks left over for a DVD to show off your new system.

I can't wait until a few more years go by so I can get a bigger set and spend less than I did on my 175 lb beast.

And the bottom line is that, yes, you will need a TV that can take advantage of the BR or HD tech. But it will actually cost less than the price of the PS3 if you do a little homework and legwork. Open Box buys can knock a few hundred off a TV easily for a place looking to get rid of it.

 

[drothgery]

Since I know diddly about computer components, power and all that I'll just quote this gamespot article that talks about how powerful the PS3 will be compared to modern PC's. I found it interesting.

GameSpot simply doesn't know what they're talking about when it comes to console CPUs; they're repeating Sony's press releases instead of talking to game programmers. The Xbox 360's Xenon is a bad CPU for a modern game machine. The Cell is a terrible one. And the Wii's 800 MHz or so G3 would have been decent... four years ago; it's not architectually stupid, but it's just way too slow. The theoretical numbers on the Xenon and Cell aren't that bad, but their designs just suck for real games, which aren't massively multithreaded (and can't easily be massively multithreaded), and which are helped a lot by out-of-order execution (which modern PC CPUs have, and neither the Cell nor the Xenon do). Really, I have to think that IBM Microelectronics was giving insanely good deals to do the CPU design work for MS, Sony, and Nintendo, because they would have gotten much better performance out of standard PC CPUs.

 

[Zulithe]

I'm already building a nest egg for PS3, though I don't plan to buy one on launch day or even within the first 2 or 3 months after the release. Worst case scenario, I decide not to get a PS3 (or wait for a price drop + better game selection) then I can use that extra cash on a Wii or PC hardware ^__^

 

[trancejeremy]

Your pricing is way off, man. Two years ago I bought a Sony 30' CRT for $800 that has an HDMI input and 2 component inputs at Circuit City. Yeah, it was on sale ($100 off that week) but it was brand new, in the box from a reputable store. I actually saw it online at the time for as low as $700. That was 2 years ago.

These days, a TV that can take a component/HMDI/DVI signal can easily be found for $500 or less. May not have a 60' screen but that's okay.

Looking on Circuit City, the cheapest HDTV seems to be about $900 (for a 30"), and you don't hit the really high resolution (1080p, which the PS3 and the HD DVD formats are aiming for) until the $3500 mark or so.

If you got one for $700 2 years ago, you got a pretty good deal.

Anyway, on even a HDTV, is the picture from a regular DVD (480p) that much worse than it from a Blu Ray (or HDTV) downsampled to 720p?

 

[John Crichton]

GameSpot simply doesn't know what they're talking about when it comes to console CPUs; they're repeating Sony's press releases instead of talking to game programmers. The Xbox 360's Xenon is a bad CPU for a modern game machine. The Cell is a terrible one. And the Wii's 800 MHz or so G3 would have been decent... four years ago; it's not architectually stupid, but it's just way too slow. The theoretical numbers on the Xenon and Cell aren't that bad, but their designs just suck for real games, which aren't massively multithreaded (and can't easily be massively multithreaded), and which are helped a lot by out-of-order execution (which modern PC CPUs have, and neither the Cell nor the Xenon do). Really, I have to think that IBM Microelectronics was giving insanely good deals to do the CPU design work for MS, Sony, and Nintendo, because they would have gotten much better performance out of standard PC CPUs.

Whoa, whoa, whoa...

What are you saying here? That the PS3 isn't powerful or the 360, er - I dunno. Seriously, when it comes to the capabilities of consoles it seems terribly difficult to make a comparison to modern PCs considering all the different hardware. It's even harder when the system isn't even out yet and games haven't been played by any posters here.

The bottom line for me is that there are many ways to play games. I have played games on PCs that were built by educated pros/reputable companies and there is slowdown, skipping and crashing. The same goes for consoles except that there is rarely any of the last 2 on my little list. And keeping up with what is current and being able to play at the best looking resolution requires an upgrade every 2-3 years for PC games these days.

Megahertz, memory and the like are all well and good but when they are focused towards one thing, in this case gaming, it seems like these companies are getting alot out of their dollar. They are spending millions to make sure their tech is the best for what they are doing while still being able to make a buck. So, discounting everything in that article with the same amount of techno-speak does nothing for me.

So let me ask you this:

What should have Microsoft done to make their system better for games while still being able to take less of a loss on each sale of a 360?

Why did Nintendo choose the architecture they did for the Wii rather than something "faster?"

Why is the Cell processor terrible? What would have been better to put in the PS3?

I'm a curious party.