DescentBB

If this is true, the PS3 is dead as nails.

Whats the point of cache if you can't use it?

I was going to say something disparging about Rambus, but I'm going to use IBM instead.

IBM: Screwing Sony over because we got MS and Nintendo too.

LOL! That's absolutely ludicrous. It seems the hardware architecture was very poorly designed.

Diedel, I think you're right about the PS3 being dead as nails.

16 megabytes???? Jesus Christ...

Thats just sad.

Xbox 360 had it sealed once PS3 announced its price tag.

And then they have some very good games for the 360 ... and none for the PS3. Looks like Sony could be in trouble here.

I don't know, people made similar claims about the PS2 in the wake of the Dreamcast not so long ago yet despite the perceived weaknesses in the PS2 compared with its competitors the PS2 still mopped the floor with all of them. What a lot of people keep forgetting when making these kinds of predictions is the strength and marketing power of the PlayStation brand. That'll what'll end up selling PS3 more than the strengths (or lack thereof) of it hardware or games library.

I don't think it was the brand reputation alone - it was the great number of great games that were available for the Playstations.

Here's the thing: All Sony had to do to effectively derail Dreamcast sales was announce the PS2. It didn't matter to consumers that the first PS2s didn't start shipping until a year later, that the hardware was largely inferior to Dreamcast or even that Dreamcast had built up a fairly strong games library (something the PS2 wouldn't start doing until over a year after it was launched) the very idea of the PS2 was enough to make them wait for and later, buy the Sony offering over the Dreamcast.

Admittedly, much of this is due to Sega's shaky financial position at the time largely preventing them from marketing the Dreamcast as aggressively as Sony. However, it still serves to highlight the massive amount of faith consumers had in the PlayStation brand - especially when you consider that, despite the quality of PS2 titles released between the consoles launch in 2000 and the holiday season of 2001 being widely reported to be quite poor, sales of the console remained strong.

The point I'm trying to get at here is that it's all but impossible to use \"traditional\" factors such as the quality of the games library or even the performance of the hardware (which itself has never really played a part in whether a console was successful or not. Things would have played out very differently if it had) to try and predict how a console released today will fare as the importance of these factors have been broken down and new ones created to replace them, largely by Sony.

I doubt the PS3 will have trouble selling initially, for that same reason.

However, its continued success does depend on whether people find it's worth buying. If the hardware sucks, it's not going to keep much of a reputation (at least among the people that care about that). If there are no decent games for it, same deal.

Sony Exec 1: \"This foot shotgun isn't letting us shoot ourselves in the feet thoroughly enough!\"
Sony Exec 2: \"Prepare...the foot cannon!\"

So, the main issues appear to be:

1. Local RAM can be written at 20 Gigabytes per second, but can only be read at 15 Megabytes per second? (Am I the only one who thought that had to be a typo?)

2. The graphics processor seems to be only capable of half the throughput of the XBox 360's (I'll avoid turning that into another NVidia vs. ATI argument, hehe)

While #2 may not be a huge factor in performance comparisons, and initial sales of the PS3 may not be affected much, I'd say (from reading the article) that the biggest impact is going to be game development.

If developers find that they have to make huge adjustments to get the performance they need, it will eventually start affecting the number of available games for the system, and that will be the major problem.

The bit-tech.net ppl also thought about a typo, but

- the entire document used the same value
- There is a memo (or so) from Sony recommending to avoid local memory accesses to the game developers

Foil wrote:While #2 may not be a huge factor in performance comparisons, and initial sales of the PS3 may not be affected much, I'd say (from reading the article) that the biggest impact is going to be game development.

If developers find that they have to make huge adjustments to get the performance they need, it will eventually start affecting the number of available games for the system, and that will be the major problem.

If I may make another historical reference, the PS2 was widely regarded as being the hardest of the previous generation consoles to develop games for yet that didn't affect the number of games that for developed and released for it (Wikipedia claim that at one point, there were over 5,277 titles as of March 2005, though its unclear whether that's unique titles or includes multiple region releases of the same game). The reason for that is even though it may have been an absolute ★■◆● to develop games for, the installed base of PS2s and the rate at which they kept selling made it impossible to ignore as a target platform. Even a flop on the PS2 could have potentially made more money than a success on its competitors. In other words, even if this cache thing turns out to be a major problem, if the PS3 sales momentum is strong enough (and there's every reason to believe it will be) then game developers will be forced to come up with creative ways to deal with it (and they will, we're talking about a group who came up with the idea of tasking one of the Vector units in the PS2s Graphics Synthesiser to do real-time DTS encoding) as once again they won't be able to ignore the PS3 as a target platform.

Yes, but will people buy the extra speakers for the SACD support?

Blueray isn't the only format that sony has riding on the PS3.

Actually both Sony and MS are pushing a concept of \"High-Definition gaming\" with their new products. Since High-Definition video tends to imply the need for a multi-channel amp and speakers anyone wanting to take full advantage of the HD capabilities of both the 360 and the PS3 would more than likely already have (or plan to buy) the requisite hard. The rest just won't care and will quite happily hook the PS3 up to the 10 year old junker their PS2 previously sat under.

It also apparently requires an HDMI cable and downsampling of analog signal... stupid DRM.

16 mb per second , yeah bottleneck..but i Guess we have to remember its a 'gaming' system not a computer yet. in the future they will be basically small computers.

...well, gaming consoles have always been computers, just not general-purpose ones (or, should I say, capable of BEING general purpose. Practically).

And now Sony says the PS3 is a computer.

I think sony lost the plot somewhere.

As I said, it IS.

*runs and hides* :D

Necropost:

People are simply too stupid to care about 16 MB read speed after a 20 GB write speed. They either won't have the brains to find this out, won't have the brains to figure out what it actually means, will assume that it must be wrong, or will assume that even though it is a correct characteristic everything will be fine because something as big as the PS3 couldn't mess up like this.

Sony won't have to worry. The previous systems were just too good for people to not buy these. They'll fly off shelves no matter what problems it has. I'd bet on it.

It's pretty much gonna go like this:
Sony are pretty much gonna go solely for the rich stupid people. (No sensible person would pay £425 for this)
Unfortunately, due to the large numbers of rich stupid people in the USA, Sony are still gonna make millions!

Money! wrote:Necropost:

People are simply too stupid to care about 16 MB read speed after a 20 GB write speed. They either won't have the brains to find this out, won't have the brains to figure out what it actually means, will assume that it must be wrong, or will assume that even though it is a correct characteristic everything will be fine because something as big as the PS3 couldn't mess up like this.

Sony won't have to worry. The previous systems were just too good for people to not buy these. They'll fly off shelves no matter what problems it has. I'd bet on it.

yeah you´re right.

I was really looking forward to playing MGS4 on the PS3... until I heard how much the PS3 is going to cost...

OK, a lot of you aren't going to like this...

Easy solution to this... Don't buy any game consoles.

(if you're already playing enough games to warrant having one... what else could you be doing with your life with the time you've been spending on games?)

I actually consider playing games in the same category as going to the theatre or watching TV/Sports, a form of entertainment.

My girlfriend and I will spend an evening watching DVDs or playing some World or Warcraft, as long as we're both having fun. Unfortunately you need a PC to play certain games, you need a DVD player to play DVDs, you need tickets (or pay-per-view) to watch some sporting events, and a console to play certain games.

Just dropping 600 bucks at launch time on a console with very few games is unappealing to me. I'll wait until it drops in price a bit and there are more titles to warrant a purchase.

interesting. so Sony will be resting on their brandname laurels to move these off shelves.

but i'm not actually sure Sony's brandname is as strong as it used to be, hasn't their name been mudied somewhat with the increasing public hatred of the old publishing giants (ie: one of the RIAA/MPAA giants)?

So perhaps this will not bode well.

Nintendo meanwhile is in the middle of a very pleasurable marketing orgy. While Sony's campaign seems comparitively... well, uneventful.
(Perhaps it's because Nintendo's campaign is sucessfully self-catalysing - their technology seems so very interesting in itself, the public is excited.)
but really, i suppose we were all rather excited about the PS3 when we first heard about it. So i guess Sony's problem has been that they concentrated their marketing too early.

TFA wrote:Whereas it can do 20GB per second write speeds, its read speed is a mere 16MB per second - an order of magnitude lower.

Let's see here: 20x10^9 compared to 12x10^6.

Hmmm. ONE order of magnitude?

9 - 6 = 3 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE.

I love it when writers can't even add or subtract.

This is obviously nothing but FUD. There's simply no way an architecture will perform 1000 times slower than is planned. Simulations would have caught that 3 years ago.

It IS pretty hard to throttle it that much, indeed...