Sony says PS2 for 2-3 more years | PS3 for 9

[IR1]

I was in Target today and I saw the PS3 on display playing GRAW 2, I was not impressed with the graphics, and while there was no fps counter, I could tell it was about 30fps. Which is petty slow, maybe they had it in 1080i, but still. Anyway I don't know what Rainless' response to my post was exactly about but I think he may have missed the point.

I do not think PS3 as it is now is close to the Xbox 360 in actual game performance and graphics when looking at the same game (it is possible theywill figure out how to better program for the PS3, or maybe it really is just a POS). I know a couple multiplatform games that are great on the 360 and perform like garbage on the PS3. I was just saying the Wii will be worse, and controls will be afterthoughts on 3rd party multiplatform games.

 

[Panneskjegg]

I do not think PS3 as it is now is close to the Xbox 360 in actual game performance and graphics when looking at the same game (it is possible theywill figure out how to better program for the PS3, or maybe it really is just a POS). I know a couple multiplatform games that are great on the 360 and perform like garbage on the PS3. I was just saying the Wii will be worse, and controls will be afterthoughts on 3rd party multiplatform games.

I have both a 360 Elite, and a PS3. And I agree with you - the 360 is better when it comes to gaming. I won't go into GFX differences between the 2 consoles, because I haven't done any A/B comparisions. But I think the GFX is good on both. On paper, the PS3 should be miles ahead of the Xbox360 - but it's not. Perhaps it's because the developers don't take full advantage of the PS3 "engine", I don't know. But the Xbox360 has been out much longer than the PS3 - so I hope games will eventually be better on the PS3.

As of now, I think the 360 is the better of the two for gaming. Just crank the volume up LOUD when playing on the 360, because it is noisy as hell. I think that's the biggest minus about that console.. It's not fun having an airplane in your living room.

However.. What about all those people buying new 720/1080p TVs ? Here the PS3 has a HUGE advantage. Because it has an awesome DVD/Bluray player, which can also be upgraded easily. Most people don't care about that (or don't know that), though... But for those that do care about that - the PS3 is so worth every damn penny, even if it did cost twice of what it does now. Gaming is just a bonus on it

 

[Neural Net]

I have both a 360 Elite, and a PS3. And I agree with you - the 360 is better when it comes to gaming. I won't go into GFX differences between the 2 consoles, because I haven't done any A/B comparisions. But I think the GFX is good on both. On paper, the PS3 should be miles ahead of the Xbox360 - but it's not. Perhaps it's because the developers don't take full advantage of the PS3 "engine", I don't know. But the Xbox360 has been out much longer than the PS3 - so I hope games will eventually be better on the PS3.

There's nothing to take advantage of because it's all a gimmick, a marketing ploy. The cell is good for things like f@h but not for gaming, out of order processors are far better in that respect. The cell has 9 cores (1 PEE, and 8 SPEs, one of which is reserved for redundancy) - you'd be pushed to get a game to use 8 separate threads all at once.

Eventually games may be better, but the graphics chip in the 360 is more flexible and the Cell isn't the be all and end all. It's very fast for certain applications, but games actually isn't one of them. The Cell was originally intended to do everything, including the work of a GPU, but it fell flat on its face.

Basically the 360 and PS3 are practically identical, the graphics chip in the 360 is actually more powerful, but the Cell just about manages to make up for this.

 

[rainless]

There's nothing to take advantage of because it's all a gimmick, a marketing ploy. The cell is good for things like f@h but not for gaming, out of order processors are far better in that respect. The cell has 9 cores (1 PEE, and 8 SPEs, one of which is reserved for redundancy) - you'd be pushed to get a game to use 8 separate threads all at once.

Eventually games may be better, but the graphics chip in the 360 is more flexible and the Cell isn't the be all and end all. It's very fast for certain applications, but games actually isn't one of them. The Cell was originally intended to do everything, including the work of a GPU, but it fell flat on its face.

Basically the 360 and PS3 are practically identical, the graphics chip in the 360 is actually more powerful, but the Cell just about manages to make up for this.

There's more to it than that. Those 25GB discs are gonna come in damned handy (if you don't believe me look at when games started using DVDs last generation) and then the PS3 actually uses its HDD for cache and whatnot.

It's going to get interesting. I believe eventually the 360 Elite will have the HD-DVD drive built in and things will be even once again... though I think Microsoft's policies will screw them in the long run.

 

[Neural Net]

There's more to it than that. Those 25GB discs are gonna come in damned handy (if you don't believe me look at when games started using DVDs last generation) and then the PS3 actually uses its HDD for cache and whatnot.

It's going to get interesting. I believe eventually the 360 Elite will have the HD-DVD drive built in and things will be even once again... though I think Microsoft's policies will screw them in the long run.

Well... maybe. Then again you get games on the PC with higher (and variable) texture resolutions and whatnot, that still do not need more than a single DVD, and don't even take up more than 9GB of space when installed. By the way, the 360 HD is used for caching files - Oblivion is an example.

Rumours were running around that Bizarre Creations (makers of the PGR series) were limited by the DVD9 format, but this turned out to be false.

The consoles will run out of graphics power to render the additional data that would require more than a single DVD9 disc than running out of space. Of course Sony argues that you can't have compressed audio (like it said with MGS4) and that the MP3 format is rubbish, and other such things but the fact remains that is more of a marketing ploy than anything else - it's been proven most if not all can not tell the difference between high bitrate mp3s and uncompressed audio, and most do not have a speaker system capable of allowing you to hear any difference either. In theory it seems like a good thing, but in reality it's nothing but marketing as it doesn't make a discernible difference.

Just look at the installation of Crysis on your PC, it takes up 6.84GB - and that game has graphics far beyond what this consoles are capable of. The only benefit that bluray really has is putting all additional bonus content on one disc for special editions and whatnot (but Kayne and Lynch special edition on the PS3 uses 2 discs...), or very cutscene-heavy games, which tends to be a Sony-only trend anyway.

I'm not saying bluray doesn't come into play, but I doubt it's going to impact the games for this generation of consoles, it certainly doesn't now. Ironically, using more than one DVD doesn't actually bother people that much, they'll just think they're getting more for their money, to top it off most consumers are not aware of the capacity differences between the different disc formats.

All (minor) differences aside, these two consoles are almost indentical, which is amazing considering the variety of ingredients. Then again, the PC is the best gaming platform anyway.

 

[tenchi86]

/\Many games are already going over the 9GB limit of DVDs. Unreal Tournament for example was around 30GBs but as they developers wanted to make the game equal on all platforms they cut out many levels/textures. The extra room also allows better graphics as you are able to stream textures from the disk and not use as much ram.

As for graphics of the two. They are honestly both pretty close IMO (yes I know both). Ratchet and Clank compared to say Halo or CoD you can clearly see the PS3 has some power. Still though multiplatform games do tend to look and run better on the 360, a thing many developers claim will change with time.

 

[Neural Net]

Err, yes uncompressed games will often take upwards of 20GB, this is not uncommon. It's certainly not due to "cutting out textures" that games fit on a single DVD. Streaming textures from the HD is also a highly avoided scenario because the games will start to chug, HDs cannot keep up in this regard. Again it's processing power not storage which rules the day in graphics capabilities.

 

[Shiggity]

As long as timeless games are made for said console, it will live forever.

I love you SNES and I always will!

 

[rainless]

Well... maybe. Then again you get games on the PC with higher (and variable) texture resolutions and whatnot, that still do not need more than a single DVD, and don't even take up more than 9GB of space when installed. By the way, the 360 HD is used for caching files - Oblivion is an example.

Rumours were running around that Bizarre Creations (makers of the PGR series) were limited by the DVD9 format, but this turned out to be false.

The consoles will run out of graphics power to render the additional data that would require more than a single DVD9 disc than running out of space. Of course Sony argues that you can't have compressed audio (like it said with MGS4) and that the MP3 format is rubbish, and other such things but the fact remains that is more of a marketing ploy than anything else - it's been proven most if not all can not tell the difference between high bitrate mp3s and uncompressed audio, and most do not have a speaker system capable of allowing you to hear any difference either. In theory it seems like a good thing, but in reality it's nothing but marketing as it doesn't make a discernible difference.

Just look at the installation of Crysis on your PC, it takes up 6.84GB - and that game has graphics far beyond what this consoles are capable of. The only benefit that bluray really has is putting all additional bonus content on one disc for special editions and whatnot (but Kayne and Lynch special edition on the PS3 uses 2 discs...), or very cutscene-heavy games, which tends to be a Sony-only trend anyway.

I'm not saying bluray doesn't come into play, but I doubt it's going to impact the games for this generation of consoles, it certainly doesn't now. Ironically, using more than one DVD doesn't actually bother people that much, they'll just think they're getting more for their money, to top it off most consumers are not aware of the capacity differences between the different disc formats.

All (minor) differences aside, these two consoles are almost indentical, which is amazing considering the variety of ingredients. Then again, the PC is the best gaming platform anyway.

Crysis installs 6.4GB to the hard drive... No console game to date does that. Those files are uncompressed. Currently you could fit about 3 games the size of crysis onto the 360 if they went that route.

I have no problem believing that even current graphics processors can do over 20Gb just like the previous generation had no problems running 8GB games and up. The extra space doesn't have a damned thing to do with the graphics... it would simply be more space with which you could use uncompressed audio, 3D models, etc...

Take Mass Effect for example... they bent over backwards to fit everything onto one disc and the expense was hiccups and lengthy load times.

 

[tenchi86]

Err, yes uncompressed games will often take upwards of 20GB, this is not uncommon. It's certainly not due to "cutting out textures" that games fit on a single DVD. Streaming textures from the HD is also a highly avoided scenario because the games will start to chug, HDs cannot keep up in this regard. Again it's processing power not storage which rules the day in graphics capabilities.

Yes you are correct. Mark Rein is simply misinformed I suppose.

"We'll compress some things," Rein stated, before adding, "But you know, we may have fewer maps on the 360 version ... Blu-ray has definitely given us a lot of legroom."

http://www.destructoid.com/unreal-tournament-iii-needs-the-blu-ray-legroom-38601.phtml

He then later went on record saying as they wish for all versions to be as equal as possible they will use a few compression techs like repeating textures. Which if course if a texture is repeated then the world becomes a little more bland then what it could have been. If what you want though is compressed audio and video with still fewer levels though then I guess DVD9 would be fine for you.

As for streaming, maybe you could do well to read up on how current engines like the Unreal one or the one used by Insomniac work.

partly because of the Unreal Engine's ability to stream textures. This means that you can have much higher resolution textures than you could normally fit in your 512 MB of RAM. It also means that you're going to chew up more disc space for each level. With streamed textures, streamed geometry and streamed audio, even with compression, you can quickly approach 1 GB of data per level.

http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/f...n-this-console-generation/70209/?biz=1&page=2

More on streaming: http://www.insomniacgames.com/tech/articles/1107/files/texture_streaming.pdf

 

[Neural Net]

Oh, fine.

ALL HAIL BLURAY, LARGER DISCS MEAN BETTER GAMES. AMAZING.

 

[tenchi86]

/\Sorry if that is how I came off. I am simply trying to help educate people and be educated myself by talking about current technology. Blu-Ray is helpful, but does not mean the system will or will not last 9 more years, which I believe is what we were originally talking about.

 

[sulretal]

My father will be pleased to know that his sports games for his PS2(actually mine) will be available for a little bit longer.

 

[tenchi86]

I know this is hard to believe but a Walmart near me actually sells PS1 games still. Only two, a basketball, and football game, but still pretty amazing. Its about 30 minutes away but if I am near it soon I will get photos for verification.

 

[FudgeNuggets]

Some old games still look nearly as good as new games when upscaled on a 360 (Jade Empire, Forza) or better than current gen games (NFL 2K5).