- 61
PlayStation 3
Sony Computer Entertainment offered some inside information on its successor to the PlayStation 2 console at this week's Game Developers Conference in San Jose. Before you start watering at the mouth though, the next PlayStation console won't be making an appearance at your local games shop for quite some time but we're sure you'll love devouring the information that was unveiled anyway.
The new console -- don't call it a PlayStation 3 -- would be a networked device with roughly three times the computing power of the PlayStation 2. And like the current generation of consoles, the new box is intended to be more than a mere game device: It's a home media hub that could serve as the centerpiece for movies, music and other media delivered over the Internet.
Shin'ichi Okamoto, Sony Computer Entertainment's chief technical officer, said in a keynote address that the PlayStation 2, which is capable of producing near-life-like game images and rich surface textures, nonetheless disappointed the game development community. Designers want a console that's capable of ``real time'' rendering -- the ability to draw images instantaneously, he said.
The third-generation PlayStation will attempt to achieve this Holy Grail of animation, with a processor that's 1,000 times faster than the current console. It would be powered by a new microprocessor, dubbed the ``cell.'' Okamoto offered few details about the new chip, which it's developing jointly with IBM and Toshiba, other than to say it would work in parallel with other computers on the network.
``We are very eager to invent a new architecture,'' Okamoto said in a press conference after his speech.
The cell project is an outgrowth of Sony's GSCube project with the movie production studios. These workstations combine 16 sets of graphics chips from the PS2 in a single box, to achieve 100 times the processing power of a single game console. These powerhouse rendering machines were used to create characters for animated films, including ``Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within'' and ``Antz.''
We'd like to thank Dawn Chmielewski from the San Jose Mercury News for the information contained in this story.
Sony Computer Entertainment offered some inside information on its successor to the PlayStation 2 console at this week's Game Developers Conference in San Jose. Before you start watering at the mouth though, the next PlayStation console won't be making an appearance at your local games shop for quite some time but we're sure you'll love devouring the information that was unveiled anyway.
The new console -- don't call it a PlayStation 3 -- would be a networked device with roughly three times the computing power of the PlayStation 2. And like the current generation of consoles, the new box is intended to be more than a mere game device: It's a home media hub that could serve as the centerpiece for movies, music and other media delivered over the Internet.
Shin'ichi Okamoto, Sony Computer Entertainment's chief technical officer, said in a keynote address that the PlayStation 2, which is capable of producing near-life-like game images and rich surface textures, nonetheless disappointed the game development community. Designers want a console that's capable of ``real time'' rendering -- the ability to draw images instantaneously, he said.
The third-generation PlayStation will attempt to achieve this Holy Grail of animation, with a processor that's 1,000 times faster than the current console. It would be powered by a new microprocessor, dubbed the ``cell.'' Okamoto offered few details about the new chip, which it's developing jointly with IBM and Toshiba, other than to say it would work in parallel with other computers on the network.
``We are very eager to invent a new architecture,'' Okamoto said in a press conference after his speech.
The cell project is an outgrowth of Sony's GSCube project with the movie production studios. These workstations combine 16 sets of graphics chips from the PS2 in a single box, to achieve 100 times the processing power of a single game console. These powerhouse rendering machines were used to create characters for animated films, including ``Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within'' and ``Antz.''
We'd like to thank Dawn Chmielewski from the San Jose Mercury News for the information contained in this story.
