PS3 General Discussion

[Jay]

PlayStation 3 rumored to be behind closed doors only at E3

Wow I hope not the world release is coming up fast and they still may have it under wraps

 

[Tenacious D]

Well, with half the planet wanting to get their hands on playable demos - and a few unsavory types wanting to rip off PS3 prototypes - this might make perfect sense. I remember mention of a couple of PSPs disappearing at E3 when they were debued, even with tight security.

 

[Dave A]

Someone got caught attempting to leave with a PS2 when they first appeared at a show. Ofcourse it'd be a lot easier to take a PSP, with it being so much smaller, I wouldn't be suprised if a couple did go missing.

 

[LaBounti]

Dreamcast was shown behind closed doors and editors had to sign a NDA. I dont think they'll have to since its not really a secret since MS can't do anything about anything sony has to show off that hasnt been seen yet.MS fooled people into believing they were playing Xbox360 when it was just X850XT powered macs(Alpha kits) at the (PR overload) MTV thing and at E3. No games were runing on the hardware. Sony has more time to work with than MS did.

Bet on the ECTS and TGS for PS3 booths like what Microsoft did with Xbox360.

 

[fasj6418]

Here in Brazil we get games at around... Oh, wait. We don't get games here (beside some PC games), we have to import them! So that would be the price of a new game in US + shipping + 60% of importing tax over the price of the game and shipping. Not very cheap.

still in page 32 of this great thread, but i had to reply to this...

ever since the end of the sega x nintendo war, we get scr%$# here with videogames.

here in brazil we get piracy.

simple as that. importing games is a bit unrealistic and only for very rich people.

when GT4 came out, it coast 300 R$

to put in perspective...

minumum wage here its 350
i´m a journalist, work 40 hours a week on a radio and i make 808 a month.

HOW´S THAT FOR A GAME PRICE???

that´s why piracy rules in all latin america, we get the copies for 20... wrong? absolutely, but since they just rule out latin america for all their gaming plans, we have to live with that. its a "be the theft or be stolen" something like that. importing games is just out of question for 99% of gamers.

if i didn´t eat, had to pay rent and stuff, i could only buy 4 PS2 games a month with my salary. just insane.

my PS2 cost me 1000. the x box 360 is been sold at 3.200 here.

3.200!!!

of course, its a hyped price, but it will drop to 2.000 or so...

way expensive... so that´s why there is so much piracy here... but here´s the thing: sony does not really care about this, because:

if they fight piracy here, they will not sell anything. ok, that´s normal. but if they "live thru this" they know they have a big market for piracy, but the hardware is original. they are selling PS2´s here, thru paraguay and imports... so they profit in the hardware... point is, there will be a mod chip for PS3, because there´s a lot of market... brazil has a lot of consumers in potential, but stupid taxes makes it way to difficult to launch a system like the PS here...

either way, we get scre%$#. we can live with the piracy, or just abandom gaming. i know i´ll have to save almost two years to get myself a PS3, thinking that will cost me about 2.000, but i´ll do it, i love games so i don´t have a choice.

next time you guys complain about prices, if the PS3 will cost 400 or 500, remember that it is a lot worst for a lot of people.
you guys are lucky

 

[slackbladder]

The PS3 may be a problem in Brazil. As ALL PS3 games will be on Blu-Ray there won't be any pirate PS3 games. It's not easy for you at all.
Yeah, if the price is on or below £400 I'll be very happy and pretty relieved.

 

[Omnis]

It's region free, though.

 

[livemusic]

As I said, if you pay R$3.200 on a X360 you're just stupid. That's not what it costs. X360 were being sold for U$2.000 last year on eBay, you just buy if you want to though. Importing one wouldn't cost you more than R$1.700, and if you can sneak it into Brazil without paying import taxes it would cost you R$1.000.

About BD piracy, I'm not sure it can't be done. People said the same about the PS2 and its DVD games but that didn't last for long. I hope it can't though. Although I've been buying or downloading pirate PS2 games since I own it, I'm planning on buying only original games for the PS3. An anti piracy disc would help me a lot to achieve that goal though. Oh, the temptation!

 

[Dave A]

Wouldn't it be cheaper still to take a 1 or 2 day holliday to the US, buy one in the US then stick it in your luggage for the trip home?

 

[livemusic]

No, that would be much more expensive. And they could still catch you in the airport with the console hidden on the luggage and you would have to pay the tax anyway.

Although the two days in the US would be very enjoyable.

 

[Dave A]

You have expensive flights them too, damn. I can go to Spain and back for around than £30 by plane, that's about $45-$50.

 

[livemusic]

I think Spain is much closer to UK than Brazil is to US, and they're much bigger countries also. U$45 is the price of a bus ticket from my town to São Paulo.

 

[fasj6418]

yes felipe, i know that price tag for the x box is just silly, and i know for sure that you can get one in paraguay for roughly 1000, but still, its more than i make in a month

i would also love to spent 2 days in the US to buy the PS3 in november, with original games... for that to happen, i have to get lucky in my scollarship... maybe i can get into the US for a year or so after all

as for the piracy talk, same problem with me here, its the temptation, i know its bad, killed my PS2 once, and i´m not helping game developers, but still, you know our crap reality when it comes to gaming here...

we won´t have Blue ray discs in short term, but since it will be future standard, i´m sure i´ll be able to buy BD to record, from brands like Maxell, TDK and the cheap ones like osaka

happened to DVD before, so, there will be pirate games, there´s a huge demand for that in asia, latin america and also africa. if they blocked, hackers can unblock, its an endless fight. and we also have to think that the PS3 will have a built in HD. still didn´t hear anything on that, but it might be as easy to crack as a PC... but again, i don´t have any tech info to go that far... but if they include a BD recorder, and also with the HD, i think it opens up a room for more piracy... interesting to see what solid lifters and other experts have to say about that...

i hope we get a little more consideration this time... but its not likely to happen... heck, we even have a sony channel on cable TV, so why can´t we have one of their main products?

sorry about the bad english, i was in a little hurry...

 

[LaBounti]

It's region free, though.

Yes and no. There will be shared regions. Japan, US and most of asia. Europe shares with Africa.

 

[KENJIusa]

OK guys, not Gamestop, EBgames, Bestbuy, or even ...Farmfresh, but it's Toys'R'us now begins to take PS3 preorders.
http://ps3land.com/news/article279.php

 

[Sprite]

Yes and no. There will be shared regions. Japan, US and most of asia. Europe shares with Africa.

Actually the blue-ray movies will have seperate regions as you have described, but all games will be region free, so importing wont be a problem for games.

 

[Poverty]

OMG OMG OMG I just played PS3 at ken Kamamuchos sons house. Its f%$"ing amazing omg metal gear solid demo omg




































Not really but I cant wait for the PS3. The xbox been out for ages now but no one seems to really be talking about it, and I never here about any of the games for it.

 

[Solid Lifters]

OK guys, not Gamestop, EBgames, Bestbuy, or even ...Farmfresh, but it's Toys'R'us now begins to take PS3 preorders.
http://ps3land.com/news/article279.php

If they didn't have such money problems, I would have taken this more seriously. But, I still wouldn't have paid them $50 even if they didn't.

I'll take my chances this time around, and hope I can get one at launch.

 

[LaBounti]

Actually the blue-ray movies will have seperate regions as you have described, but all games will be region free, so importing wont be a problem for games.

Yeah I know i was thinking it but not typing it. Thats why I said yes and no. My mistake.

 

[Sprite]

Yeah I know i was thinking it but not typing it. Thats why I said yes and no. My mistake.

To be honest I think that region free gaming is one of the biggest things to seperate it from the 360, but not alot of people seem to be bothered by it, personally I would rarther have region free gaming than better graphics, this means importing quirky Japanese games is easier than ever.

Dont know if you guys have read the news about the SPU reserved for the OS, and that the OS can call up another SPU at anytime if needed? Its really interesting that Sony beleive that this is the way forward but at least the OS can be called up at anytime durin gameplay, like the 360, also the OS will use a fair amount of RAM at anytime too, so I just hope they optomise the online games and take into account this. We will soon see at E3.

[edit]

Airtight have been hireing for thier nextgen games, and have released some new tech demos based on the AGEIA physics engine. Looks mighty impressive. LINK

 

[Omnis]

I don't understand your paragraph about the OS SPU, but cool link.


edit: Actually, I think Solid or Con has already posted those videos.

 

[LaBounti]

I understand it. and I also understand these must not be hard facts. Why would it need 64mb of the video ram??

 

[Sprite]

Well since PS3 was announced Sony stated that the Cell will have a Main core and 8 spu's but one was made redundent, and another was kept for the OS that was commen knowlage, but newer info has come to light about the operating system and how it will use Cell, it is reported to actually be able to take over another SPU if it needs to, thus cutting the actual spu's used by games down to 5. It will also be using a bit of memory too.

This brings us to the information we have concerning the PS3. As some gamers have heard, Sony revealed at GDC this year that they will be constantly reserving 1 of the 7 available SPEs on the Cell Processor for their OS. This, we have discovered, is just the tip of the iceberg.

As was witnessed in their demonstrations at GDC, Sony is planning to have an Operating System running constantly in the background, just like one witnesses when using the Xbox 360 OS (aka Dashboard). They plan to have a "Blade" like pane that can appear out of the right hand side of the screen for viewing and participating in activities that the OS enables.

This include but are not limited to,

- Multi-User Voice Chat across all games, even outside of the games own UI
- Multi-User Video Chat across all games, even outside of the games own UI
- Notifications and messaging to be sent between users regardless of the games they are playing
Like the Xbox 360, these come at a cost and our sources have told us that these features use approximately:

- 64mb of the 256mb of available XDR memory off the Cell CPU
- 32mb of the 256mb of available GDDR3 memory off the RSX chip
- 1 SPE of 7 constantly reserved
- 1 SPE of 7 able to be "taken" by the OS at a moments notice (games have to give it up if requested)

In the case of the PS3 this equates to 12.5% of the available Cores on the CPU always reserved, an additional 12.5% sometimes taken by the OS, 12.5% of the available RSX memory and 25% of XDR Cell memory. Balancing these out, one could argue that Sony has removed up to 25% of the available CPU power and 18.75% of RAM for these features as well as others that are not mentioned here or will be added in future updates to the PS3 Operation System.

The 1 SPE that can be taken away, by the system, from the games at a moments notice could be for the purposes of rendering the Blade and decoding and presenting the multiple video sources and other content onto the Blade when it appears to the user. This will have minimal to no impact on the ability of single player games to utilize the SPE, though it will likely add complications during development of games for the system. The main impact would be in Online Multiplayer games that do not have a pause option available and thus will have increased difficulty in relinquishing the SPE.

 

[Omnis]

I understood about the SPU's and whatnot, but your first post's paragraph wasn't very well written. No offense, of course.

Anyway, that's very interesting. Are you sure the "unusable" SPE previously set aside in the past's plans is not the same SPE that they will instead use for the OS?

 

[LaBounti]

I cant say "that sux" or that I care. All i care about is my PS3 games running at 60fps and looking pretty. I dont know the ins and outs as to how this will work but i think they could have just used 96MB of the video ram since games dont need much more than 128 to look great(TES4).

 

[tha_con]

To calirfy.

The SPE that can be uses "at a moments notice" by the OS will only happen during the pause of the game, when the interface pops up, and it would be necessary to decode certain things, like recieved letters, video messages, audio clips etc. I highly doubt that while a game is running it will matter at all, because of two reasons:

1) The interface is not available until it is called up, so there is nothing to "decode" until the interface is requested by the user.

2) I doubt that any Online Multiplayer game will include video chat *during* gameplay, as it will more than likely be pre and post gameplay (lobby functions).

As for the video memory and such, this is also only required during the operation of the OS, and will not be used of the interface is not present, and when the interface is not present, there is no need for the game to use it, hence, it will not "hinder" gameplay directly, HOWEVER, it could cause a slight delay between the call up of the OS and the return to gameplay, I would expect a few seconds minimum.

Also let us not forget that the HDD will be present. This will enable Sony to "cache" information from the game that otherwise may be needed to be stored in the game.

 

[Tenacious D]

This is what I thought. The PS3 will have a number of computer-like features, and to manage them all, an OS will constantly be resident. I didn't think it could work any other way. Like some of the others have said though, I really doubt that any of those resources the OS needs will impact gameplay. I don't remember any complaints about Dashboard on the 360 either.

 

[Solid Lifters]

Anyone concerned about the performance of the PS3 shouldn't be. Although it might run an OS, it's still not a PC.

The RSX will be able render pixels to anywhere in system memory. The HDD could be used as system memory, but I doubt that'll happen for the PS3. Games being cached to the hard drive will also improve performance.

The PS3 will do 100 billion shader operations per second, which is three times that of the fastest PC. Plus, 51 billion dot products per second. Pentium 4 can only do 3 billion. The Cell and the RSX are very powerful hardware. Using one SPE for the OS is not going to cause much trouble.

And yes, the OS will run while playing games. We've seen that in the video of the OS working while online gaming was going on. But, I'm sure will have the ability to turn that off if we want, but why would we? The OS shouldn't effect games all that much, if any.

 

[Tenacious D]

What he said.

I think the main bottleneck to game performance will actually be the development tools Sony gave the game programmers. I'm sure that Sony worked hard with software engineers along with the hardware they created, so that development kits would handle a lot of the issues of using this crazy multiprocessor environment. So the main Cell CPU would be doing traditional central processor duties while the six or so SPEs would be available to handle whatever would make the games run like bandits, like handling bot A.I., background animations, weather or whatever.

Initially, games for the 360 and PS3 may be indistinguishable. But when Sony engineers and software developers come up with even more refined tools to handle all these processors and assign tasks in a streamlined, transparent way that game programmers won't have to deal with themselves, the games for the PS3 will begin to truly astound us.

 

[Sprite]

No probs Omnis, Sometimes I type without really thinking about whats being put down on page, My tutors said the same thing as you so dont worry about pointing it out My typing skills have been likened to an "unconscious babble of twoddle"

tha_con is correct in what he said, I think that my post may have come across as a bit of a doom sayer post, but I was just passing on information that I thought would be interesting for those who dont go looking for new info and what not,

Anyway Solid yeh the PS3 will be a ground breaking bit of hardware more-so than PS2, if the lauch goes according to plan and without any major hitches I personally think we will see a record breaking console beyond what we have hoped, Games will look lush a stunning, and with all the third party SDK stuff, developers will be able to get on and concentrate on what makes games great, and thats gameplay. Not to mention that the next big peice of news to come from the Sony camp is the new pad design, can't wait for that.