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Games Entertainment

High-end Computer or Game Machine? 199

Posted by CmdrTaco from the games-people-play dept.
ghibli writes "A New York Times article on the Sony PlayStation II describes it as a high-tech computer that will rival Wintel PCs. It's virtual reality CPU, dubbed the "Emotion Engine", claims to be more powerful (and expensive) than anything on the market. "
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High-end Computer or Game Machine? More

High-end Computer or Game Machine?

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  • Re:Threat to Wintel? Not a chance... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I just saw this piece in Times yesterday. This will only challenge the Wintel empire even more. Sony has invested so much on the R&D (10 billions, if my memory serve) that it can't afford to not bring out the web surfing option. (With memory stick to save the cookies, I suppose.)

    Now this is one Webtv scheme M$ can't buy out. Come on everybody, bring on the dirt cheap alternatives! WebTV; Satellite browsing; free-pc; AOL non-windows box free for two years of subcribtion.... What? what did you say? Besides surfing and word processing, non-win boxes don't have enough game support?!? Now PlatStation 2 can surf! Take that Intel, so much for Pentium III IV V.

    One important question, does PlayStation2's DVD media format owned (partially) by Sony? If so, Sony probably will make DVD burner available just to kill off other Game playing platforms.


    cy
  • Game consoles and computers are, have been, and always be in separate domains. No one except sweet but clueless mothers ("Oh deary, I want my sweet little sonny boy to learn that computer thing.") will buy an add-on to a game console to turn it into a 'real computer'. A game console is a toy. A game console with a keyboard and a hard drive is still a toy.

  • Technical info on the Playstation 2 chips (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Playstation 2 chips are the cover story for the current issue of Microprocessor Report. Paul DeMone summarized the information from that article for a posting to comp arch.

    Three chips: the emotion engine (EE), the graphics synthesizer, (GS), and the I/O processor (IOP)

    • The EE: 240 mm2 0.25 um chip with 10.5 million transistors * has 300 MHz superscalar MIPS CPU with 128 bit wide SIMD extensions, 16 KB icache, 8 KB dcache, 16 K SRAM * has two 128 bit wide SIMD FP vector processors, each with four 32 bit FMACs and one FP divider. Each vector processor can perform 19 macs and one divide every 7 clocks. * memory controller with two direct rambus channels * 64 bit by 150 MHz interface to GS * 32 bit by 37.5 MHz interface to IOP
    • The GS: 279 mm2 0.25 um chip with 42.7 million transistors *includes 16 pixel processors and 4 MB of multiport DRAM * simultaneous 1024 bit wide video reads, 1024 bit wide video writes, and 512 bit wide texture reads for 48 GB/s total bandwidth. * uses 32 bit RGBA pixel and 32 bit Z values
    • The IOP: includes playstation CPU (34 MHz R3000) for backward compatibility with old games * supports local bus + USB + IEEE-1394

    Performance claims: 6.2 GFLOP/s peak * 66 Mpoly/s transform peak * 36 Mpoly/s transform sustained * 16 Mpoly/s Bezier surface patches * 75 Mpoly/s peak rendering * 2400 Mpixel/s fill with z buffering + alpha blending * 1200 Mpixel/s fill with Z + alpha + texture David Sheth

  • Re:Hmmm (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think add-ons required by games (unless they're really simple or included, like with the NES light gun for Duck Hunt) are a very bad idea. Making game systems expandable like that, and, *shudder* an open architecture would just be a nightmare for game developers. Not only does expandability mandate generality and thus raise prices, but you have a combinatorial explosion in the possible systems your game could be running on. That requires way more testing, and will probably drop the average game reliability to PC-quality. Remember, most video game programmers are NOT John Carmack-- they're no better programmers than the average CS graduate. The closed architecture makes it easier to deal with the system makes it easier to make lots of games and pick the 40% of them or whatever which get released makes it easier for Sony to recoup for selling consoles way below cost.
  • My friend here at school is s console gaming nut, but I think I'll ALWAYS prefer my computer to a console system for the following reason:

    I am not too much into fighting, shooting, and adventure games. I prefer strategy and first person style games, as well as military sims and due to storage factors(consoles would need larger HD's) and the fact that most console gamers don't like these types of games as much, they aren't released often on a console system. A television doesn't have the resolution to show the crispness that is need for the small icons and text of a strategy game. It just seems that the computer, and many computer gamers are drawn to more complex and thought provoking games than just straight fighting and first-person shooters.

    Some people on this thread seem to believe the DC or PS2 are some kind of second coming or something, well I doubt they will be. Are they impressive, heck yeah! Are they going to sell well, probably yes as well, but they are still just new console systems!

    I think that the computer & console gaming indistries REALLY need to improve the quality of their gameplay innovations first, and then worry about polygon pushing. Case in point: Thief: The Dark Project. Although this game's graphics are not the most powerful or gorgeous, Thief is an extremely entertaining and innovative idea in the relatively tired FPS genre. Her was a game where the standard FPS tactics only got you killed, and a game that actually brought back those feeling of excitement, fear, and surprise that had left me after I first played DOOM/DOOMII(really, what truly GREAT innovations have been made in FPS games since DOOM?). I see what my friend buys, from both here and Japan, it seems that a large chunk of new console games are just the n-th rehash of Final Fight, FFVI (or FF3 int he US), Tomb Raider, or Street Fighter 3000 Ultra-Deluxe Super Edition Beta 9!

    In the end I'll be more impressed with less polygons and more innovation and re-playability.

    Respectfully,
    Kevin Christie
    kwchri@maila.wm.edu
  • IIRC, the Emotion Engine will be produced by Toshiba, who worked with sony on the development.
  • Artdink's claim to fame was the A-Train series in Japan. A-Train 3 in Japan came over here as A-Train, and was released by Broderbund/Maxis for the PC. It is no longer available. (I got it a few years back for $10 in full retail boxes from Maxis. Of course, when Maxis sold its soul to Electronic Arts, it stopped selling almost all of their old games, but I digress.) A-Train also has a PSX version I'm told. Artdink had other games too, I'm sure, but this is the one I'm aware of.
  • That 700 dollar figure is according to an "analyst", who is misquoting a very early Japanese rumor article released when news of the Playstation II was leaking. Sony replied to questions about this by promising to keep it "under 400" (so we can assume 399.99...).

    Sony has had extensive experience in the computer market in Japan, and only recently in the US with its consumer-oriented Vaio computers.
  • Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:

    The PSX2 will be of no substantial threat to the computer industry. Just like every one of its predecessors, the PSX2 will be nothing more than an expensive toy. The WebTV was supposed to dominate the low end market, because you could "surf the web", send e-mail and print from it. Those things are a joke.

    The PSX2 may be a cool game only machine, it may be a nice game/DVD machine, but it's not a computer. It doesn't have the power of flexability that a computer has.

    If the low price was so important, people would be buying up those $599 specials that we all see. The don't as soon as they see the limitations, people will not even think of trying to replace the computer with some set-top appliance.

    Sample conversation.

    Console Gamer " I can do 'X' with my PSX2!"
    Computer Gamer "Well I can do 'W','Y','Z', and I can emulte 'X' on my computer"!

    Consoles should die a quick and painful death, the heyday of the Atari 2600 && NES are over.

    LK
  • Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:

    >>isnt that what they said about PCs

    A PC has more inherant flexibility than does a PSX(2), Sony builds into them the inability to play games that they do not publish.

    If Microsoft had designed DOS to not run on non IBM systems, there would be some similarity. Since Sony holds all of the cards, people are at their mercy.

    LK
  • Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:

    >>I'd much rather spend $200 on a console than $3,000 on a PC.

    If you're spending that much for a gaming PC, either you need to redefine your requirements or you're being ripped off.

    A good, custom built gaming PC shouldn't cost more than $1500-$2000. Depending on the type of options you get.

    LK
  • Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:

    >>When I said 'PSX' I meant 'PSX 2'

    This is what we were told about the PSX , two years ago. We'll have gigahertz machines before the end of the year (I hope), the CPU power will be there within two years, it's just a question of who will do it.

    LK
  • Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:

    >>Yes, but how many of you have 15 (or 4 for that matter) computers sitting around in your living room? And if you don't, then it's a huge hassle to get them all in your living room.

    Check the URL I have listed above, if everyone brings their own computer, it's not a problem at all. We've had over 20 computers on our lan before.

    LK
  • cypherpunks/cypherpunks as login/password works just about everywhere!
  • Goldeneye and MarioKart look terrible in little tiny windows, and the TV is a lousy display anyhow.

    clearly, your TV is too small... :0)

  • (really, what truly GREAT innovations have been made in FPS
    games since DOOM?)

    Jedi Knight? Hmm, might not qualify as 'great', but certainly significant.
  • Well, you can bet they know that $500 is asking too much for a home game console. They'd only have to look at 3DO, CDTV, and an old CD-based console sold by Philips/Magnavox to see where they could end. Most people don't care about quality as long as there's a cheaper option available. I just hope they can find a way to recoup the costs (licencing, perhaps?).
  • Hhmmm... With the exception of the Game Genie, add-ons for games have sold very poorly. Say, Sega had a hard time trying to sell the 32X (which was an extension for the Genesis). There were games designed specifically for it, yet it became a dud (marketing was to blame then). In the case of the Game Genie, no games required it; it was simply an enhancement, and it'd work with most, if not all, games that were out there. Which brings us to the compatibility issue...@#^$@YT$ NO CARRIER
  • Well, yeah, the 32X was pretty much like the N64DD. It was a 32-bit processor board that plugged into the Genesis cartridge slot. This allowed the use of the Sega CD for 32X CD games, although one could use cartridges too (think of the Game Genie and you'll understand). The reason this was a flop was because it was designed as some sort of upgrade path to the Saturn (it was released at almost the same time).
  • I think this article is interesting in how different it is from all the other articles out there on the PS2. Most have said Sony's target price was $300, without DVD playback capability (or rather with it purposefully disabled).

    $300 seems low, but Sony's never been a company to sell their game machines for the profit -- they make their profit by being the only publisher of the games.

    Everything I've read indicated that the lack of DVD playback was purely a pricing issue -- they didn't want to cut into their $300-$500 low-end DVD player sales. So maybe this higher price (although I'd hope not *that* high) is the result of a guess on their part that they may sell more of them at a bit higher price that includes the DVD support than without it, without hurting their $300 DVD player market.

    I for one hope they have the DVD support. Sure, some people may then have two, but how many people have more than one CD player? Lots I'd guess.
  • In the time it took you to post your complaint about NY Times logins, you could have simply done the annoying registration...

    And you weren't first post, either :P :P
  • Television is an illusion of picture quaity due to the constant motion. Our eyes are trained to watch things that move. Television seems to have a very high quality picture, because we process more information from the average television experiece compared to the static ultra high definition monitor.

    Now, if we watched movies and the usual media on a computer monitor, there might be an appreciation for the detail. It would be nice if movies on tv would have something steamy worth the resolution, but the frames keep moving. Even the nude shots are such a blur in motion it wouldn't make a difference.

    Television is great for inexpensive gaming and large viewing from a comfortable distance. As long as it moves quickly, the consumer thinks its great. I would be depressed if I still had to use a television for computing (Sinclair ZX81 and Apple ][ were my experiences, but I'm spoiled by my 17 inch!)
  • it's really only FP performance now, there's plenty of bandwidth left on the AGP bus.

    Napalm will have mad geometry acceleration, 3Dfx isn't stupid. Their line on the whole issue is "well, we guess you can use the CPU for physics or something unimportant like that" :)
  • It's not clear to me that pushing more GPixels is meaningful.

    the highest end Voodoo3 can fill 1600x1200 at 60fps. That's _plenty_ of fill rate to go around. And the next generation will be faster.

    You have to take these tech spec numbers carefully. they get big very fast, but they don't always mean much.

    Don't get me wrong, I don't work for 3Dfx. But I'm a game developer. The PC 3D card companies work hard to support game developers, while devkits for consoles run like $50k, so obviously there's no love lost.
  • than 4-way N64 games. Goldeneye and MarioKart look terrible in little tiny windows, and the TV is a lousy display anyhow.

    Andy, if you read this, we're gonna have to have NetFest IV this summer ...
  • will suck 5 years down the line, it's just that there will still be games produced for it (like N64 now).

    I would just consider $100-$150 (no need to spend more than that on 3D hardware) a part of the price of a new computer every 18-24 mos. Granted you may end up spending more, but that's because computer games continually take advantage of the latest technology that's available. A good thing rather than a bad thing IMHO.

  • I have my doubts about these things (Score:4)

    by aheitner ( 3273 ) on Wednesday May 05, 1999 @01:23PM (#1903561)
    for several reasons.

    a) Performance: the numbers I've seen on these things suggest 20million polygons per second. But this has to be taken with a grain of salt. The current leader is almost definitely the Voodoo3, which claims to be capable of 6-8million polys/sec. But our benchmarks of a V3-2000 indicate it gets about 500k best case in the real world. But fine, PsxII will be extremely impressive if it can actually do 5-10million polys/sec.

    b) Obsolescence: this thing will be out in Q1'00 in Japan, and not in the States till probably Q4'00. And that's the introductory price -- they will have to keep selling this thing for years (as Nintendo still sells the N64, which came out in like '95?'96? only now is Nintendo making money on the hardware...). But that's an absurdly long time to keep a computer -- we expect them to be obsolete at the best every 2 years.

    c) Competition: this thing goes head to head with the current leaders in game performance, nVidia and 3Dfx. But 3Dfx will have their new Napalm boards for this Xmas -- 1st completely new architecture board yet. All kinds of spiffy features (they talked about it at their developers conference at GDC this year). Cycle time in 3D hardware is 9 months, forget Moore's law. N64 & Psx are pretty pathetic now, and they didn't have any 3D hardware competition till partway thru their product lifespan. PsxII will enter a madly competitive, established field.

    d) Price: Sure, new computers appear more expensive than Sony's announced price targets for PsxII. But remember, computers right now have a lot more functionality. The wholesale (or pricewatch.com) price of a computer without HD or monitor starts to push Sony's targets, and when you consider that OEM's always have to be making a profit on their machines, since they can't sell the same configuration for very long, a computer is decently price competitive.

    This is not to discount what Sony is doing. It's interesting, and I'd be fascinated to know more about the hardware in there (yeah right! Japanese technology...we may never know. Be easier to get an account on the NSA's supercomputer :). But they've certainly carved out some hard work for themselves.
  • With the vector processing of the emotion, with the nuon processor doing the management, and the IEEE1394 iLink, stacking a few PSX2s will make for a helluva parallel system.

    Even at $500/box, that sill slaughters most other methods I've heard of. I imagine Becker and NASA will be all over it.

    This is absolutely right. I've been looking at those things as a possible replacement candidate for the several hundred x86/UltraSPARC/MIPS boxen we use in my employer's machine room. And the PSx2 looks like a very serious machine for heavy low precision floating point work. The next generation StrongARM chips also look very good for this kind of work.

    The biggest problem I have in that machine room is the large power requirements x86 draws when multiplied in the hundreds. This is not just about a power bill, but it affects the size of our UPS, air conditioning, and rack requirements as well. Several hundred x86 are cheap compared to a few SGI Origin/Sun E10000 SMP boxen, but those machines are really designed for high I/O, not compute. Anyway, now that we've come to accept the price point distributed x86 systems offer over the supercomputer competition it's time to begin thinking how to drop that price point down even further. If PlayStations do the trick I'm all for it.

    Thing is, Sony is going to have to support such a move. We need more than just a PSx2 Linux based SDK... we need an entire Linux distribution ported to the PSx2, plus driver support for all the nifty features like firewire et all included in the box. Sony hasn't mentioned anything like supporting a Linux distribution on this hardware, only that they're providing an SDK under Linux (probably running on x86 with a hardware cartridge dongle to the PSx2). So, Sony would have to open the hardware up before this could be a serious possibility.

    If not the PSx2, maybe those crazy guys at www.rebel.com [rebel.com] (the new name for Corel Computer) will recognize low power consumption and high integer/floating point compute systems as viable, and begin developing a hardware line specifically to target that market. I tell you, if they released a Netwinder with decent floating point performance, supported at least 512MB of RAM, and sucked roughly the same power the current Netwinders draw (about 15 Watts total) we'd buy hundreds of 'em.

    Of course, the same holds for Sony if they opened up the PSx2 and began to target the performance compute market. I just want cheap compute that draws as little power as possible (thus dissipating little heat) and fits in a smaller form factor than a standard AT or ATX case. Is this really too much to ask?

  • That's a good point. Basically I think that there's two ways to go about this, but your idea might be better.
    I had been thinking that if you release a lot of compelling games that rely on the new peripheral they'll drive sales of it.
    Your idea is that if you release a perhiperhal that enhances all (more or less) existing games the quality will encourage upgrades, although the games continue to be playable.
    I like the second much better, but it would mean that programmers would have to be VERY careful to code for not only the standard hardware, but unspecified hardware too. If made _really_ cheap I can immediately see some good stuff there. For instance, a better set of default sound samples (I know that the storage medium doesn't encourage this...) could be replaced for ~$5-10 with clearer ones. Since they'd be basically the same (maybe some standard additional ones - appending them to the spec) it would be an easy upgrade. Better 3d hardware would be a lot more difficult and expensive, but I do like this idea.
  • Well, while it sounds pretty cool, I have to say that there are two important factors for what people will want to buy.
    1st off, there's performance. PS2 sounds like it will kick quite a lot of booty, although I think that the Emotion Engine thing is basically hype.
    2nd, and more important to most people, is price. If PS2 sells at ~$100-150 it'll sell like heroin hotcakes. At ~$500+ it'll sell like, oh, NeoGeo, or 3DO.
    Hell man, after the Rev. C iMacs appeared, the earlier revisions dropped in price and outsold the new models. People would much rather save a few hundred bucks than get a better system. What I'd like to see is an expandable architecture. I know that add-ons for games have never done well in the past, but a dirt cheap add on that significantly increases performance, and which new games require to run would be the best bet.
    Consoles are not a market I'd want to deal with. Too scary.
  • I'm sure the old 'cypherpunk' trick will work soon enough
    Chris Wareham

  • Anyone else remember the Coleco Adam? It was an add-on to the ColecoVision game system that made it roughly the equivalent of an Apple ][+ (keyboard, floppy drive, daisy-wheel printer). I never actually saw one of these units in person, and if I recall correctly, it was a pretty big flop. Haven't heard much from Coleco since then.

    Sony makes excellent products, and I worry that these plans for the PlayStation 2 may tank, and drag the company down with it. That would be a shame...
    ________________________

  • With the vector processing of the emotion,
    with the nuon processor doing the management,
    and the IEEE1394 iLink,
    stacking a few PSX2s will make for a helluva
    parallel system.
    Even at $500/box, that sill slaughters
    most other methods I've heard of.
    I imagine Becker and NASA will be all over it.
  • IF PS2 is a hit, I think it will be the end of the traditional console, not the computer. However, Sony must overcome many problems before they will reach the goal their hype has set for them. There are three major reasons I doubt PS2 will be the PC killing console some people have dubbed it:

    1) The techology. Read this from an article in Next Generation:

    ***********************************************
    "Remember the Jaguar?" one developer opened our
    interview. "It could reportedly do a billion
    pixels. That was possible if there was no
    software and all processors were dedicated to
    pushing pixels. It's the same thing here."

    Sony's Phil Harrison has stated that the Next
    Generation PlayStation has a fill rate of 2.6
    Gigapixels. (That's 2.6 times the Jaguar, for
    those keeping track at home.)

    Several other developers had the same doubts
    about the machine's spectacularly high polygon
    numbers. One PC and Console developer joked "It's
    the 3dfx rope-a-dope. They convince you that the
    only important benchmark in the universe is
    framerate. nVidia has better image quality? So
    what! It's all about the framerate. Sony knew
    they could destroy Sega on polygon count and
    Floating Point and that's what they did. Ease of
    development, quality of games...none of those
    things are here. It's all about the polygons."

    However, some developers we spoke to simply don't
    believe Sony's polygon numbers. "They're there to
    make you report on them," one developer
    admonished. "They're 'best case' scenarios
    achieved by adding every processor's raw output
    capacity. They don't take into account bus speed,
    communication between processors, or any
    effects."
    ***********************************************
    http://www.next-generation.com/j smid/news/5998.html [next-generation.com]

    Those who have seen the early demos have reported that it is indeed AWESOME (for instance the famous dancing couple demo, or the dinosaur), but remember that a demo is not a game, and does not show the finished product. The console is not here yet, and while it might easily beat several Xeons with Voodoo3/UltraTNT2 as some have reported, a lot can go wrong in development of this ultra new technology, and in the meantime a lot can happen in the computer world in a year.


    2) How to make a profit. When the Playstation emulators came out, I read that even on the Playstation 1, Sony actually LOST money on every console sold. What they made money from was licencing the rights to make games to gaming companies. On Playstation 1 this worked wonderfully as we have seen - the console gave people wonderful prestanda/price which meant they sold LOTS. The big market made gaming companies willing to pay the licencing fees.
    But look at PS2. The system will be MUCH more expensive. Sony first claimed $300 or below price [next-generation.com], but who thinks this is possible? $500 dollars is a lot....$800? Hardcore Playstation fans will no doubt buy it anyway, but will parents buy it as a Christmas gift for their kids? (Playstation 1 sales soared around Christmas) Lots of developers were also attracted to Playstation 1 because of ease of development. No worry about different hardware configurations, different OS versions and so on. But what of the Playstation 2? Read what Squaresoft has to say in the same article as above....

    ************************************************ *
    The most important issue in development, however,
    is who will be able to develop for the machine.
    No developer we asked could think of a team in
    the United States with the expertise to develop
    for the Next Generation PlayStation's high end
    abilities.

    The demo shown in Japan revealed an ability to
    create curved surfaces and pre-rendered quality
    gameplay graphics. Whether anyone currently
    geared toward developing with polygonal systems
    will be able to turn around a game using that
    kind of technology is highly questionable --
    particularly with the quick development cycle
    Sony's 2000 release will require.

    No one has commented on this question, whether a
    world used to developing for PlayStation can take
    advantage of a wholly new architecture with
    advanced 3D functions, more publicly than
    Tomoyuki Takechi, president of Square Co. The
    Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported yesterday that the
    Square chief believes, "No more than five
    software companies can develop games that take
    full advantage of the PlayStation 2's
    capabilities." (Though given that outlet's recent
    translation troubles, he may have in fact said no
    more than fifty.)

    Takechi reportedly went on to say that the new
    technology will draw the lines between
    developers "who have computer graphics prowess
    and those who do not."
    ************************************************

    FIVE?? And even if it was fifty, that is pretty god damn low! Are these companies alone expected to support Sony and their subventioned console? They will have to make a really big profit then to make ends meet. Also, fifty companies in the world. How many good and original games can they churn out per year? Look at how long it has taken Id to learn the new technology (curves and so on) and do Quake 3. And look at Squaresoft the flagship of Playstation, they seem to be only making compies of their old hits these days. (Parasite Eve, Final Fantasy 8. I have seen it all before.) As a gamer, I am sceptical. The added price and low number of developers can make the positive spiral of Playstation 1 turn negative. Few games and an expensive unit around release could make many gamers take a wait and see approach. And if profits doesn't come quickly gaming companies will start to pull out and develop for PC and Dreamcast instead. Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar anyone?

    3) "It's a bird! It's a plane! No! It's..a pretty hot computer!"
    Even if Sony manages to overcome the previous problems (and that is a big IF), what is it that they are creating? According to Verant, Sony is considering making Everquest one of the games available for the PS2 when it comes out. To play Everquest, you need: An Internet connection, a harddrive for the patches, a keyboard, a mouse, a monitor unless you want to view the gorgeous graphics on a cruddy TV screen, speakers for the monitor, an OPERATING SYSTEM to manage all these things. What is this if not a computer? Also, they have said they will have DVD, Firewire, USB, a built in camera and microphone. With internet connection you will want a browser. A mouse for the browser. An email program. A frigging ICQ client, maybe IRC! Are Sony going to develop all this hardware and software by themselves?? If all these promises are kept, how the HELL are they going to keep the price for the "console" below $1500?

    Again, if they despite all odds manage to pull this through...more power to us! I presume this will mean that we will finally be free of the crud that has built up over the years around the x86 architechture. We will have computers that are many times more powerful than today. The only losers will be Intel. And hopefully Microsoft. :-)

    There, I've spread enough FUD about poor Sony for one day.

    /Lars
  • What makes you say that? It seems to me that *vast numbers* of people will buy the PS 2...
  • $175 for a 17" montior?
  • It'll be a while before you'll be able to emulate a PSX on a PC. It'd be interesting to see a PC emulated on a PSX though.... ;-)
  • When I said 'PSX' I meant 'PSX 2'
  • Well, 2 years kind of falls into "It'll be a while".... ;-)
  • And the next generation will be faster.

    Yes, but when should you stop waiting for the next generation and actually purchase a card? And when the next one comes along, you are not likely to get a "free upgrade" in order to play the newest games.

    Compare that to a PSX owner, who knew when they purchased the console (at a fraction of a PC's cost) that they would be able to play new games three to five years down the line, whereas the PC owner most likely would run into the "you need to purchase a $200 card for this game to be actually playable" trap.

    (Or extra memory. And so on.)

    It is cheaper to buy a new console five years after the first than to suffer from upgradaholism over a system that was costly in the first place.

  • That's why community minded individuals created cypherpunks/cypherpunks

    Hm. I should try logging into /. with that sometime.
  • Ok, this is sounding a bit more realistic. Thanks for the information. Commentary is as follows.


    The EE: ... 16 KB icache, 8 KB dcache, 16 K SRAM


    It'll starve its data cache pretty quickly, but the 16K of scratch RAM should easily make up for that. This looks nice.


    has two 128 bit wide SIMD FP vector processors, each with four 32 bit FMACs and one FP divider. Each vector processor can perform 19 macs and one divide every 7 clocks.


    Good luck keeping those pipes saturated, but this should make transformations a lot easier. Instruction processing will be the limiting factor, not FP performance.


    The GS: 279 mm2 0.25 um chip with 42.7 million transistors


    At 0.25 micron, this will be a bugger to fabricate. The bright side is that a lot of those transistors are DRAM, which can be made fault-tolerant. When they ramp up to 0.18 micron, yields and raw production will both get considerably better.


    includes 16 pixel processors and 4 MB of multiport DRAM


    Now, the question is whether the DRAM is multiported _enough_ to drive that many rendering pipes. The main load on it will be texel requests (as the most productive use of it is a texel cache - a Very Useful Thing to have multiported RAM for).


    and 512 bit wide texture reads


    This is a *bad* thing - if you only need one texel of information, you're still reading in 512 bits. In practice, the rendering pipes in the graphics engine will have their own individual texel caches with finer granularity, but your texel bandwidth under real conditions won't be anywhere close to the theoretical maximum. Still nothing to sneeze at by a long shot, though.


    This was probably an architectural tradeoff. Finer cache granularity would have involved more silicon and a lower cache capacity.


    So, this looks like a well-designed system that integrates two MIPS cores, some well-designed FP extensions, a good graphics ASIC, and some cache into a powerful unit. The hype is still hype, but there is something decent behind it.


    Performance claims: 6.2 GFLOP/s peak * 66 Mpoly/s transform peak


    "peak" says it all.


    36 Mpoly/s transform sustained


    Better. Sustained transformed, not rendered, though.


    16 Mpoly/s Bezier surface patches


    Peak or sustained? Set up or rendered?


    75 Mpoly/s peak rendering


    I hope they've dropped a decimal point, because that's higher than their peak transformation rate. 7.5 million polys per second rendered would be believeable and very impressive (conventional graphics cards process at most a few million _submitted_, IIRC).


    2400 Mpixel/s fill with z buffering + alpha blending * 1200 Mpixel/s fill with Z + alpha + texture


    Without texturing, the 2.4 Gpixels/sec applies only to screen/z clearing and Gouraud-shaded light maps, then. 1.4 Gpixels/second is still nothing to sneeze at. In fact, it's sufficiently excessive that I suspect that other parts of the rendering pipe will be the bottlenecks, as opposed to fill rate. Triangle setup for small polygons or texel fetches for large polygons is my guess.


    In any event, it looks nice, and I look forward to seeing how it behaves in practice. Graphics card manufacturers could learn a lesson from studying this system architecture (putting a DSP or FP-optimized processor on to a card with the graphics ASIC isn't hard, but isn't done very much on the consumer end yet).

  • They can produce it for 100$. Big whoop. Do you know how much it costs Intel to make a PIII 500mhz? about 80$...wait...they sell it for close to 1000$. Amazing isnt it? Lets say they had a chip that can do 75 million polygons...thats ALL FPU, that means this chip is one big FPU processor. It doesnt mean it can run linux or windows, it means it can do some fancy rendering.
  • Ok, here's some bubble bursting comments.

    1. 75 million polygons- Big freaking deal, it's still only 320x240 or 640x480 resolution, this isnt like a computer game that can get up to 1280x1024 resolution on a big monitor. Just like N64 and the PSX, they can do their fancy rendering and effects with a super low resolution. The N64 only has 4 megs of video ram, it rarely uses textures, just colors. It uses a über-shading to make stuff look like they have a nice anti-aliased look to them.

    2. This system wont be supported by as many game developers as the PSX is because only a handful of companies have the technical ability to develop games for it. Just like Suqaresoft told the press. This means without a trillion licensees that the system is gonna cost an arm and a leg. All the extra doodads on it are gonna to make the price skyrocket.

    3. Games like Everquest that need a hard drive for patches and such will give Sony an excuse to release proprietary Firewire drives just for it, sure it adds a little more flexibility...but at what cost? 200$ for an add-on hard drive? Plus the 500$ or so system cost? No thanks

    4. The DVD will be nice, but when games DONT take up all 5 gigs of space per side does that mean we're going to see commercials in games? Demos and trailers might be nice..but I see a potential for companies to have commercials play before the game starts, ones that you cant fast forward through. This would help them offset the cost of the hefty licensing fees charged by Sony.

    5. If it CAN run wince then we'll probably see a M$/Sony alliance that basically strong arms developers into using Microsponge or nothing at all.
  • Let's look at this, point by point: Storage? Sorry, need to buy it. Recall the (justified) flap about the iMac?

    Which is why the iMac has sold something like a bazillion units? The PSX II has _four_ ways to store data: PSX Memory Card (cookies and bookmarks for a PSX II browser could easily fit in one or two slots), FireWire, USB, and PC-Card. People who want large-scale storage are going to go FireWire.

    Exapandibility? Yeah, like a laptop. We all know how often THEY get expanded. Keep in mind the difficulty of expanding what will still be a GAME machine too... if you start creating games that require expansions, things are going to get complicated. Enough expansions, and now you've got a PC level of complexity, without true PC expandibility.

    There's no RAM expansion, and there's no PCI slots. Beyond that, we're talking about a pretty expandible unit here. The average home computer user never upgrades anything and never buys a new bit of software or hardware. For those who want to expand their toy, a PSX II has lots of room to grow.

    I don't know what the device driver situation is with the PSX II, and I don't think anyone outside of Sony does, either. When they are done, we can see how it handles its expansion devices. I'd bet that Sony understand Plug and Play about a million times better than Microsoft.

    Display? Nifty cool, it can pump out millions of polygons... to a TV screen. Wowie. Can it still do that to a real monitor?

    Yes. Did you even look at the tech specs on the PSX II? It can drive a digital TV. That's sufficient resolution for consumer purposes.

    Believe it or not, browsing the web is not the be-all, end-all of computing. Can you write a paper? Balance a checkbook?

    If yes, then why on earth are you doing it on a game console?

    Cost, cost, cost. There's no reason why you couldn't bundle a keyboard and low-end office software. A USB keyboard costs what? $20? A copy of Microsoft Works or ClarisWorks is around $70. Quicken is around $50. Charge $100 for a keyboard, word processor, and expense program and you could still make a good-sized profit. Everyone is going to have one of these boxes in their home anyway. What's $100 to make it practical? Data could be stored on a USB Zip drive or a FireWire drive, or maybe on a remote server.

    Price? Look around. A $700 computer is already reasonably capable. Do you think that this is going to be any less true 6 months from now? And by the time this thing is out, we may be looking at the first breed of graphics accellerators that do geometry mapping as well.

    PSX II will ship for under $300. I'd wager on that. If Sony is smart, they'll realize that adding on the ability to play back DVD movies is a huge win. Considering the number of teens and pre-teens with a TV in their room, this is a no-brainer. Buy one box for something like $250 and give the kid a game station, a DVD player, and a low-end Internet-capable box. Pop in the right software, a FireWire hard drive, and a DV Camera, you've got a low-end video and sound studio for schools and middle-class families with creative kids. Heck, you can Ethernet them together with a $50 Ethernet PC-Card. Sony'll sell 10million units in 3 months, easy.

    Sony is being smart and not claiming that the PSX II is a low-end PC killer. But it is. I'm drooling already...

    -jon

  • If they're "smart" and sell it at $250, then heck YES it's a great product. It's a steal even. But can they afford a $300-$500 loss on every unit? That's a _lot_ of games. At $700, it's much less competitive, and won't be even that competitve for very long (unless they want to really treat it like a computer, and half the price every several months).

    I believe my main point stands... Sony does not understand computing. Most people assume they do when they make these assements. Heck, maybe they do, but competence in the console industry has NEVER equalled competence in the computer industry, and I don't think the two have merged yet (if they ever will; a machine to play games easily will probably always have a market).

  • Playstation as a computer? Give me a break! (Score:4)

    by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Wednesday May 05, 1999 @02:26PM (#1903581) Journal
    OK, so Mr. Playstation wants to be a computer. Let's treat it like one.
    • Storage? Sorry, need to buy it. Recall the (justified) flap about the iMac?
    • Exapandibility? Yeah, like a laptop. We all know how often THEY get expanded. Keep in mind the difficulty of expanding what will still be a GAME machine too... if you start creating games that require expansions, things are going to get complicated. Enough expansions, and now you've got a PC level of complexity, without true PC expandibility.
    • Display? Nifty cool, it can pump out millions of polygons... to a TV screen. Wowie. Can it still do that to a real monitor?
    • Believe it or not, browsing the web is not the be-all, end-all of computing. Can you write a paper? Balance a checkbook?

      If yes, then why on earth are you doing it on a game console?
    • Price? Look around. A $700 computer is already reasonably capable. Do you think that this is going to be any less true 6 months from now? And by the time this thing is out, we may be looking at the first breed of graphics accellerators that do geometry mapping as well.
    If everybody would get over the excitement of having a video game console work as a computer (oh my!), we'd see this for what it is: A cheap computer, in both senses of the word. It tries to be a computer, with video-game console ideals. Thing is, the computer industry isn't some kind of idiotic mindless stuck-in-the-ruts industry that everyone who seems to be excited about this seems to think it is. Being all the things Sony thinks the Playstation II can be means being a very complicated product, and I seriously doubt there's anybody at Sony who really understands the computer industry, who has to deal with that kind of complexity on a routine basis. "Does this game run on all the thousands of possible Playstation configurations there are?" is a question Sony has NEVER had to answer, and it's the biggest advantage the consoles have. The video game industry is quite bad at answering that question; see Sonic CD for a great example. (Also, Sonic R has many problems on my Riva 128, which I haven't heard a hint of from anyone of a fix... which should be simple)

    I think the Sony will do reasonably well at the beginning... with its name power, it can hardly fail to. What happens after that is always difficult to tell. But Sony is hardly the first video game manufacturer to try to break into the computer buisness (Even the Intellivision tried that stunt!), and nobody else has come even close. That's because for all the video game industry (and its fans) thinks that the computer industry is somehow inferior, and not as difficult to be in as the computer industry, it is not easier and Sony has no experience there. Playstation-as-computer will go the way of the "Entertainment Computer System".

  • Random musings... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Shepherd ( 17338 ) on Wednesday May 05, 1999 @11:31PM (#1903582) Homepage
    My 2 cents, after reading a few of the opinions on this thread...

    Sony is very forward thinking, I believe. They have a very strong base, with the PSX, and plan to grow it even further with the PSX2. For the longest time games and consoles were for kids, and it was the era of SNES and Genesis. Enter Playstation, alongside the Jaguar, N64, and Saturn... Of all of them PSX is the biggest slice of the game market now, 5 years later, and by the time PSX2 comes out, will be positioned exactly for all those teens who bought into the PSX, and co-incidentally will have gone through college and are now young adults; they can afford a 300$ gaming device, I think.

    Sony can and will definitely leverage its advantages, the large installed user base by utilizing the current games and controllers in their PSX2, while also embracing a new range of technologies. It is not rare to see 2 or 3 CD games now, so DVD will be a welcome addition to their arsenal. Likewise, the PSX is *finally* getting pushed to its limits, and even if Sony has overestimated their performance figures by an order of magnitude, and can only provide 7 million polygons per second, comparable to a V3 system, it will be more than enough; developers like Square will sell the system, and not the number of polygons per second the system pushes.

    People complain about the price and such; Sony will probably PLAN on losing money per unit, as long as there remains strong sales of software/games for the unit, and as all the teen-aged gamers of today grow up into consumers of tomorrow, there will be no shortage of buyers for quality games.

    DVD movie support is a plus, and will leverage Sony's own DVD market, likewise the FireWire support and their own line of FireWire devices.

    It would surprise me if Sony seriously marketed this towards anything other than the home market, as a functional integrated home entertainment device, for movies, games, email, web browsing, and minor computing tasks.

    There exists and will not exist anything in the market that will compete at this target price range; Come on, a bunch of Cyrix CPUs and Rage Pros currently inhabit the 300$ PC market, and 2 years from now we will see 300MHz Celerons and Savage4s in that price range; they would still suffer from the complexity of the PC architecture, unless Intel manages to push something drastic through the channels, and they would still suffer from the performance bottlenecks of EIDE drives, low small busses to shuttle data around, and the generally unoptimized nature of their hardware for high performance.

    On the flip side, I really doubt Sony will even come close to producing a device that can push 75 million polygons per second, or whatever they are quoting, without the significant help of giants such as Intel or IBM; AMD, NVIDIA, etc and all the other companies have problems manufacturing to high specs, how can I be expected to believe Sony and Toshiba can do so?

    Likewise, their sails may be seriously deflated by Dreamcast, esp if Sega has really gotten their act together... The lure of the DC is that it is WinCE compatible, and games targeted towards the DC is much easier to retarget towards desktop PCs than the usual...

    Still, Sony has guts and balls, grabbing the market away from Nintendo, with a device that will fit perfectly in the homes in many consumers in the next few years...

    I'll probably get one, just so I can play Xenogears2 on it or something =)


    -AS
  • Or, when I want to play multiplayer, I'd take a console anyday (far more fun to slug someone sitting next to you then to "T"alk over a network).

    Have you ever heard of LAN parties? Why squeeze a two player game onto a TV screen when you can blow up 12 of your friends in the same room in deathmatch?
  • I find it sorta funny that you're complaining about it being an "expensive toy"... isn't the gaming driving the PC hardware industry as we speak?

    True, but once the computer can't play the latest greatest games, but you can take a five year old PC and install Linux/BSD on it and use it for a web/file/mail server.

    What are you going to do with an the orgional NES or Genesis?

    What wouold be really cool is if Sony added a monitor port, enabled DVD playback and released the specs for the hardware. Then you could use it as a cheap, powerful Linux box. :)
  • Not to mention that while computers have deathmatches over the net, consoles have deathmatches with the players right next to each other, a great party thing!

    Oh yes, fighting over who gets to play next, dividing an analog TV screen in two (or four, if you're masochistic).

    Contrast that to a 15 player tribes game with everybody in the same room.....
  • You will not be flamed, as I recall Voodoo2's came out in February/March 1998.

    It's funny how everyone ooh's and aah's at this Playstation, forgetting that it's not *here* yet. When it's here, then we can compare it to VoodooX's that are here at the same time, and I bet it won't look as impressive.

    The N64 was really great too, it had the processing power of a $100000 SGI system of a couple of years before. Now it's just a console.
  • but the business model for Sony is not to make money selling the consoles, but to make up for the loss through licensing revenue. Seems to work pretty well for them...

  • who the heck wants to watch a DVD using those horrible RF-outputs?!

    None of the modern consoles even have RF outputs, much less require them. They use RCA outs like most other consumer video equipment. Now, if you are one of those people who use S-VHS outs and fiber optics all over, or balanced outputs, then you might not want one, but Sony is likely not marketing a Playstaition to audiophiles.

  • True, they would be outpriceing their lower-priced models, but a lot of people are willing to pay more for "features", not just a bare-bones model..who the heck wants to watch a DVD using those horrible RF-outputs?!
  • Um... doesn't MS own WebTV or am I totally scrambled?

    PSXII will be a totally awesome set-top box if they really go for it; maybe this will really bring 3d to the net. But they'd need a HD to cache stuff on, store cookies, etc.; every "web" set-top plan has a few 100 meg for this purpose. -m

  • a) Performance: Have you seen the screen-shot video clips? I don't have any doubts about performance. Anyway 20million polys is more than the PSXII can generate geometry for, so it's certainly enough.

    b) Obsolescence: (as Nintendo still sells the N64, which came out in like '95?'96? only now is Nintendo making money on the hardware...). Nintendo never intended to make money off of it... they sold it below cost to make money off of licensing games.

    c/s) Competition/Price: PC's are in a totally different ball game. PSX, N64... a stable, uniform platform. Try running/writing a PC game that never crashes, runs the same on everyone's machine and has (almost) no glitches. I don't know about you, but most PC games I run can't match this. I'm willing to pay a lot more for this kind of reliability out of a game machine. -m

  • I don't see to many boys and girls getting this as a Birthday / Christmas / Hanukkah present. As far as I can tell, the console game market has depended upon kids begging their parents for the newest thing. How many kids do you think can pull off a $500 job of begging?

    I don't know, an $800 dollar beg got me my first 286 and that was quite a while ago.

    For all you doubters, I have one thing to say - animatronic Leonardo DiCaprio. If they can pull off a winking, smooching DiCaprio they could get $1000 dollars for the thing.

    Realistically, I'd expect them to just take a huge loss on the machine and make it back with $75+ games.

    -sunking

  • I don't see to many boys and girls getting this as a Birthday / Christmas / Hanukkah present. As far as I can tell, the console game market has depended upon kids begging their parents for the newest thing. How many kids do you think can pull off a $500 job of begging?
  • Last I heard, this thing could also double as a DVD player.

    @ around $550, this thing would be cheaper than a good game console and DVD player.

  • Chip is the threat (Score:3)

    by schporto ( 20516 ) on Wednesday May 05, 1999 @01:21PM (#1903595) Homepage
    I don't think anyone is really claiming that businesses will have PSX2's at the worker's desks. (Although I'd be happier coming to work) I think what is possible is using the Emotion Engine chip that they were refering to and using that as part of a pc. Kinda like using the StrongArm in the netwinder. The new PSX2 chip seems very well suited for things like medical imaging, CAD programs, VR schtuff, etc...

    Word processing is probably not its strong suit. Complex molecular visualizations though would probably be well done on it.
    -cpd
  • Isn't it funny how many people had their troll detector offline and took the trouble to post what they consider to be their serious responses... Kaa's law in action!


    Kaa
  • People consistently tend to forget that TV sucks as a display. Really, really sucks. That may change in the future with the HDTV/digital TV/the great PC-TV convergence, etc. etc. but I expect that to take a while and necessitate shelling out mucho bucks for new hardware.

    Basically, you cannot get high-rez high-quality computer graphics on the TV. That's no problem for Mario kind of games, but highly graphical games (such as Baldur's Gate, even though it's only 640x480) would be painful on a TV. Don't even think about any serious word processing. And, of course, once you add the cost of a decent monitor, if the machine can drive it, that is, the price rapidly approaches $1000 and there the PCs can compete perfectly well. Don't forget upgradability, software base, etc.

    To me, consoles are cheapo hardware for kids. They have the right to cost up to $200 (YMMV), but if I were to spend, say $800 for my kids' computing hardware, I would definitely buy them a PC.

    Kaa

  • revenge of the network computer (Score:3)

    by sporkboy ( 22212 ) on Wednesday May 05, 1999 @12:38PM (#1903598) Homepage
    reports of the network computer's death have been greatly exaggerated. This looks like it will do email, possibly web surfing, and play games as well as or better than any pc. That sure seems to cover a good share of the PC buyers out there. They will just need some kind of printer support and a word processor and this could be a category buster. Maybe Larry Ellison wasn't so crazy after all?

  • I believe Artdink were also responsible for Carnage Heart, one of the most underrated Playstation games of all time.
  • A couple of points:
    • You're assuming a price of $600 for the PSX2. That's very unlikely to be the price it launches at. Among others, FGNOnline is reporting an expected $250 launch price in Japan, and while that may be a bit on the low side, Sony aren't sufficiently stupid to price themselves out of the market.
    • Prices come down. PSX2 isn't going to hit the US untill mid-2000 at the earliest. That's plenty of time for the price of the bundle you suggest to come down to less than $400
  • Actually, they added the X during development to differentiate the Playstation-X from the failed Nintendo/Sony SNES CD-ROM called Playstation.
  • PSX2 will have a number of great features that may make it worth the price.
    • 100% backward compatible with existing Playstation games
    • DVD and CD capable. It may not play DVD movies in its default configuration, but perhaps add-ons will be available.
    • Networking capabilities will enable 'Net gaming and may provide a platform for WebTV-type functionality

    $500-$700 is expensive for a new game machine that has no software. But for a versatile, powerful platform that can be extended to play DVDs and surf the 'Net and already has thousands of game titles it can run, it's a bargain.

    IGN and PSX2 [ign.com] have more info.
  • Actually, all the modern consoles also have S-Video out. You just have to buy the cable seperately.

    --

  • no one can see the future for sure
    but we can see the past

    1975 - Magnavox Odessy $150 Pong!

    1982 - Intellivision about $200

    fill in your own horror stories

    oh, and the Osborne $2000
  • This machine certainly has some power under the hood. I'se seen a couple short movies and screen shots. I thought that was amazing for a game machine until I saw this
    Myers said Sony would have to charge at least $500 for a Playstation 2 to even begin to approach break-even, making it at least twice as expensive as rival consoles -- and some have speculated the price will actually run to $700 or $800.
    $700!! By next Christmas (when it should be out in Japan) I'll be able to buy a Cel500 and Voodoo3 for that. Which actually puts them on about the same footing, graphics wise. Sony is sneaking a computer through the back door, and personally think it will fail miserably as a game machine if they charge more than $200 for it. Of course with a Net connection possibility, and all that raw power, some SERIOUS net gaming could take off. I've heard it would absolutely suck as a file server though, maybe a Vid-phone, streaming MP3/Movie jukebox, dictation taker?
    Who's working on the Linux port?
  • I honestly do not see the sony playstation as event a remote threat to wintel, however "information appliances" are a must for the future and there is a great deal of money to be made in this.
  • you forgot a few things:

    A) Performance: The figure you quote for the Voodoo3 is correct. The card is physically capable of taking a stream of 5+ million polys/sec and displaying them on the screen in realtime. The problem is that the floating point unit of the P6 core (even with SSE) can't push geometry for more than about 500k polys/sec. the Emotion Engine fixes this by adding a pair of vector processing units for all those nasty FMUL and FDIV instructions. This gets geometry running at 20x10^6 polys/sec. 6.2GFLOP doesn't suck.

    B) Obsolesence: This system is so head-and-shoulders out there, I don't think you're going to have to worry about introducing a new box for 4-5 years (which is actually industry average). And since Intel (hell any CPU manufacturer) doesn't apparently have plans to boost floating point to the PSX2's level anytime soon, I bet it'll be awhile before PCs catch back up.

    C) Competition: Well, considering that the deck they've described is about 9 times faster than a $2mil Infinite Reality 2, I don't think that they'll have to worry about competition from the esablished companies. Yah, so 3dfx has some pretty trick stuff out now, but they've already spent hordes of cash on an existing architecture that's orders of magnitude slower. And even if you take the 9 month doubling timescale into account, given current performance, 3dfx will be pushing 1.2 Gpixels/sec, while this deck has a fillrate in excess of (and this is a guess, considering the bandwidth available) 6-9 Gpixels/sec. Should be good for about 3-4 years on this end, too...

    D) Price: yah, at $500-$700, it's a littel pricey, but for USB, IEEE 1394, PCMCIA slots, and a DVD-ROM, I can see it. And remember, there'll be REAL Firewire components available for use with the PSX2 by the time it comes out. In a year, a 2.1GB disk will be had for around $120 in an external encosure (who knows, maybe Sony will make their own), plug right in to the i-Link port, customer slots the boot CD (or DVD, whatever), and has an AMAZINGLY functional and expandable internet/information/entertainment appliance.

  • yah, wow. So you're pushing 240+ SPECfp95. Great. At what price? Aren't POWER3 RS6000s going for five-digit sums these days? Great.. or I could wait a year, and get a box that'll smoke it for under a grand (more likely less than $300US), plays really awesome games, DVDs, connects to the internet, has nifty peripherals (firewire, etc)... I could go on.

    And that number was 20,000,000 triangles/sec, with peak somewhere around 66million triangles/sec. And it seems that the IR2 doesn't really get going until you've poured $2-4million into the system. Hell, even the next-to-best system they quote on the site has half the poly rate, and 1/30 the fillrate!

  • simple verdict.

    As long as an industry continues to separate the platform hackers from the developers and the developers from the users, they're going to have other people walk all over them. It's all a matter of whether or not buyers want a do-hickey like their neighbors or they want to decide what they need it for after the purchase.

    Some want a do-hickey. Like all those different removable drive sizes we're about to be bombarded with again. You know - standard issue homework disc 35MB, Professional Email archive disc 40MB, Enterprise report disc 63MB. How far can you take a gimmick? Depends on who or what your customer is. Last I checked they were people but that was a while ago. Now they seem like mindless zombies.

    No serious user would bother with a PSX with email when it's so much easier to just buy or e-purchase an email program. Nevermind the savings in styrofoam, cardboard boxes, bubblewrap :)
    (Keep our attics clean!)

    Besides, if the majority of people just want to get a,b,and c done and don't have to lift a finger, who's pushing the industry forward? What's a college degree worth to those of us who give a shit, if the market is full of fad freaks? There's a price to pay kissing up to couch potatoes. Speaking precisely of the hardware industry, it was PC gaming not console gaming that pushed it forward.

  • $67 Motherboard AGP K6-III ready

    $90 AMD K6-2 400
    $85 3.2 G HD
    $175 17" Monitor
    $5 Keyb/Mouse/Pad
    $36 24X CDROM
    $230 TNT2

    ----
    $513
    check pricewatch for real prices
    add 20% per item at fairs
    add $400 for brand name store PC's
  • If it weren't for heavy business use, there wouldn't be a Wintel monopoly. How many IS departments are going to trade in their Dells and Gateways for Sony Playstations???
  • And the issue is whether or not the PSX2 is really going to be a gaming console. Personally, I think it will be capable of topping all of the PCs currently out there, however, the fact that it is produced by Sony Computer Entertainment (And if it's actually really called the PlayStation 2, is it?) people's minds will instantly draw a link to the first PlayStation, which was, without a doubt, a gaming console -- and thus, by common logic, a toy. If they gave the PSX2 a name that in no way revealed its link to the PlayStation gaming console, and marketed it as a PC, the PlayStation 2 might make it as a high-end computer -- but then they would risk losing a hefty portion of the console gaming market, the casual gamers, who would barely be aware the thing was a good gaming device as they don't really spend all that much time checking out the ins and outs before buying -- a lot of my friends have just asked me "Which should I buy, PlayStation or N64? You know this stuff." It seems like Sony cannot conquer both markets very well by marketing the same device to both groups.

    Sony has a Good Thing(tm) going here. What they should do is release the PlayStation 2 gaming console and use the Emotion Engine to power seperate personal computer products, perhaps pulling talent away from their in-house game developers (I've never really played an in-house Sony game I liked anyway, it would be no big loss) to develop applications and such for the system -- maybe even make it Linux-based, but that's a long shot. :) Of course, by the time they got all of this done, their Emotion Engine chip would probably be pretty average in terms of CPU balls.

    So I have no clue what I'm talking about.

    You know, I think I'd prefer it if they kept in the console business and didn't take a stupid risk trying to topple Wintel, just so the console gamers would get the ultra-badass games the console could produce. Granted, it may have seemed stupid to try to tackle Nintendo years ago, and look where they are -- they all but own the Japanese gaming market, and they've got a good hunk of the other markets. Still, I'm skeptical.

    --Slack

  • Sony and Toshiba's early comments was that the Emotion Engine will be a chip used in several multimedia pursuits. The PSY is just the first of them (and plans are to create add-ons at least in Japan to allow the PSY to double as a PC), but future uses could include routers or anything else that could benefit from a fast, fairly inexpensive processor.
  • A) The limitation for PCS is the PCI/AGP bus, CPU floating point, etc. A good average case for the PSX2 with all effects, etc will actually be closer to 20mil/sec, possibly 25. I have seen it in action and used it, and can testify to this. The Playstation 2's busses were all designed for peak performance, unlike the PC.

    B) I've had my PSX for 2 years, and I still prefer gaming on it to gaming on a PC. Final Fantasy VIII, Tobal 2, Tekken 3, Gran Turismo 2, Omega Boost, etc. all still look extremely pretty compared to all PC games on the marketplace.

    C) Consoles don't compete against 3D boards. When I want to play a FPS or RTS, I use my PC. However, when I want to play anything else, I use my consoles. Or, when I want to play multiplayer, I'd take a console anyday (far more fun to slug someone sitting next to you then to "T"alk over a network).

    D) I have doubts about a $500 price point, as do virtually all of the online gaming sites. Expect $400 or less, probably closer to $300.

  • Don't count on Wintel topping the PSX2 soon... (Score:5)

    by Gary C King ( 34445 ) on Wednesday May 05, 1999 @01:28PM (#1903615)
    I have used the Playstation 2 (no kidding), and I can tell you this : a celery 500 and Voodoo 3 doesn't even *approach* the PSX2. When they say 66 million triangles/second, they aren't lying - the PSX2's graphics are *amazing*, real-time bezier tesselation and modifications (used for such kick-ass effects as morphing) is incredible. Seeing as the Playstation 2 has over 3x the floating point performance of a Pentium III-500 (and the FP is well-optimized for vector and bezier calculations, unlike the P3), which is critical to 3D graphics performance, your combination won't even match.

    However, the PSX2 has Firewire, PCMCIA, and USB connections. So, add a firewire hard disk, a USB keyboard and mouse, and a PCMCIA ethernet connection, and for under $1000 you have a machine with integer performance equal to a P2-300 and floating point performance equal to a quad Xeon-500. And the PSX2 has VESA, DTV, and NTSC output capability, to boot, so you wouldn't be limited to 60hz interlaced.

    Yes, all my information came straight from Phil Harrison - I'm not pulling this out of my butt.
  • Somewhere in England, they were tired of the bus station terminals being shattered and needing replacement, so they replaced the thick glass with plywood. Vandals scrawled, not scratched, though breaking the wood was almost as easy (and probably less painfull) as glass.


    Preceptions are important, as the history of computer platforms illustrates clearly.


    More than a game machine? Only when a non-game 'killer app' (the writer supresses a shudder at using the cliché) comes along.


    --

  • I realize I am certainly almost going to draw fire for this, but I feel it's about time I chip in my two cents into the circle here...

    First off, I'm looking forward to the Dreamcast more than the PSX2. Yes, I hear you say, the Dreamcast's specs are inferior. Yes, I hear you say, the last console Sega put out here (the Saturn) bombed. Second point first. Does nobody remember the glory days of the Genesis? At one point, it was the most popular system in America. OK, I will freely admit I spent more time devoted to my Super Nintendo, but the point remains that Sega has been on the top before.

    Now to address the first point. Even if inferior, the DC's specs are pretty damned good in their own right. Second, it's already out (at least in Japan), and the US launch is just a scant four months away. Compared to the PSX2, whose launch still isn't until December in Japan and godknowswhen here. So, months ahead of time, titles are being released for the DC in Japan which I am already eyeing.

    Moving on to that point. These are gaming systems; they would never replace my computer. Why would I want to get them if they didn't have the games I wanted? Right now, I know the following titles are out/will be out for Dreamcast, and I know I'm going to want to get a hold of them: King of Fighters '99, Marvel vs. Capcom, Soul Calibur, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, House of the Dead 2, and so on. On the other hand, I don't have a clue for what's going to be for PSX2, because the developers have been really tight-lipped.

    Moving on to developers. In a survey of 20 major gaming companies conducted by Weekly Famitsu (a Japanese gaming mag) on April 14, 1999, (being ArtDink, ASCII, Atlus, Bandai, Capcom, Data East, Enix, From Software, Game Arts, Hudson, Imagineer, Koei, Konami, Namco, NEC, SNK, Square, Taito, Takara, and Warp), all but *three* of those companies are committed to Dreamcast development. Enix is undecided, and ArtDink (who I have never heard of) and Square have said no.

    Now comes the Square gambit. Some people are going to get a PSX2 only because Square is developing for it and not DC. Personally, in my opinion this gambit is simply not what it used to be. Square has put out some titles which have been the most enjoyable gaming experiences of my life (Final Fantasy 1-7, Secret of Mana 1-3, Parasite Eve, and Xenogears especially). However, and this is a big however, their insistence on using only the highest-grade technology available to them has caused them to lose sight of how to make good games and their core audience, in my opinion. Final Fantasy 8, while visually stunning, is a flat game. It's either too hard or too easy, depending on what features you abuse; there is no middle ground anymore. Saga Frontier was just far too nonlinear and far too confusing fr a console game; it probably would have worked better as a computer game. Then there are the myriad games coming out based on the chocobo mascot. I don't care for this much. I appreciated the chocobo for transportation, not to explore dungeons while looking cutesy (Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon) or participating in a Mario Kart ripoff (Chocobo Racing). On top of all this, they're producing a movie which is going above George Lucas's self-imposed limit: making fully polygonal actors who are indistinguishable from normal people! (Lucas has stated that he will never use CG to render humans, since humans aren't humans if they're not human. Or something like that.) Which brings me to my next point.

    (Before that, though, a quick loopback to the support bit. On PSX2, of the above companies, only ArtDink, Atlus, Capcom, Enix, From Software, Koei, Namco, and Square are committed. Warp has said no; of the rest, they are all either interested or undecided.)

    Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I truly believe that we in the USA are currently being forced to evolve from 2D to 3D. I am an appreciator of drawn art, animation especially (my home page is proof enough of that; devoting a section to reviewing fan fiction based off of a perticular anime is probably the 5th level of fanaticism right there). I collect pictures. I collect posters. I even try to draw sometimes. There is a certain charm in the drawn art form which appeals to me; and very few of those pictures are 3D renderings. Soul Calibur is about where I draw the line; the characters are gorgeously rendered, but I notice in each of them just enough of the drawn style of art to fully appreciate them. Animation isn't animation to me if it looks far too real.

    Well, this is getting probably long-winded of a read as it is, so I'll just reiterate the main points: so far the DC has the games *I* want to play, has plenty of third-party support (which the Saturn didn't have), and is far from selling out to the 3D-obsessed crowd. I may make a post later on the technical non-gaming aspects, but for now I want to hear what the /.ers have to say.

    Navaash

  • This is what I was thinking about when they said that Sony would have to relearn their buisness.

    I can see a Sony TV with a PS 2 and some well placed stereo speakers doing away with some home theaters. DVD capable vs Sony DVD players; Audio CD capable vs Sony Audio CD players; include MPG3 capable (Internet audio and video), cable box capable. And oh yeah, replace your PC monitor with a 27 - 35 inch TV monitor. I can see how a $500 - $700 box would do well.
  • All:

    I don't see how this product would "make computers unecessary" ... if everyone had Emo-Engine based boxes on his desktops, he would still be using a computers.

    If he wants to use a word processor, he needs software; if he needs to print they requires a means to communicate with the printer at least (and that's more software) ;)

    This is not just semantics or a curmudgeonly gripe, but totally serious.



    I think everyone reading this forum expects -- or at least would not be shocked by -- radical changes in computer use, computer appearance, computer ubiquity, etc, in the coming years, but (please correct me if this is off-base, someone!) computers will still have hardware / software and some form of OS, even if it's just applications cooperating to use the hardware. Even if the OS is hardwired, in fact - it'll still be there.

    If these Sony chips become as popular as it sounds like they could / "ought", and are worked into extensible boxes, I certainly hope that there are multiple competing operating systems fighting for their users' mindshare. Linux (or other GPL'd, or BSD liscensed, or whatever, OSes) would make good contestants.

    Respectfully,

    Timothy

  • http://psx.ign.com/news/7154.html
    This link is to a playstation 2 faq. In it is says that Sony has officially announced that the playstation 2(or whatever it will be called) will have a maximum price of $400.00 and it could be alot less.
  • I dunno, I just got a pair of 10 gig IBms for 120 apiece. Software raid is cool.
    http://www.ryans.dhs.org
  • Can we port Linux to this baby?
    The more processors out there, the better for Linux!

    Maybe AMD should team up with Sony to crank
    out some K7's at 18 micron... Seems Sony will
    have the fabs soon. Just a thought.
  • > Last I heard, this thing could also double as a DVD player.

    Unfortunately, "could" is the operative word here. It could double as a DVD player, but reports are it won't. Sony is justifiably afraid of canabalizing its DVD player sales, so the Playstation II will not work as a DVD player--at least not right away. Sony is looking into selling an add-on that will allow the unit to play DVDs. That way they can sell the PSII at a low price to capture the gaming market and charge enough for the DVD playing add-on to avoid shooting themselves in the foot.

    From what I've read, plans for the add-on aren't firm. Afterall, history shows that most gamers aren't willing to pay for expensive add-ons. However, console games are reaching a much larger audience than they were even just a few years ago, and that audience includes a growing number of adults. Kids with $2.50/week in allowance may not have been able to afford expensive add-ons in the past, but Sony may be able to sell the DVD add-on to adult gamers with real money.
  • What if this chip found its way into PC's. The article states that sony could produce these chips for $100. That could possibly make it an affordable alternative to other chips produced at his time. And just think. Not only could you surf, but you could provide all of the common household computer needs (word processing, spreadsheet, taxes, solitaire..) as well as play all of the Playstation and Playstation 2 games on a high resolution monitor. All at under $1000.

    Now all you need is an OS....hmm...
  • Boy, you hit the nail on the head about the iMac. That thing tanked because it didn't have a floppy drive. Talk about a bomb...

    I bought one and right away I had to get a floppy with it, or else I couldn't live with myself.

    What a waste of money it all was. Not only did I dish out $100 for the floppy drive, I've yet to use it! Not one time! But I know, from reading all the responses here at Slashdot that I NEEDED a floppy drive....but I guess I'm doing something wrong because I can't seem to find a reason to use it.

    But anyway, hopefully Apple will learn from it's mistake with the iMacs and G3's. Maybe they should get some pointers from Compaq or Dell on how to run their company.

    (By the way, for the sarcastically challenged out there, I'm kidding)

  • Well, Beavis, you're obviously uninformed. The machine also has a bank of 32MB of system memory, residing on a ultra-fast bus (2560bit, I believe), which can be used for any purposes the developer sees fit. I'm sure you never bitched about AGP being designed to use system memory to store textures, and this is fundamentally the same idea, only running WAY, WAY faster. I see no reason to believe they can't pull it off.

    I'm sure you know way more about system architecture than Sony's elite engineers, though, don't you? Such wankery, sigh.
  • Myers said Sony would have to charge at least $500 for a Playstation 2 to even begin to approach break-even, making it at least twice as expensive as rival consoles -- and some have speculated the price will actually run to $700 or $800.

    $500 for a home console is way too high. Almost no one would buy it for that much, especially with the Dreamcast at $200 and N200x around that too. The only one's who would buy the PS2 would be hardcore gamers and you can't support a system solely on them. Sony is going to have to lower the price in order to compete with it's rivals. Of course, if they market it to the high-end PC gamers and include a modem, then they could justify the cost. $500 is cheaper than a $3,000 gaming computer.

  • But if they did that, why would anyone want to buy Sony's DVD players? They would be killing a part of their company then. If they didn't make the PS2 a DVD player, then they could sell two things (PS2 and DVD), instead of one. Double the profit.
  • Consoles should die a quick and painful death, the heyday of the Atari 2600 && NES are over.

    Consoles will not die anytime soon. First of all, they are a heck of a lot cheaper than a high-end gaming platform. I'd much rather spend $200 on a console than $3,000 on a PC. And with consoles, I don't have to worry about upgrading and compatibility issues. I know that when I stick the cartridge into the N64, it will work. I don't have to upgrade or get some patch to make it run. Consoles are so much easier to pick up and start playing. Not to mention that while computers have deathmatches over the net, consoles have deathmatches with the players right next to each other, a great party thing!
  • $2,000 $3,000 what's the difference? I was just trying to point out that it's still a heck of a lot more for a computer. And when I said $3,000, I meant one powerful computer (PIII 500, 256 MB RAM, TNT2, etc.) That will get you to $3,000 in a hurry.
  • Yes, but how many of you have 15 (or 4 for that matter) computers sitting around in your living room? And if you don't, then it's a huge hassle to get them all in your living room.
  • Consoles will continue to thrive until PC's become as easy to use as a console is today. It's no where near that at the moment. And they also won't die because it's a blast playing 4 player Smash Brothers or Mario Kart, with other people in the same room. Human interaction is great! Consoles can allow you to do a lot of things that computers never will.
  • I don't think they should change the name at all. Customer recognition is key in getting customers to buy your product. It seems to work well for Nintendo (Nintendo Entertainment System, Super NES, Nintendo 64). Companies need to build on their name brands, not demolish them.
  • what truly GREAT innovations have been made in FPS games since DOOM?

    You ever hear of a game called Goldeneye 007 for the N64? That game revolutionized the FPS genre. It's considered by many to bringing back intrest in FPS. It's the only game that I'd ever want to play that's a FPS because I personally don't really like them. But I love Goldeneye.

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