* Posts by Nick

15 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Oct 2007

Sony plans movie+game dual-media Blu-ray Discs

Nick
Stop

Wii says hi

"PS3 sales have taken a bashing in of late, with figures revealing that Microsoft’s Xbox 360 is now the sales leader."

Wii says hi.

Pioneer's 500GB Blu-ray disc

Nick

The most future-looking format won

8 months ago HD-DVD were claiming they had the highest capacity because they had a *prototype* 51Gb triple-layer disc. Just goes to show that sticking with DVD technology wasn't going to last in the long run.

By the way, turning a blu-ray article into a PS3v360 rant is unnecessary. Are you really that insecure about your favourite console?

US PS3 sales surge

Nick

RE: Really?

Those are NPD numbers tracked from the point of sale. They don't cover every single retailer, but you'll struggle to find more accurate, independent sales figures anywhere else. I'm sorry that doesn't fit into your fanboy rant, but sometimes the truth hurts.

Sony, MS want control of PS3, Xbox iPlayer, Beeb boss claims

Nick

A surprising insight from a BBC employee...

"For Microsoft the issue is more tricky because the 360 doesn't have a browser so any service has to "integrate" into Xbox Live.

"I'm guessing that Microsoft wanted the content but not the iPlayer branding.

"I also suspect that the BBC's free iPlayer service probably doesn't hold too much commercial interest for Microsoft because the company can't take a cut from the cost of rentals or downloads."

Hit the nail right on the head there.

3D TV debuts in Japan

Nick

This worked on PC years ago...

e-Dimensional 3D glasses

http://www.techspot.com/reviews/hardware/ed_3dglasses/

Worked in the same way, and when correctly configured to your eyes, gave an astonishing result.

Microsoft denies Lite-On Blu-ray rumour

Nick
Stop

The world would be a better place if...

...you all went and played your consoles instead of posting comments to websites about how rubbish the one you don't own is.

If you really feel the need to go on the internet at every opportunity to argue about how your console is better than the alternative, then you must be feeling quite a bit of envy right now for the other system. If you really believe everything you write, you'd be happy playing your console and not seeking some affirmation from the wider world that you made the correct choice.

Xbox 360 'Wii Remote' in development?

Nick

Just a quick HDD point

You need a HDD on the 360 to go online with Burnout Paradise, for example.

Boffin stacks 16 PS3s to simulate black hole collisions

Nick

RE: But this is what the PS3 is designed for, not games

"The Cell processor simply isn't a very good architecture when it comes to gaming" - Really? My day job would argue otherwise, but I'm sure you have good reasons...

"It has too many cores that are too specific in task to be usable for the constantly changing data of computer games" - You can never have too many cores now that the Gigahertz era of CPU design is over. SPEs are not really that specific, they are very good at the sorts of things a game engine needs - physics, scene management, culling, in fact a lot of things that can aid the RSX, in contrast to a PC graphics card which tries to do everything to relieve the general purpose CPU. Data in computer games usually consists of predefined audio, 3D models, textures, etc, it doesn't change constantly.

"as users input commands via the controller it's impossible to predict what needs processing next" - Everything. For example a racing game, your controller input affects the steering angle, which needs to be fed into the physics engine. The physics engine is running regardless, it's just a different input.

"and hence which SPU should handle it, as such a lot of resources are wasted deciding where data has to go" - SPUs are identical, a good scheduler will route work to where there is idle time. The time taken for this is negligible and anyway you handle this on the PPE, which is what it's designed for.

"and even then some or possibly even all SPUs may not be able to handle such type of data processing as is required at that point in time and will end up unused for that period of time anyway." - You've written the SPU code and compiled it, so by definition both you and the compiler know it will run on the SPU. If you find yourself in this situation, you've broken your compiler.

I've never seen a post that displays such complete misunderstanding in pretty much every phrase. It is obvious you have never programmed either for the Cell, or worked on any published game, given your complete lack of knowledge about both, so I have to wonder why you have gone to such lengths to post what you have. Presumably you are trying to make yourself feel better about purchasing a rival system? Why don't you just go and play it?

Missing: 80GB PS3. Last seen: Sony's website

Nick
Stop

I'm confused...

...as to why this so called "news item" exists. A search for "80Gb Playstation 3" on sonystyle reveals:

http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&productId=8198552921665225458

That's journalism.

Xbox 360 console failure rate forecast at 16.4%

Nick

@Marco Alfarrobinha

I'll take your grand, cheers. Pleasure doing business with you. Based on the principle that people would be equally negligent with a Wii or PS3 and they haven't suffered the same failure rate, your argument doesn't hold water.

Or are you arguing that 360 owners are significantly more stupid than Wii or PS3 owners?!

Warner to back a single HD disc format?

Nick
Joke

FUD

A series of short stories:

---

>"blu-ray is evil I tells ya. All this DRM nonsense, it's just another way to be unfriendly to consumers."

>"Really, why's that? Can't you play the movies?"

>"Well, um, yes. You can't copy them though."

>"What, so you mean pirates can't put them on the internet for freeloaders to hive off the studios and break the law?"

>"Um... yes. Er, did I mention it's EEEEEEVIL?"

---

From the latest HD-DVD association press release:

"As you can see from the figures above, if you exclude the PS3, all sales in the territory of Sweden, and all sales to a household that has at least one pet, HD-DVD is winning the format war! Many people reiterate that blu-ray disc sales are outselling HD-DVD disc sales by 3:1, but herein lies our master plan. We, the HD-DVD association, have been buying all the blu-ray discs to make shelves empty!! Yes, if you exclude all the blu-ray discs that we ourselves have bought, you will find that HD-DVD is in the lead!"

---

I'm about to wander off to the shops with £300+ to spend on a shiny new console. I wonder what it does? What's this big blu-ray sign on the box mean? Why does it keep mentioning blu-ray in the PS store? This is as confusing as when I bought that iPod thingy and it kept talking about MP3...

---

Christmas morning. Dad opens up the new HDTV. Oh but what's all this HD business all about? I wish I had some HD material to play on it. Little Tommy pipes up "but Dad, my PS3 plays high def movies!". "No it's okay son, I've heard that instead of buying a movie for that console already under the TV, I should go out and buy a whole new player, that's financial sense."

---

I'm here all week

Sony's 40GB PS3 for Europe confirmed

Nick
Thumb Up

Wow

A lot of vitriol for what is a very nice announcement for consumers...

Some myths explained:

The original PS3s contained the hardware CPU (EE) and graphics chip (GS) from the PS2 for backwards compatibility. The European version software emulates the CPU but still has a hardware graphics chip. The new version has neither. The only PS2 game I've played on my PS3 is Pro Evo 6, and now there's a new version of that so I'm not going to be doing that any more.

The internal HDD is designed to be swapped out for any 2.5" laptop HDD. Get the 40Gb and stick a 250Gb one in if you want. Also you can plug external HDDs into a USB port.

The memory card readers can be replaced by a USB memory card reader.

The DualShock 3 has been announced so no more complaints about lack of rumble.

Despite all the arguments about lack of games, there were some really good launch games (Resistance, Motorstorm, F1), most decent xbox 360 games have been ported (I'm currently playing GRAW 2, Rainbow 6 Vegas and Call of Duty 3 - bit of a shooter fan!), and the next year or so looks awesome from the PS3 perspective (MGS4, GT5, Killzone 2, LittleBigPlanet etc), whereas the xbox 360 has just had Halo 3 scraping in at the not-quite-HD 640p and now even let Bungie go cross-platform. Not many xbox 360 AAA exclusives around the corner, relative to the PS3.

Cheap PS3 won't help Blu-ray, claim HD DVD backers

Nick
Thumb Down

Skew the stats, prove anything

"If you exclude all HD-DVD purchases, then blu-ray is the only next gen movie format!"

Part of the reason I bought a PS3 was for blu-ray on my HD plasma. I'm not about to go out and buy a standalone blu-ray player when I have a blu-ray machine already, and one which is of very high quality and is constantly being kept up to date through firmware updates.

There is a percentage of PS3 owners who do not bother with blu-ray, but there is also a percentage who do. I do not know what that percentage is, but unlike the HD-DVD backers, I admit that it exists. However, when it comes for the first group of PS3 owners (who incidentally are going to increase in numbers quite dramatically over Christmas with the price cuts) to look at high definition movies, let's say in one year, two years, do we think that they will either a) use the PS3 sat under the TV for free, or b) go out and choose between a standalone blu-ray or HD-DVD player?*

*This argument is based on the assumption that the high definition movie market will be in a similar state to now in two years, it may well be that the decision doesn't need to be made because one format has already won.

Japanese Wii sales rain on PS3 parade

Nick

Just another point

@ Anonymous Vulture: "People who think that huge amount of great PS3 games that use its hardware to its full potential are just around the corner are in for a major disappointment -- there are more 360s than PS3s around so third party will concentrate on making them for 360 first and porting them to PS3 later, and none will bother with extra cores in any significant way."

Any third party serious about cross-platform concurrent development (such as EA for example), will have teams dedicated to each console, working alongside the modellers and artists. It almost becomes a competition between platforms, even though the content of the games can't change much for obvious reasons, there will always be "we're running this framerate, this native resolution" arguments etc. Look at Burnout Revenge on the PS2 compared to the original Burnout, it looks like it's running on a different console, that's the advantage of having a team eeking out the performance over a product lifecycle. For the first year or so of the PS3's life, it has seen more than it's fair share of "let's port this successful game to PS3 as quickly as possible to cash in", but that's not how third parties go about releasing cross-platform games when both platforms are available from the start of development.

Having said all that, my original point still stands, that games such as Oblivion, Rainbow 6 Vegas, Fight Night Round 3 and Half-Life 2 are running perfectly well on PS3 hardware without using the SPE's, at least not in any fundamental way, and that games which do come to use them will be the ones which begin to show the possibilities.

Nick

Just a point

@ Anonymous Vulture: "For every year that passes, the 360 is a generation ahead, and there will remain very little difference between 360 games and PS3 games - many games that currently appear on both systems are actually better on 360."

I see this a lot, and I was surprised to learn (as you will be too I'm sure), that for example Rainbow 6 Vegas was ported from 360 to PS3, and only makes use of the PS3 3.2GHz dual-core GPE, and doesn't even touch the 6 developer-available 3.2GHz SPEs (source: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=7598043&postcount=1).

Developers are taking their time to learn how to make best use of the PS3 hardware, and while arguably cross-platform ports are not going to even bother when they can use the 360-like GPE, first party games, third party exclusives and timed exclusives, and cross-platform simultaneous development games will begin to use this as-yet unharnessed power of the PS3. In contrast, Halo 3 was pushing the 360 boundaries, and they couldn't quite up the resolution to HD on that, instead having to settle for 640p.

The PS3 is not inherently more difficult to program for, it's just a number of factors; 1) The 360 has been out for almost 2 years, and is based on a design which is very similar to the original xbox and PC development; 2) The PS3 has been out for under 1 year, Sony released their devkits late, and it is an inherently different design to the 360; and 3) Developers which have ready-made 360 versions of games would rather rush ports at smallest cost to a PS3 soon after launch, to make a quick buck.