@Trezzer

Quote:

About Oblivion loading faster - well, it's also on the disc several times because the drive isn't fast enough.

The Blu-Ray drive is fast enough for gaming, storing used data close to eachother is a nice trick to reduce seek times. End users will mostly care about the end result.

"Entering dungeons or buildings results in a load of 3-5 seconds, compared to the 7-10 seconds or longer for the 360 version of the game."

Quote:

It will not be mandatory to buy a drive to play UT3. It's recommended

Typo fixed, thanks.

@MikeB

It was the wording and the twisting of data. At least it seems others recognized your style of writing in it.

I never get upset by facts. When I get upset it's because data is misrepresented or false.

@Trezzer

Quote:

Second part of CNET's fight between PS3 and Xbox 360 is up.

And so I was right, the XBox 360 wins in terms of available software (too early), although I expected them to mention backwards compatibility, for instance important for people interested in God of War 2 or other titles found in the huge library of many thousands of PSX/PS2 games. A rematch would be interesting after the European launch (OS upgrade, more good games), I think they will about equal each other out from a gamer's perspective, at that point of time both offering its own advantages with regard to games.

But for the long run I believe the PS3 will win hands-down and I am into the PS3 for the long run. IMO round 1 was more important with regard to the long run.

BTW, IMO from a consumer perspective the comparison was pretty objective and fun to watch.

@MikeB

Quote:

The Blu-Ray drive is fast enough for gaming, storing used data close to eachother is a nice trick to reduce seek times. End users will mostly care about the end result.

Certainly. I'm not arguing about that.

FWIW I believe Oblivion is also using the 360's harddrive for streaming data. I actually bought the game because I found a place where the full version cost less than a platinum version (while the second hand stores around here still carry it at price higher than the initial retail price outside the border *sigh*).

At first I wasn't really all that impressed - mostly because I played Morrowind before it. But I realized after some 8-9 hours later, that it was good enough to make me play that long in one go - which few games do. It's still just a prettier Morrowind (with an Oblivion to explore), but that ain't bad. PS3 owners have something to look forward to.

I wonder how they are going to handle the information snippets that you get during the (already short - especially compared to Morrowind) loads. They tend to put little snippets of history or tips about races etc. - I mean.. who read manuals? If they are able to completely nix them on PS3 (though I guess it may just be the small loads and not the larger area loads they were talking about) some people might have a hard time learning the laws of the land.

I'd take better loading times, but then again I know the game fairly well by now.

@MikeB

Quote:

I think they will about equal each other out from a gamer's perspective, at that point of time both offering its own advantages with regard to games.

Finally a sentence I think most of us can agree to.

Quote:

But for the long run I believe the PS3 will win hands-down and I am into the PS3 for the long run.

I think that remains very much to be seen. I was disappointed, for PS3s sake, that it couldn't beat the competition from the get-go. It means that even if PS3 does win in the end, it will be much tighter match then the pre-launch hype suggested.

Here is a guess of mine (could be totally of the mark): PS3 will have a longer shelf-life than Xbox 360. I fully expect the successor to Xbox 360 be released way before a successor to PS3. That much better for us who like to have the latest hardware... I'd give Xbox 360 four years before completely revised hardware appears and lets say six years until PS4.

I don't think this has so much to do with the hardware performance than different strategies from the companies. I wouldn't mind buying a new console every few years. Too long for me if I'd bought a PS2 in 2000/2001 and still waiting for PS3...

@Trezzer

Quote:

It was the wording and the twisting of data. At least it seems others recognized your style of writing in it

Personally I don't agree, I do try to be objective and not twisting data, if you really want to go there then IMO you and a lot of other seemingly XBox 360 / HD-DVD enthusiasts posting here this quote relates more to yourself and such people.

Trezzer this is a web forum, nobody can easily get away with twisting facts as they are so easily corrected. Reading back I think you mostly get upset by my *opinions*. But IMO let's get back on topic.

@MikeB

Yeah, well, in terms of aesthetics I happen to think that the PS3 is pretty horrendously ugly just like the original PS2 (the updated slim version was much nicer). I know some people like the bling-bling look it has, but I prefer a more practical size. If I were to go out and get one today I'd honestly have no idea where to put it - because my CD32 is definitely not moved for a mere PS3

The 360 isn't perfect either, but to me it's not as much of an eyesore as the PS3. It looks almost like higher-end Apple hardware, except Apple wouldn't have settled for shiny plastic on the drive.

The other area where I felt PS3 received more credit than was due was the online component. Considering how far ahead Live is, I'd say the PS3 should score 2 at best.

The software line-up was also a bit overly positive considering that the 30 games for the European launch even includes downloadable titles - but then again as she said (and we all know) this will improve in time - so no reason to make a bit fuzz about it either way.

Quote:

IMO round 1 was more important with regard to the long run.

It's really quite hard to tell anything for the long run. I agree that the launch will most likely either turn people on or off a console for the near term, but it's hard to tell what long term effects will be. So far there's mostly negativity towards the PS3 in the general gaming public and the press. The question is whether Sony will be able to overcome that - I wouldn't worry so much if it were based on games press, mainstream press or even gamers, but when developers start saying it too, I call it a bad sign. After all they are the ones deciding whether they support a platform or not. If they believe a platform will fail, it will fail due to that.

That said I don't think PS3 will fail. I don't think it will get its market share by being better - but by being "PlayStation". I just don't see this system selling 100 million. Will I be proven wrong? Well, it would be kind of fun to be that much wrong.

It's just too early to tell much at all still. Some systems that were selling really well at first just stopped selling after a while. Sony had the fortune of being on the winning end of the stick twice in a row. Will it manage a third time? Or will it be like Nintendo who had two great generations and then almost faded into obscurity? (only to come back strong later).

Nintendo was arrogant. Sega was arrogant. Sony are there now. Will it backfire? Will consumers care? We'll see in a few years' time.

@MikeB

Quote:

Reading back I think you mostly get upset by my *opinions*

Not if they are based on facts rather than spun conjecture. But yes, let's get back on topic.

@Trezzer

Quote:

If I were to go out and get one today I'd honestly have no idea where to put it - because my CD32 is definitely not moved for a mere PS3

I agree my CD32 SX32-Pro 50 is going no where!

@MikeB

In respect to PS3 Yellow Dog Linux printing, I've just found this link:

The Linux Foundation - OpenPrinting database - Printer Listings

Does this mean all the listed printers here are compatible with YDL on PS3?

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@MikeB

You may find this interesting: The 360 version of Rayman Raving Rabbids will have camera support in 37 of its 70+ mini-games. Perhaps the PS3 will get the same eventually.

I can't wait to see how well it works, because so far Totemball is a mix between fun and frustrating (like most EyeToy games).

@MikeB

Quote:

The XBox 360 isn't really doing so well in Europe and Australia neither, except for the UK, so will the PS3 perform any better? What do you think?

Isn't it? While the 360 hasn't made the PS2 numbers I don't think it was expected to. It's the growth of marketshare that Microsoft is looking for. If I recall the 360 was the fastest selling console at launch, at the time, in Australia. How is this not a good thing? In the first 7 months in Australia Microsoft sold about 100K (Liddell is the source saying sold and recognizing Microsoft has shipped morethen 100K) in the first 7 months making it the 2nd most popular selling gaming platform in a 7 month period. The first is the Gameboy Advance with 128K units in 7 months. How is this not a good thing? I believe the 360 is ahead of the original in sales in Europe and Australia is it not? How is this not a good thing?

GTK Australia reports 5-11 sales #1-2 are PC games, #3 Lost Planet, #4-5 the PS2, #6 GoW, #7 Wii, #8 PS2, #9-10 DS. A console that's not doing well has 2 games on the top 10?

Now I, as many others, expect the PS3 to be able to best this. I expect in the end the PS3 will have more marketshare then the Wii or 360. However, I expect the PS3 to not do well in the sense that it's marketshare will be lower then what the PS2 enjoys. What I, and many others, predict is the Wii and 360 will own a larger % of the gaming market then the Gamecube and Xbox. At the same time the PS3 will own a smaller % of the gaming market then the PS2. Likely Sony will be the winner. But, isn't it a quite a bit unfair to say the 360 isn't doing well when it's getting into more homes then the the Xbox?

I think you need to better define what you mean by 'well'.

Last edited by BrianK on 15-Feb-2007 at 04:52 PM.
Last edited by BrianK on 15-Feb-2007 at 04:44 PM.

@Trezzer

Quote:

f Rayman Raving Rabbids

This game also looks very promising on the Wii, the game seems to have very good support for the controller.

@ BigD

I think you have to find out if there are open source drivers available for any printer you are interested in. The driver development kit is aslo open source, is the driver is open source and you are developer it shouldn't be hard to por it yourself if not already supported. With regard to the package you are referring to I try to ask someone else.

Last edited by MikeB on 15-Feb-2007 at 08:57 PM.

@MikeB

Quote:

This game also looks very promising on the Wii, the game seems to have very good support for the controller.

Yeah, generally it's quite fun on Wii (and pretty good looking too), but some levels are frustrating because of poor implementation. At least there's a lot of variation in the controls.

If you want to know what Motorstorm currently looks like (a vast improvement over the Japanese version) check this out:

Motorstorm: Behind the Scenes Exclusive
http://www.gametrailers.com/

More info with regard to Formula One:

"The rain drops you see are image processing effects that utilize the hardware's extremely powerful SPU's for a physics simulation to calculate the movement of the rain droplets based on forces/velocities per pixel. What this basically means is that as you drive around in the rain, the game calculates the speed and forces on the car to move the rain drops accordingly on your visor, down to a per-raindrop level of detail. You also notice the splashes that the raindrops leave as they hit the tarmac and this is done using the landscape collision system - again, running on the SPUs - to calculate individual positions for each splash."

"The rain effects in particular and other aspects of the F1 CE game code are currently being prepared for other first-party development teams that have requested them"

"We use the SPUs for the following jobs: audio effects, particle system, physics (landscape collision, narrow phase and collision resolution), rain effects (rain droplets and rain splashes) and various render side jobs."

"The SPUs are heavily involved in the graphics pipeline and do an enormous amount of work to eliminate inefficiency before anything arrives at the PPU and RSX. For example, the SPUs are powerful enough to decompress and check every triangle [polygon] before passing it on to the RSX. Triangles that are facing away from the player, or that are not on the screen can be 'trimmed' away by the SPUs, which hugely reduces the amount of redundant work sent to the RSX. This in turn lets the RSX get on with what it does best--drawing stuff on screen.

The SPUs can also be used to augment the RSX vertex shaders, making far more vertex-heavy tasks possible which is very useful for character animation. Additionally, the SPUs can be used to implement behavior very similar to geometry shaders--F1 CE uses them in this way to render seamless interpolated levels of detail for some scene elements. So in answer to the question "Do the Cell and RSX work together?" the answer is a resounding "Yes," and I think this is one of the real strengths of Playstation 3 that we'll see increasingly exploited by development teams going forward."

http://ncroal.talk.newsweek.com/default.asp?item=486210

Last edited by MikeB on 15-Feb-2007 at 09:00 PM.
Last edited by MikeB on 15-Feb-2007 at 08:57 PM.

MikeB wrote:

Quote:

@ Trezzer How's that for reasoning? RR6 was the second best selling XBox 360 game at the time in Japan! Soon we will have figures for the 11th February and for fun let's compare these to 5th of March 2006 XBox 360 figures when available, the figures to beat by the PS3: 114,000 XBox 360s sold Best selling games (the only 5 games selling more than 20k at the time): 1) Dead Or Alive 4 - 76,000 2) Ridge Racer 6 - 45,250 3) Perfect Dark Zero - 25,750 4) Enchanted Arm - 22,750 5) Project Gotham Racing 3 - 21,500 OK, we already know these figures are already beaten hands down. Do you really believe RR6 only sold less copies in Japan than RR7 does due to the 'poor' quality of available games?

OK 11th of February PS3 2007 vs 5th of March 2006 Japanese sales comparison:

668,250 PS3s sold.

1) Ridge Racer 7 131,750
2) Mobile Suit Gundam: Target In Sight 130,000
3) Resistance: Fall of Man 114,250
4) Armored Core 4 75,000
5) Genji 2: Days of the Blade 53,500

Also Motorstorm and currently topping the Japanese charts Virtua Fighter have already outsold RR6 in a similar timespan (and Gears of War in total), RR6 was the XBox 360's second best sold game on the 5th of March 2006. Clearly the PS3 is outperforming the XBox 360 in Japan, more worrying this month only 7,000 software titles were sold vs 66,500 for the PS3, really bad for this period in the product's lifespan.

Last edited by MikeB on 15-Feb-2007 at 09:40 PM.
Last edited by MikeB on 15-Feb-2007 at 09:32 PM.

@Trezzer

Quote:

For instance the 360 DVD player has average quality playback (it could be MUCH better with the hardware available) and even on that dvds look pretty good when upscaled to 1080p. But even then it's just bicubic sampling and none of the (expensive) advanced filters.

One has to question Microsoft on why they did such a thing. It's likely the group I hang out with but there's one person I know that uses a console for DVD playback and that's just for their kids. Their main AV uses an actual DVD player - perhaps Microsoft sees the market for DVD upscaling as not a big deal. Undoubtably the 360 could do better on DVDs heck it does very good on HD-DVDs which have greater processing demands. It does decent on streaming content and it does decent on harddrive recorded HD downloaded content. Also if I recall correctly the HD-DVD drive upscales DVDs to 1080p where the console only does 480p. It'd be interesting to have the tests rerun but using the HD-DVD player and see how/if the results differ.

@MikeB

Well, again no-one has ever thought that the 360 would be the dominant system. Like I've stated time and time again: It's going to be a long, hard fight. Microsoft, however, have both the time and the money.

I'd be more worried if I were Sony. Did you look into how the PS2 performed at launch compared to PS3?

This is how the launches align.

It's not looking pretty if the PS3 is to gain the same market share/support as the PS2.

In fact it looks more like the Dreamcast launch.

@BrianK

The 360 upscales dvds to 1080p when you use the VGA cable - you don't need the HD-DVD drive for that. I do it all the time. Because of the component cables MS were not allowed to upscale 480 to 1080p on that connection, though. It was a compromise. Even though VGA is analogue too (and thus just as easy to capture) apparently they could only get permission to do full 1080p dvd upscaling over VGA. On component you only get 480p and on composite and SCART it's 480i.

And the 360 really only had one really bad review when it comes to dvd playback - which leads me to suspect that they might have had a faulty unit or that something else was wrong.

This is what most reviews conclude (more or less):

"The Xbox 360 is a pretty good DVD player, given its primary purpose. Its performance is pretty close to the average DVD player at this price point, but given that it is supposed to be using one of the best graphics cards out there, I was hoping for a bit more on the de-interlacing side."

Have a look at the full review here. (note that it was written before upscaling was added with the fall update)

Out of the players I have (PS2, Xbox, stand-alone unit with no upscaling, various Macs) the 360 offers the best picture quality when playing back dvds - even if black levels are a little high as pointed out in the review - my monitor has a multimedia setting that nils that effect completely though.

Last edited by Trezzer on 16-Feb-2007 at 12:18 AM.

@BrianK


Quote:

BrianK wrote: @Trezzer Quote: For instance the 360 DVD player has average quality playback (it could be MUCH better with the hardware available) and even on that dvds look pretty good when upscaled to 1080p. But even then it's just bicubic sampling and none of the (expensive) advanced filters. One has to question Microsoft on why they did such a thing. It's likely the group I hang out with but there's one person I know that uses a console for DVD playback and that's just for their kids. Their main AV uses an actual DVD player - perhaps Microsoft sees the market for DVD upscaling as not a big deal. Undoubtably the 360 could do better on DVDs heck it does very good on HD-DVDs which have greater processing demands. It does decent on streaming content and it does decent on harddrive recorded HD downloaded content. Also if I recall correctly the HD-DVD drive upscales DVDs to 1080p where the console only does 480p. It'd be interesting to have the tests rerun but using the HD-DVD player and see how/if the results differ.

"ATI, nVIDIA graphics cards trump dedicated DVD players"
http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/02/ati-nvidia-graphics-cards-trump-dedicated-dvd-players/

Like Radeon X1xxx, the Xenos GPU is equiped with AMD's Xilleon.

Sony also use AMD's Xilleon in thier BRAVIA range.

Last edited by Hammer on 16-Feb-2007 at 06:44 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 16-Feb-2007 at 06:36 AM.

_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

BTW: Just one detail that interests me. MikeB praised the PS3 power off from controller/remote feature in a past thread, but I was wondering if that feature really is any different from Xbox 360? I've read on PS3 the power off (or in fact the PS button, similar to Xbox 360's comparable button) too opens a menu where shutdown is confirmed? How are these different, anyone?