@MikeB

I wrote up a response, but really, there's no point. Everyone has said what they believe about you and your posting style, and you don't change or possibly even see it. There's really nothing else to say here, as it's all been said already.

*shrug* This, including my responses to this, remains off-topic. Feel free to PM me if you'd like to continue this for some reason.

_________________
Are we not done with the same silly arguments and flames yet??!

@wegster

Don't you get it, wegster? MikeB is not the one with a problem, all the rest of us are mistaken. ;)

@jtsiren

OK, formulate exactly what is your problem with my "writing style"?

My personal perspective is, yes I am enthusiastic with regard to the PS3's technical possibilities, yes I have a very positive outlook on things, yes I have good faith in the first party PS3 exclusive developers. But so what?

There are a lot of naysayers and doom mongers, what makes such people's writing styles superior to mine? Please go in depth.

And yes it's possible for a majority of people to be wrong (but note there's always a silent majority reading forums, I have received lots of private messages in support on a large variety of topics), a majority of US people voted Bush into office twice. Hitler had a majority support in Germany in the past, Khomeini had a majority support in Iran when he came to power, etc. In hind sight most however thought their choice wasn't that great after all, yet at a time were vivid supporters, many of which who looked down on people who didn't agree.

Last edited by MikeB on 21-Jan-2009 at 09:25 PM.

On topic:

Firmware 2.6 is now available, it adds support for older DivX 3.11 encoded movies, adds Blu-Ray movie preview support (similar to game previews on the XMB, background graphics, music, animated icons and such) and guests are now allowed to browse the Playstation Store.

IMO the most interesting new feature is a new photo album application, it allows you to organize and personalize your photos, a demo:

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2009/01/20/upcoming-ps3-firmware-v260-update/

MikeB said:

Quote:

The areas of the game with the most impressive lighting are the areas in the game with large scale environments: http://www.gamekings.tv/index/videos/minidocu-killzone-2-special-part-2/

With English subtitling for those who don't understand Dutch:

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-UaRN71XL0
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ummHRrA7D_Y
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFgu7nFaB9Y
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grinVmII0b4

Last edited by MikeB on 21-Jan-2009 at 10:49 PM.

@MikeB
Mike - seriously, please drop it. We've had numerous conversations/debates on AW about your personal posting style. That really isn't necessary again. Your posting style or way you come across hasn't changed, and it won't through added discussion, nor through your 'justification' or validation attempts (last paragraph). Use the search feature if you'd like to read up on the prior discussions, which ironically, included you, each time, already.

on topic:
I did give in and pre-ordered KZ2. I do hope it's less linear than R2 for single player campaign mode.

_________________
Are we not done with the same silly arguments and flames yet??!

@MikeB

RE: firmware 2.6
The 'most interesting' is pretty much because, well, there are only 3

The photo app looks like a promising start though - can the PS3 mount network shares and use them for photo display, though? (don't know, haven't tried..the new app might make me think about it but only with network support, I don't need a USB flash or external PS3 HD when I have a multi-TB NAS..)

It will be interesting to see what they add to it over time, like basic editing features, and the 'smile detection' bit is neat.

The rest? DivX 3.11 - minor yay, but doesn't hurt anything, and will make some happy.

I'm still waiting for the PSN store to well, not suck quite so badly. The last revamp was an improvement over the 1.0 PSN, but..not there yet, either.

It's nice to see both Apple and Sony actively updating their respective devices, though (iPhone, PS3), although obviously people can argue over 'worthwhile changes' or not endlessly.

Last edited by wegster on 21-Jan-2009 at 11:08 PM.

_________________
Are we not done with the same silly arguments and flames yet??!

@jtsiren

Quote:

MikeB is right here. While MikeB did introduce the Epic quote to this discussion (in the original thread two years ago), he did keep it as a quote - adding disclaimers like "if Epic is right" to his comments. Eventually, later in the thread, he did say he doubted Epic were right.

Thanks. I did lots of searching and came up blank for this section. Perhaps he did add disclaimers.

Quote:

Now, GoW 2 is different - now MikeB has made a personal claim so let's see how it turns out.

@MikeB Quote:

And BTW Gears of War 2 isn't that much more impressive than the Gears 1.

This part of his personal claims is already incorrect. GoW2 has much improved lighting, details, blood, and much more going on, on a screen.

I think what MikeyB might be trying to get to is the delta between GoW1 and 2 isn't as large as what one might expect. I think Resistance1 and 2 has a bigger delta.

Last edited by BrianK on 22-Jan-2009 at 03:27 AM.

@MikeB

Killzone2's G-Buffer's precision is FP16, that FP16+FP16+FP16+FP16= 64bit packed.
Thier G-buffer has disadvantage of limited output precision and dynamic range, but thier methods allows for hardware MSAA.

Still looking 128bit HDR+MSAA....

_________________
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 ECS, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3A+/Emu68)

@BrianK

Quote:

Thanks. I did lots of searching and came up blank for this section. Perhaps he did add disclaimers.

Yeah, I actually checked. It was in the thread (middle of it, around pages 15-30) that I linked to earlier in the current thread when looking back at the history of our discussions here.

The PS3 has been on the market now for 2 1/4 years. It's still last. Really: what's left to be overly enthusiastic about? Other than hoping future out of warranty hardware failures lead to increased sales, what else can they do?

No one buys a PS3 to play BR movies anymore, I've seen BR players for $170. The BR advatange was a short-lived one. Developers sure as poop don't "take advantage" of it. Square Enix are the only onese who are possibly going to fill a disc because we all know how much they love their FMV in Final Fanstasy titles.

With an additional $337M in losses in the gaming division, I question the likelyhood of the predicted pricecut come April. PS3 is full of epic FAIL.

If they want to save money on PS3 production, make all titles DOWNLOAD-only and include a 1TB hdd and eliminate the BR drive, cut the price to $200 and you might have something. Otherwise, continue to bleed to death...slowly.

Last edited by Lou on 22-Jan-2009 at 06:58 PM.

@Lou

Quote:

With an additional $337M in losses in the gaming division, I question the likelyhood of the predicted pricecut come April

The price cut WILL have a negative short term impact on Sony's gaming's division. It's a bet that it turns into long term profits. Sony unquestionably needs to get the console in consumer hands. Again it's a bet that game sales and Blu-Ray sales will off-set the console losses.

At this juncture Sony should be highly worried about being profitable before the next-gen ships. Signs are not good at this point.

PS3 perhaps will pick up sales when the next-gen consoles ship. Perhaps Sony figures their 10 year life cycle is good because it means the PS3 will be the low cost leader next generation.

@BrianK

Not necessarily, Microsoft may have to be careful about not finding themselves in a similar spot next generation. I think they want to squeeze what ever they can out of the 360... infact they may want the 360 to enjoy the kind of user base the PS2 enjoys now... what stops M$ cutting the 360 price again to deal a final blow!

Q!

"i aM hOMe"

@QuBe

Quote:

Not necessarily, Microsoft may have to be careful about not finding themselves in a similar spot next generation. I think they want to squeeze what ever they can out of the 360... infact they may want the 360 to enjoy the kind of user base the PS2 enjoys now... what stops M$ cutting the 360 price again to deal a final blow!

I think what Microsoft rolls out next gen will answer the question for us. Will it be something over the top and tres expensive (PS3) or will it be lower cost and more mass appealing (Wii) or will they end up with approach that's a bit of both again (Arcade/Elite).

I think Microsoft is dangerous next generation. They seem to be able to learn from products and their 3rd attempts tend to produce home runs.

Right now I think Microsoft isn't going to lead the price cutting. They are selling at a good clip and software sales are very strong. They're making a profit in a down turned market. I think they will hold as they in the market position over the PS3. When and how Sony does a price cut is going to play into 2009. Word on the street is a April price cut up. If I were Microsoft I'd lay low. Let Sony take the low selling summer season. Respond in Aug/Sept with a price cut and steal Christmas 09 away from the PS3.

The other rumor out there is the new 360 model, Valhalla, with CPU/GPU on a single cheap. If true, Microsoft could better sustain a price cut.

At least in 09 I really don't see the tea leaves in Sony's favor. (Lest someone think I'm a Microsoft Fanboy -- Don't forget I predicted the PS3 to pull to the forefront by the end of 08)

Last edited by BrianK on 23-Jan-2009 at 03:41 AM.

@minator

Quote:

minator wrote: @BrianK Quote: Something related to performance 16 core for max performance. It appears that after 8 cores the performance levels out and after 16 cores and especially towards 64 cores the performance drops. One has to wonder how this plays out in the Cell2. The PS3 has 9 threads (one can read cores). If the Cell2 is coming will extra SPE's give it any more usable power? This appears to be in reference to desktop GPUs, though it's generally considered going beyond 8 cores is going to be immensely difficult. The same goes for software, I wrote this back in 2006. There will be scaling issues with any processor but things like GPUs don't have scaling problems and Cell is designed specifically get around them. On a traditional desktop processor the cores have to be kept in sync (i.e. coherent). This means communication between caches goes up drastically every time you add a new core. GPUs generally have small non-coherent caches so this isn't a problem, Cell has non-coherent local stores so again there's no problem. As long as you can parallelize the problem and keep upping the memory bandwidth GPUs and Cell are not going to suffer from this problem. Desktop processors and Xenon will.

Each of G80's processing elements has the following specs
[MT IU]
[SP][SP]
[SP][SP]
[SP][SP]
[SP][SP]
[Share memory]

8 scalar threads processors(SP)
32 GFLOPS peak at 1.35Ghz
8192 32bit registers (32K).
- 512KByte total register file space.
768 thread active threads in total
16KByte on-chip memory
- shared amongst threads of a block
- supports thread communication

Source: http://s08.idav.ucdavis.edu/luebke-nvidia-gpu-architecture.pdf

For example;
Geforce 8600 GT/Geforce 9650M GT has four of these processing elements i.e. 32 SPs with 32768 32bit registers.
Geforce 9600 GSO has eight of these processing elements i.e. 96 SPs with 98304 registers i.e. these values are stored next to actual execution cores.
...

This is in addition to texture, filtering, AA, Z-Cull, Early-Z-Cull, ROPs, PureVideo (SIMD) and ‘etc’ support units. ATI Radeon HDs has more support units e.g. programmable tessellation and global illumination. These support units reduces the workload on the stream processors. CELL doesn’t have this luxury.

PS3's 7 SPEs only has 896 registers.

Last edited by Hammer on 23-Jan-2009 at 12:39 PM.
Last edited by Hammer on 23-Jan-2009 at 12:33 PM.
Last edited by Hammer on 23-Jan-2009 at 09:48 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 23-Jan-2009 at 09:45 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 23-Jan-2009 at 09:26 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 23-Jan-2009 at 08:45 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 ECS, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3A+/Emu68)

@BrianK

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/analyst-slashes-ps3-sales-expectations-following-disappointing-2008

Sales expectations are getting slashed on the PS3 in it's current state.
BluRay looked like a good idea at the time but as the people who know argued at the time, it does nothing for gaming. As most PS3 games require an install, they might as well be on mult-DVD's and install the the hdd. Only elitists bought the PS3 because of BluRay. No one else seems to care.

If PSN is as popular as Sony would have you believe, adding a SKU that eliminated BluRay and offers a download-only model seems like a no-brainer to cut costs and get more PS3s in consumer's hands who care about the actual games on the system...

@Lou

Quote:

Sales expectations are getting slashed on the PS3 in it's current state.

PS3 is the new comer. They shouldn't be taking a dip in sales. IMO that is a bad sign. The larger question is how and if the 360 or Wii will dip in sales. I think they all might, until Christmas time. I'd think the higher priced PS3 will see more fall off in a bad economy.

Quote:

BluRay looked like a good idea at the time but as the people who know argued at the time, it does nothing for gaming.

What Blu-Ray does is allow for uncompressed files and larger games than what DVD provides. But, as we can see only a handful of games need a Blu-Ray.

The economic condition impacts games too. IF a company was to make a game large enough to require more than 1 DVD the question at this point is how well will the market bear the sales. Is it worth all the extra work to expand it beyond a DVD? Will this gain enough sales to off-set the additional development costs? In a down economy companies are even more conservative.

Blu-Ray is great philosophically. A company could really bust out a game if they wanted too. In reality it makes little difference to gaming.

And since Blu-Ray is now under $200 and likely to fall under $100 by this Christmas playing that movie on your PS3 isn't worth as much as a selling factor. Instead people are turning to the games. Turns out the majority of PS3 games can be had on the 360 for a lower price and the exclusives aren't as compelling as they could be.

Quote:

If PSN is as popular as Sony would have you believe, adding a SKU that eliminated BluRay and offers a download-only model seems like a no-brainer to cut costs and get more PS3s in consumer's hands who care about the actual games on the system...

I don't think this will happen. I believe Sony has too much hubris when it comes to the PS3 and Blu-Ray they aren't going to break them up.

As an idea this is interesting remove the Blu-Ray and move to a download only gaming model. I can't imagine this would save a whole lot on the manufacture of a PS3. $30-$50 perhaps? It may be better to take the price cut and loss then try to bet on a new approach for the PS3 in a downed economy.

The writing is on the wall -- PS3 needs a price cut if it's going to sustain this generation. Unfortunately, this means more losses for Sony (at least in the short term) and hopefully when the economy comes back people will want to buy lots of movies and games.

http://www.nintendowiifanboy.com/2009/01/22/wii-on-track-to-beat-ps2-ps3-selling-like-gamecube/

The PS3 is selling like the Gamecube and the Wii is outpacing the PS2.

@Lou

Quote:

If they want to save money on PS3 production, make all titles DOWNLOAD-only and include a 1TB hdd and eliminate the BR drive, cut the price to $200 and you might have something. Otherwise, continue to bleed to death...slowly.

Interesting comment, and a subject I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about, as well as discussing with some friends at work.

I don't think it can be done wholesale, not at this point. It removes the retailer entirely from the equation, which is a win for consumers (price) to some extent, but then - why sell the PS3, if you can't make $ on games?

My 'best attempt' at answering that would be next gen, or the following. Say either a BD-W disk, or more likely/desirable, large flash media. You have the *option* of doing download only, or...you walk into a retail store, with several kiosks set up. The retail stores 'buy in' perhaps to a set of publishers/distributors, and each kiosk can demo any of the titles in it's inventory (read - far more than most have on hand once the number of titles gets larger). You can play the demo, say 5 minutes, then that's it, or normal demo/limited scenario, or perhaps optionally (enabled or disabled by each location, so they may actually have an 'arcade section' but also demo/sales only sections) in addition 'rent to play' like arcades, say $1-$2 for 5 minutes non demo game.

Like it? No problem. Insert your flash media, and swipe your credit card on the kiosk itself, game is burned to your media, and updates PSN/Live with your purchase, who 'registers' it with the required publisher, so if later lost, you re-download it, via PSN or Live, like you can do today. Go home, install to HD from flash.

Or..download it direct as well, but you do get some 'value add' to keep retailers in the chain.

_________________
Are we not done with the same silly arguments and flames yet??!

@wegster
Interesting concept of the try it at the arcade then bring it home. I like that idea. Something you should patent quickly. One could collect a bit of money from the end user and if the end user likes the game they get that credit off of the purchase price so they can bring it home and play it on their console.

The other thing it does is provides a way for users w/o large bandwidth to the home to get games. This makes sense. Shipping atoms to carry bits is a dumb idea.

@Thread --
Recent news is Sony is going to report a $3B loss for last year. Good news is the entertainment division is reporting 1/2 the losses of last year. Part of this is that the PS3 is losing less money per console. The other part seems to be profits relating to the PSP helping to off-set further losses.