Sony Exec: Nobody will Ever Tap Full Power of PS3


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In an interview with MTV, Sony executive Phil Harrison talked about the PlayStation 3 and where his company was planning on taking their latest game console. To start off with, Harrison talked about how excited he was about the new possibilities offered by the online capabilities of the new generation of game machines. "The video-game business for the past 20 years was about shipping closed experiences," he said. Somebody made a game. Gamers bought it. They played it. End of story. Now comes a new trend, he said, where "the start of the relationship with the consumer is when you launch the game." A cynical person might comment that the "relationship" being referred to is simply one where the consumer continues to empty his pocket on a monthly basis by purchasing extra add-ons and unlockable content for the games they have already paid for. However, there are plenty of possibilities afforded to consoles by the inclusion of online access. Many of these have already been explored for some time by the PC platform, such as the development of communities based around popular games.

Harrison talked about some of the problems his industry faces, such as the relentless attack on the morality of gaming by publicity-seeking politicians, and the struggle for the industry to be taken seriously as a legitimate art form. "I fervently believe that the biggest challenge we face is that our industry is referred to as 'video games,' and games are supposed to be fun," he said, echoing the words of Doug Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association (ESA). He defended games such as Grand Theft Auto by saying that "games should deal with fear, should deal with comedy and with death. They should deal with peril, with drug offenses."

Harrison saved his most interesting comment for last. In discussing the future of the PS3, he stressed that developers are not currently using the machine to its full capacity. In fact, he stated that the current crop of games are using "less than half" of the machine's power, and that "nobody will ever use 100 percent of its capability." Of course, it is common at the beginning of a new console's life for games to not make full use of the power of the hardware: it takes some time for developers to learn the best tricks and techniques for squeezing every last bit of calculating power from any new platform. But to claim that nobody could ever make full use of the system's power, ever, seems a bit hyperbolic. Some developers, at least, will be wanting to tap the full power of the Cell, such as IBM's high-end customers in the HPC market. Some of this knowledge is bound to leak over to the game development world.

The major reason Harrison wants to hype up the "unlimited" potential of the PS3's architecture is to downplay comparisons between games running on Sony's console and Microsoft's Xbox 360. The two systems are not completely dissimilar: they both contain a PowerPC core running at 3.2 GHz, both have similarly-clocked GPUs, and both come with 512 MB of RAM. The 360 adds two additional cores running simultaneously, whereas the PS3's "Cell" architecture eschews the extra cores in favor of seven smaller "Synergistic Processing Units" (SPUs) that act as vector processors with a separate instruction set and a tiny amount of on-board memory. Whether or not two extra cores are equivalent to seven SPUs is a matter that has not yet been adequately resolved: many have argued that the Cell architecture has more theoretical potential power, but whether this will translate into significantly better-looking games is still unknown. Many games still don't take full advantage of the Xbox 360, either, and as the two heavyweights battle it out, it will be fascinating to watch what developers on both sides can accomplish. Still, in the end it is more about whether or not the games will be fun, and thus the race is on to sell as many systems as possible in order to create a larger market to encourage widespread third-party developer support.

source.pngArs Technica

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:rofl:

What a wonderful excuse.

And if it is true, it's because Sony's development tools are **** and no developer can figure out how to harness the full power.

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If this is really the case, why don?t they put in slower components (that will reach the full potential) and drop $100? We wouldn?t notice any different, because the ?fast PS3? wouldn?t be used to its fullest anyway.

I know you can?t just pick some abstract specs, and go from that, but doesn?t it seem like poor engineering if they are building something overly expensive that isn?t necessary?

Not to mention the fact that the current specs they are using are in short supply (My point being that they would most likely be able to get more of a slower product).

Do you guys see where I?m coming from with this?

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Why did harrison choose to admit that their console is so poorly designed that developers are unable to make full use of it? If I'd released a console that was so poorly designed that developers are unable to make full use of it, I'd keep quiet, knowing full well this kind of talk is impossible to prove or disprove anyway.

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Obviously the PS3 will have more longevity in terms of performance than the 360 (think of how the PS2 is still going strong!), but part of this is due to the difficulty in programming the damn thing (along with the more powerful hardware). The other day I read the AnandTech article about how Valve were working on multithreaded game engines for the PC, along with a small discussion on how to port to the PS3, with its smaller, more specialised processing engines and localised memory banks. These make the tasks of programmers very difficult with trying to get the multithreading to work nicely. Oh well, at least they have built a machine that would seem to be reasonably capable of taking on gaming workloads for the next three to four years.

Cal

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That article is completely wrong in parts. The PS3 has 256Mb of RAM, not 512 (and 64Mb of that is reserved).

I thoguht it had 256MB XDR and 256MB GDDR3? :wacko:

And one of those two (I don't know ram) is stuck with system process or something.

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No console comes out of the gate showing its full potential. You'll start seeing what the system can after the 2-3 gen titles roll out. I suppose next week the Sony hype machine will be telling us that we'll be playing Matrix style soon....Oh wait, they already did :rolleyes:

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I thoguht it had 256MB XDR and 256MB GDDR3? :wacko:

And one of those two (I don't know ram) is stuck with system process or something.

You're both right depending on how you look at it,

256 main system RAM (-32 for the OS)

256 graphics RAM (-64 for the OS)

And one SPE reserved for the OS at all times, with one needing to be given up by the software you're running to the OS whenever it needs it.

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What a silly thing to say? considering the money they spent (and huge debt Sony accumulated with it) to develop the Cell and PS3, you'd think they'd want developers to take full advantage of the system! Openly claiming the PS3's power will never be fully utilized just further proves that it's a pain to program for, which in term could lose business for them...well that is what I think anyway.

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Yes

I am also designing a super computer in my basement.

It has 10000terabytes of ram, 40000terahertz processor and 10 gig grapix card, Unfortunately windows xp will never be able to harness teh full power. Sorry guys.

Nice excuse.

Edit*'

However lame this is Sony fanboys will allways use this in argumentas about 360 vs PS3, they will always go on about the hidden power that hasn't been harnessed.

This also reminds me of that South Park episode when they talk about how mormon religion wa sinvented. People have to have faith and believ the crap sony spews,

But I do not understand how they are trying to score points with this revalation... It shows developers the archtecture sucks and its never going to get any better then teh 360 (thats what Harrison really wanted to say).

Edited by Hitman2000
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And no-body ever tapped the full power of a GameBoy either, just means they haven't thought of a different way of developing a game yet..

Of course they have, what a daft statement.

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