The Big PS3 Pork Pie - Naughty Sony!

[da.Guvna]

Sony never claimed it was in game footage they said it was a mock up of what in game would look like. Most of the XBox360 stuff was also pre-rendered only EA had actually gameplay.

Actually, if you watch the E3 video for Fight-Night Round 3 (or whatever iteration it is), the guy presenting it actually says "this is all running in realtime on the PS3".

[TheBuZZard]

Isnt that what I said? Fight Nights an EA game

[da.Guvna]

Yeah, but my point was that you said nobody claimed it was in-game footage, but EA did.

[Beach]

Surely the point is, going back to the original post, it couldn't have been on the PS3 regardless of what the footage represented, in-game or pre-rendered.

[TheBuZZard]

Yeah, but my point was that you said nobody claimed it was in-game footage, but EA did.

I give up. You starting an argurment over facts we agree on!

[da.Guvna]

Hahaha, I'm not trying to start an argument, I was just clarifying cos I'm not sure you understood what I was getting at.

.....I was gonna summarize it, but I can't be arsed now, hahaha!

[Stoo]

The same was true for the xbox360, that was running on g5's + R520.

People can get their knickers in a twist about this all year long, but nothing "next gen" at E3 was "real" simply because there is no final hardware for either system.

All they can do is show off demo systems that approximate the performance of the final hardware, nobody is "lying" about anything, it's just the way things are, and have always been..

If you only wanted demo's etc on final hardware/final code, then E3 would be a very dull place.

[Beach]

All they can do is show off demo systems that approximate the performance of the final hardware, nobody is "lying" about anything, it's just the way things are, and have always been..

Very true Stoo, can't dispute the first part but if someone explicitly says "Look at this running on a PS3" when it isn't, aren't they lying? After all, they don't say, "Look at this running on a test system designed to approximate the PS3 hardware environment" do they.

[Stoo]

That's called marketing

I can see both points of view, but think about it this way, when a car manufacturer launches a new model, quite often it's just an electrical powered mockup (think new jag). The design has pretty much been finalised, but there's still some tinkering etc to do underneath, but they still launch it "as" the new model, and not as an approximation of the final design.

By launching as the new model it gives off a far better impression to shareholders, industry types, and most importantly, the customers that the item is a real and tangeable product, and not another vapourware product that won't see the light of day for years, if at all.

TBH, digging any further is just getting nitpicking, as *everyone* does exactly the same thing to varying degrees of success. (Nintendo's Project Reality anyone? )

[Beach]

True, true but they don't build a fibreglass shell, stick it over the top of another car, bung it round a track and say look how great our handeling and speed are, do they. When the car industry do as you say, they're largely showing off how the car will look, not how it will perform. The game console industry does the opposite and that's where the line between marketing and lying beomes blurred.

As you say they all do it, and it's unfair to point the finger solely at Sony, but just because they do all do it, it doesn't make it right

[Stoo]

True, but that's what they have to do to be able to drum up support for their platforms, if they didn't there simply wouldn't be a games industry.

In the case of the PS3 in the above argument, the only thing "missing" is the final RSX processor. I say "missing", but the engineers know that the final RSX hardware will be at *least* equivilent to a certain hardware configuration (In this case I believe it was an SLI'ed G70 setup), and thus build the system to convey how it will hang together.

It's not as if the hardware isn't there, it is, just in an early iteration.

[Beach]

I agree but it's still a sad state of affairs when you think about it. Looking back at the original Playstation and the infamous T-Rex tech demo, the level of detail shown during that demo was never achieved in game by anyone. Kutaragi's claims for the 'emotion engine' processor in the PS2 were hollow to say the least. And yet, as each new generation of hardware comes round, the press and public alike lap up the dodgy FMV sequences and marketing hype seemingly without restraint. It may be the way of the world but it doesn't seem right somehow.

[Stoo]

The PS2 did eventually get there, but good ol' Ken did go somewhat overboard on his marketing gumph.

As for the latest version, I really do believe a large amount of what was claimed can and indeed will happen, the power of the next gen systems is *way* over the last generation, and it's not hard to see where it's come from..

Look how fast the pc graphics card market has moved in the last 5 years (not least the last couple of generations - the X800 series craps all over the 9700pro, which in turn wiped the floor with everything before that..), then combine that with improvements in processor technology, and last, but not least, game engine design and middleware improvements.

Bare in mind things like the Unreal 3 Demo running in real time (which IMO shows the power off far more than anything else), which is nigh on impossible even with the current pc graphics card generation.

Something else which might explain things would be Sony's pushing of the word *physics* in their demos. If I'm right in thinking this, the Cell processor can accelerate physics processing in a similar way to the AGEIA PhysX Physics Processing Unit (Linky), and this would seem to make sense of how some of the claims could be accomplished.

If a physics engine can take over much of the creation of the gaming "world", then all the graphics part has to take care of is making it look pretty, and that would be a huge advantage..

(This is turning into a great conversation peeps, keep it up )

[Beach]

Sorry Stoo, real world impinging on internet use is a real bummer

Anyway, the power of the latest 'next' generation is impressive but I've yet to see anything that offers the sort of generational leap seen when the N64 was released. It's difficult to match the impact of Super Mario 64 and yet there seems to be little inclination from developers to try and match or even exceed it. The processing power of these new machines will, as you point out, afford developers the opportunity to fully develop a realised physical environment and match that with the sort of graphical output only dreamt of a few years ago. If, however, this simply translates as more realistic ball physics with more recognisable digital avatars in the latest FIFA offering then what's the point? Who is willing to take the new technology afforded to them and try to push the whole industry in a new and exciting direction?

Of a greater concern, to me at any rate, is the rapidly spiralling cost of developing games for these new consoles. If, as is often reported, the size of development teams is increasing and the budgets for the majority of titles is pushing the limits of the average Hollywood film, then several things are going to happen. Firstly, the smaller, more independant developers are going to be squeezed out as the financial burden of developing a game simply becomes too much; secondly, no-one will be taking a risk. With such huge sums of money at stake, people will less willing to invest in anything new and innovative and will put their money behind the same tired franchises that we currently see; and thirdly, the cost of the game to the consumer will increase. It has to, just to recoup the money spent on development.

Reading what J Allard had to say in this months Official XBox magazine was very interesting. He sees the new online structure of console gaming being quite organic and embracing gamers and non-gamers alike. His story of the boy who plays a Tony Hawks, whose sisters makes virtual t-shirts for him to wear which she then sells online; with a father who offers to sponsor competitions and another familly member who wants to provide commentary and a mother who wants to watch her son perform is all very well but misses one big point. Only one of those people has bought the game. Only one has bought the game. Whilst he may widen the experience of video gaming to a greater demographic than before, the market hasn't grown at all. It's a strange future he paints and you can't imagine MS or any major developer being happy about allowing so many people to 'experience' their product without paying for it.

SO, returning to my earlier point, games will cost more to make and therefore the price of those games will go up. If the MS vision is even remotely accurate, then the number of people buying those games is not to increase that much and so economics dictates that more money will need to be charged. There's already talk in the gaming press that prices will increase to around £60 a game for the next generation of consoles.

Now looking at the cost of the hardware, what could happen there? The type of dual card SLi set you mentioned earlier, if bought to upgrade a pc, would cost what? £500-£600? And they're building a whole system around such a set up, with a brand new, custom built processor. Even allowing for the fact that they traditionally take a hit on the hardware, you could be looking at a price of about £500 on launch. Obviously these are only assumptions but the original XBox, for example, only launched three years ago for £399 so I might be in the same ballpark with £500. When they take a hit on the hardware, they generally expect to make up the difference in software sales which bring us back to an expected increase in the price of games which will now have to recoup development costs AND [huge] hardware losses.

All of which is bad for the average consumer and could stifle future market growth as people simply refuse to pay those sorts of prices for their gaming entertainment. People don't want to spend, say £500, on a peice of equipment that has maybe a built in obsolesence of four years. The one thing the console manufacturers seem to have missed in their efforts to sell their particular brand as the essentiall-do-everything (DVD, CD, games, digital Recorder, etc) is that when people buy one, they want it to last longer than a few short years before having to change it. If the general public (not the so called 'hard core' gamer who'll buy anything) doesn't but into this new generation then the market will begin to stagnate. If the market doesn't grow then we'll see more of what happened to Crawfish, Acclaim, Eidos, et al and the we will all be poorer for it.

So, I suppose we should be careful what we wish for.

[alterion]

to quote pointlesswasteoftime.com

Sony has bragged about the mini-supercomputer at the heart of its next machine for a couple of years now, a custom chip designed by IBM. It'll truly be a one-of-a-kind, unique gaming experience.

Unless you own an X-Box 2.0. IBM, it turns out, is making a similar chip for Microsoft's next machine. Oh, did I mention that IBM is also doing the chip for Nintendo's next?

The three companies hired to do the graphics processors for the machines are, in order, ATI, ATI and ATI.

[Yohji]

Got to love that.