Playstation Update

I came across something interesting today. PS3Forumz is holding a contest where you can win a free PSP. All you have to do is register on the site, and post once a week, and they’ll enter you in the drawing.

If you really want a free PSP, post more. For every 30 posts you make, your name will be added to the list again for the drawing. It’s a brand new site, and there aren’t too many users registered on the site yet, so you actually have a chance of winning. I just registered as “gary”, come say hi.

You may have heard by now that Ken Kutaragi of Sony has stated that the PS3 will be capable of running games at 120 fps (frames per second). The question is, do we care? As many people have pointed out already in discussion of this comment, no TV produced today is capable of refreshing at 120 fps. Pretty much everyone is stuck at 60 fps. I’d also like to go out on a limb and suggest that even were you to get your hands on an imaginary 120 fps TV, you would lilkely not be able to tell the difference between 60 fps and 120 fps. I don’t think your brain can refresh that fast, never mind your TV, so it doesn’t really matter.

What does matter is that the PS3 will be capable of this kind of massive graphical processing. Even if we don’t care about insane refresh rates, this means the PS3 will be capable of dealing with more pixels and polygons per second. It would be capable of handling, for example, 1080p. Now that I do care about. Or I will as soon as I find a giant pile of money to throw down on a new 1080p HDTV set.

From PS3Blog.net.

This is actually a bit old, but in case you don’t have them pasted on your wall yet, here are some of the core specs for the PS3, still supposedly to be released next spring:

CPU: Cell Processor
PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz
1 VMX vector unit per core
512KB L2 cache
7 x SPE @3.2GHz
7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs
7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE
* 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for edundancy
total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS

GPU: RSX @550MHz
1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance
Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels
Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines

More details at News.com.

Note that Sony has since proclaimed that the HDD will be nixed. I’d expect to lose a few other bits and pieces before the final hardware comes out.

According to Kagan Research, the XBox 360 is set to dominate console sales in 2006, taking 54% of the market share. By 2008, however, PS3 is forecasted to be back on top with the same share, 54%. Source: GibThis.com

I don’t know exactly how accurately anyone can predict what console sales will be like in 2008, but I imagine the numbers for 2006 won’t be far off. The official word from Sony is that the PS3 will be available both in Japan and the US in spring 2006. This would be quite a feat, and I wouldn’t start lining up just yet. This will give the XBox 360 plenty of time to build market share without any serious competition.

The past has proven that being first doesn’t mean you win, however. Look what happened to Sega with both Dreamcast and Saturn. 3D0 anyone? All of these platforms were ahead of their competition, and all of them pretty much failed miserably. (I owned most of them at one point. That 3D0 sytem cost about $700 if I recall).

I’m inclined to agree with the experts on this one. XBox may gain a temporary lead while Sony hurries to release the Playstation 3. If the PS3 is half as good as we all expect it to be, however, I think it will quickly close the gap and resume pounding Microsoft. As it should be.

More commentary on this at ps3blog.net.

P.S. Somebody leave a comment. Though I do enjoy talking to myself, I’d love to hear from you.

-Gary