Ugly gets screenshot capability

Yeh, Sony are saying that son of Quasimodo (aka PS3) is getting a firmware update that allows you to take screenshots.

Woopie-clucking-doo.

What next - designer bags to put over it?

I mean really - screenshot capability - surely that can't be sought after by anyone that felt sorry for it and bought it?

I say round them all up in a field and blow them up - life will be so much more pretty.


If you took a PS3 to any ugly competition - you'd be disqualified for cheating.

I hear that some people treasure their PS3 - well, it would be an excuse to bury it.

Some people carry their PS3 around with them so that they don't have to kiss it goodbye when they go out.

I think if you buy a console just for how it looks, your pretty sad. It's what the console can do and the games. Hide it away if you don't like the look.

The 360 looks terrible, in a different way :o) Wait for Rob to come along and rant about this. I generally agree.

I wouldn't mind a screenshot taking utility actually :o) It's a bit of a throw-away thing, but doesn't do any harm :o)

Uhm, OK. Why should you buy the PS3 then? :o)

Well it does have more computing ability than the other systems...

The only reason the games aren't blowing away the competition is because no company would create games specifically for the PS3 and unlock its full potential when they could just dumb down the graphics to the 360's level, and thus get more sales.

I have to go with Ross C on this one. And personally I like the look of the PS3 better, simply because it's black. At least it would match my stereo, DVD player, and TV, instead of that awful white and green look.

The architecture is totally different from the current codebase, and you can't put hardware out without ignoring development or at least backing it up with your own R&D and expect others to do the job.

To say the truth, when you buy a PS3 you don't even pay for the actual power you are using: much like in the audio industry, there is a high number of processors which doesn't make it to the production stage (being a multicore processor, often you have less than eight cores functioning), and basically you also pay for the defected chips, which are way more than in a x86 architecture - which is OK in research but less acceptable in the mass consumer market.

I fail to see how one less core is really affecting to quality of titles on the PS3, given that most devs don't know how to use the 5-6 available to them anyway.

to me PS3 look is entirely okay and nicely blending with rest of the equipment I do have..regarding visuals, I have no idea how to incorporate in such environment greyish/green box noisy like RC helicopter..and anyone like it or not, PS3 has more power than other consoles on market..how developers going to utilize that inside their games is different story and it has nothing to do with real quality PS3 can generate..and yeah..its damn good Blue Ray player..

Because if it has less then 8 [edit: 7] cores they don't put it in the PS3. But of course you pay for the entire production stage, not only working CPU's, so the assumption that it costs so much that it must be very powerful is wrong. It's just one of the bad design choices, one of the others being trying to compensate GPU's shortcomings with Cell's floating point oriented cores, which in gaming are not as useful as in research. In fact, if I'm not mistaken in the beginning Sony intended to use a Cell processor for graphic rendering and later decided that it wasn't up to the task, but a gaming console doesn't need raw floating point power for much else than that, so the investment in the cell processor while disregarding the importance of the GPU is baffling (that story alone would make you think they had a very confused roadmap).

In the end, as a gaming machine the X360 has a stronger and more reasoned architecture and shows the difference in software development experience between Microsoft and Sony (notice that both consoles were developed in conjunction with IBM).

> how developers going to utilize that inside their games is different story and it has nothing to do with real quality PS3 can generate

Only for those living in a theoretical world. I don't give a rip what it is capable of in theory - only what it actually delivers.

That said, I do think the PS3 titles I have seen look better then the other consoles. Not enough for me to go out and get a PS3 yet, but another price drop ought to do it.

kettle. pot. black :-)

Oooh... fan-boys at 20 paces.... Put the hand-bags away folks... nothing to see here... :-p

Ah, yes, freedom of choice. Isn't it great?
You have what you want. I get what I want. And puki can play with his sausages...

Everyone is happy.

Little Big Planet, 'nuff said.

PS3 have the power, xbox360 have the games.
Wii rock their socks off!

(There might be a tiny little Ninty fanboy inside me, but everyone is more or less biased in one way or the other anyway... :)

I own a Dreamcast, a PS2, a DS and a good PC. Not much of a fanboy, uh? :)

Freedom of choice is great, but freedom of speech is great too... don't shout "fanboy" as soon as someone touches your purchase. :)

I got a zx81, ps1, DS, GameCube, PC, Amiga :D

I still have the original, brown C64... jumped straight to a pc then (never liked the amiga for a number of reasons, and oh boy, the amiga really had lots of fanboys... today's console wars are watered down in comparison).

I'd like to still have the ooold Pong console from the late 70s (I don't even know what it was out of the many ones produced)...

Amiga kicks ass!!! You'll have to get mine from my Cold Dead Hands!!!! (if I knew where I'd stored it that is)

Let me get this straight. You are saying that because they are shipping PS3s with a CPU with one broken core when the full potential of hat CPU is eight cores, which is a widely known fact and announced prior to the release of the PS3, that 7/8ths of the CPU makes the CPU 'practically useless' in terms of power?

I personally would say 'slightly less useful' and I'm usually the cynic.


Of course, because games programmers are still stuck in the eight/sixteen bit days where we avoid all occurrences of floating point calculations because of the massive speed hit it would incur.

Nobody uses floating point calculations now in this day and age where we have CPUs with all sorts of funky on chip FPU like functions, or whole cells dedicated to the task and especially not games where 3D maths involves all sorts of crazy calculations. What were Sony thinking...


I seem to recall some very impressive real time rendering demonstrations using just the Cell and given your other comments I would be happy to concede that you are indeed mistaken.


Don't hold your breath - Sony have recently announced that there will be no drop for Xmas because they still believe it is good value.

No, you couldn't misunderstood more. It's got nothing to do with performance or power. I'm talking about costs, an entirely different concept. Often *more* than one core is 'broken' when manufacturing, and in that case the processor is discarded. You also pay the discarded processors, which are way more then the average discarded x86 processors. With audio equipment it is very common: manufacturing processes aren't perfect and standards are thight, and only a small percentage gets over quality control, so that you pay a lot more *but* you reach higher standards. Of course, this concept of higher standards doesn't apply to computing, so you just end up paying more for the same. That's one reason why semiconductor companies always try to improve their processes: with R&D they can actually reduce costs, something every gaming console producer keeps in mind.


Well, that explains why they put a nVidia chipset in at the last minute instead of a second cell... you can do amazing things with a multithreading setup running simultaneosly on many cores (something the X360 isn't devoid, having 3 custom built PowerPC's cores), but as far as GPUs go, they are far more powerful *and* cheap in their specialized area. Think about CUDA, and tell me if Intel or IBM processors could do the same in an even remotely similar price range or not.


There aren't just many other uses of that kind in a game besides graphics, unless you want to do audio processing or video editing with a gaming console. It's the same reason because jumping from 32 to 64 bits in gaming never was very useful. It's as simple as that. Even if you are going to reproduce an entire galaxy in a game, you just have to create an illusion as opposed to a realistic simulation with real scales, and you wouldn't gain any advantage in doing it the realistic way apart from obvious headaches.

The damn hype that Sony has created after all is all about misinformation (beginning from the prerendered movies shown as in-game clips), and after two years the hype is finally decreasing. In that respect we ought to say that Nintendo was utterly honest and got opposite results.

> Little Big Planet, 'nuff said

Agreed. Fab-looking game

> Don't hold your breath - Sony have recently announced that there will be no drop for Xmas because they still believe it is good value.

Lucky for me I was not planning on buying it till at least next year then...

I'm not sure I understand where your coming from Puki: I mean yes a screenshot capability is not a big deal but I don't think the PS3 is particulalry ugly, it looks like what it is, a games console. My only real critism of the PS3's design is how big it is and even then your splitting hairs really.

PS3's critical weaknesses are:

Game Library
Online vastly inferior to Live
No credible equivlent to XNA.
Graphicly inferior in most games due to the difficulty of programming for the PS3.

Darkheart

OK, sorry I misunderstood. I get where you're at now, but I fail to see how that has anything to do with my 'quality of titles' comment you referred to.


Wait, which is it? Did they bung the GPU in without much thought or were they "trying to compensate GPU's shortcomings with Cell's floating point oriented cores"? It can't be both...


Most cross platform ports are shabby ports. The only real test is a game written specifically for the PS3 - of course that doesn't happen in a cross platform world. The first real test will be FF13 - the Xbox port was an afterthought and isn't even being developed until after the PS3 version is finished - meaning if Square can produce equal or better results on the Xbox the only true proof will be there imo.


Still matters of opinion since the last time time you claimed it.

They put the GPU in at the last minute because a second cell couldn't handle the graphics load even if they thought so in the first place, but on the other hand the GPU used is not on par with the XBox360 (actually, it's about half as powerful in most tests). But Sony also tells that the Cell wasn't still exploited to its full potential, and since there aren't much useful things you can do with the cores left on a games console besides graphics, I guess they refer to a visual advantage (which, as you mention, is almost a contradiction).

However, when combining all 3 XBox360 cores you have about 115 GFlops, while PS3's Cell gives you about 134 GFlops, so even CPU wise the Cell has a short advantage while keeping a big disanvantage GPU wise. Now you know why multiplatform games are usually better on the XBox360.

Umm no, I already knew why (although all multiplatform games I have seen look identical) and your reasoning is not it.

Most cross platform ports are shabby ports. The only real test is a game written specifically for the PS3 - of course that doesn't happen in a cross platform world. The first real test will be FF13 - the Xbox port was an afterthought and isn't even being developed until after the PS3 version is finished - meaning if Square can produce equal or better results on the Xbox the only true proof will be there imo.

It already happened but even Kojima wasn't very impressed.

Linky linky?

http://kotaku.com/381412/kojima-disappointed-with-metal-gear-solid-4

Frankly, even though Metal Gear Solid 4 is PS3 only and had massive budget, development times and expectations, it's all but revolutionary technically wise. however you'll surely come up with something about that too.

Personally, I stand by my previous hardware statement which speaks for itself. Gaming wise Sony really had a bad round this time (in fact from the launch they changed most of their entertainment management), and even though many could easily argue this time around that they were more interested in the monopolization of the home video market they still lost a great share due to poor planning.

Yes, you appear to be the second person on the planet to have ever said that... Well, at least MGS4 didn't get a 6/10 like... anywhere... And let's not forget that Edge magazine said Haze was great. I think it's bizzarro-magazine.

And, lets not take him completely out of context now, you Kotaku-boi (yes, that IS an insult):

In short, they were aiming too high on their pre-PS3 dev kits. That's only a fault of Sony for not providing enough specs (or dev machines that were too powerful).

There's a LOT that can be said about that article. But it seems like you just want to find ways to diss everything in order to somehow take the blame off the developers (which is the only link my comment you originally quoted has), which is a bit naive considering these are all still entry level titles on a new system.

Games are not rated purely on technically achievements, you know... (although I suspect that at this point MGS is rated mostly on the soap opera aspect and huge cinematics, as recent square enix games are).


He took shelter after he noticed the blast he did deliver. :)
And I quoted Kotaku, which I don't read much myself, but they didn't write the article which was quoted almost everywhere. At the moment he was not alone though as some talkative giant developers were on the same track too and probably he didn't think thoroughly about the reactions. I could link to other more interesting ATI articles about how to collaboratively plan a gaming architecture, but then everyone would just shout that I am a MS fanboy even though I don't own a 360 myself.

Anyway, I've had enough, and we could nitpick on just about everything. :) I only stated some coherent facts about the hardware and everything else is chit chat.