[Dark Helmet]

I really don't care who sells the most, who "Wins" or what the company shares are at. I just want the system to come out with good hardware and good games.

[the_glassman]

Wii Have A Problem...
CNN.com

[Eug]

Originally Posted by Dark Helmet 

I really don't care who sells the most, who "Wins" or what the company shares are at. I just want the system to come out with good hardware and good games.

In other words, you do somewhat care who "wins". The one with the least number units sold often gets shafted on the games.

Originally Posted by the_glassman 

Wii Have A Problem...

Look on the previous page.

[Dark Helmet]

Originally Posted by Eug 

In other words, you do somewhat care who "wins". The one with the least number units sold often gets shafted on the games.

It is chicken and egg as sometimes the reason the system sucks is because it has few games or it can have low hardware sales and good games.

The N64 was like that. Good hardware but few titles.

The Xbox 1 didn't sell that much but it had a lot of great games.

[Eug]

Originally Posted by Dark Helmet 

It is chicken and egg as sometimes the reason the system sucks is because it has few games or it can have low hardware sales and good games.

The N64 was like that. Good hardware but few titles.

The Xbox 1 didn't sell that much but it had a lot of great games.

Well, despite being discontinued a year ago, the Xbox (whose games I didn't really like that much actually) sold more units than the GameCube (which is still for sale).

[Dark Helmet]

Originally Posted by Eug 

Well, despite being discontinued a year ago, the Xbox (whose games I didn't really like that much actually) sold more units than the GameCube (which is still for sale).

By 3 million. Hardly a big number.

[ort888]

Yeah, but there was a large amount of quality Xbox games coming out right up until the end. The cube dried up really quick and was basically 90% dead for the last 2 years of it's life. (During which time the Xbox was thriving)

Also, if I'm not mistaken, didn't the Xbox sell 3 million more worldwide, yet outsold the Cube by quite a bit in the States?

[Dark Helmet]

Originally Posted by ort888 

Also, if I'm not mistaken, didn't the Xbox sell 3 million more worldwide, yet outsold the Cube by quite a bit in the States?

Ya I think you're right. Bombed in Japan though.

[Dark Helmet]

EA says they are only using 20% of the PS3s power:

Electronic Arts VP talks PS3 | PSU - PlayStation Universe

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Dark Helmet 

EA says they are only using 20% of the PS3s power:

Electronic Arts VP talks PS3 | PSU - PlayStation Universe

We'll see about that. The PS3's design has made it as hard as possible to tap that power.

Sony should have just thrown in a few real processor cores and called it a day and never bothered with the Cell.

[TETENAL]

Originally Posted by goMac 

Sony should have just thrown in a few real processor cores and called it a day and never bothered with the Cell.

I'm glad that instead they innovated and left the "good enough" approach to Microsoft.

[Dakar²]

I dunno, innovation is nice, but with a company who's reputation for making developers lives easy is less than stellar, a move to a new technology didn't fill me with hope.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

I'm glad that instead they innovated and left the "good enough" approach to Microsoft.

Innovating doesn't count when you make things more difficult, not easier. They could have had the exact same power from a traditional processor design. For example, a Quad Core Core 2 Duo could steamroll the Core, and it wouldn't make life difficult on developers.

I think significantly more than %20 of the PS3 has been tapped. The PS3 is not even the sort of chip design where you can measure what percentage of mhz is being used.

My guess is someone in the marketing department of Sony read about the Cell, decided that it would look cool to be different, and pushed for the Cell to be used in the PS3. A game system is not necessarily the best place for the Cell to be used. Not to mention it has a lot of features missing that hurt performance, features that it's traditional processor brethren have.

Edit: You know what would have been cool, worthwhile, and innovative? Something like SLI or Crossfire. That would have increased performance while keeping life easy on developers.

Besides, how deep of knowledge about the Cell or code do you think someone that high up in the company has?

[TETENAL]

Originally Posted by goMac 

Quad Core Core 2 Duo could steamroll the Core, and it wouldn't make life difficult on developers.

It also costs a lot more

My guess is someone in the marketing department of Sony read about the Cell, decided that it would look cool to be different, and pushed for the Cell to be used in the PS3. A game system is not necessarily the best place for the Cell to be used.

The Cell was designed by Sony for the PS3. Gaming is what it's made for.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

It also costs a lot moreThe Cell was designed by Sony for the PS3. Gaming is what it's made for.

Sorta. It was designed by several companies (Sony, Toshiba, and IBM) for multiple uses.

Yes, gaming was to be its primary use early on, but it's also going to be used in consumer electronics, like future TVs. Furthermore, some of the design choices seem to be due to IBM's influence, for scientific computing.

IMO, Sony chose a design like this because it seems well-suited for multimedia applications. However, at least in 2006 and 2007, it doesn't seem to me to be particularly well suited for game design. It's most definitely a powerful chip, but "powerful" ≠ "gaming".

[starman]

Originally Posted by goMac 

We'll see about that. The PS3's design has made it as hard as possible to tap that power.

LOL. That's EXACTLY what the anti-PS2 people said.

[starman]

Originally Posted by goMac 

My guess is someone in the marketing department of Sony read about the Cell, decided that it would look cool to be different, and pushed for the Cell to be used in the PS3.

Sony helped make the Cell themselves, Brainiac. They didn't "read about it" in Wired.

[Hawkeye_a]

The best use of the Cell in the PS3 that ive seen, was when they demoed it decoding 12 HD streams silumatenousley. but, decoding video isnt exactly gaming.

In my opinion, the Cell and Blu-ray were developed purely for Sony to try and win the format war and be the primary delivery medium for HD content, thus securing millions if not billions in royalty fees. they obviously decided to leverage their strongest branded product to do that as well....the PlayStation. It just so happens that the Cell is a processor that can ALSO be used to write games on and BR ccan ALSO be used to store games.

The gaming aspect of the PS3 seems more like a side effect than a primary-function, whereas with the XB360 and Wii, gaming is the primary function (more so with the Wii).

All you have to do is see what the Sony fanboys keep saying..."but your getting a BR-player for $600". And thats fair enough...its a great deal if you have a HD-TV. but in my opinion, gaming wasnt the objective of the PS3. It becomes even more apparent when you see that they have made no progress in the "interactive" aspects of the system..... it's exactly the same controller(minus rumble) with a Wii-esque-motion-sensor tacked on at the last minute to make it seem like they actually care about games as opposed to content delivery.

[starman]

Hawk,
You have to understand that Sony wanted the PS2 to be what the PS3 is now. I was giddy about that in 2000 but Sony never delivered. So what if it's supposed to be the media hub of the house? If it WORKS, what's the harm in that? I alrady ditched my old DVD player since I don't need it anymore.

[icruise]

Originally Posted by Hawkeye_a 

All you have to do is see what the Sony fanboys keep saying..."but your getting a BR-player for $600". And thats fair enough...its a great deal if you have a HD-TV. but in my opinion, gaming wasnt the objective of the PS3. It becomes even more apparent when you see that they have made no progress in the "interactive" aspects of the system..... it's exactly the same controller(minus rumble) with a Wii-esque-motion-sensor tacked on at the last minute to make it seem like they actually care about games as opposed to content delivery.

I do admit that the motion sensing is tacked-on and I don't have very high hopes for it, but does that mean that the PS3's focus isn't gaming? What does that say about the Xbox then? What improvements in interaction does the Xbox 360 have over the original Xbox? None that I can think of. I'm not really sure that's a valid way to judge a system.

[starman]

Well, I like how the 360 interacts with my iPod. The PS3 can actually go out and get cover art for my CDs, I don't think the 360 does that. I love that I can have a dynamic sig with my gamertag with the 360, the original Xbox didn't do that. The free stuff from Live is excellent.

[icruise]

None of that is interaction in the sense he is talking about. I'm not saying that the next-gen consoles don't have new features, just that the way you interact with them (by holding a controller and pressing buttons) is the same.

[Dakar²]

Originally Posted by icruise 

None of that is interaction in the sense he is talking about. I'm not saying that the next-gen consoles don't have new features, just that the way you interact with them (by holding a controller and pressing buttons) is the same.

Yeah, I've never been a fan of reinventing the wheel every generation.

Honestly, all our controllers are now is an SNES controller with another set of shoulder buttons, and analog sticks.

[Hawkeye_a]

Nothing wrong with the PS3/XB360 being a "media hub". In fact for someone looking for a media hub, id recommend a PS3/XB360+HD-Drive.

I come to this argument as a "gamer" so i tend to judge each system as gaming machines, thats all. Gaming to me is interactivity. XBox/360 definately has the best online offering so far, eons aahead of the other two...it's got that going for it in terms of interactivity.

The Wii, probably being the "purest"(although not completely) gaming system out of the 3, has definately made an attempt to improve the interactivity of gaming.

Microsoft wanted to get a head start in the gaming market, thats why i think they released the console earlier and without an HD-DVD drive built in.....it wasnt the primary objective of Microsoft to push a format, it was to garner support (developer and consumer) for the XB360 as a gaming platform.with the multi media features tacked on.

Sony did the opposite in my opinion.the PS3's primary purpose as far as Sony goes was to deliver BluRay and then gaming. thats why the gaming aspect of the PS3 is rather dismal imo (processor for gaming, controller). nothing wrong with that, the PS3 is probably the best HD-Video player o nthe market and at a great price as well. And if this discussion were about HD-Video players/multi-media-hubs, the PS3 would win hand down and the Wii would loose miserably imo.

[starman]

I don't understand why you think the PS3 is "dismal" when it's only been out for 2 weeks. Do you remember the PS2 lineup?

[Hawkeye_a]

Dismal in my opinion, as to what new stuff it brings to gaming. it's pushed all the numbers higher, but nothing has changed, nothing has been "improved". thats all. it's pretty much a faster PS2 with a better graphics card and wireless controllers, which is what the other two systems have as well, as far as gaming goes anyway.

But the XB360 has a better online offering, and the Wii has a better(imo) controller.

Sony's problem right now, in my opinion is.... it's developed the PS3 as a Blu-Ray delivery product, and it's marketing it as a gaming-console. the problem is, it's cost/price is low for a HD-Player, but high for a gaming console.

[starman]

And again, the PS2 brought DVD to the masses. Did you forget that?

EDIT: Although, DVD was a whole new format back then.

[Dakar²]

DVD was beginning to saturate the market at the time, though.

[Jawbone54]

Originally Posted by starman 

I don't understand why you think the PS3 is "dismal" when it's only been out for 2 weeks. Do you remember the PS2 lineup?

I agree that some time needs to pass before any judgment is dealt, likely as much as a year. Sony has done plenty of things wrong; that much is indisputable. But that doesn't meant they're dead in the water. Microsoft has been wildly successful with the 360 in establishing the XBox Live community. Microsoft is making huge gains in North America and Europe. PS3 will be extremely successful in Japan, but looks like it won't have the market share in other markets that it previously had. The Wii's future has the biggest question mark attached to it. It's longevity depends on whether or not the remote is revealed as a gimmick.

Who knows?

[Dakar²]

This generation stands a decent chance at having a huge amount parity, marketshare-wise.

[starman]

Originally Posted by Dakar² 

DVD was beginning to saturate the market at the time, though.

Not yet. Players were still very expensive.

[Dakar²]

Define expensive.

Also note the word 'beginning'

[Jawbone54]

Originally Posted by Dakar² 

This generation stands a decent chance at having a huge amount parity, marketshare-wise.

At least it has a much better chance than the last generation. In other words, I agree. However, I think that the reason that it's even a possibility lies primarily on Sony's shoulders.

[Dakar²]

Originally Posted by Jawbone54 

However, I think that the reason that it's even a possibility lies primarily on Sony's shoulders.

I'm afraid to assign who deserves the credit or lack thereof yet. Microsofts early entry and game library may prove to have contributed as much as Sony's mistakes.

(Oddly enough I still think Nintendo has very little control over what marketshare gains they will get. Not after their a graphically inferior system and perhaps gimmicky control scheme).

[starman]

Originally Posted by Dakar² 

Define expensive.

Also note the word 'beginning'

The PS2 was the cheapest DVD player you could get at the time. Players were at least $200 more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playstation_2

[Dakar²]

Originally Posted by starman 

The PS2 was the cheapest DVD player you could get at the time. Players were at least $200 more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playstation_2

Sorry, I was looking around and I didn't see where they listed the price of DVD players at the time.

[Gamoe]

I wonder when, if ever, the PS2 will go down to $50-60 new. Even I'd be tempted to get one at that price.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by starman 

LOL. That's EXACTLY what the anti-PS2 people said.

Ok. Let's assume EA is right. Only %80 of the Cell is tapped. That's great and all, except the Cell doesn't push pixels out to the screen. That's the job of the GPU.

Now, the PS3's and XBox 360's GPU's are pretty close in terms of mhz. Each one is 500 mhz. But the XBox 360 has 512 megs of VRAM, the PS3 has 256 megs of VRAM. So the XBox 360 is great for high definition crisp textures. The PS3? Not so much!

But the PS3 has Bluray! It has space to store tons of high definition textures on Bluray discs! Well that's great and all, but before it can use those textures, they have to be moved to VRAM. And having a Bluray disc all full of textures won't do you much good at all if you have no VRAM free to move those textures to.

But 80% of the Cell's power is untapped! Yes, but if that's true, that doesn't mean anything at all about graphical power. Again, the Cell isn't what's pushing out the pixels. It's the GPU. More complex graphics require more GPU power, not CPU power.

But at least the PS3 will be on graphical parity with the XBox 360, right? No, it won't. Epic has already said the 512 megs of VRAM was necessary to hold all the textures they used in Gears of War. This means the Gears of War for the PS3 would have to take a quality hit because it's going to run into the VRAM limits of the PS3, and all the leftover CPU in the world can't fix that.

But the PS3 can devote RAM to upping it's video memory, right? Yes, you can swap in between VRAM and RAM, except this is going to create a massive slowdown. If this was a smart way to be doing things, we wouldn't have GPU's on the PC side with large amount of VRAM, you'd just have a GPU with a small amount of VRAM and put a large amount of RAM on your machine. But this doesn't work so well for performance. And this is entirely ignoring that the XBox 360 could also swap in between GPU and RAM.

What should Sony have done? Built a GPU based on the Cell's design and for a CPU thrown in a dual or quad core chip. Programmers are already used to a programmable GPU, and rendering is something that can be done in parallel.

[Eug]

Originally Posted by starman 

The PS2 was the cheapest DVD player you could get at the time. Players were at least $200 more.

PlayStation 2 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

No it wasn't.

I bought an RCA 5200P DVD player for US$299 in early 1998, which was TWO AND HALF YEARS before the PS2 was released (at $299) in North America.

Now, I got mine on sale, but nonetheless there were two more generations of DVD players released after that, before the PS2 even launched.

[jokell82]

Originally Posted by Eug 

No it wasn't.

I bought an RCA 5200P DVD player for US$299 in early 1998, which was TWO AND HALF YEARS before the PS2 was released (at $299) in North America.

Now, I got mine on sale, but nonetheless there were two more generations of DVD players released after that, before the PS2 even launched.

Yeah I call BS as well. My first DVD player purchase was in 1999 and I only spent $150.

[Dark Helmet]

Originally Posted by goMac 

I think significantly more than %20 of the PS3 has been tapped.

Please share how you have reached that conclusion.

Gomac:

PS3 Developer: Nope
Owns a PS3: Nope
Owns a PS3 dev kit: Nope
Attended a tour of the development lab at EA: Nope (unless you didn't tell us).


But ya, I'm sure you know better than EA.

[Dark Helmet]

Originally Posted by Eug 

No it wasn't.

I bought an RCA 5200P DVD player for US$299 in early 1998, which was TWO AND HALF YEARS before the PS2 was released (at $299) in North America.

Now, I got mine on sale, but nonetheless there were two more generations of DVD players released after that, before the PS2 even launched.

I got the first and only Toshiba progressive scan DVD player in 1999. It cost $1000.

[exca1ibur]

Originally Posted by goMac 

Ok. Let's assume EA is right. Only %80 of the Cell is tapped. That's great and all, except the Cell doesn't push pixels out to the screen. That's the job of the GPU.

Now, the PS3's and XBox 360's GPU's are pretty close in terms of mhz. Each one is 500 mhz. But the XBox 360 has 512 megs of VRAM, the PS3 has 256 megs of VRAM. So the XBox 360 is great for high definition crisp textures. The PS3? Not so much!

But the PS3 has Bluray! It has space to store tons of high definition textures on Bluray discs! Well that's great and all, but before it can use those textures, they have to be moved to VRAM. And having a Bluray disc all full of textures won't do you much good at all if you have no VRAM free to move those textures to.

But 80% of the Cell's power is untapped! Yes, but if that's true, that doesn't mean anything at all about graphical power. Again, the Cell isn't what's pushing out the pixels. It's the GPU. More complex graphics require more GPU power, not CPU power.

But at least the PS3 will be on graphical parity with the XBox 360, right? No, it won't. Epic has already said the 512 megs of VRAM was necessary to hold all the textures they used in Gears of War. This means the Gears of War for the PS3 would have to take a quality hit because it's going to run into the VRAM limits of the PS3, and all the leftover CPU in the world can't fix that.

But the PS3 can devote RAM to upping it's video memory, right? Yes, you can swap in between VRAM and RAM, except this is going to create a massive slowdown. If this was a smart way to be doing things, we wouldn't have GPU's on the PC side with large amount of VRAM, you'd just have a GPU with a small amount of VRAM and put a large amount of RAM on your machine. But this doesn't work so well for performance. And this is entirely ignoring that the XBox 360 could also swap in between GPU and RAM.

What should Sony have done? Built a GPU based on the Cell's design and for a CPU thrown in a dual or quad core chip. Programmers are already used to a programmable GPU, and rendering is something that can be done in parallel.

Only thing is in gaming. Graphics are only one factor in the equation. Sure the graphics are pretty much equal on both platforms, but if EA has use 20% of the CPU, this leaves 80% more than can be put into gamePLAY, which is more what I'd like to see at this point, as I have no issue with the PS3 OR the XB360 graphics ability. Both hold their own, so the pissing contest is mute, in my opinion.

What I look at their comment is that the PS3 has the potential for pushing a more realistic AI (The most overlooked feature in all gaming in every generation), a deeper and more realistic gameplay is something I'd like to see improved on in this generation as very few games come out exploiting that feature. For sports it would be great because now you could say have an AI that can think more based on situations, how you play etc.

I always think games should be to a point where their is no difficulty setting. Especially for sports, the game needs to be able to play you according to how you play it and scale. THAT is the next generation of gaming that I'd like to see approached. The Cell might have this ability, it might not, but the potential is there, yet all we seem to bitch about are the graphics. Look at GTA, it didn't sell big because it was a graphics powerhouse. The graphics were decent for what it needed to portray and the game play is what sold it. The world and how you interacted with it was the big deal.

My 2 cents...

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Dark Helmet 

Please share how you have reached that conclusion.

Gomac:

PS3 Developer: Nope
Owns a PS3: Nope
Owns a PS3 dev kit: Nope
Attended a tour of the development lab at EA: Nope (unless you didn't tell us).


But ya, I'm sure you know better than EA.

Explained above. You're welcome to read.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by exca1ibur 

Only thing is in gaming. Graphics are only one factor in the equation. Sure the graphics are pretty much equal on both platforms, but if EA has use 20% of the CPU, this leaves 80% more than can be put into gamePLAY, which is more what I'd like to see at this point, as I have no issue with the PS3 OR the XB360 graphics ability. Both hold their own, so the pissing contest is mute, in my opinion.

What I look at their comment is that the PS3 has the potential for pushing a more realistic AI (The most overlooked feature in all gaming in every generation), a deeper and more realistic gameplay is something I'd like to see improved on in this generation as very few games come out exploiting that feature. For sports it would be great because now you could say have an AI that can think more based on situations, how you play etc.

I always think games should be to a point where their is no difficulty setting. Especially for sports, the game needs to be able to play you according to how you play it and scale. THAT is the next generation of gaming that I'd like to see approached. The Cell might have this ability, it might not, but the potential is there, yet all we seem to bitch about are the graphics. Look at GTA, it didn't sell big because it was a graphics powerhouse. The graphics were decent for what it needed to portray and the game play is what sold it. The world and how you interacted with it was the big deal.

My 2 cents...

True, the Cell could allow for better AI. It's possible you could load AI code into each SPE, and you could probably get that running pretty well in parallel. You could probably run a sound/music manager on an SPE also. But at that point the XBox's triple core design starts to make a lot more sense. Microsoft isn't just filling the machine with a bunch of SPE's. They've determined that 3 is a good number of Cores for doing operations in parallel. And they're probably right. One core to do management and push stuff to the GPU, one core to do audio, and one core to do AI. And the consumer isn't forced to pay an arm and a leg for the console, and developers don't have as steep a learning curve. But the Cell doesn't mean a thing for graphics, the PS3 is hobbled by it's low VRAM. GPU and VRAM are what allow you to push better graphics.

This is why it seems that the PS3 was assembled by a marketing team and not engineers. There are just such odd design choices. Generally when you design a console, you want to build it with like components so you don't get these odd bottlenecks in your design. The XBox 360 has a mid-high end CPU and a mid-high end GPU. On the PS3 you have a mid-high end CPU, an average GPU, and a high end optical drive. Then you end up with these bizarre bottlenecks like having a Bluray disc full of high resolution hd textures, but no video memory free to load them into the game with. If you're going to build the system for high resolution textures, you want to have as much VRAM as possible.

But maybe this is where you run into the ugly truth. Maybe Sony doesn't actually care about Bluray's capacity for high resolution textures. Maybe the point of putting on a Bluray drive was just to try to force Bluray on the market, and they never cared enough about Bluray being used for games to put in an adequate amount of VRAM.

[Dark Helmet]

Originally Posted by goMac 

never cared enough about Bluray being used for games to put in an adequate amount of VRAM.

When the PS2 came out devs bitched to no end that it didn't have enough VRAM and no AA.

In the end it didn't matter, so far my PS2 games look 10x better than anything on the Wii. And as you hate to hear it runs in 1080i.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Dark Helmet 

When the PS2 came out devs bitched to no end that it didn't have enough VRAM and no AA.

In the end it didn't matter, so far my PS2 games look 10x better than anything on the Wii. And as you hate to hear it runs in 1080i.

I'm not sure you're understanding. The PS2's design is not like the PS3's. There are no hidden optimization routines as there were with the emotion engine. I think the PS2 used a lot of procedurally generated textures with the emotion engine. And I suppose you could do that on the PS3, but that then begs the question... what is the point of the Bluray drive?

There is no technical reason a Gamecube could not output to 1080i. You keep citing the 1080i games on the PS2 (how many were there? 1? 2?) as a reason the PS2 is the most powerful console. A 6100 can display a higher resolution than the PS2. Does that make the 6100 more powerful?

The PS2 could output 1080i but wasn't powerful enough to really support it well, it was just a tacked on feature. That's why hardly any games could use 1080i, because the PS2's hardware was not powerful enough to really output at that high of resolution. If anything, 1080i was tacked on to make the Sony fanboys like you think the PS2 was the most powerful console of it's generation.

[exca1ibur]

Since no one here has seen a developer kit, nor programmed for the PS3, how would anyone in here know? We are looking at nothing but first generation games. This is a trend of EVERY console ever made, I think this is more an argument for 1-2 years down the line. As far as if they made the wrong call or not. I have to agree with DH on this being the same argument as the PS2. I didn't buy a PS2 till about 2 years after because I saw the same thing. Nothing was groundbreaking compared to my Dreamcast (Which I still have). As developers learned to use the system better things changed. Same situation here from what I see.

How is the PS2 outputing GT4 at 1080i call 'tacked on', if any developer that wanted to output that resolution could? Its the same thing as with the PS3 able to do games at 1080p, yet most games run at 720p.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by exca1ibur 

How is the PS2 outputing GT4 at 1080i call 'tacked on', if any developer that wanted to output that resolution could? Its the same thing as with the PS3 able to do games at 1080p, yet most games run at 720p.

Because any console of that generation could run GT4 at 1080i. They all had the power to do it easily. Nintendo disabled it because for a large majority of games it simply wasn't an option. The same was true on the PS2, for most games it simply wasn't an option. SWG pretends because the PS2 could output at 1080i that makes it more powerful than the other systems, when that isn't true at all.

And again, the PS2 is a different monster than the PS3. With the PS2, developers over time could tweak their games with the emotion engine. I'd be really surprised if developers didn't know how to optimize their games for the GeForce 7800 by now. This isn't exactly mystical Sony hardware we're talking about. And no programming trick is suddenly going to make the PS3 have more video memory available. It's not a mater of having a dev kit. It's a mater of simply parts not being put onto the PS3. If the parts aren't there, we know what technically the console potentially can and can't do. And we know by the PS3's lack of memory it's not going to be able to run games like Gears of War without the texture quality taking a hit. It simply does not have the memory.

[starman]

To those that magically found $150 DVD players in 1999, please post the model numbers.