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Playstation/Gaming Discussions => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: jm on April 29, 2002, 11:21:49 AM
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http://news.independent.co.uk/digital/news/story.jsp?story=289715
I\'ll highlight the notable points I picked up in the article.
Although the company believes it has enough good games in the pipeline and a wide enough global customer base to compete for the moment, PlayStation 3 is being designed specifically to handle online gaming – seen by many analysts as the future of video games.
The three-way struggle for supremacy has seen each company adopt different tactics. Sony got its PlayStation 2 machine on the market before anyone else, and reaped the rewards of being the only player on the block for 18 months. Microsoft\'s Xbox, meanwhile, has made its appeal to what it sees as more serious gamers. Although the enormous Xbox – much larger than other consoles – is Microsoft\'s first step into the world of video games, its rivals cannot afford to dismiss the machine. After all, Sega and Nintendo seemed to have the market sewn up in 1993 when Sony arrived and sold 85 million PlayStations.
The Xbox\'s software makes full use of the machine\'s huge graphics and memory capabilities, and the games line-up includes "Halo", one of only a few games to which reviewers have given a "perfect" rating. Unfortunately, the past six weeks have not gone Microsoft\'s way: sales have been sluggish and, within five weeks of launch, the company decided to drop the price by 38 per cent to drum up custom.
The Xbox may have the best technology, but the market is only interested in the quality of the games. Nintendo, a past master at producing must-have titles, has not only got a meaty selection of games to accompany the launch of the GameCube, but is also selling the machine at less than half the original cost of the Xbox.
The only thing I\'d tare apart is the saying, which says "Xbox\'s software makes full use of the machine\'s huge graphics and memory capabilities." Perhaps I\'ll let mm clarify what I mean.
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...PlayStation 3 is being designed specifically to handle online gaming – seen by many analysts as the future of video games.
yes yes hype hype...like PS2 the next gen machine and the Toy Story graphics...the next gen games...and millions of fools will buy millions of PS3 at launch...
I really hope PS3 will be a better machine than PS2...
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Originally posted by BizioEE
yes yes hype hype...like PS2 the next gen machine and the Toy Story graphics...the next gen games...and millions of fools will buy millions of PS3 at launch...
I really hope PS3 will be a better machine than PS2...
:rolleyes:
No text needed, really..
[Yes its SPAM!]
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Originally posted by BizioEE
I really hope PS3 will be a better machine than PS2...
:rolleyes: Well Du\'hhhhhhhh ! :rolleyes:
;)
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Originally posted by ooseven
:rolleyes: Well Du\'hhhhhhhh ! :rolleyes:
;)
Sorry mate...but I couldn\'t resist :D ...:)
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nice info. The Cell processor btw is intended for network. I read some quite interesting news (had been posted here before) - I just hope that by then, most people will have broadband (and at a decent cost), or else it might be pretty useless.
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I think the PS3 will support both these things.
Games via CD/DVD (its going to be able to play PS2 games) and downloadable games..
We will even start to see this on PS2 later on. (PSBB has a PSX Emulator were you can download PSX games and play them on PS2. PSBB will also offer downloadable demos for PS2)
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Originally posted by seven
nice info. The Cell processor btw is intended for network. I read some quite interesting news (had been posted here before) - I just hope that by then, most people will have broadband (and at a decent cost), or else it might be pretty useless.
True, we\'ll call it "the waiting game." PS3 peeps will have to wait to see what the sucess of online gaming is in the next year to see if it will be worth it in the years to come.
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Toy Story like graphics?
That\'s a huge overstatement for the PS2. Maybe a step towards Toy Story like graphics.
Toy Story\'s graphics were ray-traced, something that takes huge graphic power. And Toy Story was rendered at 1280x1024x32 w/ FSAA at a consistant 60fps.
I doubt PS2 was even capable of doing that at 640x480!
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oops, i see something coming!
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Originally posted by jm
Toy Story like graphics?
That\'s a huge overstatement for the PS2. Maybe a step towards Toy Story like graphics.
Toy Story\'s graphics were ray-traced, something that takes huge graphic power. And Toy Story was rendered at 1280x1024x32 w/ FSAA at a consistant 60fps.
I doubt PS2 was even capable of doing that at 640x480!
It\'s not hard to render something real time at 1280x1024x32 with FSAA - the question is what are you rendering. Personally, I don\'t think Toy Story was too impressive. Okay, impressive at the time, but the textures, background.. nothing that good. I might have to watch it again, but I\'d say that todays games aren\'t too bad compared to it when you think of textures, effects and other things.
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JM?
I hope your being sarcastic, cause you really have no idea what your talking about :D
Toy Story\'s graphics were ray-traced, something that takes huge graphic power. And Toy Story was rendered at 1280x1024x32 w/ FSAA at a consistant 60fps.
To the best of my knowledge regarding the subject (I did actually take a 3 day course at Universal Studios Orlando regarding 3d rendering)
Toy Story was rendered using multiple computers, AKA a Renderfarm (only I would venture to say that pixar owned all the computers),
Each comptuers renders each frame of the movie indidually one at a time, I doubt it was .5fps let alone 60fps. (edit: the frames are then sent to a central computer which compiles the movie into a AVI or whatever format they use, its not recorded in realtime)
Also, justifiying the time the movie was created, it was probably all caculated using the processor only, no graphics acceleration for rendering (i\'m not sure its accelerated even today)
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toy story was done with SGI and pixar proprietary software
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I acknowledge that Toy Story was rendered upon hundreds of workstations, rendering each frame, and it took a lot of time. There was an article in Maximum PC on this topic, "Will we see Toy-Story like graphics in the next 3 years?" They went into detail on that. I can re-print the article, but again, you took the course, shouldn\'t be anything you don\'t already know already.
But doesn\'t video card power play a role in graphic rendering?
I\'m just mocking the "hype" statement of PS2 power being compared to hundreds of workstations that made Toy Story possible.
EDIT: I see where you meant Chrono by myself saying rendered at specific resoultion:P I was trying to say, that Toy Story at the end had to be able to run at 60fps @ 1280x1024x32 w/ FSAA at the end.
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Dammit! :mad:
Don\'t they realize that some people don\'t want to get involved in online gaming? I\'ll take my traditional single-player RPG over their Massive Multiplayer Online RPG blah blah blah anyday!
I seriously hope the future of the gaming world doesn\'t revolve exclusively around the \'net. I\'d hate to have to throw away this favorite hobby of mine so soon.
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not to worry
console online gaming will be a small percentage and broadband users will be even smaller
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jm: I seriously doubt that Pixar uses FSAA in their films.. it\'s just high enough a resolution not to need it.
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(https://psx5central.com/community/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pixar.com%2Ffeaturefilms%2Fts%2Fimages%2Findex_tc.jpg&hash=7a9ec5139eba7922eaebe6c6e70a7840b913c6c9)(https://psx5central.com/community/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fmaccentral.macworld.com%2Fgaming%2Freviews%2Fedutain%2Ftoystory%2Fcleanup.jpg&hash=2053c58653de7396b1487d21080db8131e2dabec)
Those are two screens out of Toy Story 1. They do look good, but my only point is, they aren\'t that good or detailed not to be possible on any next gen system. The backgrounds - not all that many objects around there and the textures aren\'t very detailed either. What we\'re basically seeing are some high res polygon figures with low polygon objects in the background. I do think this kind a graphics are possible on PS2 or even Xbox or GCN. Don\'t misunderstand me, they were impressive at the time, but they shouldn\'t be impossible on the current hardware. Also seing that the marketing crew of SCE liked to refer to the polygon performance of their machine, that quote could have been aimed specifically at that while speaking of "toy story graphics". But I\'ll guess we\'ll see in a few years from now if any of these machines got to that far. ;)
PS: Chrono, do you remember what workstations they used? Just curious... I would like to compare it to the ones Square Pictures used for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within...
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None of the Pixar´s movies are rendered fully with ray-tracing. Renderman is mostly standard triangle based renderer.
Ray-Tracing is usualy used when there is need to do reflections or refractions which would be very hard to do well otherwise.
And they use antialiasing, motion-blur and other fx quite heavily...
as far as i know only full lenght feature using primary ray-tracing for rendering is Ice Age.
Square usa is developing own huge-paraller raytracer called Kilauea. Here´s link for .pdf for those who might be intressed.
http://www.squareusa.com/kilauea/siggraph2001/kilaueaE.pdf
Some stats from toyStory1 (taken from various sources)
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Leaves on a typical tree: 10,000
Trees on Andy\'s block: 100+
Leaves on Andy\'s block: 1.2 million
Number of basic arithmetic operations per pixel: 500,000
Painted texture maps: 2000+
RenderMan shaders: 1300.
Amount of RenderMan data sent though the renderer: 34 terabytes
total storage for final frames: over 500 gigabytes Resolution per frame: 1536 x 922 pixels.
(rendering was accomplished via Pixar\'s RenderMan software running on Sun\'s multiprocessor SPARCstation 20\'s).
The movie\'s final image rendering was accomplished on a "farm" of 87 dual-processor and 30 quad-processor 100-MHz SPARCstation 20s
Even with that, rendering the film\'s 110,000 frames required the equivalent of 46 days of continuous processing; put another way, rendering each frame took one to three hours of SPARC processor time.
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Originally posted by 182Ways
Dammit! :mad:
Don\'t they realize that some people don\'t want to get involved in online gaming? I\'ll take my traditional single-player RPG over their Massive Multiplayer Online RPG blah blah blah anyday!
I seriously hope the future of the gaming world doesn\'t revolve exclusively around the \'net. I\'d hate to have to throw away this favorite hobby of mine so soon.
being run through the net wouldnt just be for multiplayer necessarily.. it could offer infinate possibilities for single player games.
use your imagination..
(i certainly hope developers will)
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Downloading new landscapes for an RPG.....wow. That would be cool.
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Originally posted by GmanJoe
Downloading new landscapes for an RPG.....wow. That would be cool.
I think that\'s no so hard to do, so likely we\'ll see that in the next generation.
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That could be done now with the pS2. It\'s already going in leaps and bounds. By the time ps3 is out lord only knows what will become possible!
Looking at that article, the thing that I found intriguing is when they mentioned the secret lab. They just gave away it\'s location, didn\'t they? :P
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Originally posted by mm
oops, i see something coming!
:surprised
I didn\'t know anybody was watching.
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some people just dont get that what makes toy story impossible on ANY sytem of this generation is its NURBs and Ray tracing.
those screens take days if not weeks to render on SGI rendering machines. NO way xbo or ps2 can do that
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You\'re taking this too serious Metal_Gear_Ray. I doubt the management of Sony who spoke of "Toy Story" graphics wanted to go as far to make people believe that they were possible on PS2 hardware taking the same techniques into consideration. That message went out to the casual consumers who can\'t figure out what 66 million polygons means etc - but that Toy Story and future PS2 games will be comparable. If I recall correctly, he also just stated that graphics will be comparable to those of Toy Story. Anyway, it doesn\'t matter anyway - we\'ll see in a few years if developers will get that far with the system or not.