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PlayStation 3
"another next-gen machine ... by rival Sony"
Developer: Sony
Released: Spring 2006 (Japan!)
Price: unknown at this moment
Genre: next-gen games console
Data Posted: 5 September 2005
ScreenShots: 6
Written By: Mathieu Sarraasin
The Next PlayStation
Cherished by the latest technologies, the "PlayStation 3" (PS3) will possess the touch of reality games that we're actually missing now, making it the direct opponent of the Xbox 360 (PlayDevil.com Preview) which will also, on its side, propose amazing technical features.
One of the most important (important in the way of revolutionary) feature is the new Cell processor included in this beast machine, which is able to do what we never though would be possible, as well as the 7 co-processor running at a cadency of 3,2GHz.
Those specifications make it the more powerful console on the market in term of speed.
As shown at the last E3, this Cell processor could make the PS3 run 12 HD streams simultaneoustly at full frame! Crazy isn't it?
Now, let's see in details why the PS3 might be the winner of them all!
The design and all the features
One of the more important aspect is the new ergonomic design which is great.
Though it does not offer the same freedom as the Xbox 360 (which you can place on 360 degrees), it comes in 3 different colors, white, silver and black, which makes the looks a little more attractive when it comes to choose your model.
Everything has been revamped from the beginning to give a better figure to the console.
We could also consider all the I/O slots added behind the system as part of the design. We can count a total of 9, plus the power supply switch. Here's a list that you can consult:
1 x External Gigabyte Communication port (Note that 2 more slots are internals)
2 x USB 2.0 ports (Note that 4 has been placed on the front)
1 x Memory Stick, SD Card port
1 x Compact Flash port
2 x HDMI (Digital Audio/Video) ports
1 x AV Multi Output port
1 x Digital Audio Output (SPDIF) port
All those additions will give the opportunities to enjoy the pleasure of the digital media (Audio, Video and Photograph), computer entertainment, video communication and obviously Internet access. We could say that this "machine" is a home computer literally.
We have still to consider that it will assume entire compatibility with both Playstation and Playstation 2 games. This is a great plus, if we don't take in consideration that PSOne and PS2 memory cards won't be compatible with the PS3 and that other hardware like controllers might not be compatible as well but we still have to get an official statement about this one.
The secrets of the PlayStation 3 console
Now let's see what this bomb can show us!
The PlayStation 3 will deliver an nVidia and Sony powered GPU called RSX, standing for Reality Synthesizer, which will be twice as powerful as two GeForce 6800 Ultra video cards.
Clocked at 550 MHz, it will allow game to run at full high definition (1800p; P stands for progressive scan/non-interlaced).
The vertices performances is about 1.1 billion per second. Can you believe it? One billion! And that not the most impressive, it can operate 100 billion shaders per second! Anyway, judge by yourself with this amazing list of plenty feature we're going to get out of it!
- Clocked at 550 MHz
- 1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance, 356 GFLOPS programmable
- Full high definition output (up to 1080p) x 2 channels
- Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines
- 300.4 million or higher transistors (exact number not known yet)
- 136 shader operations per cycle
- 100 billion shader operations per second or higher
- 51 billion dot products per second (When combined with CPU power)
- 128-bit pixel precision (for rendering scenes with high dynamic range imaging)
- Vertices Performance: 1.1 billion vertices per second
- Texture bandwidth: 47.5 GB/s
The Xbox 360, on its side, will be sent with a custom made ATI chipset, called Xenos. You can compare those technical informations with the PS3's, but you'll soon find out that PS3 beat the crap of the Xbox 360 GPU. But then again, these are only "technical specifications" and mainly on 'paper'. Only the launch games and further development of games will tell us really who's the most powerful console.
- 337 million transistors total
- 500 MHz parent GPU (90 nm process, 232 million transistors)
- 500 MHz 10 MiB daughter eDRAM Framebuffer (90 nm process, 105 million transistors)
- eDRAM has internal logic for Color, Alpha Blend, ZStencil and Anti-Aliasing
- 48-way parallel floating-point dynamically-scheduled shader pipelines (ALU's for Vertex or Pixel Shader processing)
- Unified shader architecture (This means that the pipelines are shared between pixel pipelines and vertex shaders; for example, 42 pixel pipelines : 6 vertex shaders).
- 16 Filtered & 16 Unfiltered Texture samples per clock
- Polygon Performance: 500 million triangles per second
- Pixel Fill Rate: 16 gigasamples per second fillrate using 4X MSAA
- Shader Performance: 48 billion (48,000 million) shader operations per second (96 billion shader operations per second theoretical maximum)
- Dot product operations: 9 billion per second (Microsoft figure), 33.6 billion per second when combined with CPU power
For the memory, two different stick will be present.
The first one will be a 256MB XDR Ram stick, clocked at the CPU die speed which is 3.2 GHz. The second one is a 256MB stick of GDDR3 VRAM clocket at 700MHz!
Usual PC memories are clocked at 400MHz at max, if we talk about DDR. The DDR2 can reach a higher value, but anyway, it is only for comparison that the PS3 will also surpass the usual standards.
A great aspect of the PS3 is the presence of many media as said earlier in the preview. Hard drive (which won't be included in the original pack) will comes with a preinstalled Linux OS which will bring some great developing portability.
Is it the first time that a console will comes with a fully exploitable OS.
Pictures
  
The controller has also been redesigned, keeping all the usual buttons we can find on a Playstation's controller.
The physics seems to be quite more ergonomic, more curved, giving a new "futurist" aspect. Though, it is impossible to say if the comfortability will be as great as its look. They will use the USB 2.0 technology to be connected to the console, which will deliver a more stable link between both, the console and the controller.
At total, you'll be able to plug 7 controllers at the same time, which actually make a change to the standard on console which was fixed to 4 for several years.
The disc technology used is a really captivating aspect of this gaming system. The Blu-ray disc support can store up to 27 GB of storage, depending on the model.
Though, the PS3 will still support CD-ROM and DVD. The fact of having that much supported storages medias will eases the hacking of the system for sure.
It will probably be way more possible that we see a boot disk appearances as it happened for many console in the past, even some only supporting 1 or 2 disc formats.
Contrary to recent rumours, the PlayStation 3, the most waited next-gen console, will not be out until spring 2006 as officially stated Ken Kutagari, President and Group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment.
Of course, PlayDevil.com will report as soon as any other 'official' statements are confirmed by Sony.
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