cstGaming

One year ago, German gaming webiste, Cynamite predicted how the new generation of consoles is going to look like. After the presentation of Playstation-Move and the introduction of 3D gaming at E3, we know a bit more about Sonys new console generation.

So, Cynamite took it upon themselves again to breakdown how the future-console is potentially going to pan out. Take a look. I have to link it through ‘google translate’ or you won’t be able to read anything.

Playstation 4, eh?

The God of War (GoW) lineup has been a quality series for the Playstation brand for quite some time but the boys over at Sony are treating this latest rendition like no other. They set out to push the PS3 to it’s limits and apparently the ESRB too. This game takes gore to a whole new level: Decapitations, Impalement, Pulling off of finger nails; This could be the goriest game I’ve ever seen, which only makes me want to play it more. Gametrailers TV (GTTV) with Geoff Keighley did a showcase (gore fest) on this very game in their latest episode. It’s only 21 minutes and it covers a few other titles coming up this year but GoW looks so ridiculous I had to post it.

The guys over at NeoGAF have already started breaking the video down and making some SICK .GIF’s: Forum Thread. You can also download the raw .FLV HERE if you want to save it and watch it at your leisure, i.e. when your boss isn’t around.

You have something in the corner of your eye. Lemme get it for you...

We’ve all wondered for some time now when the day would come when the DVD just isn’t enough and I think it’s about that time…

Let’s have a little history lesson first off:

It all started with the DVD and the PS2. The orginal PS2 disc’s weren’t infact DVD’s, but a Hybrid disc that Sony developed specifically for the PS2. They did make the PS2 compatible with DVD’s as an added feature but eventually this “added feature” became the standard media format to develop games on. The orginal X-Box used it and with the “earlier” realease of the X-Box 360, they also followed suit. Time passes and Sony who is falling behind in the gaming market boldly moves ahead and decides to develop games on there “next-gen” media format, the Blu-ray Disc. Mircosoft inturn adopts the HD-DVD and the format wars begin. Utimately the Blu-ray Disc wins because of Disney (my opinion, but do you blame me?) and Mircosoft allows returns on all the HD-DVD players that they sold for their X-Box 360′s. So here’s the result: PS3 with minimal console sales using Blu-ray, and Mircosoft using the DVD with rather large console sales. Everyone’s okay with that, right? Wrong. Microsoft’s big asset this time around was the number of Playstation exclusives that they turned into multi-console games and the number of exclusives the company acquired; The same move that Song made on the gaming world during the era of the PS2. The problem lies in the fact that their is such a dramatic difference between the DVD and a Blu-ray disc we as consumers always knew that one day this quality would play a large factor in game development itself.

This is a comparasion chart of two media mediums: (it’s a bit dated but it’s still accurate)

The medium that a game is on can make the life of a gamer much more enjoyable. Anyone remember when Half-Life 2 came out and if you bought the CD version you had to sit through a 7 CD install? Then you went over your buddies and he had his DVD version sitting there in it’s “one disc glory”. The X-Box is feeling these same effects. Developers are either packaging multiple DVD’s in one box and requiring installs of the additional discs to the harddrive or limiting the product as a whole. These limits can even be seen in graphics or features throughout the game.

One of the biggest examples of this issue is in the upcoming release of Final Fantasy XIII. The game itself is slated to be around 25gb total. This either means one dual-layer blu-ray disc or 3 DVD’s. 2 of those DVD’s will need to be preinstalled; a total of 18.3gb of data on your harddrive whether you like it or not. Rumor has it that the game was developed on a different graphics engine to compensate for the space restrictions of the DVD. If you search the internets you can find several sites with comparasion screenshots between the two versions but little can be distingushed between the 2, so if they did use a different graphics engine they did an awesome job with the equivalent. As a developer that has to be a major pain. (<-Great Movie) 

Games like God of War 3 are releasing with 35 gigs of content and if Microsoft doesn’t see this as a problem they should. They may have the “real” next-gen console lead but if they don’t look over their shoulder and try to fix some things the PS3 is going to sneak up on them with the consumers and the game developers leading the rush.

Okay so yesterday Sony all but announced their plans for the PS3 Slim.  Now they didn’t actually say that… but the rumor has been circulating since the beginning of June and a source told Playstation Insider that Sony has planned “Something that hasn’t been done before.” The suggestions they tossed at them were the PS3/HDTV Bundle? PSP Go Price Cut? PS3 Slim?

They replied with:
“N, Y, Y, (?)You’ll see “

4 answers that will truly keep us guessing. All that is definately known is that August 9th the 80gig version of the PS3 will stop selling in Japan and the 160gig version isn’t available there, so what are they going to replace it with? They did a slim version of the Playstation and PS2, why not the PS3?

August 18th should shead some light on the subject. Gizmodo believes that the system will be shown off at the gamescom expo in Cologne, Germany.

With Sony showing off new tech and delievering price cuts left and right you might see a quick shift in the market share for the current “real” next gen consoles. $50 off 160gb PS3 Package

okay, i know this is a shopped wii with a ps3 top on it... but cmon, it still looks kinda cool, right? ...right

Fake Youtube Video for the PS3 Slim… Silly Asians

Okay, regardless of the lack of “quality” games that surround the PS3, people have to start to realize and acknowledge the hardware that lives inside this beast. This system has been on the market since November 11th 2006 (coming up on 3 years now) and Intel is finally catching up to the speeds and processing rate that the PS3 puts out. Intel! The worlds largest semiconductor company…is finally catching up. Seriously, though, how much of a punch is the cell processor packing that the worlds leader, 3 years later, is just coming into the picture in performance specs?

Orginal PS3 Dev Kit

I remember the original development kits that were released pre PS3 and those puppies were pretty hardware packed at the time. Dual 7950GT’s, 512MB of RAM, and a Cell Processor. As a PC Gamer, mainly, i would have loved to get my hands on those graphics cards. But, who would have thought that the PS3, 3 years later, would be unrivaled hardware wise, even compared to comsumer grade PC’s? I surely didn’t.

PC Games Hardware (a German PC Gaming News Site) was the first to post this interesting information. Below is a rough translation of the article written to compare the video encoding capabilities of the Core i7 965 XE processor to the Cell Processor located inside a PS3. The results are astounding.

“Cell processor faster than Core i7 965 XE
H.264 video: New Playstation 3 codec uses for transcoding

 

A novel transcoding tool Fixstars allows for the conversion of video material on the Full HD format, with the help of a Playstation 3 in real time.

 

Now put Linux Developer Fixstars a video converter called Codecsys CE-10, which was to encode movies into MPEG-4-AVC format (H.265) The Cell processor uses a Playstation 3 – this format will be predominantly on Blu-Ray media and IP-TV via video-stream uses. The CE-10-encoder sends out from a Windows PC, the output data via Ethernet to the console, which finished the encoded data back to the PC sends back.

 

According to the announcement of Fixstars reached the Cell processor of the Playstation a performance of 29 FPS, that is 1.2 times real-time conversion – so that the cell would have a similar performance as the CUDA Badaboom encoder in combination with an Nvidia Geforce GTX 285, so colleagues from heise online. By comparison, Intel’s current top-CPU, the Core i7 965 XE, does it still at 18 FPS – normal desktop CPUs even create only about 5 FPS.

 

Prices Fixstars said the developer still does not know the Codecsys CE-10 will be on 22 Of June will be – more information, see the datasheet.”

Original Article
The Datasheet

So, i guess the question is when will the processing power of the PS3 be trumped? Another 3 years? I guess we’ll have to wait and see…