Sony PS3: Doom & Gloom

moot

That's not really rumor, it's pretty widely understood. The specification for a cell chip is to have 8 SPE's and 1 PPE. By default, one of the SPE's is going to come turned off. Developers have known all along that they are only going to have 7 SPE's and 1 PPE the whole time, so this really isn't an issue.

From the article:

-- With Reeves' statements, it appears as though Sony will be producing PlayStation 3 consoles with different Cell processors -- some with all eight cores operational and some with just seven. Reeves however does not believe that Sony will offer different pricing for the machines and only time will tell if there will be performance differences. Reeves says however that users will not see any differences in speed. "The PlayStation 3 only uses seven of [the eight cores]. You'd have a spare."--

I don't see a problem if IBM is already saying the PS3 will fully function with no degradation at 7 cells. The thing to look out for is the possibility of a second cell burning out and making your PS3 an expensive deadweight (after warranty). Doesn't seem like it would be likely with the testing IBM is doing, and even if there is a percentage out there Sony will likely do the same thing Microsoft did with the Xbox (DVD drive scratching disks to the point they are unreadable) and just keep repairing or replacing the faulty equipment regardless of warranty .

I stand corrected, if it's being upconverted then it's not the same. If the source material is being deinterlaced at half the speed, then we're all good.

You're confused, I believe, on multiple counts.

1. Downscaling certainly doesn't look like crap, unlike your example when you uprezzing a 720p to your native resolution, with a pretty stupid, crappy quality software solution (VGA driver).
Besides this almost every better monitor have smart stretch-zoom-etc functions.
Finally 1080p-capable HDTVs are exclusively 1920x1080, not 1920x1200 like your notebook display and they can be had for fair prices. I have a Sceptre 37" here which is native 1920x1080 - excellent piece, you can have it for only $1,500 and looks far better than your notebook display.

PS: My Dell 24" - 1920x1200 native - have no problems with 1080p either.

It's a rough decade for Sony. they lost their position on every other market. Desktop console market is the last one - mobile console market was always owned by Nintendo and PSP is a far cry to be even a just a good performing competitor here - and they are about to lose it finally.

that was a spelling error on my part, i did mean to put P on the end of it, remember, a 720p native and a 1080p native displaying the same content at each resolution will look exactly the same.

displaying it on a device that does ABOVE that resolution (computer monitor) you will see a diffrence in quality, being the size of the display window relative to the rest of the display.

cheese, my display is a 19" samsung syncmaster 997DF, native is 1920x1440, max is 2048x1536.

Wired's excellent, long article about Sony:

»www.wired.com/wired/arch ··· ony.html

Yeah, it's pretty much a non-issue. While most of the processors made will not have all the cells working, the PS3 will be shipping with chips that have either 7 or 8 cells working. There is no reason (yet) to believe these cells have high burnout rates. If I were to buy a PS3 I would wait before buying to see what happens.
It's a further non-issue for me as I'm going for the cheap-o wii.

Ain't that the truth? It's depressing to see how much of my paycheck ends up at Target, WalMart, & Kohl's.

I'm more a fan-boy of oldskool. I'm not happy at the prices of the software (X360 titles average=$59.99).

I think that if Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo each released a system at $299 and titles at $29.99, they would each fluctuate around 1/3 market share.

I am not a fanboy. I can afford each system, and would glady get one of each if there was a title worth it. I would not hav e a GC if not for playing ResEvil4 on someone elses. I would not have Xbox if not for playing halo on a friend's. I do have a 360 and none of my friends do. They have toddlers and financially, they are wiser.

Spend your $700+ . But don't be ignorant of other platforms.

"Who's more the fool, the fool or the fool that follows the fool"---O.K.

Well said. Though I somewhat liked Halo, it became a boring game with in a few months. The 360 has no games to my liking. The Wii's controller looks quite impressive (especially at their E3 intro)

however does HD matter to you for gaming? i still have N64, SNES and even a few NES games id enjoy. point is HD is just a Novelty for video games and is being used to sell games with poor gameplay.

I doubt anyone will be playing 1080p games at 60fps anytime soon either.

Which is probably the main reason that no one is releasing any 1080p games at launch.

Man, I plugged in my HD-DVD player to HDMI, and it got an IP from my router. Wild.

that's the callhome, it's 1 of the 3 diffrent literations of DHCP.

the other two, are watermarking, and self distruct.

Consdiering the 360 is not capable of displaying 1080p I'd say no. 360 games use the same old DVD technology that the XBOX and PS2 use so how can it show games in high def? Blu-ray/HD-DVD is new technology so in 2 or 3 years when the full potentional of those 50 GB Blu-ray discs are realized the PS3 will show why it is vastly superior to the 360. How far can games go with regular DVDs that hold 9 GB at most? Unless omeone comes up with a deca-layer DVD format.

Hmmmmmmm....From Samsung Website.....

The Samsung Sync Master 997df is a 19-inch CRT monitor offering 0.20mm horizontal dot pitch, 30-96 kHz horizontal frequency, 50-160 Hz vertical frequency and a maximum 1920 x 1440 resolution. It utilizes Samsung DynaFlatTM display technology, which has no visible curvature of the internal screen surface (horizontally or vertically)resulting in razor-sharp images without distortion and only minimal glare.

Your TV sets will not support 1080p.

It's HDCP, not DHCP, which is completely different.

You need to educate yourself before posting Sony fanboy drivel about something you obviously know nothing about. There is a difference between encoding in 1080p for movies and rendering in 1080p for games. DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-Ray are nothing but storage formats. It's the politics of those formats that determine what they can and cannot do. The DVD forum will not allow for DVD's to output an HD source, but the format is capable of doing so. High Def movies can fit into the 9Gb that a DVD offers if one uses the right codecs and compression like WMV-HD. As for gaming in HD people have been doing that on the PC for years already even when most games were on CD.

Ok, how good will a 1080p video look on a 720p screen?

Only as good as the lower res screen will display, no more.

You can't create more pixels than are there.

Watching a 720p video source on a 1080p capable display will either be WAY letterboxed, or stretched to unwanted pixelation.
No confusion there.

From across the room, your TV will look better than my laptop screen at the same distance, up close... not so.
At 1920x1080, there are fewer of pixels. Plus, bigger screen, bigger pixels.

All you are getting is more distance, not a better picture.

PS: My laptop has 17" display.

If you are dealing with a source that has the same resolution, lets say, for example, a standard 1080i source is being displayed, it's somewhat true that both a 720p and 1080p HDTV will display a very similar picture. The quality won't be much different, but they will not be exactly the same.

The 720p unit will convert the 1080i source to 720p. The 1080p unit will simply de-interlace each frame. The pixel per second count of 720p and 1080i is roughly the same but that's the only simularity.

A 1080i signal does not exactly equate to a 720p image when de-interlaced. It depends on several factors. It depends on the motion detection capabilities of the TV's video processor, it depends on the compression of the original source, and more. A 1080i image can only natively de-interlace to 1080p. For a 1080i image to be displayed at 720p, it must be converted. The two 540 interlace frames that make up a 1080i frame are summed and doubled. So it's really doubled to 1080p. The biggest reason why we had 720p displays and not 1080p displays is simply because it was easier to make a display to handle the amount of data involved with a 720 line non-interlaced image. The amount of data in a 1080i frame and 720p image are almost the same, but not the actual resolution. A 1080 line non-interlaced image has about double the pixel rate, right at 2 million per frame. That's a crap load of data. Not to mention Texas Instruments was not able to make a DLP chip that had 1080 lines of resolution and it was also cheaper and easier to make a LCD screen or rear projector with 720 lines of vertical resolution instead of 1080. But now, the technology involved has gotten better, production costs have decreased and Ti has a 1080 DLP chip and the other manufacturers have followed suit. Other technologies could recreate 1080 lines easier, like CRT for instance. Those have for the most part always been 1080i. But their electronics were not advanced enough to handle 2 MP frames and there were not any 1080p sources anyway.

Yes, with computers, the situation is different. With games or Windows programs, the detail increases with increased resolution because every pixel has it's own output. But when dealing with video on the computer, like playing DVD or video file, just like with a TV, the increased resolution makes no difference. The image is simply scaled to match the higher resolution, but there is no increase in quality what so ever. One pixel in the original image becomes several. The image quality can actually be a lot worse, depending on how well it is scaled. It cannot, however, EVER be better, only worse.

I can push my GPU that far as well, that doesn't make it the Native res though.

Could be worst than that on EBAY like me :D

diffrence between mine and yours.

CRT, 4:3

and if you want to get specific, it's "native" is 1600x1200, with it's max being 1920x1440, and overscan to 2048x1536.

Well I guess the PRICE is what counts for the extras..

XB360: $399
PS3: $599-699
Wii: $200-250

And all the games I'd like to play again since I sold my N64 games foolishly

Mario 64 especially.

Does anyone know if the Wii has a port to plug in Gamecube memory cards?

Irrelavent, you seem to have missed this:

Maximum resolution: 1920 x 1440 at 64 Hz
Recommended resolution: 1600 x 1200 at 76 Hz
Maximum refresh rate: 1024 x 768 at 85 Hz
Horizontal frequency: 30 - 96 kHz
Vertical frequency: 50 - 160 Hz

That would make your Native 1600x1200 friend!

"cheese, my display is a 19" samsung syncmaster 997DF, native is 1920x1440, max is 2048x1536."

Uh, yeah.

I give up friend, you believe whatever you want.