[PC-Engine]

Anyone notice the superduper 7.1 ch surround sound is now plain 2 ch stereo?

[Paul]

Originally Posted by PC-Engine

Anyone notice the superduper 7.1 ch surround sound is now plain 2 ch stereo?

Jokes on you Jr. It's still 7.1 channels, he was just saying that PSP wouldn't have 7 damn speakers on it. Hook it up to capable external hardware.

[PC-Engine]

Originally Posted by Paul

Jokes on you Jr. It's still 7.1 channels, he was just saying that PSP wouldn't have 7 damn speakers on it. Hook it up to capable external hardware.

Ascending closer to the surface of the system, and issues laymen can get a slightly better handle on, Coombes addressed some questions about the PSP's sound hardware and video playback capabilities. The mention of 7.1-channel surround sound support in Sony's earlier spec lists raised a few eyebrows, but he brought that speculation a little closer to earth -- the PSP will have only ordinary stereo sound output (whether with its speakers or headphones), and sound development for the system will use the same tools developers are familiar with from the PS2. The PSP's H.246 video codec support, meanwhile, will play back movies from both the UMD drive and users' Memory Sticks, so you won't be limited to watching commercially-released UMD movies.

Paul, you're probably the only one on this messageboard capable of imagining 7 tiny speakers and a tiny subwoofer being designed into a handheld. Why in the world would you want 7/8 speakers located within a 4" radius? If you were the size of an ant then that logic may make some sense.

[marconelly!]

7.1 was overkill anyways. Noone is going to miss it, that is for sure.

Death Jr game is, I would say, of quality of lower-end DC games. Definitely not as high geometry or textures as good DC games, but quite solid particle effects (up there with best on DC) and very smooth framerate. Not so bad for a game running on some alpha emulator, from what I consider to be a no-name developer, when it comes to modern 3D games.

Water effect demo however, is better than waters I've seen in games on DC, and more upto stuff I've seen on PS2 recently, in R-Type Final for example. I couldn't see any flaw in water surface tesselation, but again, video is very poor, so I might be wrong.

[Ty]

Originally Posted by Lazy8s

They're poor captures and poor displays; I can't help that. I just made sure the examples I presented tried to conform to comparability.

Far better than the captures of the Death Jr. though. And I think the water effect (what little we could see) was already better than anything I've seen in a DC game.

[Lazy8s]

marconelly!:

Death Jr game is, I would say, of quality of lower-end DC games.

I felt M2 noting how ledges are squared off and rooms have a rather open design, and the repetition, detail, and filtering of the textures. Likening a game based on the appearance of its effects seems more reliable than comparing it to a generalization of the low end in quality for a platform, since the low end is inherently made up of the games which demonstrate the uniqueness of its architecture the least. As an extreme example, on the low end of every platform you get your Namco Arcade Museum games (likewise, DC got accelerated PSone jobs.)

Water effect demo however, is better than waters I've seen in games on DC

Nice, though still a straightforward-looking spline patch with low-res enviro mapping - nothing that should give a DC game any trouble if someone were to design that effect.

[_phil_]

psst !... hey ! ... Hint : the DC would have to display that stuff on a TV.... !!! : not the PSP (nooo? kidding ? ) .

[wazoo]

Originally Posted by marconelly!

and very smooth framerate. Not so bad for a game running on some alpha emulator,

The vodeo could have been prerecorded. There is no hint on the real framerate. We'll have to wait for E3 for that kind of impression.

from what I consider to be a no-name developer, when it comes to modern 3D games.

this dev (and Vicarious Visions) will be in charge of a lot of PSP games, you can bet. So, a lot of PSP 3d games will depend on their 3D skills.

[Paul]

If some people here think that PSP is only capable of N64 visuals thus far, what makes you think DS is going to give you roughly the same? PSP is a few leagues ahead of DS in specs.

I think a few people are making final judgements on a small low res video of a PSP game not even run on final hardware.

Wait until E3 to make final judgements, I think the stuff from Namco, Konami and others are going to amaze.

Though I am amazed by Death Jr, Unlike some I only expected around Bleemcast quality visuals(topic was "Let's talk PSP games and design", and I am now shocked. Keep expectations low, come away blown away, I learned this.

[Megadrive1988]

Paul, I thought that water demo alone shows that PSP is vastly more powerful than Nintendo64. That demo was beyond what I've seen from Dreamcast even.
I think we can tell from that water demo PSP has lots of fillrate and polygon crunching power.

I like that the PSP has many built-in hardware effects that had to be done in software on PS2.

I think that's probably good news for PS3's GPU as well.

[notAFanB]

I can see alot of people here are in denial.

the framerate is good but apart from that I cannot see the PSP's custom hardware coming off anywhere. round 1...meh.

[Paul]

PSP is between a DC(Better) and a PS2(Somewhat less powerful) in hardware.

Your going to have to wait a while to see some more games in action though.

[Deadmeat]

PSP is between a DC(Better) and a PS2(Somewhat less powerful) in hardware.

Too bad PSP titles are clearly sub-DC quality and approximates N64 quality...

Your going to have to wait a while to see some more games in action though.

PSP will never match DC quality until it packs 26 MB of RAM.... It's the RAM capacity that decides how the game looks, not FLOPS...

[notAFanB]

Originally Posted by Paul

PSP is between a DC(Better) and a PS2(Somewhat less powerful) in hardware.

raw spec wise yes, but I'd like to see some numbers regarding efficiency later. that and the final RAM spec would be nice too.

Your going to have to wait a while to see some more games in action though.

yup

[Paul]

Too bad PSP titles are clearly sub-DC quality and approximates N64 quality...

Titles? There is one low res video of a PSP game running on an Emulator and you judge all PSP games from this? I've come to expect this from you..

It's the RAM capacity that decides how the game looks

so MS could just upgrade Xbox2 with 2GB of memory right? And it would look just like a Xbox2 hardware game using 512mb. Give me a break, memory isn't the final electron acceptor so to speak. It's a balance.

[Deadmeat]

so MS could just upgrade Xbox2 with 2GB of memory right?

But MS is not out to lose money on Xbox Next.

And it would look just like a Xbox2 hardware game using 512mb.

A game specifically targetted toward 2 GB Xbox Next will look better than one targetted at 512 MB version, developers have more texture and vertices to play with. Isn't this so obvious???

Give me a break, memory isn't the final electron acceptor so to speak.

What happens when you cross the CPU clockspeed of PSX2 with the memory capacity of N64+ExpansionPack? You get N64 quality graphics, as evident by Death Jr.

[Paul]

But MS is not out to lose money on Xbox Next.

Play scenario we're not talking literal.

A game specifically targetted toward 2 GB Xbox Next will look better than one targetted at 512 MB version,

I'm talking about a Xbox with 2GB of memory vs a Xbox next with 512mb.

The Xbox next game would look better. Aw hell, Sony can even deck out a PSONE with 4GB of memory, would it look better than a PS3 with around 500mb total memory Deadmeat?

The textures would be incredible high res, then again the geometry, frame rate, particles, shader complexity, would all suck.

What happens when you cross the CPU clockspeed of PSX2 with the memory capacity of N64+ExpansionPack? You get N64 quality graphics, as evident by Death Jr

I hardly concider Death JR to be N64 quality, I don't even know where you guys are getting this from. It looks DC+ to me, and it's even low res, not final hardware made by a dev not well known for their graphics.

[Megadrive1988]

1.) PSP is far superier to Nintendo64. just how much better it is compared to Dreamcast, remains to be seen. it is possible PSP could have less texture quality than Dreamcast, in poor games.

2.) RAM memory *is* a major factor in how much can be done on any platform. certainly, the DC, the PS2, the GCN and the Xbox would have been capable of more impressive games if they had more memory. memory is not the only thing that matters, but it is a large issue.

3.) PSP has faster memory than Dreamcast. even though PSP may or may not have more memory than Dreamcast, or as much as Dreamcast. obviously if PSP has 32 MB, then it has more than Dreamcast.

4.) wait until we see some PSP games made by top developers such as Namco, before saying PSP is N64-class.

[passerby]

Actually I'm surprised that there are still some important details that are still unknown. Were any of these revealed in the "programming the PSP" track?

1) Confirmed battery life?
2) "Save" medium? (Likely memory stick)
3) Confirmed +32MB RAM?

[Lazy8s]

_phil_:

psst !... hey ! ... Hint : the DC would have to display that stuff on a TV.... !!! : not the PSP (nooo? kidding ? ) .

A Dreamcast portable would be giving you FSAA for free, so image definition would be retained from its 640x480 incarnation.

Paul:

I think a few people are making final judgements on a small low res video of a PSP game not even run on final hardware.

I'm only making judgements on Death Jr., which is obviously not very representative of the PSP's potential.

Wait until E3 to make final judgements, I think the stuff from Namco, Konami and others are going to amaze.

It should impress; that's what they do.

PSP is between a DC(Better) and a PS2(Somewhat less powerful) in hardware.

In some ways, though I don't think many people understand the DC spec sheet very well.

Also, a lot of people tend to think that an equivalent texelixel ratio between PSP and DC evens them out, but they forget that, while said condition does help, our eyes still easily see the absolute scale where PSP is simply outputting less res detail.

I hardly concider Death JR to be N64 quality, I don't even know where you guys are getting this from. It looks DC+ to me

Death Jr. looks DC+ to you? I want you to think about what you've just said.

"I look at Sonic Adventure 2, and clearly it's PS2+ level." Uh oh, I've just created a paradox.

[_phil_]

It's the RAM capacity that decides how the game looks

no.it's art.But you couldn't probably understand.It's MORE complex than technical stuff...

[Jacob]

Originally Posted by Deadmeat

PSP will never match DC quality until it packs 26 MB of RAM.... It's the RAM capacity that decides how the game looks, not FLOPS...

Of course.

And, as you said in that other thread, we saw the biggest jump from second to third gen because the difference in RAM was much bigger than the actual one.

It had nothing to do with the change from 2D to 3D, as anyone else would say. Stupid people.


Why is everybody making next gen systems?

Well, as you say, it's due to the boost in performance that more memory will bring, but then, why include all those fast processors, faster memory and next-next-gen GPUs that only serve to increase the cost of the machine, when they could just cram a huge ammount of slow memory in there and get to never before seen levels of performance? We could skip an entire gen, maybe even two.

Hardware engineers are incredibly stupid, I tell you.


Have fun buying all those costly and extremely limited "next gen" consoles; I'm upgrading my Game Boy with 100 TBs of RAM.

The matrix, here I come.

[Paul]

Death Jr. looks DC+ to you? I want you to think about what you've just said.

Overall the game looks like your average DC game, in some ways it's better. I give it a DC+, don't look into it too much.

[marconelly!]

I felt M2 noting how ledges are squared off and rooms have a rather open design, and the repetition, detail, and filtering of the textures.

Filtering is bi or tri linear with mip mapping. It's hard to tell with all the camera blurring. I know they use biliniear for the texh demos, as they've said to. That's the same thing most DC games have AFAIK, and I have no idea if M2 was supposed to be capable of it or not. I just find it hard to compare an existing game to something I've never actually seen running, (and that never existed), so that's why I chose lower-end of DC spectrum (or PS2 spectrum for that matter). To tell you the truth, I feel this Death Jr. game actually appears nicer and more solid than many low end 3D PS2 and DC games. It just seem very fluid, and with very nice particle effects, some realtime projected shadows, nice 'bouncy' animation that suggests there's some keyframe interpolation going on. Also, there are no obvious flaws, like polygon seams, cracks, clipping, etc. Sure, it doesn't compare favorably with the better offerings on either DC or PS2, but let's see what future brings. I'm hoping for the best. The big thing, IMO is if the UMD offers enough streaming throughput that would allow for the creation of games like SSX3, that could stream not only their graphics, but music as well. That would actually bring the PSP on the level substantially close to what we have with modern games on today's consoles, even if it's graphics don't match in raw terms.

Nice, though still a straightforward-looking spline patch with low-res enviro mapping - nothing that should give a DC game any trouble if someone were to design that effect.

Yeah, I agree - but again that shows that the tech there seems to be more on the level of consoles like DC or PS2 than older hardware.

[Ty]

Originally Posted by Deadmeat

[Too bad PSP titles are clearly sub-DC quality and approximates N64 quality...

By what games are you already judging the PSP on?

Originally Posted by Deadmeat

PSP will never match DC quality until it packs 26 MB of RAM.... It's the RAM capacity that decides how the game looks, not FLOPS...

And how many games have you developed for? Do you always over generalize as much as possible?