PS Business Briefing 2006 March official info

[GB123]

Games have been shown, whether you take them at face value or not. If you don't, E3 is right around the corner.

Pre-render footage has been shown and yes E3 is around the corner that will be the time to get excited when we actually see something new and get more facts.

I see this as nothing more than Sony say "We are still here don't forget us" they pulled it off brilliantly and i congratulate them for it.

 

[zRifle1z]

Titano, I'm just quoting you for an example and this is not directed towards you.

Ya know after seeing what the XBXO 360 was capable of I was really looking forward to enjoying the PS3 in 2007 when it would be available. I am just interested in it for the games, and after attending E3 last year I knew Sony was blowing smoke about a spring release.

As Sony continues to "hide" actual in-game footage of PS3 games, and their intentionally vague PR misinformation campaign, I'm beginning to loose interest. Don't get me wrong, all of the additional functions of the PS3 are nice, but I can do the same things with guess what? A computer.

The point I'm trying to get at is yes Sony is doing a wonderful job marketing what the PS3 "will eventually be capable of at some point", but as Titano’s post and many others over the last 22 pages show, Sony has revealed nothing.

To top it off Sony has successfully side-stepped the issue of not showing games running on the PS3 with what?

A Power Point Presentation.

GDC is going to be something to behold

Well, again I apologize for the above post. I will go back to lerking mode. My post was not an attempt to de-rail the thread, only to add my opinion to what Sony accomplished with no actual game play for the PS3.

 

[onanie]

There was conformation not news.. as far as i see it at least.(news to me is something new)

I dunno, but it looked like you just listed a few news items there, like things that you "didn't expect".

 

[GB123]

I dunno, but it looked like you just listed a few news items there, like things that you "didn't expect".

Yes but i don't think they make much difference at all.

 

[onanie]

Yes but i don't think they make much difference at all.

Ah, so there is news, but now you've retreated to saying that they are insignificant developments, a whole different argument. Why do you think that? Would you not want to have a 60GB hard disk on your 360? Would you not want HDD as standard, even if it is for caching, instead of a split userbase? Would you not want 100% compatibility out of the box with all the games that you accumulated over the years? Did you not want an online service?

 

[scooby_dooby]

I guess you have a great crystal ball. For the rest of us, there was news, and or even just "confirmations" to get excited about. And not just on the PS3 side, but also quite a lot on the PSP side (PSone emulation ftw!!). For example, one might have speculated prior to Wednesday that Sony might include Linux on PS3 hard disks, but held themselves back from getting excited about it, lest they be disappointed. But now we have confirmation, and can get excited about such things. See how it works? Confirmation makes all the difference, it takes you out of the realm of the speculative and gives you something solid to work with.

Just curious, do you still support the position that a WW launch is a mistake? The one you held for so long with regards to the X360? Or has that opinion changed now that PS3 is launching WW.

 

[onanie]

Just curious, do you still support the position that a WW launch is a mistake? The one you held for so long with regards to the X360? Or has that opinion changed now that PS3 is launching WW.

It is a mistake when it is executed with insufficient manufacturing capacity. I think we should be adopting a wait and see attitude.

 

[GB123]

It is a mistake when it is executed with insufficient manufacturing capacity. I think we should be adopting a wait and see attitude.

Wait and see when Sony have already told us what their production rate target is going to be...

And to be honest as much a 60 gb HDD is a nice idea if it cost me £100 i won't be buying one. (we are yet to see if the HDD is in the box as standard, so um yea.... lets wait and see)

I expect nothing less from Sony in regards to playing PS1 and PS2 games... im not a huge fan of backward compatibility but i think it does have its advantages especially in the first year.

No need to be so condesending either..

 

[liolio]

WW launch is the same for MS and Sony.
MS want to be on all the market asap, I don't think they have been surprised by supplies issues even if it should be part of a bad scenarios (i think they made lots of projections/previsions) ( english issue lol).
Now MS is out, doing so so, Ms at this point is not such a scary tread, but they can let the MS user base grow freely, So WW at least consumer have a real choice if supplie issues wil exist at least the product will be there.
So for both it's not really a choice, MS was a challenger and want to go first ( add the fact that the machine is less powerfull), Sony had unknow problem (br + i don't understand why the final dev kit will reach in june) and need to reach all market now.
It will take more or less 1 year to keep up with MS user base. It was the only smart bet Sony can make at this time.
Anyway, japan was a lost cause for MS they should have wait, they are challenger in NA and Europe, nothing in Japan... For Sony it's the hell of a different story.

 

[onanie]

Wait and see when Sony have already told us what their production rate target is going to be...

And to be honest as much a 60 gb HDD is a nice idea if it cost me £100 i won't be buying one. (we are yet to see if the HDD is in the box as standard, so um yea.... lets wait and see)

I expect nothing less from Sony in regards to playing PS1 and PS2 games... im not a huge fan of backward compatibility but i think it does have its advantages especially in the first year.

No need to be so condesending either..

Let's see, Sony has announced a target production rate of 1 million per month. Do you know the NPD figures for US 360 sales in the recent month of february?

 

[Carl B]

There was conformation not news.. as far as i see it at least.(news to me is something new)

I must admit that i didn't expect a WW launch in novemeber, although i did expect a US launch in November.

I expected the PS3 to play PS1 and PS2 games, I didn't expect sony to say to dev's that they should develop for the HDD as standard (but this doesn't really change much, how many xbox games used the HDD for anything other than cacheing)

I don't need the news to be listed to me again because i have read the whole 20 something pages of this thread but i still don't get what there is to be excited over.

If you go back to the first few pages and people saying perhaps Sony will do a better job at the WW launch than MS did, its kind of annoying seeing as Sony can learn from MS's mistakes.

The same people that a few weeks ago said that MS were stupid to try a WW launch are now saying its great because Sony are doing it, i mean COME ON !!..

GB123 I have to say that if you didn't find anything to be of interest, well - then you didn't find anything to be of interest. I can't for the life of me understand why matters of subjective perception keep being brought up as topics for debate in this thread however. For you there was nothing exciting. For others as well. For me there was something exciting. For others as well.

For myself, I've been very eager to know what the release date would be. I got that, and that's all that had I hoped for from this. But on top of that I got the worldwide launch details, confirmation of Linux, confirmation of a Live-like service with a free component, indication that HDD may play a strong role this gen, and some other odds and ends.

Now, to some people this may be like: "well, so what? Didn't you expect this already?"

And perhaps so - though in fact in reality a lot of it was indeed a surprise. But to expect something and be constantly wondering and guessing and to expect something and finally be relieved from that guessing are two different things. I like to know what's going on. This particular event stood out for me on the positive end of things because it was completely unexpected that 'so much' would be discussed, and until a week ago the event as a whole wasn't even known about.

To close I just have to restate my opening sentences though:

GB123 I have to say that if you didn't find anything to be of interest, well - then you didn't find anything to be of interest. I can't for the life of me understand why matters of subjective perception keep being brought up as topics for debate in this thread however. For you there was nothing exciting. For others as well. For me there was something exciting. For others as well.

 

[one]

The current spec (up through 1.2) supports 1080/60p but i did forget about the added color depths. I had thought that BR (and games as well) would only be supporting 8 bit color so i ahdnt even considered the additional video stuff. I'll see if i can dig up more info. I'm pretty sure the big win was for native HD audio stuff though.

H.264/AVC supports 10/12bit color profiles and both Blu-ray and HD-DVD support H.264/AVC.
http://videosystems.com/e-newsletters/whats_name_h264/

3) Last-minute additions to the H.264 standard in 2004 (called fidelity range extensions or FRExt) established a new set of High profiles supporting up to 4:4:4 chroma sampling at 12 bits per sample and coding efficiencies up to 3:1 over previous compression technologies. H.264 High profiles have since been incorporated into both the DVD Forum’s HD-DVD specification (read only) and competing BD-ROM specification of the Blu-ray Disc Association.

For games, I think it's obvious that tonemapping FP16 data into 8bit colors to output to TV is not desirable in terms of best image quality.

 

[mckmas8808]

Pre-render footage has been shown and yes E3 is around the corner that will be the time to get excited when we actually see something new and get more facts.

I see this as nothing more than Sony say "We are still here don't forget us" they pulled it off brilliantly and i congratulate them for it.

If you want games fine. Because Sony has come out of the closet, EA has now released this.

Keep your eyes open for more released GAMES information later.

 

[Rockster]

Another word of caution in estimating MS's manufacturing capabilities, all prior months have been with two manufacturing plants, with the third only just now coming online. Just something else to take into consideration.

A question about the new HDMI deeper color spec to all you techies, doesn't the GPU resolve back to 32-bit color when displaying the image, regardless of the actual frame buffer depth?

In terms of who will win, there doesn't seem to be much discussion about the effect content will have in the race. I often wonder how the PS2 would have done without GTA. There was a period of time after its release that PS2's were actually in short supply because of the demand. It might only take a few hits on one platform that the other doesn't have to swing the tide. My two cents.

 

[Dave Baumann]

It does resolve it to a format that the display pipeline handles, however I'm not aware of NVIDIA handling anything other than 8-bit per component in the display pipe. It just means that for higher colour displays this gets upscaled from display pipeline depth in the hardware.

 

[GB123]

If you want games fine. Because Sony has come out of the closet, EA has now released this.

Keep your eyes open for more released GAMES information later.

Multiplatform my friend, who's to know which dev kit these are from ..

 

[one]

It does resolve it to a format that the display pipeline handles, however I'm not aware of NVIDIA handling anything other than 8-bit per component in the display pipe. It just means that for higher colour displays this gets upscaled from display pipeline depth in the hardware.

Does it use a different pass from video playback?
The HDMI part is probably handled by a Sillicon Image chip with an HDCP key.

 

[Dave Baumann]

Does it use a different pass from video playback?

AFAIK the display pipeline is where the the video processing is handled.

The HDMI part is probably handled by a Sillicon Image chip with an HDCP key.

I'd be surprised if that was the case, truthfully, as NVIDIA have integrated two dual-link TMDS transmitters into G71, which is likely the case for RSX as well. HDCP is already incorperated into NVIDIA parts but it will require either another chip to store the HDCP license key or a special video ROM may be used where the key is programmed at manufacture time.

Note, this cropped up in an analyst report for NVIDIA following the presentation from Sony:

We forecast no royalties coming from PS3 for Nvidia in the April or July quarters, however have a modest amount in the October quarter (a few million dollars), which can be more than offset by increased licensing Sony has been paying Nvidia for interface work on the PS3. For reference, PS3 licensing for Nvidia's April quarter is $20 million. We believe the PS3 news should have no impact on NVDA shares today.

It sounds to me like NVIDIA is helping out a lot implementing the latest HDMI interface.

Note: AFAIK the next gen HDMI will be a different connector than the current one. If that is the case then I'm not sure whether there will just be a convertor to fit on to current HDMI ports (but obviously operating at current single-link bandwidths).

 

[GB123]

Note: AFAIK the next gen HDMI will be a different connector than the current one. If that is the case then I'm not sure whether there will just be a convertor to fit on to current HDMI ports (but obviously operating at current single-link bandwidths).

Damn they need to stop changing connectors, I'm glad i haven't bought a HDTV yet..

 

[one]

Note, this cropped up in an analyst report for NVIDIA following the presentation from Sony:

Thanks for the info, I thought it requires a SilliconImage chip because according to this article
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2006/0109/ubiq143.htm
for Qosmio laptop with HD DVD Toshiba implemented HDMI in GeForce Go 7600 with the assistance of NVIDIA and Toshiba says it uses a SiliconImage chip. Then, for the next-gen HDMI and iTMDS, currently only SiliconImage offers this chip
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060103/sftu042.html?.v=40
and Ken Kutaragi said at PS Business Briefing 2006 March that they were asking a maker of an LSI that supports the next-gen HDMI to supply it for PS3 right after the spec is done.

Note: AFAIK the next gen HDMI will be a different connector than the current one. If that is the case then I'm not sure whether there will just be a convertor to fit on to current HDMI ports (but obviously operating at current single-link bandwidths).

Where did you read that?
http://www.hdmi.org/press/pr/pr_20060103.asp

New mini connector: With small portable devices such as HD camcorders and still cameras demanding seamless HDTV connectivity, HDMI will offer a new, smaller form-factor connector option. Since HDMI offers the highest quality digital audio and video on a single connection, such devices will be also benefit from a reduced connector count.
...
Products implementing these new versions of the HDMI specification will continue to be fully backward compatible with earlier HDMI products.