PS3 a 1000 times the power of PS2? I don't think so!

[Megadrive1988]

from the IGN article that Wunderchu linked to:

November 17, 1999 - According to a news release on AsiaBizTech, Shin-ichi Okamoto said, "We are working to create the PlayStation3 game machine so it will have 1,000 times the performance of the PlayStation2." Okamota, senior vice president of the research and development division of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., said this when he gave a keynote speech at the "Microcomputer System & Tool Fair '99" held at Tokyo Big Site from Nov. 10-12.

Conker:

And as for all the talk about Ray Tracing in that other tread...yeah, what ever. No chance of that happening until PlayStation 4, Xbox 3.

yes I pretty much agree. even *if* PS3 was able to handle limited amounts / limited quality of ray tracing on modestly complex models & environments, I highly doubt ray tracing will be used in PS3 games. or that ray tracing will be the norm. PS3 won't be powerful enough to handle full on ray tracing on complex models and in complex environments. even if PS3 reached 6.2 Tflops and truly was 1,000x more powerful than PS2. I'll bet that even the supposed 16 Tflops Cell workstations won't be able to handle full highend true raytracing.

I would think that ray tracing and other similar types of rendering will not be feasible until at least Xbox3-PlayStation4-Gamecube3, and maybe not even then.

the only way I see ray tracing happening is if Sony, Nvidia, ATI and others scoop up some of these highly inovative teams that are working on realtime ray tracing with a tiny fraction of the transistor budget and clockspeed of modern highend CPUs & GPUs, and give these miracle workers a massive transistor & clockspeed budget.



colon:

sony also said that ps2 would not render polygons, with heavy hinting that everything would be NURBS years before the ps2 launch. i wish i could find the interview...

Yeah, I think I know what you're talking about! the following may or may not be exactly it, but here:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group...playstation/msg/ab6ce16cab4b04d6?dmode=source

Will the PlayStation 2 be more powerful than Sega's Dreamcast?An article we wrote about two months ago said it best. "During an interview with engineering trade publication EE Times in July (1998), SCEA Chief Ken Kutaragi laid bare his feelings on conventional, polygon-centric architectures -- such as that proposed for Sega's forthcoming
Dreamcast console. 'Graphics-chip vendors in Silicon Valley today are all doing the same thing. They are obsessed with the polygon race. Their Research and Development goals are so near-sighted that they are only paying attention to gradual changes in graphics technologies that can be developed in lockstep with the short-term PC product-development cycle,' said Kutaragi.

Does this mean we can anticipate PlayStation 2 (or whatever it's eventually dubbed) to signal the dawn of a new era in visual quality? That appears to be the goal. According to Kutaragi, 'Today's videogame graphics look like computer graphics. Our goal is to achieve a film-like graphics quality that won't make viewers conscious of or annoyed by the fact that they are indeed looking at computer graphics.' And for that to happen, it will take a major re-thinking of how visuals are produced.
One which may very well mean and end to the polygon."

the Kutaragi quotes are from July 1998, and that is the single most ridiculous piece of hype from Sony, ever, regarding Playstation2, imho. -- It far, far eclipses the 'Toy Story graphics' hype that happened later in 1999 when PS2 technology was unvieled and the months after, mostly thanks to the media hype getting out of control and Sony's unwillingness to burst that bubble


here a few other links to basicly the same thing:
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Stadium/1023/psx2.html
http://www.megagames.com/ps2/ps2_gfx.shtml

edit: colon, you said interview. okay this is most likely it:

Early PlayStation 2 Rumblings
http://ps2.ign.com/articles/072/072965p1.html October 02, 1998

again, the same Kutaragi HYPE quotes about 'an end to the polygon' and 'film-like graphics quality'

 

[Qroach]

yep, I fell for it last time. I can predict we'll see teh same level of hype this time around. Infact we already are to some extent.

 

[Conker Live]

Good info Megadrive1988.

I have to admit that I fell for the hype of the PS2 last time too...but certainly not this time. I will only believe the power of a next gen machine after I see a real time interactive demo...nothing less.

 

[Farid]

yep, I fell for it last time. I can predict we'll see teh same level of hype this time around. Infact we already are to some extent.

Actually, any hype calls for a backlash, that's the natural order of the things. The problem with the PS2 hype resides in how big was people disapointement when fronting the launch game for the first time. The IQ was simply shit... And therefore people didn't forgive a bit of the hype.

The problem with any hype is not to have a backlash or not, because it's inevitable, the problem is to try to have the smaller backlash possible.
In other words, you have to deliver enough "wow-factor" to the people, and naturally, a majority of them will let you get away with the others BS promises you may have previously done.

 

[Lazy8s]

The PS2 just a normal videogame machine?

"You can communicate to a new cybercity," gushes Ken Kutaragi, the visionary behind the PlayStation. "This will be the ideal home server. Did you see the movie 'The Matrix'? Same interface. Same concept. Starting from next year, you can jack into 'The Matrix'!"

"It's historic, a mass-market appliance that fundamentally changes society in the way the printing press did," says Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts and CEO of 3DO. "This is a new canvas for humanity that takes us back to our nature."

'I just finished this movie (Star Wars Episode One, The Phantom Menace) which is kind of state-of-the-art and we were sitting there being extremely proud of ourselves, and then they put this toy on the desk that is even more powerful. We struggled for years to get there, and a year from now, it is gonna be available to everybody. It is astounding.'
George Lucas

In addition to the 'polygon race', there were also some memorable quotes from Kutaragi regarding Model 3's relative capabilities and also ROM storage space as the limiting factor in next generation's games.

 

[Qroach]

Wow what a load of crap!

 

[London Geezer]

Some of those quotes are CLASSIC!

"Have you seen the movie the Matrix? Same Interface!!"

YEAH LET'S ALL STICK LONG METAL POINTY PLUG THINGS IN OUR BRAINS!!!!

 

[one]

Hey you guys should learn the art of hype surfing when you get out of adolescence

 

[rabidrabbit]

Will the PlayStation 2 be more powerful than Sega's Dreamcast?An article we wrote about two months ago said it best. "During an interview with engineering trade publication EE Times in July (1998), SCEA Chief Ken Kutaragi laid bare his feelings on conventional, polygon-centric architectures -- such as that proposed for Sega's forthcoming
Dreamcast console. 'Graphics-chip vendors in Silicon Valley today are all doing the same thing. They are obsessed with the polygon race. Their Research and Development goals are so near-sighted that they are only paying attention to gradual changes in graphics technologies that can be developed in lockstep with the short-term PC product-development cycle,' said Kutaragi.

Does this mean we can anticipate PlayStation 2 (or whatever it's eventually dubbed) to signal the dawn of a new era in visual quality? That appears to be the goal. According to Kutaragi, 'Today's videogame graphics look like computer graphics. Our goal is to achieve a film-like graphics quality that won't make viewers conscious of or annoyed by the fact that they are indeed looking at computer graphics.' And for that to happen, it will take a major re-thinking of how visuals are produced.
One which may very well mean and end to the polygon."

I don't see that comment as a direct answer to PS2's graphical capabilities, neither do I see the interviewer directly asking it.

If you read it, it's obvious they were talking about future beyond PS2. At least that's how I understand it.

...but that Matrix comment........1000x

 

[London Geezer]

I also read that comment as a vission of the future he has, not necessarily for PS2. But i think everyone else wants games not to look like CG, but more like reality, that's stating the obvious.

 

[Phil]

the Kutaragi quotes are from July 1998, and that is the single most ridiculous piece of hype from Sony, ever, regarding Playstation2, imho. -- It far, far eclipses the 'Toy Story graphics' hype that happened later in 1999 when PS2 technology was unvieled and the months after, mostly thanks to the media hype getting out of control and Sony's unwillingness to burst that bubble

I don't know what you were playing on back in 1998, but I was just getting into my 1 year-old PlayStation and considering all the graphical flaws it had back then (pixelated, unfiltered, clipping, bad-framerates) - which of course was as good as one could imagine back then - anything eliminating those flaws would be like a major step up. Of course, 8 years later, such remarks and claims become quite stupid - but back then, those claims simply had a different meaning and took the situation back then we had with computer graphics into account.

It's like speculating today what will be possible next generation. In reality, we just don't know what to expect. We have an idea of what we'd like to see, but in the end, will just have to wait and see. I'm sure some remarks made by people hit by the hype will say things that again in 8 years, we'll say is utter stupidity. It's all relative.

And one has to be careful not to mix-up what Kutaragi said in the end and what was added/said by the writer of the article. In the end, it might be some casual interviewer with not the slightest ideas about what is involved in computer graphics and is simply stuck up by using terms not quite aware what they mean and what they do (addressing the very last comment in the bolded paragraph you quoted -> "end to the polygon").

 

[one]

And one has to be careful not to mix-up what Kutaragi said in the end and what was added/said by the writer of the article. In the end, it might be some casual interviewer with not the slightest ideas about what is involved in computer graphics and is simply stuck up by using terms not quite aware what they mean and what they do (addressing the very last comment in the bolded paragraph you quoted -> "end to the polygon").

Yeah 'end to the polygon' is clearly not the idea of Kutaragi. Seeing the same article, it was merely added by the author who wanted to speculate other means such as voxels. Is the original eetimes interview with Kutaragi about PS2 available somewhere?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I agree wth Phil here. I missed the original PS2 hype so see it in a different light to those 'bitten' by it. I've gone looking for PS2 hype but found little. Glad to have it revisited here.

One example I did find was a statement PS2 could do in realtime what took ages to render for Terminator2. But that's true, to a degree, as T2 was raytraced and PS2 could manage the same effect with a reflection-mapped poly surface.

The first game I saw on PS2 was GT3, and that was mindblowing; a definite leap in CG quality. Especially in the replay's with the fancy camera effects, the results were very realistic. Compare with what we were used to PS2 could in some ways offer a display that wasn't so CG looking, but it's far from the look of realism that sounds like was promised.

Another limiting factor was software. If you compare the best of the latest games with the release titles of PS2 when coders had no idea how to write for it, there's a generation of quality difference. Perhaps if PS2 had launched with the games we now have, people wouldn't have seen the promises as hype, because the quality now is a generation ahead of what was available at PS2's launch.

Still, comments like Lucas's make you wonder. What did he see on PS2? A simple duck model, that was realistic but too simple to have practical application? Looking at StartWars:Battlefields we're nothing like at Film Quality.

In all though, I think the context of the statements, hyperbole as they are, needs be taken into account. Comparing GT3 to GT2 we do see that change from simple poly's to realistically textured and lit scenes, certainly more comparable with real TV footage than the previous CGs. I think we could read the same hyperbole into KK's current promises for Cell. What we'll see might not be real-time SW:Episode 2, the Jedi battle in the arena, but it will be such a significant shift that PS2 games will look extremely poor by comparison, in the same way the once good-looking GT2 on PS1 now looks and plays like an old pixelated arcade game.

 

[Lazy8s]

The funniest peculiarity to come out of that article is how the writer managed a comparison between Dreamcast and PS2 where the DC was the one to get labeled a "conventional, polygon-centric architecture".

 

[London Geezer]

The funniest peculiarity to come out of that article is how the writer managed a comparison between Dreamcast and PS2 where the DC was the one to get labeled a "conventional, polygon-centric architecture".

What's funnier is that he managed a comparison before even DC came out, when nothing was known about DC and even less about PS2. That's quite neat.

Reminds me of... errr... Today.