War notes

A good post I read written by someone commenting on Joystiq’s news comment form:

I would like to add some insight to that and possibly have people learn why SONY is having trouble with getting the PS3 out so soon. What most don't realize is that the PS3 was designed from the begining to be a media device and not necessarily a "next-gen" gaming machine (It may have been SONY's idea of what next-gen would be). The cell processor performs best as a multihead DVR capable of streaming, decoding and encoding multiple streams of video. It does that because that's what SONY really designed it for. Ken Kutaragi was probably under the impression that making a unified CPU for media and gaming functionality will allow SONY to market their failed "PSX" device a lot cheaper. SONY's understanding of next-gen gaming was that the main CPU of the cell (running at 3.0GHz) would be next-gen enough along with the 7 SPUs used as GPU pipes to process vertex and pixel streams. With the challenge from the XBox camp with their XNA tools, SONY needed to counter that with an easy to use SDK. In doing so, it was only then that they realized their mistake. They may have been building the ultimate media center device, but in gaming capabilities, the PS3 would fall flat on it's face due to it's inability to implement powerful and efficient GPU functionality with it's 7 SPUs. Their assumption of extrapolating the 2 VPUs of the PS2 to 7 SPUs in the PS3 was a pathetic attempt at making a next-gen console considering the technological advances happening in the PC gaming markets, not to mention the state-of-the-art gaming GPU that they heard ATI was making exclusively for the next-gen XBox.
You can imagine the trouble Kutaragi San must have gotten into when he realized that he would not only have to increase the cost of the hardware significantly by including a GPU and all the plumbing, etc required to accomodate it, but also have to push out the release of the console significantly in order to accomodate these changes.
In such desperate times, was the SONY nVidia alliance born to proclaim the PS3 as a nex-gen game console rightfully. On the brighter side, going with nVidia brings some really nice things to the PS3. nVidia is one of the strong voices on the OpenGL ARB and also have their own dev tools that have been deployed in the PC gaming world and the PS3 gets to use all of those. They now have a decent counter-attack for XNA. With E3 looming up and Microsoft poised to make a sure-shot announcement to release their next-gen console, SONY had to show up and steal the show somehow. They did exactly that. Announcements like BlueRay DVD inclusion and impressive demos stole the show. Having come this far, there are still troubles with the PS3 as a gaming device. To name a few..

• Cache coherency and the transfer of data between the CPU and the SPUs. Basically different game threads will have trouble sharing data. To their disadvantage, XBox 360 just rocks in this department.


• BlueRay is bleeding edge technology and as a result the first-gen drives are not going to be smooth in terms of various perf. characteristics (like the seek times and transfer rates) and doubling them as DVD drives has it's own issues as well.


• Their software emulation layer for the backwards compatibility isn't going as smooth as they want it to be. The sheer number of games that made PS2 a success is coming back to haunt them in their backwards compatibility story. They included the PS hardware in the PS2 and can't do the same in the PS3. As is the costs are skyrocketing!!

Basically, because of the late changes in design, SONY is vigorously trying to iron out all the kinks that are coming in. To make things worse they have announced an aggresive release schedule. How well they fight it out is yet to be seen, but so far we are yet to see the promised playable demos. One thing I can be sure of. When the PS3 comes out, it will be one amazing media center DVR like device. As for the BlueRay, expect to see problems with the first batch of PS3s. These problems will quickly be corrected before their US launch.Seeing the problems that SONY is facing, it surely begins to make sense why Microsoft steered away from a next-gen DVD drive and announced limited backwards compatibility.