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DF - RETRO: Sony PlayStation 3: Chasing the 1080p Dream (2006/2007) (UPDATE: PART 4)
Bonfires Down
Member
The beginning of that generation was a bad period for PC gaming. Very powerful consoles were available for much cheaper. Console exclusives were still a thing even on Xbox, and PC exclusives were rare. Steam hadn't found its footing yet. Once the Steam sales spun up I didn't go back though.
64gigabyteram
Reverse groomer.
My first ever console was an Xbox 360 so i was born into HD gaming, it doesnt make me any less impressed by the jump from Genesis to PS1, or PS1 to OG Xbox
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saturnalian
Member
Edit, wrong quote
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1080p only test? What about 120 fps games? lol
PS3 could run at 120 fps
Sony Computer Entertainment boss Ken Kutaragi has claimed that the PlayStation 3 will run games at an unprecedented (an…www.eurogamer.net
PS3 could run at 120 fps
According to Ken Kutaragi.
News by Ellie Gibson Contributor
Updated on 31 Oct 2005
Sony Computer Entertainment boss Ken Kutaragi has claimed that the PlayStation 3 will run games at an unprecedented (and perhaps rather pointless) 120 frames per second.
According to Japanese news service Nikkei BP, Kutaragi's comments were made at the Tokyo International Digital Conference last week where he turned up to extol the virtues of the PS3 and its Cell processor. And, of course, to make his rather astonishing claim.
It's particularly interesting because there isn't actually a TV in the world which can refresh the screen at a rate of 120 times per second. Kutaragi acknowledged this, but said he wants the PS3 to be ready to make the best of the technology once it finally arrives.
Kutaragi pointed out that the Cell chip can decode more than ten HDTV channels at a time, and can be used for rotating and zooming effects. He also discussed some of the different ways in which it could be used - to display actual-size newspaper pages, for example, to show more than one HD channel on the screen at a time, or for video conferences.
Kutaragi also explained how a processing power of 25.6 teraflops could be achieved - by creating a Cell cluster server with 16 units, each made up of eight Cell processors running at 2.5Ghz.
We want to talk about TWO HDMI OUTPUT?
Double the HDMI, twice the fun
The fine folks over at EvilAvatar and MagicBox are reporting that the low-end PS3 isn't the only PS3 to gain an HDMI port. According to their TGS information, the 60GB version will now have not one, but two HDMI ports. Like me, you maybe asking yourself: "What the hell?" Here's Sony's alleged...
www.engadget.com
March Climber
Member
that would mean you have to...
CONNECT YOUR PC TO A TV!
In 2007? The same 2007 where Steam was barely a few years in, WoW was still taxing on most machines, and Windows Vista was a thing? With those PC part prices costing as much as all of the consoles combined and barely any assisting websites or tools were around for building help? The same 2007 where mini towers and console sized cases weren’t a big thing yet so you still had to haul giant ugly towers around? Where plug and play devices and controllers weren’t fully standardized yet? When people were still buying Gateway PCs and Circuit City existed?
Yea…I don’t blame that poster for doing what he did. I would have done the same.
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RoadHazard
Gold Member
Weren't those typically something like 768p? Which doesn't match anything the PS3 can output.
PaintTinJr
Member
The 360 Xenos is inferior to the RSX in high quality rendering and polygon throughput, the only advantage it had was the tiny edram buffer bandwidth - that couldn't fit 1280x720 at RGBA8888 with a 32bit zbuffer in double buffered mode - but was ideal for accumulation buffer fx.
Had Microsoft needed a direct financial return on project Xbox some day - like all normal gaming companies like Atari, Sega, Nintendo, Sony - the 360 would have never launched when it did at those specs. It certainly wouldn't have had 512MB of unified RAM that Epic begged Microsoft to put in the console - instead of the original 256MB - and they would have clocked the Xenon much lower to avoid RRoD - instead of upping it to 3.2GHz to pressure the poor yields of Cell BE to remain at 3.2GHz. The PS3 original design was dual Cell BE processors, 512MB of unified XDR memory and a powerful 2D GPU (similar in flexibility to the Reality Synth of the PS2 produced by Toshiba). The last minute revised design halving the Cell BE count, halving the XDR and licensing an expensive nvidia GTX 9700 grade GPU - with no cost reduction benefit over the generation - is all why we ended up trapped with double/triple buffered deferred renderer 720p25-30 gaming on PS3 for most games - other than sim racers and fighting games that typically went forward renderer with simpler lighting and 1080p60 was used from time to time.
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Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
From what is know yes, PS2’s Graphics Synthesizer (which assumed all vertex processing do be done on the CPU, but had limited programmability, still it had a Z buffer so calling it a 2D GPU is not incorrect but not correct either IMHO) was to be replaced by a GPU called RS with a lot more eDRAM (more than Xenos) and pixel shaders so it was jumping to fully programmable pixel pipelines. Still, it did not make the cut and Sony had to quickly jump onto a last minute deal with nVIDIA (good tooling at least) with a GPU that had some interesting performance bugs on the vertex processing/triangle setup side of things and a last minute bit botched FlexIO implementation (where CPU access to GPU memory and viceversa was a bit screwed up and asymmetrical making the programming model worse as a result).
solidus12
Member
The launch PS3 model was the most complete console ever.
Think of it, it’s 2006 and you have a console that has WiFi, HDMI, card readers, a hard drive to put all your photos, music, and video.
It was also a CD player, DVD player, and a Blu-ray player.
With a built-in internet browser with mouse and keyboard + printer support.
Last but not least, you could play your PS1, PS2, and PS3 games on the same system; you could also download and store your PSP and Vita games there too.
It’s a shame that the launch model is unreliable and prone to failure.
Think of it, it’s 2006 and you have a console that has WiFi, HDMI, card readers, a hard drive to put all your photos, music, and video.
It was also a CD player, DVD player, and a Blu-ray player.
With a built-in internet browser with mouse and keyboard + printer support.
Last but not least, you could play your PS1, PS2, and PS3 games on the same system; you could also download and store your PSP and Vita games there too.
It’s a shame that the launch model is unreliable and prone to failure.
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Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
… and. SuperAudio CD player too, Sony ended up disabling support for it on consoles that had full playback support of that format
.All things considered, for $499-$599 with user upgradable HDD was actually quite good, but Sony was sure greedy losing, at that MSRP, more than $200 at launch on each unit. So greedy.
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SkylineRKR
Member
RR7 isn't on Xbox, but 6 is playable and its very similar. Its not boosted but it delivered 900p ish 60fps native on 360 so it still looks fine. It works but for some reason its never been added to the EU store. I have to switch accounts to boot it up.
It was a dark age for Sony fans for sure. Something about the PS3 just felt off to me. The PS1 and PS2 flourished with the best RPG, fighting games and all that stuff. The PS3, especially at first, almost offered nothing of the sort. And to make matters worse FF, Tekken, DMC they all went multiplatform and JRPGs were barely a thing on PS3 for a while. Sony didn't lose those games, but all reasons to specifically buy a Playstation were gone for me as those were the games I bought Playstations for. On top of that the industry moved towards FPS, co-op, everything had to feature this.
The PS3 was just a hard sell. Worse performance on average than 360, slower system in general, many exclusives that made PS2 so good were gone. Slow installations and update processes, unpacking games after downloading them. Many times when I wanted to quickly fire up a game I decided to just quit when I saw another update screen. I hated a lot about the PS3. Consoles were supposed to be plug and play, no bullshit. Enter PS3, here's 30 minutes waiting for a mandatory installation or update. And then most games would run at a low ass resolution with a pathetic framerate.
PS3 got better over time, in its twilight years it was the place to be for core gaming while MS alienated itself for some bizarre reason (motion controls). But PS3 never had the same magic the PS1 and PS2 had in their respective eras. Never was I so glad that a console generation was dropped. The PS4 fixed a lot of problems I had with PS3, mainly with IQ, performance and installation processes. Though it created new ones such as limited compability with peripherals, online paywall etc. I did hate the Pro though, but mainly for its fucking fan noise and lack of UHD playback.
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rodrigolfp
Haptic Gamepads 4 Life
Yes. Even before 2007. Almost as easy as it is today.
In 2007? The same 2007 where Steam was barely a few years in, WoW was still taxing on most machines, and Windows Vista was a thing? With those PC part prices costing as much as all of the consoles combined and barely any assisting websites or tools were around for building help? The same 2007 where mini towers and console sized cases weren’t a big thing yet so you still had to haul giant ugly towers around? Where plug and play devices and controllers weren’t fully standardized yet? When people were still buying Gateway PCs and Circuit City existed?
Yea…I don’t blame that poster for doing what he did. I would have done the same.
PaintTinJr
Member
Yeah, IIRC from my time with PS2linux, the Emotion Engine dual vector processing (co-processor?) was a flexible combination of a physics accelerator card - that existed at the time - and the vertex/geometry shader pipeline part of a opengl 2.1 GPU, leaving it to the designer how much they wanted to divy up use for Physics/inverse kinematics and vert H/W T&L before feeding the RealitySynth - which IIRC used GPU assembler for fragment shading, although might have done the geometry part too - as I remember the paper about Caramack's reversal (Doom3 shadowing technique that CreativeLabs owned the patent for) being efficiently accelerated on PS2 hardware.
So, yeah I completely agree, the PS2 Reality Synth was more than a 2D GPU, but not quite a 3D GPU
. I believe, the intention of the dual Cell BE prototype design that didn't make the cut, was to have the 12 SPUs be a monster sized Emotion Engine in a PS3. GT5 and GT6's multiple PS3 rendering mode - even with the bottleneck of gigabit ethernet interface gives us a good idea of how good the other design would have been IMHO at 1080p60.
It feels like it has taken until the PS5's flexible Geometry engine and Tempest engine for PlayStation to finally deliver the benefits of the PS2 big brother prototype (in a product) with the unified memory, flexible accelerator, and high performance rasterization. I do wonder if EA hadn't bought Renderware just before the PS3(iirc) - which had an upgrade path for developers from PS2 multi-plat to PS3 multi-plat - Sony might have still risked the prototype design knowing tooling for the market was good enough for the early launch years.
Given how complex the EiB and FlexIO together were, it is quite amazing the games we got IMO, and how amazing the ICE team did to wrapper the complexity and produce a SPURS library that did what Renderware did for PS2.
StateofMajora
Banned
Congratulations on misleading others apparently P Panajev2001a , but the worse graphics card in the PS3 was self evidently true when developers didn't properly utilize the cell processor ; you ended up with games like the darkness which was 1280x720 with 16x AF and 4x msaa on Xbox 360, and 540/576p on PS3 with inferior AF and no msaa. It was patently worse at msaa which is why you would frequently see either less msaa on PS3, none, or quincunx aa.
Rsx was also inferior when it comes to alpha effects which you could regularly see like the flamethrower effect in killzone 2 being low res, and multiplats like bioshock used lower resolution alpha on the PS3 versions.
Games like motorstorm apocalyptic eventually ditched transparent explosions for a solid looking effect because it was easier on the rsx.
Sony got duped into buying an inferior graphics solution at the last minute by Nvidia...
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phil_t98
#SonyToo
My mistake, was RR7 any different to RR6 then? I remember at the time thinking it was a the same game ported over
PaintTinJr
Member
And it had SuperAudioCD playback, it could also TvTvTv (with PlayTV) recording HD tv simultaneously (while in a DF faceoff
/s ) even before that was a meme, and it had hdmi 1.3B allowing it to support 3D mode (and 3D auto switching with higher bandwidth than the 360's retro fitted hdmi port) and a Lossless audio format via optical or hdmi iirc.
PaintTinJr
Member
You are flat out wrong if you go check meaningful specs rather than a opaque situation with why a game ends up in state X or Y on two different consoles with their tool chains and the game's launch contracts surrounded in NDAs. The independently held information and comparison with state of the art PC gpus of the time place the RSX far ahead in quality rendering capabilities - hence why it is in the Sony Zego that was used for professional media creation where they could have choose anything within the budget.
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The alpha fx are accumulated over frames which is a good example of using the edram bandwidth benefits, just like GearsoW(3?)'s object space anti-aliasing which allows the model data rendered to be used repeatedly for anti aliasing the objects without needing the in-flight framebuffer to be held/stored and AA processed before the backbuffer flip. Yes, it resulted in partial scene AA for GearsoW3 but it looked sharp in the important areas and allowed for more efficient rendering.
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StateofMajora
Banned
Nope, but go ahead and try arguing that point on beyond3d if you like.
What I said regarding alpha, msaa and generally having less pixel pushing throughput due to fixed pixel pipelines is very true, but you're welcome to produce evidence against. Without the Cell processor being used as a bandaid for the aged rsx gpu you would have never seen multiplat games in a better state vs. launch.
PaintTinJr
Member
Almost all games have the wrong gamma on 360, specifically called 360 gamma, you even see it in John's video where the Virtua Tennis 3 isn't a perfect match on 360, because the colours are oversaturated(wrong).
StateofMajora
Banned
Which has absolutely nothing to do with what I said or anything regarding performance...
This isn't even a PS3 vs 360 debate, I am just specifically talking about the PS3 graphics solution and how the cell may have been a beast but Sony put a poor gpu next to it after there initial plans with Toshiba fell through.
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PaintTinJr
Member
It is, because that's the inferior stuff you find in budget rubbish of the time. If the Xenos had to take the hit on every game to render the same - identical polygon counts, pixels, framebuffer formats, etc, etc, like being gamma correct - it would render slower than the PS3's RSX.
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Back at the time, ATI Radeon were doing a technical demo using their character Ruby in a cobbled street section showing off floating point framebuffer colour formats - for a type of pseudo HDR. Guess which of the two GPUs in those consoles has the hardware to render that demo as intended?
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YeulEmeralda
Linux User
If memory serves a lot of people didn't even have flat screens yet when it launched.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Sorry but what
? Thoughts about people spreading performance metrics on either GPU? Sorry, but that is in your head.
Sub_Level
wants to fuck an Asian grill.
Wasn’t Ninja Gaiden Sigma 1080p? Did they accidentally miss it? I could have sworn it was.
Correct. You can find threads on various forms back then about people being unable to read the text on screen, because a game would be optimized for HD but the player was still using an SDTV. It was a mess. I got a 32” 720p native set for $1000, nowadays you can get a bigger 4K set for a few hundred lmao
Correct. You can find threads on various forms back then about people being unable to read the text on screen, because a game would be optimized for HD but the player was still using an SDTV. It was a mess. I got a 32” 720p native set for $1000, nowadays you can get a bigger 4K set for a few hundred lmao
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StateofMajora
Banned
???Sorry but what
Apparently you think the rubbish the other poster presented was accurate, is what I meant
PaintTinJr
Member
StateofMajora
It is interesting that you think the RSX was being carried by the Cell BE SPUs, but in VF5b(on PS3) and VF5c(on 360), the PS3 version is using just the PPU and the RSX, and the 360 version had a slightly better CPU (because it was 3 symmetrical cores 6 logical cores with shared cache) and yet higher polygon counts on PS3 version, higher resolution, and higher resolution or uncompressed textures, and zero tearing (v-sync double buffered), Gamma correct too, and it is older code, with a less established tool chain.
YeulEmeralda
Linux User
I switched to PC gaming because today you can play ALL THE GAMES on PC.
But back in 2007 you sure as fuck weren't playing Japanese games on a PC.
But back in 2007 you sure as fuck weren't playing Japanese games on a PC.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
I did not comment on the performance of one chip vs the other, just commented on GS vs RS and the RS itself (and some of the bugs the chip had with geometry processing performance and CPU - GPU asymmetric access to the common system bus). Did you read what I posted?
Anyways, personally the two chips, RSX bugs and all, had some pro’s and con’s, but PS3’s biggest cons one is that the state of RSX and its integration should have delayed PS3 a year more/maximising its performance needed 1-2 additional years as a result. As a console, not as separate components PS3 pushed to the max was no slouch vs Xbox 360 pushed to the max, but PS3 needed a big rethink and realignment for devs (including their first party ones).
StateofMajora
Banned
Wouldn't surprise me if they didn't utilize the edram on Xbox 360 in that case.
It is interesting that you think the RSX was being carried by the Cell BE SPUs, but in VF5b(on PS3) and VF5c(on 360), the PS3 version is using just the PPU and the RSX, and the 360 version had a slightly better CPU (because it was 3 symmetrical cores 6 logical cores with shared cache) and yet higher polygon counts on PS3 version, higher resolution, and higher resolution or uncompressed textures, and zero tearing (v-sync double buffered), Gamma correct too, and it is older code, with a less established tool chain.
Which is why you saw ff13 run at a lower resolution on 360 ; it was made with PS3 in mind and the port to 360 was very low effort.
That is not to say games like the darkness being far worse than that example weren't due to low effort in utilizing the cell processor, but it did show what happens when you lean on rsx only.
StateofMajora
Banned
If anything PS3 seems to be a bit more powerful than 360 when fully pushed (in order to truly know we'd have to see what Sony devs like Guerilla and ND could have achieved on 360) but it was a Frankenstein design which required far too much effort to extract equal performance vs Xbox 360.
Sony literally just should have gotten an identical gpu as 360 from ati or better yet, not accepted Nvidia's old crap and opted for the 8xxx series chipset which would have smoked 360 even without leveraging the cell for graphics.
Aesius
Member
Which is a big reason why 7th gen consoles were so impressive, especially on demo kiosks at Best Buy or whatever. I'll never forget seeing Call of Duty 2 on a 55" Samsung HDTV in 2005. I had been gaming at 1600x1200 for years before that on PC, but that was on small CRT monitors. Seeing even a 720p image on a very large screen was breathtaking.
PaintTinJr
Member
Sega AM2 working on a paid Xbox online port of VF5 targeting 60fps aren't using the Edram, really?
The reason the game tears is because of the edram use and the inability to double buffer a full sized 1280x720 framebuffer set in that memory. If it was just using the GDDR3, vsync would be enabled and the frame-rate would just plummet temporarily - but stay in sync - when the performance budget was exceeded.
The evidence doesn't back up your theorized conclusion IMO.
01011001
Banned
yes, but many could accept 1080i and downsample from that
the 360 was a way better fit for HD Ready TVs tho as it could actually scale the image to a fitting 768p
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StateofMajora
Banned
Yeah. FF13 even was bundled in with Xbox 360 consoles in a marketing deal, but yet the game didn't use edram.
Without edram the 360 has slightly less than half the bandwidth vs. PS3 which would explain your vf5 example. But y'know, it's hard to know what happened without talking to the developers.
Your tearing comment is incorrect ; MS just liked to push adaptive vsync on 360 as an option. You can see certain Xbox series x games using adaptive vsync (tearing when the fps dips) vs. PS5 versions.
SkylineRKR
Member
Yes this is what I've used to think about. What if the PS3 GPU was a tad better, the GF7 was notorious for its lack of AA+HDR if i'm not mistaken. GF8 would absolutely blow the 360 out of the water. Sega Europa-R ran on GF8, it did Sega Rally 3 with track deformation at 60fps for example. But then again you'd probably at even higher assembly costs. All which could've been offset by not including BR. and/or perhaps dropping Rambus XDR.
PaintTinJr
Member
It was the resolution was also adapted to fit the edram, so no, AM2 were using edram and pretty sure if I check games they released before on the 360 it will be utilised too.
Your view of the Xenos with the Darkness seems more like the 512MB of unified RAM played a bigger part for DirectX lead developers working with the PS3 in its early days, where 90MB or more (iirc) were being used by the OS, and even when fully optimised PS3 devs still had to deal with the flexIO as P Panajev2001a talked about even when the OS was using just 14MB of the GDDR3.
My point being that just switching the RSX for the Xenos wouldn't have changed the flexio situation for PS3, so even if you don't believe the RSX has twice the polygon quadstrip throughput of the Xenos - and all the other features - it wouldn't have fixed the bigger limiting factor that 360 devs didn't have to worry about.
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RoadHazard
Gold Member
I luckily skipped the whole "HD Ready" phase since it seemed dumb (and not future proof) already back then, and instead went directly to 1080p.
StateofMajora
Banned
No Blu ray would have been a shame tbh, it was just good for disc durability, higher quality audio and not having to swap discs.
Imo PS3 manufacturing costs were so high to begin with, what's the hurt in a little more xD they still would have got the cost down eventually. Agreed on dropping xdr memory, slightly faster gddr3 would have done the same job, using a unified pool with 256 bit bus.
01011001
Banned
I had an HD ready TV but played mostly on an 800p CRT PC monitor using the 360's VGA cable... absolutely pristine image quality, later I played on a 1050p 16:10 LCD monitor, which sadly meant black bars on top and bottom as games of course didn't support 16:10... but the 360 still thankfully supported the 1680x1050 output resolution so the scaling was perfect
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U n i o n 0015
Member
I'm still pissed that someone stole my launch 60 GB PS3 last year. It was running great and had full PS1/PS2 BC.
StateofMajora
Banned
I'm open to being wrong but you'd have to present evidence. As I said, mine is a theory regards vf5 but it would make sense.
It was 128mb, what the PS3 os used early on. It never reached 14mb ; in the end it used 50mb while Xbox 360 os used only 32mb.
Which definitely would have impacted the darkness, but not the PS3 version of Bayonetta in 2010.
March Climber
Member
01011001
Banned
for real, people act like HDMi to DVi cables didn't exist