I'm wondering if anyone bought one and if it's actually good. They have about 50 for sale at costco here and nobody is touching them. It's a bundle with some racing game.

Too pricey for me.

Then again, I'm practically broke..and cheap.

PS3 baaaad

360 gooood

The fact that they have 50 there and no one is touching them would say something to me. Regardless, I can't say that I've heard anyone really enthusiastic about the PS3, even some of my friends who are big playstation fans.

I have one and it's been good to me. Only problem is, there aren't many really great games out for it yet.

I'd say wait on it. IMO it's shaping up to be the best of the new-gen consoles, but right now the 360 offers more. When PS3's heavy hitters come out I think it will start to pull ahead.

A console is worthless without good games. Wait for either a price drop (budget version without bluray would be sweet) or some killer game.

Honestly, I've been dying for mroe and more games for the PS3.
Cut to the chase: I use it for PS2 games, occasionally to check the internet when my computer is not working.

I never had a PS2, but I had a gamecube and Xbox. So I have a whole library of games (so far God of War #1, FFx, and now FF12, MGS3 is my next choice) to hold me off until some GOOD PS3 games ( like lair, heavenly sword, MGS4) come out.

Not to say it doesn't already have some good ones, Resistance is a fair game, quite good. It's something you can look at and say "that was a very decent launch title, but it wasn't innovative enough to be a system killer."
Imagine playing, say, Medal of Honor, as a launch title for Xbox, instead of Halo. Not the best game in the world, but good.

motostorm got some good reviews, from the demo it was an amazing feat, and very fun to play. I haven't bought it yet though.

The PS store doesn't have what I want in it yet.
There are only about 15 games to download PS1-PSP games included, some of them are ok, but nothing I'm anxious to spend 6 bucks for (I downloaded flow, it's a nice 'meh' game like street fighter 2 or something would be on a newer system).

If I had something capable of playing 1080p, the blueray player would be more fun, not to mention resistance's graphics.
Supposively PS2 games are supposed to look better on this system, but it's hard to tell without a better TV. if you have one, kudos to you, you'll appreciate it more.

Truth is, it doesn't have Xbox live, it bleeds a need for HOME, or some kind of better "meet people and network/talk to them" system. (BTW, my Gamertag ID is Veger if anyone wants to look me up and message me... SiliconC hasn't responded to my invite yet)

I predict this system will kill the competition if some developers use the damn hardware capabilities. 1-2 years from now maybe. For the moment... go with an Xbox 360 :P. (or a wii... paper mario looks good)

Oh yeah, theres this thing called "folding @ home" where you use your PS3 as a super-fast gene folding simulation for a research project at harvard. It takes 8 hours to complete 1 unit of work. You don't actually see much, but you can view the company's website and there's a globe of the earth to look at with lights and an accurate night/day system.
I've done 28 units of work.

It's for a good cause, but... I don't get anything out of it and it's really all I can use my PS3 for :(.

/rant

The PS3's hardware isn't very good.

The GPU is underpowered and it has a lackluster feature set. It's based on a 6000-series GeForce. Cell is, essentially, a supercomputer processing element so it's very good at floating point math, but it's almost designed to suck at games: Cell SPEs have really small caches and no way to read from memory on their own, and they're miserably slow at integer math. The PS3 also has 512 MB of memory with a hard divide between video and system memory - meaning you can have, say, no more than 256 MB of textures in use at a time.

The Xbox 360 has a better break here. The ATI GPU is designed around a subset of DirectX 10 (including the unified shader model and the geometry shader). The CPU is a more traditional design, with three general-purpose cores (each with two hardware threads, like HyperThreading), and it's about 3-4 times faster at integer math than the PS3. All three cores support Altivec. The 360 has 512 MB of low-latency GDDR3 which is shared between the system and the graphics hardware - meaning you could fill that whole 512 MB with textures, if your game needed to.

NVIDIA also has obscenely bad normalmap compression. I think John Carmack wrote an article about how Doom 3 got around it but I can't remember. Most games don't bother though. ATI has 3dc which helps retain fine details better. It's been a part of the DirectX 9 featureset for a while, but NVIDIA never got around to implementing it.

A Cell killer app would pretty much need to be a physics demonstration and the PS3's GPU couldn't handle rendering that many crates getting knocked over. It couldn't be AI or complex game logic, because the Cell sucks at integers. And, to be totally honest here, Cell can't really do anything that can't be done on the Xbox 360's GPU --- and the 360's GPU is faster at it.

Sorry if I'm making you :(, but I wouldn't keep my hopes up about this if I were you.

I don't want to sound like a fanboy, but I'm just genuinely pleased with my 360. Graphics look great, games are fun (and there are TONS of good titles), great online community. I don't know if you already have one or not, but IMO I'd look into getting a 360. I just wouldn't be able to justify paying more for a system and having fewer good titles available to me.

The PS3 has a few aces up its sleeve...mainly MGS4, GoW3, FF13, and Heavenly Sword. Honestly, those are enough to make me want one badly, maybe not you so much.

Do not get a PS3.

Yeah, none of those really interest me except MGS4. Even then, the last MGS I played was Solid. I'll probably get a PS3 a few years from now when I can pick one up used for $100, I'm fine with waiting til then.

Are you kidding me? MGS2 wasn't that great, but MGS3 is easily one of the best games of all time...get it.

I'd add Lair/Warhawks to that list.

Aglar: Have you played God of War I/II? It's hard to believe anyone wouldn't look forward another GoW game after being treated to the first two. Hopefully Heavenly Sword will be just as good.

Oh, and the screenshots from upcoming PS3 games blow away the 360's graphics. But I would agree that this shouldn't be the deciding factor.

It may be a while, but I'll buy a PS3 someday. Price of PS3 + cost of investing in a bigger/nicer TV to game on are why I don't have one yet. I don't think PS3 as a system will suffer a weak library of games.

Yeah, God of War 3 is going to be...amazing.

Also, Brian, HardOCP just posted some 30 days with the PS3 thing...dunno if it'll be helpful/useful, or even positive or negative (I haven't read it), but here you go.

http://console.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTMwOCwxLCxoY29uc29sZQ==

oh, okay



which ones?

I like my PS3, but I agree that the lack of a killer title is really hurting the system at the moment.

Resistance and Motorstorm are quality titles, but recently I've spent far too much time playing Gran Turismo HD Concept. It's just Gran Turismo 4 with (much) better graphics and a Ferrari (yay!!!), but that's good enough for me.

I'm going to save up over the summer, and pick up a PS3 in the fall for one, primary reason: Metal Gear Solid Four.

That's what I was wondering, too. Because I haven't seen a single PS3 game that just looks WAY better than a 360 game.

The best comparison I can make is the new Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport 2. They look nearly identical.

I don't know how to direct to video youtube movies... but

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex1F6vRasNU

I still haven't seen a PS3 game that looks WAY better than a 360 game.

^
+1

Tons of "PS3 exclusives" are jumping ship and releasing on the 360 also.

Such as Devil May Cry 4.

There's no real reason to get a PS3 unless you just like humping MGS4. And I really can't justify buying a $600 system for one game.

Apparently the Final Fantasy 13 project is no longer a Sony exclusive. Square-Enix has yet to announce any of the specifics; whether the 'core' FF13 games will appear on 360 or not is still up for debate, but at least something with 'Final Fantasy 13' in the name is going to appear on it or Wii.

Are you sure the PS3's GPU is based on the GeForce 6 series Jon? I thought it was a slightly faster 7800.

DMC4 and FF13 (maybe) are the only ones so far. They still have God of War (well, obviously), Heavenly Sword, and MGS4, plus god knows what else.


Knowing Squeenix, it won't be FF13 but will instead be some weird spinoff clone.

To be honest? God only knows.

The only information I've seen about the RSX is Sony's spurious claptrap (which we shouldn't believe any more than the Xbox 360's published performance information). I think you're right and it is G70 based, and the published clock rate puts it around the same speed as a 7800 GTX.

At the same time, Sony's been fighting tooth and nail to keep other details out of the media. Things like the number of pixel pipelines and shader units. This makes me raise an eyebrow since, if it's just a 7800, that information would be quite commonplace. It has around the same number of transistors though. The 360 has... um... 48 general purpose shaders, I think? Off the top of my head it's around the same number as the 7800's pixel and vertex shaders combined.


Assuming the PS3 is a slightly faster and feature-complete 7800, it's still at a significant disadvantage because:

1.) It's a traditional model GPU with discrete pixel and vertex shader units that cannot be reallocated to do other tasks,
2.) It has half of the video memory available to it.
3.) It has NVIDIA's crappy texture compression.
4.) The PS3 renders everything internally at a higher resolution - in fact, the PS3 has to render 230% as many pixels as the 360 does at the exact same fillrate (16 billion samples/sec). But at least the blurry, poorly-compressed textures will be rendered sharper on the screen.

Oh, so Assassin's Creed didn't jump ship, nor did RE5? Wait, yeah they did.

Educate me. MGS:4 is such a popular anticipated game, why wouldn't the developers port over to Xbox360 to reach more players? Contract with Sony?

Well, to be fair, that's partially why the Cell is going to be so useful. You can use it for a lot of rendering operations alongside the RSX. And since you have, what, 6 or 7 cores to work with, that leaves plenty for normal processing.


RE5 was never an exclusive, and Assassin's Creed "jumped ship" before the demo they showed at E3, and has "jumped ship" for quite a while now. I'd agree with you that RE5 was an exclusive if it wasn't for the whole RE4 fiasco--Resident Evil hasn't been a Sony Exclusive since the PS1.

Hideo has a long standing relationship with Sony, as they helped him publish the original MGS which was extremely expensive and not all that guaranteed to take off. He published MGS2 on the Xbox and MGS:TTS on the Gamecube, but these were both long after the releases on Sony systems. Still hasn't ported MGS3 over to anything.

Basically, he's hinted he might want to go to other systems, but I doubt he will, as he's invested so much into MGS4 for the PS3 already, it'd take longer to port it over to the 360 (and it's not going to the wii).

This might sound condescending but I don't mean it to be.

no you can't, because:

- The pixel shading performance of a GPU absolutely demolishes the performance of the Cell and any other general-purpose processor in the world.

Cell: 100 GFLOPS measured real-world single-precision floating point performance. It could do a fixed-function transform on about 590 million vertices a second or 2 billion trilinearly filtered texture samples a second. That's super-keen.

RSX: Theoretical floating point output, if you combine the number of floating point operations performed by all of the shader units including the texture samplers? 1.8 TFLOPS. About a billion shaderized, transformed and lit vertices a second. 12 billion anisotropically filtered texture samples a second. This isn't even in the same ballpark. Throwing Cell at the RSX would be like trying to speed up a freight train by ramming it with a Civic. I'm sorry, but a 4 cyl 1.8L VTEC just isn't going to make a difference. Actually it's going to hurt performance, because....


- RSX and Cell do not share memory.

And even if they did, trying to feed data from the CPU straight into the GPU would absolutely strangle the GPU.

Back before the original GeForce and Radeon, computers used the CPU for transformation and lighting. This was "okay" because the polygon counts were relatively low - the CPU could handle the math, and the PCI bus could handle the relatively minimal amount of data that was being sent across.

Even then, the more bandwidth intensive data (textures) were uploaded to the card permanently.

At a certain point, though, scenes simply became too complex and the bus couldn't handle updating the whole thing every frame. So, instead, you upload the scene data to the graphics hardware and issue draw instructions along with a few variables like the camera position.

This is nice for another reason: the GPU can draw the scene asynchronously while the CPU moves ahead and processes gameplay updates for the next frame.

The fastest way you could do it is to lock a vertex buffer, fill it, unlock it and then pass the rendering call, and all of those are blocking operations. And that's still only if you're using the vertex shader for transformation and lighting (just using the Cell for stuff like animation). It goes down from there. Quite sharply.


- The only part of the Cell that's any good for general-purpose processing is the PPE.

The SPEs are only really good at floating point math. They also have no way of directly accessing memory and very small caches. The PPE has to keep them on a short leash - they're more like vertex shaders than full-fledged processors.

The PPE is also the only part of the Cell that can issue instructions to the RSX. Including things like filling vertex buffers and other wonderfully synchronous operations. Thread starvation is :awesome:.



umm... I sort of lost track of where I was going with this post, but in conclusion: the Cell can't be used for any significant rendering operations, and because of the way the PS3 is built your performance would actually suffer if you tried.

So joncy, can you explain that in a way that someone such as myself can understand?

I have a hard time understanding techno jargon.

PS3 THINKY THING NO GOOD AT LOOKY THING.

ME SMASH PS3.

Got it. Thanks.

Yeah thats seriously all I needed to hear.

No, I really wasn't into console gaming last generation. I owned an Xbox but I only had a couple of games, mostly used it with XBMC.

You'd better start playing God of War in case you'd ever need that sort of training.[/jackthompson]

Might I add that devving for the 360 is just plain easier, mainly because it's essentially a windows box. There are differences, but they are not so major that you can't use a windows machine for testing.