Kuturagi Enables Claim Mode Again

Haw

Minimum of 120 fps...what's the use? The human eye can't see the difference anymore when goes higher then 30 fps (animation wise).

I think Ken always takes a good snuff of coke before every statement he releases and starts blabing around what pops in his mind.

Actually the eye can see more than 30 fps but the brain can only process around the average of 30 fps. So while the brain will only average everything past that, the higher the frame rate the less the eyestrain, at least that is how it is on crt style moniters. Moniters that are not scan based are different.

On the other hand, and for the most part, you are correct about 120 fps being overkill. The funny thing is Sony's concept of HD moniter technology is all LCD based and most lcd's cant even keep up 24 fps refresh rates without ghosting images. Who is he kidding to assume that lcd will get true response times fast enough to fully enjoy 60 fps games or images?

Christian

If you concentrate too hard on today, it's tomorrow before you realise that you've been left behind.

http://www.behardware.com/news/7811/3ms-lcd-acer-monitor.html

I've got a 32inch LG HDTV which is LCD and it doesn't ghost or motion blur at all.

LCD's are all pretty good now and they are getting good response rates from them.

So, will the PS3 be like jacking into cyber space? Like they said the PS2 would be...

Who said that, and where did they say it? Please provide the source of your information.

Sorry for being vague, just remembered that years ago someone from Sony made that claim. Can't remember if i read in a magazine or on the internet.
Have just trawled the net and have only been able to find - "You can communicate to a new cyber city. 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'!''. (quoted from http://users4.ev1.net/~sheath/PS2success.htm).
From what i can gather it was said in 2000 by Kuturagi (but may have been a reference to Sony's GS CUBE).

Sony did promise something along those lines, along with all the other bullshit propaganda, like the Toy Story graphics and the whole 'emotion' spiel - it's obviously gonna happen all over again.

Man Sony impresses me all the time some times i forget that they are such marketing geniuses. I will tell you people here expect maybe later this year or at E3 06 but Sony has ever so smoothly been gradually hinting at the fact that the PS3 is coming out in 2007 and ya know what i am pretty much bought on the fact that it is coming out in 2007.

Come to many things Sony they much like hype which with some how they have become master of making the sukers who buy their systems except the fact with a grain a salt that they are gonna under deliver or make you pay out the ass PS3 $499 at the least with disapointments. Sorry but true fanny boys.

Again. I challenge you.

Prove that Sony made the Toy Story claim.

You can't. Because they didn't.

This is all part of one big urban legend, that everyone repeats without ever doing the legwork to find out if its actually true or not. Find one reputable news source that actually quotes ANYONE from Sony saying anything about Toy Story. You can't! What you'll come back to is a quote FROM A JOURNALIST in Asahi Shimbum, trying to give readers something they can understand at a time when Toy Story was big news. He/she says something about Toy Story - nothing about real time.

You are perpetuating a myth.

Dr.

If you read your own link you will find that it is not a true 3ms lcd panel. They say so themselves. Even though they claim that it is more likely a rebadged 4ms panel, that too is very likely bogus. I have yet to see an honest review of a moniter with a true refresh test showing a higher refresh then 12ms. True 3ms response time is the mark for true non-residual 60 fps imaging. this means that 1.5ms it the mark for 120 fps.

The claims about this sub 10ms response times are misleading because the moniter does refresh the pixels that fast but they over saturate the pixel and the actual time for the pixel to normalize is still usually around the 12-16ms mark. If you do a strong contrast test on these moniters you will notice that they introduce a bunch of noise into the picture. Sure it removes the ghosting, but the distortion is just as annoying in high contrast scenes.

Is it possible to get a true 60 fps lcd moniter in the next 5 years...yes, but because of the issues with the technology itself 120fps lcd moniters is virtually an impossability, until they find a different way to address the pixels on the screen, instead of using a straight up grid addressable array (which will require a new input technology).

Also Doc, i see you coming to Sony's defense on all of this stuff, and i dont understand why. I mean sony has always been full of crap in the video game business. I mean watching the "real time" yet actually fully pre-rendered demo's at e3 just show how full of it they are. Their theoretical numbers are just that theoretical otherwise RE4 would not have had to be stripped down for its port to the ps2.

I say and have always said that in this generation that the ps2 was the most powerful hardware, but was least suited for gaming. This means that despite its theoretical mips or flops, its like trying to play a game on a TI-86 calculator.

Christian

i had this really bad ass fps that actually did mode seven on my ti-85... you coudl reduce the width of the screen to make it run faster... at 2 pixels wide it ran at 15 frames a second... of course i over clocked it and could run it fairly well till i burnt the thing out... was fun whiel it lasted though.

_____

True but then, I pasted one of a mihundred similar links, many many manufacturers are now marketing 3ms LCDs.

http://netscape.com.com/4520-3174_7-6358806-1.html

And like with most things in the computing and tech sphere, response times will continue to improve. Two to three years from now, we'll have sub 1ms response times LCD screens.



Not true. 60 x 3 = 180. There are 1000 ms in a second. 60fps can be done adequately with 14ms screens.

A "true" 3ms LCD could theoretically do 333.3333 fps. Your points about



Response time is defined as the time required for an LCD pixel to change from fully active (black) to fully inactive (white), then back to fully active again. So that's from off to FULLY saturated to off again.



I am not with you there. Simple grid addressing of a 3,000,000 pixel array in sub milli-second times is possible. Your memory card does it all the time. The limiting factor is not array addressing, but pixel refresh times.



That is your opinion, and you are entitled to it. Doesn't make it right though.

I was beginning to believe the same thing. But a respected colleague of mine challenged me to provide the evidience, and when I researched it... it turned out that most of it was heresay and bitching from forums... very little of it actually came from Sony itself.



Of course. I believe the clue was in the part where they were referred to as 'theoretical'. The thing is, you believe that theyw ere plucked out of Sony's ass, and I believe they were calculated by hardware architects.



I'm sorry, but I cannot see how theoretical numbers for PS3 at E3 can have any bearing on the capabilites of a PS2 game already released.



Which puts you at odds with almost everyone else, who generally believe the Xbox and GameCube to have more raw grunt. Which explains why RE was downgraded for PS2, that and (as has always been the case) sloppy porting.

Last time round, PS2 had a first-to-market advantage, and backward compatibility with a phenomenally successful predecessor.

PS3 will lose the first-mover advantage, but in return (based on the word of developer I know who are working on both systems) has a considerable advantage over Xbox360 in terms of hardware grunt. These same developers also tell me that PS3 is considerably easier to develop for than PS2 was.

Nintendo are likely to come to market this generation with neithe rfirst mover, nor raw power advantage. They seem to be concentrating instead on innovation and originality, and this might make them surprise winners.

Doc,

You are right, i missed a decimal place when figuring milliseconds (looks like my math minor is getting a little dusty). I totally miscalculated all that stuff.

Still there are some other things i would like to address though.

There are 2 ways to calculate response time for lcd moniters. The easiest way is to calculate the response time for a pixel to go from black to white but that is very innacurate when it comes to rendering images composed of real colors. The other way to calculate response time is to calculate how long it takse for any given pixel to normalize to the actual color it is supposed to be rendering. Like i said these sub 12 ms moniters are measuring only the first way when actual response time should be measured for accuracy. When pixels are not spot on, instead of ghosting images, they introduce distortion in the form of colorized noise. Look up what overdrive technology does which is featured in most of these low latency moniters.

So i will still stand by my statement that sub 12ms response time moniters are not accurate representations of the technology at hand.

I also read somewhere (it could have been over a year ago), that the way that lcd moniters addressed each pixel was a limiting factor when it came to lowering the response time of lcd's. I cannot for the life of me find the source of that info, but i will say that trying to compare memory timings to display timings, even using x/y addressable grids is not valid. You have to compare timings for the processing, memory, and display tech when figuring its latency. Because i cannot find the source, i cannot expect you to assume it as true.

Next up, my comparisons of sony being full of crap had nothing to do directly in reference to the ps2 or ps3 respectively, but to thier gaming business in general. Did sony show some real time rendering at e3? Did sony show pre-rendered footage at e3? Yes. How do you tell the difference? Well when sony showed unreal 3 and the boxing game and at some points the game was running without skipping, and then other times when it was running really choppy, that is how you tell. WHen they paused the scene in unreal three and manipulated the camera, that was real time, but was choppy as anything, yet when it was running the whole demo, it was silky smooth. If it was actually rendering the whole time then sony should have been able to manipulate the camera in any direction at any point without the game running choppy at all. That is how you can tell what was real and what wasnt.

Finally, my statements regarding the ps2 being the most powerful console this gen relates directly to pure processing power. This does not take into account actual rendering power. The ps2 has an incredible vector based processing unit that is very capable of doing advanced calculations. THis in now way means that it is as capable of rendering images as well as either xbox or gcn. This is where my comparison of using the ti calculator for gaming came in. The ps2 is anemic when it comes translating 3d vertices into fleshed out images for 2d representation (i mean 2d as displayed on your moniter, not 2d as in sprites). It is not capable of the same texturing performance of the xbox or gcn which is why RE4 had to be stripped down.

Is the ps2 capable of producing the theoritcal numbers claimed at e3 99? Probably, but that is without any regaurd to actually puting those images on the screen.

Christian

It's easily done.

I accept your points about pixel stabilisation, and while the science illudes me, I am also prepared to accept that there are many things relating to grid adressing in display hardware that I do not understand.

But my point remains that technology is improving, and will continue to improve. Sony is not suggesting that people are going to be running 2160p. Nor are they suggesting that people will play 2 games, and watch 2 DVDs simultaneously.

They are, in the way that ALL manufacturers have throughout the history of computing, postulating based on their hypothetical performance maxima.

This does not make them any worse than any other manufacturer. It certainly does not make them better.



And my point is that they are currently receiving a very bad rap. Worse than they deserve. All manufacturers make exaggerated claims about their hardware and software.

Currently, Sony are being held up as the poster boy for unrealistic claims. But we did a little research, and most of these claims seem to have been exaggerated on usenet and various fora by a process of chinese whispers. Claims Sony never made have become fact by repetition.

We revisited the original PS2 tech demos. And pretty much everything that they showed can now be delivered in real time.



Lambasting Sony for not showing real time at E3 2005, over a year before hardware debuts is fine. But Microsoft did not show real-time Xbox360 at E3 2004 - which would have equated to the same thing.

What Sony did is demonstrate pre-rendered that matched their calculated hardware performance.



Yeah, but at E3 2005, the Cell processor had only been in die for a matter of weeks. Performance of demos running at that time was not optimal. My friends who are developing on the machine say that the rendering power is awesome.



But PURE processing power is secondary in a games machine to rendering a shading power. And when that is taken into consideration the PlayStation was clearly not going to be the winner in the last generation. From what I hear from people who know what they are talking about (and are currently developing for both the new platforms) PS3 will be the most powerful machine in the next generation.

Well boy am i glad this didnt become a pissing match =).

Anyway, x360 did show live demos, but no x360 was playable on the floor in the MS booth (just dual mac g5s). They did have actual running hardware at their news conference though.

The point about sony's ps3 demos are well taken too. I agree that there would be no problem with them showing what the ps3 "should" be capable of, but claiming that it was running in real time just places the word bogus all over the sony empire. So that is my beef with sony at this past years e3.

i do not think one person would have blasted sony if they had simply stated "this is real time, and this is pre-rendered but should easily represent what the ps3 will be capable of when it is released next year". I do no appreciate being treated like i am a total dummy when i am a guest at their conference (i did not make it to e3 this year but will not miss next year, but i did watch the whole conference via video).

I would say that the ps3 will easily be able to render everything they showed at this past years e3. I will also agree that the ps3 is also easily the most powerful console coming out this generation. But i will not bow to the power of the ps3 simply because of all of these claims, when many of them are somewhat silly.

My worries though are that sony is over spending again and making the consumer absorb the costs. Does the consumer really need the processing power of the cell to play games when a much cheaper power pc processor(s) in some iteration will do fine? Not only do the consumers have to pay for the cell, but the have to pay for the development of it.

Folks like sony and nintendo have totally different philosophies, and you can see that MS has now seen the light. Sony wants to pack the latest and greatest hardware into their machine at almost any cost simply to be able to make the claim "most powerful blah blah blah". "It can do this and that and the other...". You can see the beauty of the simplicity of Nintendo's philosophy. They say "we are here to entertain our customers, here are our ideas for next gen games, what hardware can we use to get that done". Then they find the cheapest solution to do what a game machine is supposed to do. I guess it is the difference between being an entertainment hub, and being a game/toy machine.

Thing is gcn by far was the cheapest to make this gen, and really it didnt sacrifice in the graphical department, while sony spent all that money with their emotion engine chip, and forgot to implement texturing technology that could keep up with the emotion engine.

Game programmers usually have a background of working on a pc so the closer a console comes to working like a pc, the less the transition required by the game maker when it comes to making games, and then porting them.

i am worried that sony is overdeveloping their console again this time, and while it may be easy to program for, there will still be a learning curve in learning the architecture of the cell and ps3 layout.

So all this to say, sure the ps3 will again be the processing champ this gen, but that may not be enough to get gamers or programmers on board this time. I know that i dont need the ps3 to process 8 different hd streams at once, so i wont be investing the overkill that is the ps3.

Christian

its quite interesting this generation, we have three consoles with different philosophies:

Sony, seam to be saying that its all about the latest cutting edge hardwear;

Microsoft, are saying that its all about a balance between hardware/software and services;

Nintendo, are saying that its all about the software and the interface.

It's gonna be really exciting.

So Doc can you give us some insider information on the 360 and PS3? Is the 360 as balanced as they say and does the PS3 really have a problem with over heating? Will i have to sell a kidney to get one? Is that killzone demo really possible?