Jason

More interesting to me is the way Best Buy will handle this - it will ring through as an exchange for the unit you just bought.

Technically, at the register, you'll "return" the 80GB unit and it will be resold to you with a free game at no charge.

This will dramatically increase the appearance of PS3 sales after the Slim launches. Every customer wanting their free game will look like they "bought a PS3". To find out how well the Slim is doing, we'll have to be extra careful with sales figures at first - subtracting out returns, or breaking sales down in the Slim and old units and discarding the old units sold after the Slim launch, or something.

But nobody ever reports that stuff. Sony will come out and say there were "800,000 PS3s sold" since the slim launched, or something. Only the astute observer will say "yes, but that includes fake 'sales' to people who purchased one earlier and just wanted a free game to hang on to it instead of getting a slim."

Lynda Carter was there probably because she's married to Zenimax CEO Robert Altman. She also did voices in Elder Scrolls III and IV.

The problem is, "the same rate" isn't good enough. If the PS3 maintains the same sales rate as the 360 T-minus one year, it will by mathematical definition always be a year behind in sales. It will always be #2.

In order for the PS3 to catch up to the 360 by the end of next year, it needs to sell more than double the 360 every month. It's doing the opposite, and that's not good for Sony.

You may not have noticed, but there's an E3 2007 video of Too Human on the XBL Marketplace, even though it wasn't at the show.

And you know, it's pretty damn cool.

I think you mean "around this time TWO YEARS ago." Last year at this time, the PS3 had just begun the first in a long list of debacles - the slip from it's promised Spring 2006 release date to the fall. We all knew what the PS3 would look like at E3 2005, in May.

I really hope they turn down the difficulty. I like to play this kinda stuff and so does my girlfriend, but neither one of us buy arcade (or Wii VC) games that are really hard. We play 'em to laugh and have a good time, not to to proclaim victory over some punishing algorithms and variables. The days of me "suffering" through a really hard game for the rediculous false pride of saying I did so and beat it are long, long over.

Here's an even better note for The Behemoth--I SPECIFICALLY didn't buy Alien Hominid HD because, while it is beautiful and charming and nifty as hell, it's too hard. If it was a lot easier, they would have my money by now.

"it's exactly the same as it is on Xbox 360"

Whoa there. WHOA. It is NOT exactly as it is on Xbox 360.

On Xbox 360, you can be sitting at the dash or watching a movie or video file or listening to music, and still have access to Live - your friends list, voice chat, game invites, etc.

On the PC - at least when Microsoft showed it to me at CES - it's not going to work like that. You have to actually be in a live enabled game in order to be logged in and have access to all that stuff. Which is completely boneheaded and totally misses the POINT of Live on a PC.

I know it's not intended to be that way forever, but let's be perfectly clear about what we can expect from Live on the PC when it first launches. It is NOT like the "vision" demo from last E3. You aren't just sitting there browsing the web and a friend sends you a game invite. You gotta be playing Uno or Shadowrun or something to log into Live.

It's not going to be Forza 2 or GT5.

Forza 2 is coming out this spring (May), GT5 next spring, with maybe a demo before the end of the year. And Gran Turismo is famous for long delays.

Besides, it's way too early to make any comparison when we know so little of GT5.

The first guy had performance problems in Vista for a very good reason.

He's running a mid-range graphics card from two years ago, running WoW in a window in a dual-monitor setup. So he's rendering probably at least 2048x1024 (if not more) worth of 3D desktop and then trying to run WoW on top of that. He's probably hitting the limit of both the fill rate and memory buffer of his 256MB card.

With the latest ATI Vista drivers (7.1 from their site) Vista runs WoW quite well. It's hard to tell if there is a slight performance decrease or not, but in full-screen mode it's roughly on par with WinXP. Some of the disc access and zone loading seems faster and more responsive, mostly a result of Vista's much improved I/O code.

This article's headline is misleading.

The DRM features in Vista are:

1. Not doing anything at all to game performance. They're only "active" when playing DRM'd content like Blu-ray, HD-DVD, or possibly future online video downloads that use HDCP content protection, AACS, etc.

2. Not more draconian than the content protection stuff in stand-alone HD-DVD or Blu-ray players. It's the same requirements about protected video and audio paths, protected decryption modules, and so on.

Unless you're playing a game that used HD-DVD or blu-ray VIDEO with AACS protection (never going to happen), it won't affect game performance at all.

Game performance *will* be slightly slower on DX9 titles in Vista because the graphics driver is required to do a bit more work with regards to resource management, dealing with the 3D desktop, etc. You may suffer 5-10% frame rate losses on games that are entirely graphics-bound (less, or no performance drop, when you're CPU-bound).

When you get to DX10 hardware and driver and games, there are actually quite a few things in the new driver model and DX10 that make the CPU have to do LESS work in the graphics stack. If you were to display the same exact thing on screen in a game using both DX10 hardware, the DX10 API, and Vista, as you did with DX9 under Windows XP, the Vista version would run quite a bit faster. Of course, game devs won't do that - they'll eat up that performance headroom by adding more detail, clutter, objects, and interactivity in the DX10 version.

-Jason Cross
ExtremeTech