mirobin

Somehow I wonder if gamestop put a decimal in the wrong place. Would certainly explain why they were so "optimistic" about the number of 360s they'd get...

Peter Godly, I don't think you are looking at the entire picture.

Employing a team of 10 guys for a year to do a software back-compat story costs you $1m. Putting a $5 chip in 10 million PS3's costs you $50m.

Or, to put it into more perspective, you could have a team of 500 programmers working for a year and still break even if it replaces a $5 chip.

By all accounts, it does appear that Local Memory referred to the RSX's half of the system's RAM. The CPU's read/write speed to these locations is exceptionally poor, but it certainly isn't a major limiting factor.

It does prevent some "creative" uses of the hardware (such as using unused VRAM as a form of cache). It also means that software is forced into allocating 50% of the system ram for static textures, resulting in non-optimal use of RAM (ie: if you have < 256mb of textures, you're wasting memory; if you have > 256mb of textures you're forced to use part of main memory to swap textures around).

Pixelantes Anonymous, bandwidth "partitoning" doesn't eliminate download induced lag. The client doesn't get to tell the server how to spread the packets out over a range, and even if it were possible to do the network infrastructure of the internet may not oblige.

This sort of thing typically works by slowing down the packet ACK process and still results in bursts of data and other lag inducing behavior.

Kye, you're not looking at shiney. You're looking at bloom and HDR lighting. And metal (which is shiney).

AC,

Most of the technology in the PS3 was not developed by Sony. Sony is playing the role of a parts integrator.

Cell Chip? IBM.
Graphics hardware? Nvidia.
Blu-Ray? Industry consortium.
Memory? Nope.

Need I go on?

Regardless, development costs are inconsequential -- you can make that up over the console's lifetime. More important are production costs. That's a hit you take on each unit you manufacture.

A significant price drop in the premium system is out of the question for the PS3 release -- the first price drop will come after the following conditions are met:
1) demand for the 360 levels off
2) Microsoft can sufficiently stock store shelves
3) manufacturing costs drop

In other words, after next Christmas at the earliest. At most, you'll maybe see a $20-$30 drop or perhaps a bundled game this year. We're more likely to see a drop in the core system price.

Achievements for points will never happen. Microsoft isn't going to take a $10+ hit for each third party game that sells. Seriously, use some common sense people.

Live gold for free probably won't happen. Live gold supported by an advertisement model is unlikely. Sponsored free live gold weekends/weeks will probably continue to occur.

Expanded friends list: plausable.

50 new BC titles by June: not likely, but remotely possible. Would require a few major breakthroughs in their emulation scheme, which I just don't see happening. (Frankly, it's amazing they're able to get it to work at all)

"Kiddie" 360 interface. Not in a million years. The existing interface isn't "adult oriented" or otherwise rated M. It has a simple layout and is easy to navigate. Additionally, Microsoft's biggest problem with the dash is that everything must fit into the rom soldered onto the board, and supposedly space on that chip is already very tight.

#5: You can't include hardware THAT DOESN'T EXIST. The first HD-DVD drives are just hitting the market NOW. The 360 released months ago.

Want to hazard a guess as to one of the reasons why the PS3 is running late? Dumbass.

The guy is full of himself.

Having hardware physics acceleration doesn't magically make the things he's talking about happen. It still takes code. And if the dev doesn't write the code, the game won't have it. End of story.

Oblivion is quite clearly capable of applying physics properties to objects. The fact that they did so poorly or in a limited fashion wouldn't have changed if dedicated physics hardware acceleration were available.

The batteries last somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 hours on a single charge.