I will try and not be biased towards Sony. I will try to present their platform fairly.
CPU
- Cell Processor- PowerPC-base Core @ 3.2GHz
- 1 VMX vector unit per core
- 512KB L2 cache
- 7 x SPE @ 3.2GHz
- 7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs
- 7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE
Memory
- 256MB XDR Main RAM @ 3.2GHz
- 256MB GDDR3 VRAM @ 700MHz
GPU
- RSX @ 550MHz- 1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance
- Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels
- Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines
I/O
- USB Front x 4, Rear x 2 (USB2.0)
- Memory Stick standard/Duo or PRO
- SD standard and mini- CompactFlash (Type I, II)
Communications
- Ethernet (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T) x 3 (input x 1 + output x 2)
- Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 b/g
- Bluetooth 2.0 (EDR)
Alright, i want to say, "WOW!" 3 gigabit ports. Bluetooth and 6 USB. "WHY?"
Sony showed some amazing demos at their conference which included physics demos, 128bit color depth, and effects demos. They showed old Final Fantasy VI CG done in real time, which was pretty amazing. I was most impressed with Final Night Round 3.
Quite amazing detail.
But this is when the show went downhill. They should alot of trailers for upcoming games. They tauted this footage as 'in-game' graphics. The peeps at the conference immediately seperated into 2 camps: The ones who believed that it was real time and the others that believed that it was CG. I will try and clarify the differnece. CG (computer graphics) is what Toy Story is. It is a bunch of people working on graphics that have to be renedered over a course of years in a computer. Real time is what Halo 2 is. It is renedered at the moment real time. When Sony showed the Unreal Engine and the Final Night Round 3 they purposely proved to the audience that it was real time by moving the camera around. They neglected to tell people that the footage that they were about to see was CG. Alot of people at the conference took the footage as proof that the PS3 was 'OMG-LOL- ROFLMAO" better then XBOX. The media picked it up and ran with it. This was underhanded. Sony starts out its conference by stating that the PS3 is twice as powerful as Xbox 360. So when you see CG tauted as real time, you tend to believe it. This type of propaganda is really jsut a replay of the past.
When PS2 was going to be released, the gamers and the media were braged with stories like this.
SOURCE
I will pull a couple of quotes out of this story.
Reportedly capable of pushing graphics nearly 50 times faster than the Dreamcast, the PlayStation 2 will handle DVD movies, music, and the next generation of video games.
Successor to the world's biggest-selling 32-bit game console is to feature a microprocessor co-developed with Toshiba Corp. (6502) that provides motion picture-quality images.
We all know this to be completely false. The dreamcast had and has games that look way better then PS2. Sony also claimed the ps2 could push 70 million polygons, and showed the namco girl tech demo which was 70 million polygons in all of its pre-rendered cgi glory. The PS2 comes out and maxes at 8 million polygons at most.
Great Blog on this
This guy really sums it up.
Microsoft and their business partners had real-time, in-engine displays for the public of Gears of War, Kameo, Ghost Recon 3, Full Auto, Condemned, Dog Tag, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Quake IV, Dead or Alive 4, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Tony Hawks American Wasteland, Top Spin 2, Project Gotham Racing 3, Call of Duty 2, and a handful of other titles as well. Behind closed doors, the press was shown a recent build of Perfect Dark Zero that wowed both IGN and Gamespot That's 15 titles right there, and Microsoft announced anywhere from 25-40 games will be available within the launch window of Xbox 360 (thats a 3-month period extending from the day the console is on shelves). Xbox 360 has support from every major publisher in the world including: Electronic Arts, Square-Enix, Activision, UbiSoft, Capcom, Konami, Sega, Rockstar, Namco, Vivendi Universal, LucasArts, THQ, and many others.
Sonys press conference included real-time footage of exactly two games, both from partners who in all likelihood wont be making these games exclusively for PS3 (Electronic Arts and Atari): Fight Night Round 3, and Unreal Tournament 2007. To their credit, Sony has gotten some of their partners to announce some very cool sequels for the Playstation 3. Metal Gear Solid 4 and Devil May Cry 4 will both almost certainly be fun, blockbuster games when they are finally available and on store shelves... but once again, we havent seen any real, in-game footage of them, let alone information on what cool new gameplay elements they may bring to the table.
When you step back from all the hype and all the muscle-flexing over the hardware, and look at whats supposed to matter, the games, E3 was actually a much bigger success for Microsoft. This doesnt mean that Sonys hardware wasnt impressive. It doesnt mean that you cant speculate over how cool games on the Playstation 3 may look or play but the bare facts are that Sony really had very small portions of two actual, real-time games to show. Microsoft and their partners had close to 20 titles they could show. On top of that, they gained major ground in terms of publisher support, especially from Japanese game-makers.
The battle continues.
