E3 2005: Sony Press Conference

05/17/05

With the surprise debut of Xbox 360 on MTV last week, Sony came out of the gate on Monday with a lot to accomplish. The company needed to re-establish its leadership position, it needed to reinforce its dedication to both games and multimedia, and it needed to show that development for its next-generation console would not be as significant a barrier to entry as it was for the PlayStation 2. On most fronts, the company delivered. Sony came out swinging in its E3 2005 press conference, taking several jabs at Microsoft’s “revelation” that the console could be a tool for multimedia. “PlayStation was doing things four years ago [like backwards compatibility and DVD playback that others are doing now,” said Sony’s Kaz Hirzai. Clearly this was a dig at Microsoft’s treatment of the Xbox 360 as an entertainment “hub” of sorts, but it was also a statement that outlined where the company is looking to go with its PS3: new levels of entertainment. As much as both Microsoft and Sony tout the importance of games, it’s clear that both companies are continuing to focus on the hardware first. With that in mind, Sony avoided showing the first PS3 game until about three-fourths of the way through the press conference, and even avoided showing its first technical demo until about half of the way through. The first half of the press conference was all about technical details and hardware specs. And what a piece of hardware the PS3 is. Releasing in spring 2006, the PS3 will be powered by the Cell processor and display graphics using a proprietary RSX graphics processor developed by nVidia. The Cell has been known for years as the building block of the PS3, but nVidia’s RSX GPU was an impressive surprise. nVidia president started the RSX presentation by showing a computer-generated woman named Luna whose skin was semi translucent and eyes expressed surprising emotion. Far from just a render, Luna eventually “breathed” to life, with hand-like demons surrounding her whose skeletal structure and veins showed through their opaque skin as light shone through from the background. Impressive as that was, it wasn’t until Epic Games got on stage and showed a demo of a game running the Unreal Engine 3 that the power of the PS3 really hit home. In the demo, a militaristic man got into an incredible firefight with a Terminator-like robot, with the two embroiled in flames, explosions and, eventually, falling dozens of floors in mid-air. But not a single pixel was rendered, a point proved when Epic “rewound” the scene, paused it in mid-battle and swung the camera around to showcase every pixel that had been rendered in real-time in the demo. The was easily the best-looking demonstration we’ve seen so far (including those for Microsoft’s Xbox 360), and when Epic announced they’d gotten it running on PS3 after having PS3 development kits for merely two months, it was clear that Sony learned from its hard-to-develop-for PS2. So what makes the PS3 and these graphics so powerful? The muscle beneath the PS3’s hood. The Cell processor uses a PowerPC-base core running at 3.2 GHz, while the RSX GPU is essentially a two-card combination with as much power as two nVidia 6800 Ultras. For those of you into math, that’s equivalent to $1,000 worth of video-card power. In addition, the PS3 will have 256MB of XDR main RAM and 256MB of GDDR3 video RAM. All told, Sony’s next-gen console will have a system floating point performance of two teraflops. PlayStation3 with a controller, possibly prototype System specs are all well and good, but entertainment and electronic buffs just want to know what the PS3 will do. Well, the PS3 will display at 1080p in a 16:9 ratio. It will support two video outputs, meaning if gamers just happen to have two HDTVs lying around, they can chain them together and have a combined 32:9 HDTV panoramic display. It will support Sony’s Blu-ray discs as the preferred medium but remain backwards compatible with PS2 and PS1 games. It will connect via Bluetooth with up to seven wireless controllers. It will connect via built-in WiFi to the PSP, enabling the PSP to act as a controller or a remote. It will have six USB 2.0 ports. And yes, it will allow you to browse the Web or access multimedia files even while playing a game. If the multimedia access sounds like Microsoft’s “hub” lingo, then the PlayStation Network will also sound familiar. Through the Network, PS3 owners will be able to purchase new content for their games, trade and share user-created content and characters, and even communicate via a peer-to-peer connections. Video chat/conferencing will also be supported, just one of several functions for the Eye Toy. Several games were on display, from a Formula 1 game and new Killzone title from Sony to what appeared to be the next Red Dead Revolver from Rockstar and an off-road racing title called Motor Storm. But Sony’s press conference, no matter what they might have you believe about the software, was still focused on the hardware, so we’ll reserve significant talk of games until E3 begins on Wednesday. Until then, we can tell you that the PS3 looks not much different from its PS2 predecessor, save for the addition of white and silver models. The system is more rounded and a bit thicker than the PS2, and the DVD tray has been replaced by an auto-loading opening, but other than that, it looks remarkably consistent with its predecessor. The thickness, in fact, is as much illusion as it is reality, since it comes mostly from its convex design, not from any overly wide exterior. Early shots of the PS3 controller (like the one shown above) have been circulating around the Web, but Sony conspicuously avoided showing one at its press conference, leading us to believe it may be continuing to hone the controllers’ final appearance. Having now been to both Microsoft’s and Sony’s press conferences, we can say that of the two systems, the PS3 impresses us the most. We have yet to see the Nintendo Revolution, and we have yet to actually play games on any of the systems, but judging from the early information and the titles we’ve seen on video, Sony is most certainly not taking the next generation of consoles lying down. ----- DailyGame's E3 2005 coverage is sponsored by Cossacks II.
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