The Playstation 3 System’s Silicon Brawn
With the Playstation 3 system, would you think that Sony was just too lavish with the Playstation 3 system? Here’s the Playstation 3 system –in detail.
The Sony Playstation 3 system has a 3.2GHz Cell Processor with similar clocking speed of high end Pentium D desktop systems. It is not a Pentium D however, since a cell microprocessor is far beyond in capability. It handles floating point kernels impressively; meaning, it has allows implementation of radical game physics impossible to implement with older systems. In plain English, visuals would be more convincing: fabric sways with the air and water animations sports a truer texture. And game physics of today’s games is something that still has yet a lot to be desired even with the best game visuals.
This cell microprocessor has 1 PPE and 7 SPE, and this allows SPE assignment to specific tasks, either by paralleling, pipelining or streaming, hence the truer graphic representation. Say one core is assigned to animate player sprite movement, another core operates the weather animations and another core animates a perfect ballistics ruled projectile.
Sony’s collaboration with NVDIA also contributes large to the overall image quality of the Playstation 3 system. NVDIA provided Sony with the RSX Reality Synthesizer GPU capable of simulating textures up to the finest resolution, up to 1920×1080 pixels compared to competition: Xbox 360 can output graphics at 1280 x 720 pixels and Wii renders at 853×480 pixels. Anti-aliasing and shader pixel capabilities of the RSX will also take advantage of the Rambus XDR 256 memory and GDDR3 256 memory. Jagged edges will be a thing of history with silicon muscle power such as these.
If you have been previously wowed by works such as FarCry and recent Company of Heroes (games which used successfully pixel shader technology) you might be in for a real surprise with Playstation 3 games. Genji: Days of the Blade, Fight Night: Round 3 and Call of Duty are among the game examples where the Playstation 3 system flexes its graphical muscles. And right the next corner is the much anticipated Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.
Another big deal of the Playstation 3 system is the Blu-ray technology. While the BDrive still allows a large number of CD and DVD formats, it supports the newest format technology the Blu-ray, whose capacity in storage media, around maximum 50GB, is also still unrivaled. That means more data for games and more options for game developers hence, ideally a better game.
So, in conclusion, would you think that Sony was just too lavish with the Playstation 3 system? The answer is the game Resistance: Fall of Man. Another answer is Fight Night: Round 3. Rummage around for a genre from the competition that has the level of detail of these games. You’ll be surprised that there is hardly any.