When does Sony reach the point of no return in Japan?

[HappySqurriel]

mrstickball said: I think this is a point the whole non-HD crowd believe in: A Wii is just as, or nearly as, graphical on an SDTV as a PS3/360 is on an SDTV. It is infact nowhere near it. I own an SDTV and use HDTV via VGA Cables on my 360 to compare everything. Does the HDTV-like quality of a computer monitor provide a huge bonus over non-HD platforms such as the Wii? Absoutely. There is a HUUUUUUUGE difference that gives the 360/PS3 a huge graphical bonus. However, on an SDTV there is still a very sizable difference in qualities. Games like Gears of War, Oblivion and Condemned are very very very graphical powerhouses on an SDTV, and I was blown away by them. This is in comparison to the Wii, which on an SDTV is an improvement over the PS2/Xbox, but by only a small margin. Yes, there is less area (pixel wise) to push an uber-graphical PS3/360 game on an SDTV, but there is still lots of room for improvement on an SDTV for even the PS3/360 to go.

In a lot of ways you can not see much improvement over the Wii on a standard definition television, for example the Wii is (should be) able to produce (approximately) 30 Million polygon per second in game and SD can only display 20 Million pixels (at 60fps) so increasing polygon performance really only produces polygons that are smaller than a pixel (typically refered to as Micropolygons); also the texture performance of the Wii is about as good as you can display on a standard definition television. The area where the XBox 360 and PS3 can produce a noticeable improvement over the Wii at Standard Definition is in shader effects and image post processing. There are two things to consider about shader effects though, they are probably the #1 reason next generation game development costs are so high and they're far more noticeable at higher resolutions because they are best used for displaying variation over small areas on a surface.