drkohler on 31 December 2009
| Squilliam said: I also don't understand how people can discount the utility of having onboard processing power. It means that Gem cannot be as easily tacked onto games this far into the generation as they are already making prodigeous use of the PS3s resources. |
Huh? The point of the Gem (or whatever its name is) is the simplicity of the interface for games. After all, it has buttons on it (whose states are probably memory mapped) and a glowing ball. You find the center of the glowing ball and integrate a few pixels around the center to calculate distance. You lose an SPU for that, at most (the new Toshiba TVs use 4 SPUs to analyze/scale/improve/whatever the HDTV stream in realtime which is alot more work than finding a glowing spot at the measly eye toy resolution). There is nowhere the complexity of the Natal system in the Sony solution (also obviously Natal is a lot more versatile with its dedicated Gate-Array/Processors - but that comes with a price Sony wasn't willing to pay, apparently).
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