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Squilliam on 31 December 2009
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drkohler said:
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).

Just the I/O for the camera is an interesting problem to deal with in itself. Uncompressed video from the camera takes up quite a bit of bandwidth and processing by itself. It may sound simple but its not. Theres a reason why Natal does the processing for the camera on site and then transmits the telemetry to the console in a finished state. Even if you could state for certain that every PS3 game has the memory and processing power available to deal with this data, the I/O problem still creeps in.

As far as the cost consideration goes, you would have to consider that Natal has PC, Xbox 360 and TV applications (I have seen a tv demo) so through shipping a large quantity they can bring the cost down and Gem is no slouch as far as cost goes either as you're looking at likely two wands plus a fairly sophisticated camera. They are likely to both cost a fair bit and probably similar in comparison to each other but different in how they expended the resources in their implementation.



Tease.