My point is that firmware is really a non-issue. All three consoles will improve as time passes. Sony is making the most strides because, honestly, they had the furthest to come (not including Nintendo and their shortbus approach to online gaming). Sony is still adding features that have been mainstays on the 360 for 24 months.

The storage capacity of the media being used can effect the visuals due to the size of the textures being used. Resolution and compression.

In the interest of keeping a standard game on one piece of media, texture resolutions would be the first thing to take a hit if space on a DVD became a premium. Adding a second disk is not the solution because it adds more cost for the publisher in licensing/production fees, and in some instances, multiple disks simply aren't practical in a non-linear game unless a full install option is mandatory like most current PC games.

The effect becomes more pronounced the higher the display resolution, which is why it doesn't make a significant difference if the native render resolution is the typical 1280x720 that is the current standard. So far. If a developer was inclined to use higher res textures for a PS3 version of a game, it would mean more work, but it would also mean maximizing the platform's inherent attributes to produce the best version possible.


While a soft update can't create more physical memory, it can allow more physical memory to be available to developers for game engines by reducing the overhead of the operating system itself.

Most are aware this is the reason why a game that requires 2 GB minimum of RAM on a PC can still run on console with only 512MB RAM. Over time, those firmware updates can (already have) reduce the amount of physical memory required for the OS, effectively freeing up more RAM to be available for the games themselves.

Not as nearly as beneficial (or easy) as adding a couple RAM modules to a PC, but with consoles, firmware updates can provide limited future scalability in addressing memory constraints.

It rarely works that way, though. If anything, firmwares almost always bloat over time, not shrink.

In any case, there won't be enough of a difference to make it even worth mentioning.

i expect the PS4 2 definitely be stronger, but it wont cost as much at launch, in my opinion.

Next Nintendo console going Blue-Ray? No point of arguing with you.

Everybody is going to have to switch to an architecture similar to cell due to the current crisis in computer architecture it's just a matter of when.

Sony already bit the bullet as far as architecture goes by moving to a system with asymetric cores. Once you go above 4 cores maintaining cache coherency tends to lead to so much bus congestion that your performance actually decreases. Every major chip designer is moving in this direction, not just IBM. Intel's Larabee is probably more similar to cell than any gpu architecture even though it gets labled as a GPGPU. And anyway, if you think programming with dma's on the SPEs is difficult, then you should try GPU programming with moving context windows and no nice floating point division. Microsoft and nintendo will have to go through the same painfull transition at some point although they do have the advantage of not being first movers here.

The division at IBM in charge of developing the 360s hardware was able to slap together a system in record time. Yes, there is RROD, however considering how quickly they did the whole thing it's astonishing (and lucky as hell) that this is the worst design flaw. It was a role of the dice and it turned out in MS's favor. Had this not happened Sony would not have been forced to release early and the cell would have been much more mature (might have had a reliable SPE compiler for instance). Many of the last second fudges might have been unnecessary and it they might have been able to pull off eliminating the GPU mostly (with a couple special purpose ICs for things like AA ala the xbox).

As a side project with two other people we already have a realtime raytracer doing 6 fps using just the 6 SPUs one one PS3 involving a number of light sources emitting sierpinski triangles (at different trippy colors) onto a number of highly reflictive sheres (so theres alot of light bouncing around) at 800x600. This is even though we haven't even begun to optimize things seriously yet, all the floating point to integer conversion for display are done on the ppu which needs to be moved over to the spus, and we are doing it through the draconian hypervisior which runs underneath linux.  I honestly think that a few more usable spus clocked a little higher (not necessarily the 2007 6Ghz version shown) would have changed things drastically.

If sony sticks with the cell next generation they are set.

BTW the ps3 runs a modified version of the AIX kernel, I'm not sure but the 360 might also run AIX as they both use the POWER ISA (although what most people thing of as the OS are really userspace apps).

Me thinks so too. The next PS platform will be targeted at a slightly lower price then the PS3 at launch was. SONY will most definitely have learnt their lesson in this regards.

I do think tho that the PS4 will have an advantage over the PS3 when it was released. The PS4 will have a BD player and by that time it would be super cheap. A suped up version of the CELL will most likely be used again, which wouldn't cost SONY as much as what developing it originally cost them.

These 2 factors; the CELL and the BD player definitely cost the PS3 the most and IMO won't the PS4. SONY is wise in thinking ahead.