The programming difficulty of the PS2 was pitched, as I recall, on the basis that it would allow for continual graphical improvement, and that there was more potential in the platform. But what I think we saw was that the PS2 just took longer to reach still sub-GameCube and Xbox graphical quality. I'm not saying that will be the case with the PS3 as well, but the PS2 would suggest a more exotic architecture doesn't necessarily mean more potential: just more room for improvement.

Well ,the Cube and the Xbox were released one year and a good chunk of other after the PS2 .If they werent graphically better something very strange would be happening .Still ,the PS2 architecture and powerful CPU ,although difficult to program for ,allowed as the years passed to include many graphic effects by software and finally some games as FFXII ,Valkyrie Profile Silmeria ,Metal Gear Snake Eater Subsistence and God of War I and II have reached heights nobody tought it would and that rival Cubes and Xbox best titles .

Damn I even missed that he used PS2 numbers also! MikeB I do totally agree with you that PS2 is a powerhouse, does that matter for PS3? Well, NES and SNES was great products, and they won those generations. Then PS1 came and took over. Why? Lots of game in the long run because Sony showed more love for thired parties than Nintendo. Now we have three good consols on the market. One that have a great name on it: Playstation 3. We also have Wii and Xbox360. Xbox360 have one year head start in the USA, and a good tie ratio a lot of games sell well. It has some good games coming up, Guitarr Hero 2, GTA4 and Halo3 this year. It also have a company that have the economical muscles to support devlopers. Wii has got a lot of great press and is selling really impressive in Japan, EU and USA. PS3 well, is for the moment getting some really bad press. Some of the games looks like movies, but the consol is guit expensive looking at the competition. What I have written above is the reason why I can't understand sonys strategi. GDC might change some of it, that home thing. But for the moment their expensive consoll weak line up and bad initial production have left them far behind the competition. Yes they have sold the same amount as xbox360 did during its launch window, on two markets. BUT so far it far behind expectations: Remember: "We will sell 5 million consols without any game". Well so far they haven't. The great games that should have saved them in Japan has so far failed, Vf5 didn't do well and I actuly think it will sell better on xbox360. Gundam has if the primary rumors is correct failed to. I don't say it is impossible for Sony to turn this around. BUT I do think that PS3 can't realy on brand only, PS2 users that want to upgrade might go for a Wii or a xbox360 if the everyday press praise this consols or shows that Wii is selling extreamly well. So for me it doesn't matter if they have two consols on the market without showing some progress or future plans for ps3, I do see that xbox360 and Wii might shatter the Playstation era. Not with one clear winner but I honestly think that Wii might do a DS in japan, a run away succes, with just some PS3 games hitting the top list. In USA I predict contiuned steady sales, which I think can get a boost when the GTA crowed want the next game and sees that the could either buy a xbox360 for 400$ or a PS3 for 600$. Now we still have the EU launch left for PS3. I think we will see pretty good sales for PS3 the first million will proberbly sell out during two months (and that is good sales for an launch in marsch). Sadly I don't see that the sales will continue stron for two reason: * the system is quit expensive in EU because of taxes. * sommer time will slow down the momentum, and I honestly think that they won't regain it before they launch some real good killer app.

Yes and now we have PS3 launch one year after xbox360. The different this time is that PS2 had build up a bounch of owners during this year, PS3 so far haven't shown any enormus sales and the hype has almost died. In the same time Wii gets great hype and xbox360 is selling great amount of games in USA. So does PS3 have the time to mature when it came to programming. One year from now the portetional killer apps arrive MGS4 and FF. These are meant to get the sells up to match xbox360 in USA. The question I see is it to late? Microsoft did kill xbox fast what happens if microsoft realse a new powerhouse 3 years from now that performs better than PS3? Will the PS3 live as long as PS2 will do?

The biggest problem the PS3 has is it´s late release. You can cry for Metal Gear and Final Fantasy again and again - at the time the killer apps launch in Japan the Wii will probably have a huge Userbase. A little Story: in 1996 there was a company called Nintendo releasing their new System the N64. Nintendo had been the market leader for a long time, the NES and Super NES sold like hot cakes with cheese. And then Nintendo launched the N64... and it sold less than the Playstation, a console that was thought to fail against the gaming giant. Nintendo´s problems? they released their N64 too late, they used the wrong format... and they were to arrogant to keep the 3rd parties with them. Of course, the console war wasn´t over - Nintendofans claimed: "Wait till Zelda 64 and Golden Eye come out! And wait for the next Rare game!" Then Zelda finally arrived: It sold more than 7 milion copies and was probably the best game ever created in gaming history - but the N64 was too old, the PS was too long in the market to beat it. And so Nintendo lost this "console war". So now swap the words "N64" with "PS3" the date to 2006, the company is called Sony now and the games are not Zelda an golden Eye but Final Fantasy and Metal Gear. Makes sense, doesn´t it?

I think Louie really nails it right there, provided you realize that the N64 still sold 32 million consoles, which is pretty damn impressive. It'll be the same for the PS3. I don't think anyone is saying that it will fail as a console (sub 20 Mill). They're just saying it won't come close to the dizzying heights of previous Playstation consoles.

Well, you can be sure that it will be much more expensive. In parallel systems you find much more possible problems, that you can run into and you won't be able to recognize them before the implementation. In fact I don't even think that the raw calculating power will be the main problem of the Xbox 360 or the PS-3. It is much more difficult to synchronize the different processes. It is very easy to bring such systems to a point where they are working very hard, while they don't do anything productive and are only reloading their processors. In such situations a single process might have a much better performance. It will be difficult to find the best solution. and even small changes in a single program can change the performance of the whole system. THese are principal problems that you have on all parallel systems. There is simply much more power "wasted" for housekeeping. Add more processors and you normally get less calculating power per processor. So you can't simply add the calculating powers. The easiest way to harvest the power of a parallel system is the used of special libraries. Simply use a special call and the library will ceate a new process, that calculates the result on a SPE or in another processor or thread. But while this solution looks easy it will be not be very effective. It is always bad if the main process has to wait for results, but have you really something usefull to do for the free SPE? In fact if you work this way it will probably be a good solution for multi plattform games, because the Xbox 360 can be used in the same way and even with the same calls. It will probaly even work with the same speed. But if you wan't to get more out of the cell you suddenly have to worry about the 512 KB local memory of a SPE, memory access and so on. You will probably be more involved with your housekeeping code, than with your real problem. If you get to this point on a Xbox 360 it is much easier. Each processor works the same, you don't need to think about memory management so much. The processor will do it for you. And when I think about the stuff that the cell should do in the background I get a bad feeling. If there are bigger memory transfers in background you should not be surprised if suddenly your helper processes run into delays and the main process has to wait sometimes. Then your problems do not matter anymore, instead you have to worry about memory access speed and so on, even in processes that are beyond your control. In fact the best way to solve such problems might be: limit your own memory access even if you use even less of the available processing power. You will be done faster and the game can be shipped earlier. Such thoughts will probably play a much bigger role than in previous plattforms.

My lowest-end estimates for any of the three consoles would be about 35 million, and realistically I expect 40 million from each. In other words, I think the N64 is going to be passed up twice, in terms of being the best-selling "losing" console ever. This is assuming at least a 6 year cycle for all three systems. I say this since I'm pretty negative on the PS3. Basically agreeing with you two, Louie and stof...

The N64 comparison is semi-enlightening, except it ignores that Nintendo had the first- and second-party muscle to keep that platform alive and relative well. Sony has a window of opportunity in late 2007 into 2008 where a bunch of triple-A third-party titles put into production before the PS3s sales troubles were apparent will come out. If Final Fantasy, MGS4, etc. don't succeed in building a critical install base, things look bleak.

...and I agree, this mass-parallelism is actually an INEFFICIENT approach in terms of game processing, since the loads on different processes are changing all the time, making load balancing a huge pain, and hence the easy/common solution is just to leave lots of unused over-head. The Wii is obviously nowhere near as powerful as the PS3/360, but its power is much more accessible, and can be run flat-out all the time with not overly-complex tuning (the hard part with the Wii will be managing the texture cache, which stayed the same as the GameCube, 3mb I think)