Sony PlayStation3
PlayStation3 - The most technologically advanced box put to mass production yet will be Playstation3
Sony is the undisputed champion of the console games market. Their PlayStation line of games consoles has more third- party development support, more genres and more games period than any other. Sony's next- generation games console PlayStation3 was unveiled in a surprise to attendees at May 2005's E3 (Electronics Entertainment Expo). The technology behind Sony's new system will be astonishing, especially if they can release this device by the first half of 2006, as promised.
Sony demoed the graphics powerhouse behind PlayStation3 at E3 with samples from Final Fantasy VII and others. The lifelike moving images were uncanny to behold and looked more developed and polished than similar graphics demos from Microsoft for Xbox 360. However, this was only a demo and hardly indicative of a showdown between the two game systems. Sony put on a show and did not disappoint fans of their games consoles (critics of PS3 say all the E3 demonstration showed were cut-scene animations and not real gaming).
Sony's PS3 specs make for the most impressive on- paper technical specifications ever seen on a hardware device intended for mass production. Sony's CPU for PS3 will include the "Cell Processor" technology that runs at 3.2 GHz, providing almost three full teraflops of floating point processing power. The gGraphics processor by nVIDIA will be capable of 100 billion shader operations and 51 billion dots per second. The GPU will enclose 300 million individual transistors, a true technical marvel, transistors with gate oxide only five atomic layers thick.
- Take a look at these specs!
- CPU Cell Processor, Power PC base Core at 3.2GHz.
- GPU nVIDIA RSX at 550MHz
- Memory 256M XDR Main RAM at 3.2GHz, 256M 700MHz GDDR3 VRAM
- Detachable 2.5" Hard Drive slot
- 4 front USB ports and 2 rear USB 2.0
- Ethernet port standard w/ wi-fi IEEE 802.11 and Bluetooth 2.0
- Wireless controller with Bluetooth, up to seven
- 2 HDMI outputs
- Video Output Resolutions of 480i, 480P, 720P, 1080i, 1080P
- Digital Audio Output w/ Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS decoding.
- Blu-Ray optical media compatible with PlayStation CD-ROM, PlayStation2 CD-ROM, CD-DA/(ROM), -R, -RW, SACD, SACD Hypbrid (CD), SACD HD, DualDisc, DVD, -ROM/R/RW/ R/ RW, Blu-Ray disc.
Sony definitely hits the mark with the ultimate gaming machine. If the looks of the demos so far are any indication, this is going to present the most lifelike graphics yet seen even from Xbox 360. Sony has also spared no expense with the extras to keep this machine relevant into the future with dual HDMI ports, and support for their own Blu-Ray standard isn't necessarily a huge surprise but a welcome addition.
Compatibility with the SACD high- resolution audio discs with the HDMI output give the PlayStation3 a little something to gamers who double as audiophiles. There aren't a lot of details about the media support, and Microsoft clearly has this angle covered better than Sony with Xbox 360's Media Extender support for its Media Center operating system. But PlayStation3 looks like a pure gaming machine with the most amazing demos we've seen.