lvbuckeye;743735; said:
if you built a PC that could do what the PS3 does, it would run you well into the thousands
See? That's the rub.
Nobody would build a PC that does what the PS3 does!
The PS3's Blu-Ray drive has a
burst throughput of 9Mb/s. The XBox 360's ho-hum plain old DVD drive has a
sustained throughput of 16Mb/s. The XBox 360's drive I/O is nearly double the PS3s Blu-Ray at any read-point on the disk.
The PS3 only has 512Mb of complete system memory. How anyone at Sony thought that you could plot a million vertices, store nearly 1Gb of textures, cache the pipelines for five co-processors, load a gaming engine, its controls, and TSR the PS3 OS in 512Mb of RAM is beyond me. It doesn't work. The system chokes, and the gameplay on virtually every title released so far is crap. Blazing Angels is being panned for having frame rates drop to the low teens, while Tony Hawk and Call of Duty both run slower on the PS3 than they do on the 360. It's not just me saying this, either. It's not Gamespot or IGN. It's the developers themselves.
Because the Blu-Ray and memory subsystem are so slow, Sony has provided an option to install your games directly to the PS3s hard drive to increase performance -- sometimes at 5Gb a pop! That means if you could only afford the neutered PS3 with 20Gb of hard disk space, you will only have enough space to have four games installed concurrently, or else you'll suffer excruciatingly slow load times.
All of this and I haven't even touched on the removal of the rumble pack from the controller, which was dropped in favor of motion sensors in a blatant, yet half-assed attempt to copy Nintendo's Revolution demo, or the completely borked backwards compatibility which means a number of PS2 and PSX games don't work on the PS3.
If
you built a gaming system, you would have 1Gb of RAM at least, a dedicated graphics system with another 512Mb of RAM solely allocated to it, and you'd certainly use something larger than a 20 or 60Gb hard drive, plus you'd take DVD or HD-DVD in a heartbeat over Blu-Ray.
These are all major sticking points that are preventing people from buying the PS3, including myself, and I'm one who dropped $400 on a PS2 during its launch, was a first adopter of the 3DO before that (at a $700 price tag) and spent nearly $3000 on a 486/DX2 just so I could play Doom! The pricetag in and of itself isn't the issue, it the price vs performance. If Sony would have dropped Blu-Ray, doubled the system RAM and hard disk capacities instead, they could have gotten the systems out for around $400 instead of $600, they wouldn't be losing $200 per console sold, and the system would actually work like they promised the consumers it would.
Just call the PS3 what it is. It's a multimedia jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none. It's simultaneously the most expensive gaming console and the cheapest Blu-Ray player, yet it somehow does neither as well as competitors products. It's the new 3DO or CDi. It's a trojan horse to fuck the gamers over and give them the responsibility of making a new media format stick in a new format war, after Sony has realized they've lost billions on old tech potential like BETA and Mini-Discs.
i hear the gyros are nuts but i'll be honest i'm turned off by the shoddy graphics.. if its all you say it is i'll get one at some point
