The Wargamer

And the Award for Inventive Naming Goes To…

The PlayStation 3, descendent of the PlayStation 2, was just announced at a pre-E3 conference in Los Angeles. Coming just days after the announcement of the Xbox 360, it would take a right eejit to miss the fact that the industry is now entering a cutthroat time for both Sony and Microsoft sales cycles. For many years Sony has held the crown of the console market with the massively popular PlayStation, and then the PlayStation 2 which, for the most part, managed to fight off the original Xbox and still maintains its position on top of the console market share.

This new offering will be hitting shelves in 2006, giving the PS2 about the same lifespan as the original, which launched in the US in September of 1995 and was replaced by the PS2 in October of 2000. Sony is aiming to retain all of their existing player base and also expand upon it, hoping to knock Microsoft out of the market altogether by eating into their share of the abundant console gamer crop. But does their new machine have the balls to do it? Well, Sony seems to think so…

And Now, the Tech Specs

This console is certainly going to include a fair bit of impressive technology in it, from a 3.2GHz Cell processor. IBM will be the big winners of this console rivalry it seems: all the major console offerings upcoming from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are utilizing their IBM POWER processors. The chip will be capable of over 2 teraflops per second… for the non-technically inclined, that means it kicks ass. The processor will also handle the sound, providing 5.1 Dolby Surround with DTS to those with the speaker system to match.

The graphics are based on nVidia’s next generation RSX chip, which we were boastfully told has twice the power of two GeForce 6800 Ultra’s, a boast also made for their upcoming next-generation PC card, the G70. This suggests that the two chips are one and the same. The graphics card shares the 512MB of system ram, though given the power of this system, this shouldn’t pose too much of a problem. The graphics card receives 256MB of GDDR 3 SDRAM clocked at 700MHz and the system’s other 256MB of XDR clocked in at 3.2GHz for the processor.

System interfaces will include six USB 2.0 ports, slots for memory sticks, SD and CompactFlash media, a detachable 2.5-inch hard drive, and support for 801.11b/g standard wireless as well as Bluetooth capability, which will be used to power the interface between the console and its wireless controllers. With the days of wireless living upon us, I await to hear the first reports of some kid frying his old man by interfering with the microwave using his console controller…good times!

Microwave antics aside, the system will also be backwards compatible as far as the original PlayStation, as well as supporting the new Blu-ray discs, which can hold up to 54GB of data. The system can be used with older CD’s and DVD’s as well.

A Clash of Titans

Chris Abele discussed the merits of the Xbox 360, the PS3’s main rival, in our Xbox 360 introductory article, and that Microsoft has been rather sketchy on exact details surrounding their new console. The PS3 is Sony’s response: there is something of a running joke at the moment that some poor Microsoft engineer is down on the floor of the E3 convention modifying the showcase Xbox 360 models as we speak to match up to Sony’s boastful claims, and in terms of PR battles over the next year or so this one will be explosive. But how do the consoles actually pair up to one another? Which one will be the better, the more versatile, the more powerful, of the pair?

The answer to that, I’m afraid, will depend on the player. For the most part the two consoles bring the same technological wizardry to the table, and there is no doubt of any games on either console looking like anything other than absolute delicious graphical perfection. Both consoles support much the same future technologies such as the 801.11g wireless standard, the Bluetooth, the wireless controllers and so on. The question of which console to buy will depend on the games that are released for them, and this is why the initial line-up for each console will be so critical, and why many console watchers will be keeping a very close eye on the Microsoft and Sony stands at E3.

Microsoft is already planning a spoiling attack on the PS3, projecting the launch of Halo 3 just in time, surprise surprise, for the launch of Sony’s console. Post-E3 we will be in a much better position to gauge which console will have the lead over the other. For now all we can do is drool over the tech-specs and speculate wildly. If one thing is for sure, it is that the future of console gaming is going to be exceptionally bright if Microsoft and Sony can keep up this level of competition.

About the Author

Aaron McKenna is a freelance journalist and gaming addict, though happily enough the two seem to mix quite well. When not muttering to himself and banging the keyboard in the hopes of producing readable articles he can be found anywhere from the throne room of a Civilization, the cockpit of an F-22, the boots of a GI or the bridge of an Akula, though since the writing of this article he can be found attempting to wrestle with his annual “E3 twitch” and awaiting the onslaught of a thousand press releases.