Scott Davey has completed the second of his three-part investigation into the next-generation consoles - This time around, his focus is on Sony's still to be released PlayStation 3.
The PS3 plan was both ambitious and predictable at the same time. For the 3rd time Sony would jointly design the powerful main CPU. For the 3rd time they will launch a console with the next generation in optical disk technology. For the 3rd time the machine will play PS1 games. And for the 3rd time they will use basically the same controller. The only difference in main design this time around is the area of graphics. Graphics technology has progressed at a phenomenal rate over recent years, and consequently has advanced beyond Sony?s ability to develop a competent GPU in-house. With ATI locked up for both the Xbox 360 and the Revolution GPUs, Sony made a wise choice in Microsoft?s ex-Xbox GPU designer, NVIDIA. Now as you may have remembered from the previous article, Microsoft had some pricing issues with NVIDIA - This won?t be the case with Sony however. Sony has the same basic royalty deal in place with NVIDIA as Microsoft and Nintendo have with ATI. Sony likely learned from Microsoft?s mistake, and retained the intellectual property rights to ensure the PS3 will be forwards compatible with its successor.
EliteBastards
The PS3 plan was both ambitious and predictable at the same time. For the 3rd time Sony would jointly design the powerful main CPU. For the 3rd time they will launch a console with the next generation in optical disk technology. For the 3rd time the machine will play PS1 games. And for the 3rd time they will use basically the same controller. The only difference in main design this time around is the area of graphics. Graphics technology has progressed at a phenomenal rate over recent years, and consequently has advanced beyond Sony?s ability to develop a competent GPU in-house. With ATI locked up for both the Xbox 360 and the Revolution GPUs, Sony made a wise choice in Microsoft?s ex-Xbox GPU designer, NVIDIA. Now as you may have remembered from the previous article, Microsoft had some pricing issues with NVIDIA - This won?t be the case with Sony however. Sony has the same basic royalty deal in place with NVIDIA as Microsoft and Nintendo have with ATI. Sony likely learned from Microsoft?s mistake, and retained the intellectual property rights to ensure the PS3 will be forwards compatible with its successor.
EliteBastards
