In hindsight, how would you have changed the design of the current gen consoles?

[cmdrdredd]

Pretty much. I think Sony probably made the wrong choice on blu-ray as well. It made their console way too expensive at launch and with all the cross platform titles had limited benefit. If their parent company hadn't been in a fight to establish it as the clear winner at the time it probably wouldn't have happened.

Sony was looking to establish BD publishing in the professional world. To do that you need consumer level devices in the hands of people. It was a brilliant move for them to release the PS3 with a BD-Rom drive because it pushed Blu-Ray player prices down and pushed adoption. DVD needed to die and HD DVD was flawed.

 

[Midwayman]

Sony was looking to establish BD publishing in the professional world. To do that you need consumer level devices in the hands of people. It was a brilliant move for them to release the PS3 with a BD-Rom drive because it pushed Blu-Ray player prices down and pushed adoption. DVD needed to die and HD DVD was flawed.

Right. It was a good move for Sony as a whole, but I don't think it was the right move specifically for the console. Too early. It could have just as easily back fired on them.

 

[smackababy]

Right. It was a good move for Sony as a whole, but I don't think it was the right move specifically for the console. Too early. It could have just as easily back fired on them.

I don't think so. One of the big selling points of the PS2 was the DVD playback. Sony knew if they could get a a Blu-Ray player in their console, it would translate to more of those sales. Especially in the beginning when players were still super expensive.

 

[Rezist]

DVD was the established format when PS2 came out. The biggest thing fighting BR is DVD today. Most people don't see the need to switch, until new releases are released at price parity it will continue to be this way.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Right. It was a good move for Sony as a whole, but I don't think it was the right move specifically for the console. Too early. It could have just as easily back fired on them.

Well they had a goal and they did what it took. If Blu-Ray had never been in the PS3 $800 low end players would have lasted a lot longer.

 

[purbeast0]

ps3 was also the best bluray player on the market for quite some time. bluray in the ps3 was a genius move by sony imo. there are plenty of posts on this forum alone that i've seen people say they use their ps3 mainly as a bluray player and that's why they purchased it.

 

[Pr0d1gy]

I would have made sure they had adequate cooling solutions. Pieces of ish. Especially the FailBox 360.

 

[Midwayman]

I don't think so. One of the big selling points of the PS2 was the DVD playback. Sony knew if they could get a a Blu-Ray player in their console, it would translate to more of those sales. Especially in the beginning when players were still super expensive.

In the beginning before the format war was even close to decided you could get the HD-DVD for the 360 and look at how well those sold. *shrug* It was there 'cause they had a dog in the hd-dvd/blu-ray fight, not because it was ideal for the console. If the 360 had included a bluray for example, I think the 360 would have been worse off for it despite getting feature parity. The extra cost would have cost them more sales than they made up in people wanting a blu-ray player. I'm more inclined to think that the PS3 sold despite its blu-ray player rather than because of it (at least early on) unless there is market data to say otherwise.

 

[purbeast0]

In the beginning before the format war was even close to decided you could get the HD-DVD for the 360 and look at how well those sold. *shrug* It was there 'cause they had a dog in the hd-dvd/blu-ray fight, not because it was ideal for the console. If the 360 had included a bluray for example, I think the 360 would have been worse off for it despite getting feature parity. The extra cost would have cost them more sales than they made up in people wanting a blu-ray player. I'm more inclined to think that the PS3 sold despite its blu-ray player rather than because of it (at least early on) unless there is market data to say otherwise.

the hd-dvd was an add on peripheral it wasn't integrated with every system. totally different concept.

 

[cmdrdredd]

In the beginning before the format war was even close to decided you could get the HD-DVD for the 360 and look at how well those sold. *shrug* It was there 'cause they had a dog in the hd-dvd/blu-ray fight, not because it was ideal for the console. If the 360 had included a bluray for example, I think the 360 would have been worse off for it despite getting feature parity. The extra cost would have cost them more sales than they made up in people wanting a blu-ray player. I'm more inclined to think that the PS3 sold despite its blu-ray player rather than because of it (at least early on) unless there is market data to say otherwise.

Go to avsforum or hi def digest and search old threads from ps3 launch. There are literally thousands of people just on those forums buying ps3s for blu-ray and recommending the ps3 as the defacto standard player. It got all the updates to the blu-ray spec first, played all disks that some stand alone players would not, loaded the fastest, and was one of the first to decode the lossless truehd and dtshd ma audio and output it over HDMI. Not to mention it was $200 cheaper than the cheapest stand alone blu-ray player. It's DVD up conversion quality was also good for the time.

Contrast that with gaming forums and the predominate thread about the ps3 is "there are no games" and "when are the good games coming?" I am sure many ps3 sales were to home theater users and not gamers simply based on this fact.

 

[Midwayman]

Go to avsforum or hi def digest and search old threads from ps3 launch.

Small communities are small. See it here on AT all the time too when *everyone* here is doing it they think that means the whole market is doing it. Reality is hardcore enclaves like AT or AVSforums represent a very small slice of the market.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Small communities are small. See it here on AT all the time too when *everyone* here is doing it they think that means the whole market is doing it. Reality is hardcore enclaves like AT or AVSforums represent a very small slice of the market.

Yeah whatever...spin city

Av/HiFi Forum: "PS3 is the best Blu-Ray player" and everyone buys one

Gaming forum: "Where's the games? I'll wait" and nobody is buying it

If that doesn't say people are buying it for a Blu-Ray player and not a game console I have no idea what does.

 

[sao123]

PS3 should have ditched the backward compat from the start...
ALSO better airflow & cooling.

360 should have had implemented the Blueray immediately after the death of the HDDVD... also should have eliminated the online subscription model.

wii should have at least HD graphics and played DVD's.

 

[purbeast0]

wii did play dvds they took it away a few years in.

 

[Bateluer]

Now that the current generation is drawing to a close and we have seen how the console manufacturers have fared, I thought it would be nice to do a fun little thought experiment:

If you can go back in time, how would you have changed the design/launch of the current gen consoles?

I'll start the ball rolling:
X360

• Delay launch by a year to hopefully nip RROD issues in the bud
• Maybe increase RAM amount to 1GB? (Seriously not much seemed to need changing with the X360 design)

PS3 (Assuming still implementing Cell design in some way)

• Change the Cell processor to a 2 PPE, 4 SPE design running at 2.5ghz+, this will increase the general processing power in the PS3 (lacking compared to X360), combined with the GPU change below, will also decrease reliance on Cell for graphics tasks, which was very difficult for developers to use.
• Instead of the gimped G71 that is the RSX, work with Nvidia to produce some derivative of the G80 as the GPU, not saying put a 8800 GTX in there, but a stripped down 64-80sp part would have been much more competitive with the Xenos as a GPU than the RSX.
• Unified memory architecture
• Ditch Blu-ray/make it an optional extra, this was the main reason the PS3 cost so much to make, and was sold at a massive loss for a very high price, leading to a huge loss in market share. Sure, Sony won the format war because of it, but considering that digital distribution models are taking over, is it really worth it?

I can't commend on the Wii, so I snipped it from my reply. The Xbox 360 would mostly have needed Microsoft to not cut corners on the cooling. They knew full well that the Radeon X1800 part generated a lot of heat and, against ATI's technical advice, reduced the size and capability of the heatsinks. Future revisions of the Xbox 360 made these changes, in addition to die shrinks. More RAM would been nice, but doubling it may have been a cost they couldn't bear at the time.


On the PS3, the Cell was always more powerful than the tri core PPC in the 360. It just took years for developers to develop tools and optimize their games for it. It wasn't an easy design to code for.

Also, removing the BluRay drive would have been idiotic. The PS3 having a built in BD drive is big factor in the victory of BluRay in the standards war. Digital and streaming methods, and Internet speeds in the USA, are not up to snuff to stream raw 1080p. Its also a concern with many providers using strict data caps. I expect Cox to shit a brick when I do my next PC rebuild, with an app partition large to hold my entire Steam Library. 😛 Its also the reason why the tides shifted in the PS3s favor as the life cycle matured. A bigger question would be why Microsoft never made even an optional BluRay drive for the Xbox 360.

I think adding more RAM to both of the consoles would have benefited games enormously. Because of that minuscule amount of RAM, all games looked flat and bland since they didn't have space for good textures.

I'm curious myself, both MS and Sony contracted to ATI & Nvidia respectively, to build GPUs for these boxes. If, instead of going with odd ball CPU architectures, they'd gone with x86? If they'd used the same AMD Jaguar parts for the Xbone and PS4, they'd both be fully backwards compatible. In the case of MS, fully compatible all the way to the original Xbox. Thats a big advantage. But, what x86 designs around at the time that would have been ideal for these? I doubt the Pentium D would have been a good fit for either, with its heat problems. That would have been a thorn in Intel's side as they tried to phase out Netburst from their product line. The Pentium D didn't make its debut until 2005, and well after AMD's own Athlon 64 X2 design.

 

[Mushkins]

you can already save games to the cloud. you have to have ps+ or xbl gold to do so though, and i'm pretty sure that is the same thing that will be happening with ps4 and x1.

You can, "if you're a PS+ or gold member."

That's not core functionality, that's a value-add that only came to the systems about five years after release to try to keep pushing subscriptions. I shouldn't need a subscription service to save my games almost kinda like I could ten years ago. The memory card was *far* superior for console-agnostic gaming than the local hard drive or either of the current convoluted cloud save options. More importantly, what happens to my saved games if I cancel my Gold/PS+? Are they now held hostage until I subscribe again?

They could seriously bring memory cards back for half the price they were and over 100x the storage capacity. Saved games are still about 1MB tops, you can buy a 64GB flash drive for maybe $30. If I can seamlessly move between my bedroom and my living room and bring my saved games with me, im in line to buy two systems instead of just one.

 

[purbeast0]

You can, "if you're a PS+ or gold member."

That's not core functionality, that's a value-add that only came to the systems about five years after release to try to keep pushing subscriptions. I shouldn't need a subscription service to save my games almost kinda like I could ten years ago. The memory card was *far* superior for console-agnostic gaming than the local hard drive or either of the current convoluted cloud save options. More importantly, what happens to my saved games if I cancel my Gold/PS+? Are they now held hostage until I subscribe again?

They could seriously bring memory cards back for half the price they were and over 100x the storage capacity. Saved games are still about 1MB tops, you can buy a 64GB flash drive for maybe $30. If I can seamlessly move between my bedroom and my living room and bring my saved games with me, im in line to buy two systems instead of just one.

not sure bout ps3, but on 360 you can save games no problem to any usb device and move it around just like a memory card.

 

[smackababy]

not sure bout ps3, but on 360 you can save games no problem to any usb device and move it around just like a memory card.

The PS3 has some problems transferring certain game files via USB. I found this out the hard way. =(

 

[Mushkins]

not sure bout ps3, but on 360 you can save games no problem to any usb device and move it around just like a memory card.

There's still the occasional DRM to worry about, and the saved games are locked to your user profile, which works sketchy at the best of times if saved and run off a USB stick.

DLC also gets foggy when its saved in a different place than the profile its licensed to.

As a side note, this fashion of USB stick support for the 360 was only added years after the console was released with a dashboard update. They *did* release a memory card accessory, but it didnt work very well, it had almost no capacity, and it was prohibitively expensive.

The PS3 does have the same USB functionality, but has most of the same issues.

 

[insertcarehere]

On the PS3, the Cell was always more powerful than the tri core PPC in the 360. It just took years for developers to develop tools and optimize their games for it. It wasn't an easy design to code for.

That's issue was exactly what I was trying to address, the Cell was very powerful, no doubting that, but it was also very difficult to code for, leading to multiplatform games looking better on the X360 for most of the generation. The different cell config would increase general processing power while demphasizing the need to use the SPEs.

I'm curious myself, both MS and Sony contracted to ATI & Nvidia respectively, to build GPUs for these boxes. If, instead of going with odd ball CPU architectures, they'd gone with x86? If they'd used the same AMD Jaguar parts for the Xbone and PS4, they'd both be fully backwards compatible. In the case of MS, fully compatible all the way to the original Xbox. Thats a big advantage. But, what x86 designs around at the time that would have been ideal for these? I doubt the Pentium D would have been a good fit for either, with its heat problems. That would have been a thorn in Intel's side as they tried to phase out Netburst from their product line. The Pentium D didn't make its debut until 2005, and well after AMD's own Athlon 64 X2 design.

I have a feeling that most likely, both of them would either use a high-clocked single core athlon 64 or low clocked athlon 64 x2 in this case. The later launch of the PS3 may have enabled it to use some core duo derivative.

 

[lamedude]

ISuppli says Cell cost $89 at launch and $38 in 2010. Your options for x86 at that price weren't good at the time. PPC970MP aka dual core G5 would be the more logical alternative. Sony could take all that $ they would spent on R&D and put into their fabs to get 65nm ready for launch.

 

[insertcarehere]

ISuppli says Cell cost $89 at launch and $38 in 2010. Your options for x86 at that price weren't good at the time. PPC970MP aka dual core G5 would be the more logical alternative. Sony could take all that $ they would spent on R&D and put into their fabs to get 65nm ready for launch.

The BOM cost of the cell in the PS3 really can't be compared to what AMD and Intel are charging for cpus.

 

[mmntech]

Blu-ray was a smart move for the PS3. I think that contributed quite a bit to the system's success in the long run. Arguably, it's why BD won the format war.

The biggest thing I'd change on the early 360s would be the entire cooling system. It was woefully inadequate for the amount of heat the CPU and GPU were tossing out. Heatsinks and fans were just too small. The problem with consoles is they tend to get stuck in enclosed spaces, and need a lot of ventilation. Which is why the 360S was a better design. It draws in cool air directly from outside the system through a large vent, and blows it directly on the heatsink.

PS3 Fat has similar cooling issues. While the blower fan is adequate for dealing with the CPU, there's next to no ventilation at the top of the system. Which is where the power supply is. I suspect this is what cases the YLOD. Those passive cooled PSUs get very hot, so the heat build up is probably cooks the back of the motherboard. The PSU in the Slims are now actively cooled.

As for other changes I'd make to the PS3, I'd probably would have removed hardware backwards compatibility. It would have kept costs down in the early days to make it more competitive with the 360. I suspect most early adopters already had PS2s anyway. Plus a lot of the most popular PS2 games did eventually get HD re-releases that ran natively on the Cell.

The Cell itself was difficult to program for. I'm not sure what Sony could have used alternatively.

 

[2is]

In the beginning before the format war was even close to decided you could get the HD-DVD for the 360 and look at how well those sold. *shrug* It was there 'cause they had a dog in the hd-dvd/blu-ray fight, not because it was ideal for the console. If the 360 had included a bluray for example, I think the 360 would have been worse off for it despite getting feature parity. The extra cost would have cost them more sales than they made up in people wanting a blu-ray player. I'm more inclined to think that the PS3 sold despite its blu-ray player rather than because of it (at least early on) unless there is market data to say otherwise.

HD DVD was an add-on, it didnt come with the 360 like PS3 came with Bluray. Add-On devices have historically had a very low success/adoption rate on consoles.

 

[sweenish]

Blu-ray was a smart move for the PS3. I think that contributed quite a bit to the system's success in the long run. Arguably, it's why BD won the format war.

I disagree with this sentiment. DRM and Disney won the war for blu-ray. Maybe porn, but I think they were just publishing to both formats.

Cheaper blu-ray players than the PS3 were available, and they weren't flying off the shelves until after the war had been won and the price dropped significantly.

What the PS2 did for DVD, the PS3 did not do for blu-ray.