Sony exec: nobody will ever tap full power of PS3

In an interview with MTV, Sony executive Phil Harrison talked about the PlayStation 3 and where his company was planning on taking their latest game console.

To start off with, Harrison talked about how excited he was about the new possibilities offered by the online capabilities of the new generation of game machines. "The video-game business for the past 20 years was about shipping closed experiences," he said. Somebody made a game. Gamers bought it. They played it. End of story. Now comes a new trend, he said, where "the start of the relationship with the consumer is when you launch the game."

A cynical person might comment that the "relationship" being referred to is simply one where the consumer continues to empty his pocket on a monthly basis by purchasing extra add-ons and unlockable content for the games they have already paid for. However, there are plenty of possibilities afforded to consoles by the inclusion of online access. Many of these have already been explored for some time by the PC platform, such as the development of communities based around popular games.

Harrison talked about some of the problems his industry faces, such as the relentless attack on the morality of gaming by publicity-seeking politicians, and the struggle for the industry to be taken seriously as a legitimate art form. "I fervently believe that the biggest challenge we face is that our industry is referred to as 'video games,' and games are supposed to be fun," he said, echoing the words of Doug Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association (ESA). He defended games such as Grand Theft Auto by saying that "games should deal with fear, should deal with comedy and with death. They should deal with peril, with drug offenses."

Harrison saved his most interesting comment for last. In discussing the future of the PS3, he stressed that developers are not currently using the machine to its full capacity. In fact, he stated that the current crop of games are using "less than half" of the machine's power, and that "nobody will ever use 100 percent of its capability." Of course, it is common at the beginning of a new console's life for games to not make full use of the power of the hardware: it takes some time for developers to learn the best tricks and techniques for squeezing every last bit of calculating power from any new platform. But to claim that nobody could ever make full use of the system's power, ever, seems a bit hyperbolic. Some developers, at least, will be wanting to tap the full power of the Cell, such as IBM's high-end customers in the HPC market. Some of this knowledge is bound to leak over to the game development world.

The major reason Harrison wants to hype up the "unlimited" potential of the PS3's architecture is to downplay comparisons between games running on Sony's console and Microsoft's Xbox 360. The two systems are not completely dissimilar: they both contain a PowerPC core running at 3.2 GHz, both have similarly-clocked GPUs, and both come with 512 MB of RAM. The 360 adds two additional cores running simultaneously, whereas the PS3's "Cell" architecture eschews the extra cores in favor of seven smaller "Synergistic Processing Units" (SPUs) that act as vector processors with a separate instruction set and a tiny amount of on-board memory. Whether or not two extra cores are equivalent to seven SPUs is a matter that has not yet been adequately resolved: many have argued that the Cell architecture has more theoretical potential power, but whether this will translate into significantly better-looking games is still unknown. Many games still don't take full advantage of the Xbox 360, either, and as the two heavyweights battle it out, it will be fascinating to watch what developers on both sides can accomplish. Still, in the end it is more about whether or not the games will be fun, and thus the race is on to sell as many systems as possible in order to create a larger market to encourage widespread third-party developer support.

(C) www.arstechnica.com