6 years. Only 6 years. This is exactly how many years it took Sony to become a leader in the gaming platform market. Many people think that the corporation has always been there, but this is completely false. Moreover, the Japanese, initially, did not even plan to appear on it. Yes, there were attempts to collaborate with SEGA on the production of components, but there was no thought about our own system. Everything, as often in such stories, began with an accident. One day, Ken Kutaragi, seeing his daughter playing video games, also became interested in them and decided to take a contract from Nintendo to create an audio chip for their next console. Despite general disapproval, the project was given the green light thanks to the support of Norio Oga, then chief executive of Sony. As a result of the success, Nintendo and Sony signed a partnership agreement. The new project was of a different nature, more ambitious, so to speak.
Super NES Play Station
The beginning of the 90s was accompanied by a change in media standards; Cartridges, due to their small volume and insufficient reading speed, were already difficult to consider as a current solution – they were becoming a thing of the past; and the next evolutionary step was supposed to be disk media, and joint development was precisely that. The device was planned in two versions: as an additional CD drive for the SNES, and also as a hybrid Sony Play Station console (essentially a SNES, but with a built-in CD drive). The system existed and was even presented to the public in 1991, but literally at the last moment it was canceled due to licensing and, in the future, financial disagreements. Despite the failed project, Sony and in particular Ken, with the support of the same Mr. Og, continued to work on creating their own gaming system, especially having experience working with similar.
Further fate
Ken Kutaragi and Playstation 2 Slim
Due to copyright reasons, the project will replace the Play Station with the already familiar Playstation, and after a while it will take the lead in the 5th generation race. And if the first “Sonka” was still a kind of experiment, then the creation of the second was already approached thoroughly, which made it possible to preserve the relevance of hardware for a long time. Playstation 2 will become the best-selling and most successful game console in history, selling 150 million worldwide. copies, leaving the “mastodons” represented by SEGA and Nintendo far behind, and Ken Kutaragi himself will be proudly called the “father of Playstation”.
Playstation 3: The Beginning
Clearly, after two successful generations, Plasystation 3 was only a matter of time. Indirect development began around 2001 with the creation of an alliance called “STI” (Sony, Toshiba, IBM). The main goal of the research was to create a flexible universal processor capable of computing from a conventional home TV to a supercomputer. The result of 4 years of development was a processor known as “Cell”. Sony created the basis for their new console, but clearly did not force things – there was no need for them to rush, because the Playstation 2 continued to sell like hot cakes, the audience was only growing, and abandoning it would be madness.
Another thing is that competitors like Microsoft and Nintendo didn’t care about Sony’s success. And if the neighbors from Japan decided to avoid direct conflict by occupying their niche, which would soon allow for evolution within the framework of game controllers – which, of course, is a huge plus for them, then the newly minted American competitor was full of ambitions to butt heads on the same field.
Sony were hostages of the success of Playstation 2, it was simply unprofitable for them to finish “their sixth generation,” but at the same time there was a big risk of failing in the new one, simply missing the start. A separate circumstance creating a problem was “Cell”. As it will become known later, the original concept of the Playstation 3 did not involve a graphics chip in principle, and the processor, in addition to computing operations, also had to deal with graphics. So, bad luck, the development of graphics technologies either went too quickly, or a slightly different path than Sony expected, but it turned out that the early phenomenal results of Cell differed significantly from those obtained in 2004-2005, and far from for the better. The situation was extremely bleak, and given the average generation life of 5 years, long-term failure loomed over the corporation.
Measures had to be taken as soon as possible, and there was no time left to develop our own solution. Thus, another chip appeared on the Platstation 3 motherboard, with the pretentious name “RSX” or Reality Synthesizer, which in fact was an ordinary PC video card of an outdated series, and even with a cut-down bus, but supposedly with “raised frequencies”. The G7x series of chips, which were used in video cards, having a separate shader architecture, caused discomfort and a number of performance problems, and frankly “lived out”, and the whole world was literally waiting for the 8th generation of graphics chips. It is clear that in the future this will be reflected in a drop in frame rate, and in low resolution, and of course in my favorite – anti-aliasing and its absence.
Technical characteristics and potential
“I molded him from what was. »
Playstation 3 Fat motherboard. Behind the two seals in the center are Cell and RSX, behind the far left are the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer, combined into one chip.
The final characteristics were as follows: <br https://abcislandscasino.co.uk/withdrawal/ />
1. CPU: 8-core Cell 3.2 GHz;
2. RAM: Rambus 256 mb XDR 3200 Mhz;
3. GPU: Nvidia RSX 256 mb GDDR3 550 Mhz;
Despite the fact that, at first glance, the Playstation 3 was similar to a PC, in reality everything was far from the case.
1) Cell was not an 8-core processor. In fact, there was only one core (dual-threaded) and 8 co-processor elements. What does it mean? In simple and understandable words, that very core was the conductor for these elements and coordinated their work. This technology made it possible to create a huge number of parallel calculations, which was then a solution ahead of modern trends. Most games didn’t even support two threads, let alone eight. Even Crysis, one of the most technologically advanced projects, worked mainly on one core. However, the story about “eight threads” is not entirely true, one SPE was always blocked in order to reduce chip defects in production, one was busy with audio processing, and finally another one was busy processing the operating system. Thus, from eight SPEs there were only five left, which was also still impressive. In addition, each SPE had its own cache memory, and interaction with each other was implemented through the bus.
2) Despite the appearance of a separate graphics chip in the PS3, as conceived by Sony engineers, rendering still had to be mainly done by Cell, the same SPE. And there really was a logic to this; during the experiment it turned out that if you use 5 SPE as pixel shaders, they achieve results at the level of similar shaders on the GT 7900 video card. In other words, Cell compensated for the shortcomings of the separate RSX architecture, and this was not a whim, but truly a necessity.
Most third-party developers, when creating or porting, due to a simpler and more understandable architecture, focused on the X-BOX (a completely logical solution) and threw all the game code onto one, albeit powerful core, and an outdated graphics chip, without using SPEs at all. This is the answer why the entire multiplatform up until 2009-2010 looks strikingly better on the Microsoft console.
"Wow! We left the bay!»
The issues with the “filling” were somehow resolved, and in 2006 Sony, with grief in half, entered the seventh generation of consoles.
PS3 design presentation
The release of Playstation 3 was remembered by everyone as a great celebration and failure at the same time; the console, having appeared a year later, lost many projects, including several exclusives that migrated to the X-BOX 360, and as a result was not particularly attractive in the eyes of consumers. The first games suffered from jumpy framerates, lack of anti-aliasing, and sometimes even lack of HD resolution. Many well-known companies spoke negatively about the Playstation, and some projects were not even released due to the complexity of development. A separate “fly in the ointment” was the cost of the device; people simply didn’t understand why they should buy a console on which the games look worse and which, moreover, also costs $100 more – it’s really unclear. However, this was not a complete list… Another surprise was the overheating that occurred right up to the Slim revision. In general, this problem affected not only the Playstation 3 – the X-BOX 360 was also “on fire” for almost a year now; the other thing is that Sony had time to anticipate this.
Thus, for the Japanese corporation, the seventh generation was not as rosy as the previous one, but was in danger of failure. It was necessary to do something until the market was finally formed. In addition, 2006 as a whole was not an easy year for Sony, and in many ways a turning point. Ken Kutaragi, formerly known as the “father of Playstation,” resigns from the post of president of the corporation, perhaps by his own decision, perhaps he was “asked”, since after all, he was the one responsible for the Cell architecture, and his place is taken by the head of the American branch, Kazuo Hirai. And if Kutaragi was a romantic engineer who dreamed of creating a console, then Hirai was a pragmatic marketing manager who came to correct the situation as quickly and clearly as possible.
"Fire, Water and Copper Pipes"
Ken seems to symbolically convey the fate of Kazuo’s PS3
The first thing Kazuo did was to make the console as cheap as possible, by reducing costs, and almost personally controlling. The Fat revision of Playstation 3 in many ways seemed like a dream console, in addition to its main chips, its motherboard also contained chips from PS2 for backward compatibility, which on the one hand was an interesting solution for buyers, because many from previous generations still had a library with their favorite games, and on the other hand it added fifty green ones, if not more, to the cost. At first they tried to replace hardware compatibility with software, but due to performance problems, they left the ability to run games only with PS. Also, to reduce the cost, the card reader was “cut off”, the case materials and cooling system became simpler.
While solving the cost problem, Sony also did not forget about games, allocating huge budgets to internal studios and third-party developers. Yes, of course, there are no pancakes without lumps, and it’s difficult to call the first line of exclusives “12/10 masterpieces for all times and fingertips” – they were very raw, but some still stood out from the masses: the same Uncharted, released during the crisis of action-adventure games, Mototrstorm – a mixture of Burnout and Flatout, and Heavenly Sword, the animation in which still looks very good. Basically, Sony, of course, relied on games for a mass audience, but also niche projects like Metal Gear Solid, Gran Turismo and Demon`s Souls appeared on the system, the latter would become unexpectedly popular and would later give birth to a whole series, and many would still try to repeat the success formula.
In 2009, a new line of exclusives was released, and the “cherry on the cake” was Uncharted 2, which was considered by many as the main “why” to buy a PS3; Kilzone 2 also did not get lost, even if it did nothing for the development of the genre, but finally demonstrated that very “potential”.
A separate event was the release of the Slim revision, the consoles of which became smaller in size and boasted a smaller technical process (45 nm as opposed to 90 nm in Fat), which made it possible to almost completely forget about overheating, but also, for the sake of the same savings, several USB ports were cut off from them.
"Trouble doesn’t come alone"
It would seem that the main “stones” have been successfully removed from their necks: the cost has been reduced to a competitive figure, Playstation no longer shines with yellow lights, the expected exclusives are coming out, God of War III blows everyone’s minds, and Heavy Rain “makes people pay four thousand for a movie,” and even third-party developers began to study the features of Cell, like the same DICE, which uses SPU to implement MLAA anti-aliasing in Battlefield 3, but a new problem appears… And Playstation, as it turns out already hacked! On August 20, 2010, it became known that the console had been partially hacked – it became possible to launch game images from the hard drive, and a quarter later, on New Year’s Eve, on December 30, a gift fell under the "Christmas tree" – a complete hack that made it possible to turn back anything, even install Linux, which the Japanese "cut off" a relatively long time ago, but by timely releasing a new firmware update, Sony had already finally eliminated the possibility of hacking, and soon launched chain of criminal prosecutions of offenders.
After a while, owners of Playstation 3, and in particular regulars of online games, will face a new test – the fall of PSN. In the period from April 17 to April 19, 2011, as a result of unauthorized access, or in simple words, hacking of the Playstation Network, the data of 77 million people fell into the hands of attackers. users. Sony is forced to disable access to the service, depriving tens of millions of players online, which, given the possible hacking of not PSN accounts, but bank cards, does not seem such a tragedy. Access to PSN will return a month later, on May 15, 2011, but court cases regarding user claims will continue for another 2 years.
Also in 2011, Playstation 3 entered the third phase of its life cycle; the new revision of SuperSlim frankly did not pretend to be anything other than the maximum reduction in price and differed only in design, and the next line of games turned out to be controversial: Uncharted 3 and Motorstorm 3 were frankly weaker than the previous ones, and Kilzone 3 and Resistance 3 finally got rid of crooked game design and became playable.
It was clear that the era of Playstation 3 and the seventh generation was systematically coming to an end, and even if a couple more projects were planned, but this was still the last note of harmony, and damn it, everything is just like that – Gran Turismo 6 does not at all stand up to a full-fledged game, a large DLC, God of War: Ascension (what are you) simply should not have been released after the epic third part (which, too, according to the tradition of long-running series, ended “to be continued”). The gaming community and developers were literally waiting for the announcement of the new generation, when suddenly the PS3 “swan song” was released.
Generation 7.5
Who would have thought that at the end of the generation we would see a game of such quality as Beyond Two Souls The Last of Us. A new project in a new franchise, not a spin-off or a sequel, as is usually the case lately. To be honest, even now the setting of TLoU does not inspire confidence: the zombie apocalypse is a theme already so hackneyed by everyone, from the old Resident Evil to the new Dead Island (Dying Light), and besides, the co-op survival game Left 4 Dead should not be forgotten either, but much is determined by the accents and details. Moving a little away from the topic, the main drawback of Uncharted has always been the shootings, namely their length and the lingering feeling that Nathan Drake is not an adventurer, but an infantryman on the front line of the Third World War. Many expected from Naughty Dog, the creators, something similar in TLoU, but the opposite happened. ND abandoned the mindless extermination of the infected and focused on history, creating a real road movie in the setting of a zombie apocalypse. Parsing the plot of The Last Of Us is certainly entertaining, but something else is interesting: how Sony were able to further improve the graphics compared to Uncharted?
The fire effects look simply phenomenal, but the faces of the characters deserve special praise – they are truly alive. Yes, many will say that motion capture is no longer a new thing in working with animation, but it’s just that faces still look “cast iron”, with an incomprehensible shine and reflections. Subsurface scattering is a completely different matter. Skin is known to transmit light through itself and PBR is aimed precisely at simulating this effect. Technology today won’t surprise anyone; it’s easier to say which game doesn’t have it than vice versa, but for the seventh generation it was new, and in my memory it was implemented only in Battlefield 3 (if you know other examples, please write in the comments), but the same brainchild of DICE was stuffed with everything, and at one time required a fairly powerful video card, which was not even close to the 2006 console.
Ellie’s hair also looked quite realistic, and even though it was still far from real hair, it still didn’t consume as many resources as nVidia Hairworks, while looking rather flawed.
There was also a small evolution in the dubbing of the characters, now everything happened to match the game scene, and the sound was recorded with similar movements, but only those who played the English version could try this technique, ours, the Russian one, was done the old fashioned way.
Time to say goodbye?
As planned, The Last of Us became the “swan song” for the Playstation 3 and consolidated its success after difficulties. Naturally, the console was still supported for some time after the release of Playstation 4, and during this time several interesting multiplatform games also appeared on it, but this did not last long, somewhere until 2014, and after that only FIFA 14 Legacy Edition appeared (but every year with updated forms and rosters), some indie projects and Japanese. Sony officially stopped production in 2017, and two years later they finally closed servers for multiplayer games. However, the Playstation Store is still available and there are periodic discounts there.
As a result, the PS3, like the X-BOX 360, sold 80+ million worldwide. units, taking an honorable second place and being behind the technically weakest gaming platform of the seventh generation – Wii.
Playstation 3 went down in history as one of the most ambitious consoles, giving rise to a huge number of memes, and for Sony becoming a big lesson that sometimes “the best is the enemy of the good,” and it’s very easy to overdo the architecture, creating unnecessary problems for yourself.