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Right off the bat: I don't believe in it.
In little more than a year and a half from now, Sony will release to the masses their portable system. The portable to DESTROY all portables. The GBA, the N-Gage, the GP32...all will be crushed before it. I don't even want to know about what will happen to the Helix; that will be UGLY. This is to be the consummate portable.
So Sony will have us believe.
I don't believe in it. Not in two years. Certainly not in 1.5 years.
As a betting man, the MIPS chip mentioned in the spec is probably the R3000, staple of that system of olden times: the PSX/PSOne. Which makes sense. Older, cheaper chips that people know how to use and tweak to their games' needs. But that still leaves these large gaps, gaps that should not be present in a system set to launch a year and a half from now...
The CPU. .09 micron? I find it bordering on obscene how quickly everybody seems to gloss over this little detail. While it's incredibly easy to shout out numbers like ".09", I can't imagine it's similarly easy to forget that .09 micron processors don't exist in the consumer marketplace. Intel has been planning and replanning for their launch of .09 micron technology later this year and AMD...well, they're not really dwelling on their trailing of Intel. Being powered by a .09 micron CPU is fine and dandy, as long as it actually exists.
The NURBS. NURBS, for those who don't know, stands for Non-Uniform Rational Basis Splines. In short, it's a way of creating surfaces using curves defined by mathematical equations. Rather than having many flat faces arranged to create a not quite smooth surface, NURBS can perfectly define a perfectly smooth and curved shape. Now, 3D modelers have been using NURBS technology for years. Movies, prerendered game sequences, 3D art mockups all typically use NURBS because of their simplicity and power. But...NURBS in hardware? I don't get it.
While I have long been predicting and hoping for a shift from our current paradigm of hardware accelerated polygons to things like either NURBS or voxel acceleration (yeah, nobody agrees with me on that either...I'll show them!), why is this paradigm shift beginning with a portable system? Better yet, why are the fruits of such a paradigm shift first going to be experienced on a 4.5" LCD screen with a resolution of 480 x 272 pixels? Are we really going to appreciate those razor-sharp curves that NURBS allows on that sort of hardware?
What about the fact that this paradigm shift is happening on a portable system instead of on a console or piece of PC hardware? Will portable ports of console software actually look better as developers retune their assets to make use of these more advanced functions? Do we want a round face on a small, low-resolution screen or a not-quite-so-round face on a large screen of indeterminate resolution? With those 1.8 gigabyte discs of storage media, why work with NURBS anyways, when you can make ever finer looking models with ever more faces?
And where's the RAM? Not a single drop in the bucket about this. For an unproven optical disc system, I would think that Sony would talk about this important asset while arousing interest from the developers. It makes me wonder how real thost 1.8 gigs are: what's the relationship between the optical drive and the RAM? Are there performance issues in early prototyping stages of the drive that are keeping the RAM spec fast and loose? I might have no clue what I'm talking about, but I would think that in a system where so many quantities are undefined, a decent estimate of a quantity that both amateurs and professionals can easily define as important to game development would have grounded the project even more in reality.
As it is, I don't see this system becoming a reality at any price point (given Sony's predilection to creating the next Walkman, it'll likely be the $200 mark) within the next two years. If they have a prototype by Tokyo Game Show and a spec for the external developers to play with, I might change my tune. Right now, despite the force behind this arguably strongest of E3 announcements, Sony's portable is more than simply vaporware. It isn't real.
Vincent Diamante
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