PS3 Performance Downgraded Again

Heartless Gamer writes "The PS3's performance has been downgraded again, according to the Inquirer." From the article: "We can't tell you why the GPU lost nearly 10% of it's clock, it could be an NVidia screwup, or it could be Sony/Cell. Either way, it just became much less of an overwhelming value, but you get a DRM infected drive for 'free' either way." Interesting, but keep in mind this is The Inquirer. 9 out of 10 doctors recommend salt with their articles. Relatedly, the choice comments from Penny Arcade this past weekend about Sony's console are wandering around the internets today. From that article: "We've already talked about it, there's no chance we're buying a PS3 at launch."

again?

[dlc3007]

Is it possible that a single day pass without more bad news for Sony? Looks like it is about time to short-sell their stock.

Hmm...

[MaestroSartori]

Disclaimer: I work for Sony...

Given the crap the Inquirer has already talked about PS3, I'd take their article here with a pinch of salt roughly the size of Jupiter.

Re:Oh, Zonk

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"When will you realize that Penny Arcade just isn't funny?"

If you click the link, you'll see it's not a cartoon but a comment made by one of the peeps at Penny Arcade. So, you're right, Penny Arcade isn't funny when it's not presenting a joke.

Re:Part of a secret plan.

[MindStalker]

Good point, even a meager $50 drop would make a big difference in their sales. I don't think a 5% increase in performance will mean much, so long as it plays the games intended for it. The performance issue will really hit sony a few years later. PS2 has lasted a LONG time in gaming terms simply because the performace was good enough to last till 2006. Don't expect the PS3 to last nearly as long, especially if they keep downgrading it.

Re:again?

[Suzumushi]

You also clearly have no idea what Sony has been up to in the last year. Besides lagging sales in all of their segments, the Rootkit fiasco and now their failure even before launch of the PS3 does not bode well for the company.

While I'm sure Sony will not disappear, it is far too large for that, unless it returns to it's prior days of creativity, quality, and innvoation, they will certainly go the way of Panasonic. That being stagnation and mediocrity in the marketplace.

Will they never learn?

[antialias02]

The thing about it is that Sony will downgrade their hardware as often as they want and STILL we will hear trash talk from the Execs and higher-ups about how their hardware is going to outperform and outsell the other consoles. And they'll back up this arrogance by not moving their price point an inch. Sony seems to think that the PS2 success will drive PS3 sales. Most serious video game enthusiasts seem to think otherwise. Sony needs to wake up and start doing some serious damage control after the PAX incident, with Gabe and Tycho endorsing the "Wii60" over the PS3.

Re:Hmm...

[jtshaw]

I once sent an e-mail to one of there "journalists" pointing out an error. I got perhaps the most childish response imaginable back. They have zero integrity and don't even appear to give two shits about the validity of the information they put out.

Regardless of what I might think about Sony and the PS3, I certainly am not going to believe something just because it comes from those jokers.

Re:"Zonked" tag this baby

[Anonymous Coward]

How about instead of trolling, you try this fun little exercise: find good news about the PS3.

I dare you.

Launch titles don't count.

The only "good news" Google News found about the PS3 was the already-reported story about running Folding@Home on it. Everything else is negative.

Zonk isn't the one portraying the PS3 in a poor light. Sony's doing that all on their own.

Re:again? or will Sony survive as a stock?

[WillAffleckUW]

Someone said: Looks like it is about time to short-sell their stock

To which NineNine said: You go ahead and do that. I'll be buying.

To which myself, a different person who has many investments and who has been investing for 30 years say:

I wouldn't recommend it. I've owned Sony. I've made money off of owning Sony stock. I sold my Sony stock and bought Nintendo a few months back, and quite frankly, I have seen absolutely no reason to change my basic decision. Sony just plain isn't getting it - but Nintendo is. And it's not just the gaming platforms, quite frankly, it's the total corporation.

You probably want to buy Ford ... while all their top execs and engineers are fleeing the company. A wiser choice would be Honda, Toyota (missed the curve on that), or even GM, but buying Ford now is just as nuts as buying Sony is.

Normal and Slower PS3's?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Asus have already started putting PS3's together some months ago; if this story is true, would it mean that we'll end up with normal PS3's and slower ones with a GPU running 10% slower?

screw DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

The first thing I am going to do is to wipe that harddrive and try to tweak a decent linux distro to run on it. Afterall gcc can already compile code for the Cell processor. At first Sony has announced that the PS3 was running linux and now it looks like it'll ship with some limited and DRM crippled version. Whoever manages to come out with a DRM-free and open PS3 Linux will be the new hero.

Actually

[ZakuSage]

PSP's initial specs were upgraded. They started out by only planning to have 8MB of RAM, which was later upgraded to 32MB. Additionally, the 256bit bus in the second graphics core was upgraded to a 512bit bus. Beyond that, in firmware upgrades, PSP now has the ability to run more music and video formats, and now has a web browser with flash support.

The CPU is still 333 MHz as a peak without overclocking. It's designed to run at different speeds in order to optimize battery life. Sony's offical SKU allows it to run at 222 MHz, 266MHz, and 333MHz. At the moment, there's nothing really stopping developers from using 33MHz (in fact in all likelyhood there have been games released running at that speed), other then them wanting to conserve battery life. For instance, many homebrew applications either by default run at 333MHz or have an option to do so to increase performance.

You have to remember something here: this is The Inquirer. (No, I'm not confusing this with the British tabloid The National Enquirer.) Basically all this site does is make shit up in order to increase hits to their site. This is just the latest in a string of false information on that site about the PS3, it's Cell processor, and it's RSX graphics chip.

Re:Hmm...

[Andrew Kismet]

I'll refrain from PS3 bashing and jokes related to that conference for a moment...

As both a Sony employee and an individual, what do you think about all the negative publicity for PS3 so far? It's even reaching back to mainstream, non-gaming press. The PlayStation brand loyalty will only stretch so far. Nintendo learned that between the SNES and the N64.

Might Spike PS2 Sales

[blueZhift]

The average consumer doesn't care about or understand hardware specs. The things that still matter the most will be the games and the price of the console and games. The PS3, despite its high price will still sell out the initial shipment unless something horribly wrong with the console gets past QC. But I think that the biggest benefactor of that sell out will be the PS2. A lot of average consumers will want a PS3, but not being able to find one, they may just opt for the other, much cheaper, Sony console. So this holiday season may well be a very good one for the PS2 and PS2 games. Again, I'm talking about average consumers, not hardcore gamers. Nintendo has a pretty good shot at these people, I'm not so sure about Microsoft yet. But I think Sony will definitely get some of their money, just not as much as they might like.

Re:Price beyond the threshold of acceptability

[drinkypoo]

You're right, of course they don't want to sell a system for $600. They want to sell it for $1000 or however much a blu-ray player costs. What they're doing is trying to saturate the market with thier new (and expensive) next generation media.

I think you're ascribing far too much marketting insight to Sony. Their incredibly awful public comments suggest that the opposite is true.

Your comment makes no sense. This is precisely what Sony is doing, and it does not involve any insight, but a severe lack thereof. Sony believes that people will pay $600 for a PS3 because it plays Blu-Ray movies and a Blu-Ray player is $1000. They believe this because people spent $300 on a PS2 because it played DVDs and a DVD player was the same price as a PS2, and since a Blu-Ray player actually costs more than a PS3, everyone will buy PS3s, right?

Well, that's their logic anyway. It's amazingly poor logic, unfortunately, because everyone wanted to get a DVD player and move into the new world, but less than 10% of househoulds in the US will even have a HD-capable display by the time the PS3 comes out, so no one gives a fuck about Blu-Ray. DVDs are higher resolution than my primary movie display device, so why should I move up? A full-HD TV that's actually worth buying costs more than I spent on my fucking car, with the registration. I'm not going to, on top of that, spend enough money to buy some slick wheels and tires for it just so I can have a game console that plays a new video format.

At this point, the only console of this generation that I plan to maybe spend full price on is the Wii. By the time it comes out, maybe the Xbox 360 will have come down a bit, and I can buy one of those too, although frankly there aren't any games on it that I care about yet. There's only one game I care about that's PS3 exclusive, and that's whatever version of Gran Turismo comes out for it... and I can wait to play that. I haven't beaten GT4 yet anyway.