Exclusive: Hands-On with PlayStation 3

Kikizo presents a detailed, early account of its first-hand experience with a little known console called PS3. Is it looking like a new generational leap, or emotion engine tears? We have some answers.

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Blue Sky in Games

Remember the demo where Cell combined satellite images with landscape maps to produce awesome Google Earth-on-steroids scenes at hi-def 60fps? In our first hands-on we're moving in a PS3 game world that's a far cry from the "internal sphere" technique for skies and clouds in past-generation games. A stunning real world we're looking at - this time using RSX meat unlike Phil Harrison's demo nine months ago - gave us some clues about how the experience of freedom in a series like GTA could be enhanced in ways we've just not seen before - not with this sort of impact - and that's before any social simulation and AI is thrown in.

Developers are finding it tough to get good results in 1080p, with many PS3 games running in 720p and upscaled

Particularly from a first-person or camera-only explorative view, everything from looking at natural, detailed, muddy floor to being in the shade of a tree, feels a bit closer to the being-there experience gamers dream of. A peaceful early morning sunlight scatters through leaves and floods over the darkened branches, softly rendered shadow traces all the way down to a canvas where grains of earth are visible, while dynamic range lets our eyes see it all in accurate contrast together - it's beautiful, almost like they promised this sort of scene would be - and it seems those 100 billion programmable shaders per second are being put to good use. It really is all about dynamic range and surfaces when it comes to realistic game images.

We've now seen increasingly sophisticated effects on other high end platforms like Xbox 360 and Lindbergh, and PS3 is cramming all of it into its hardware convincingly. When on-screen action starts to move faster - much faster - later in the level, is when things feel properly impressive.

If only the machine could generate a cool passing breeze in the room, this would be totally the real deal, and hell, you can always pick up the recently announced Phillips amBX technology and see if that works for it. We weren't using the biggest HD display in the world during the session either, but bigger screens feel more immersive, and so with these things combined it could be frighteningly involving stuff.

There were some pretty noticeable environmental glitches but for the purpose of the report they should be ignored in the same way as obvious early glitches in any preview game code or E3 build. Regardless of the harsh errors though, the depth-of-field optical filtering, astounding texture quality, convincing material movement, and later in a sequence, heat distortion and complex fire-based effects all shine through - and still offer a satisfying wow factor.

Stick a Broom Up My HDMI...

And this is a key point; while it's clearly struggling to achieve Full HD without heavy compromises, something that PS3 does better than Xbox 360, most straightforwardly, is 'more stuff simultaneously'. An impressive list of simultaneous, wonderfully shaded, dynamic visual effects was evident, but PS3 was also able to throw around tonnes of geometry in terms of realtime 'explosion' calculation - and convincingly affect dozens of objects all at the same time.

The development source concurs: "Unlike Xbox and PS2, where Xbox had a host of built-in effects that were a generation ahead of PS2, the Xbox 360 and PS3 are same-generation machines. One doesn't have additional effects over the other - 360 can do the same effects, just not as many of them simultaneously and with less geometry [because of the speed difference], but memory bottlenecks can kill part of the PS3 speed advantage anyway... the overall visual difference it makes will depend a lot on the developer's skill, and how much time and money the publisher spends on a game."

Busy scenes represent PS3's strength over Xbox 360. They offer the same tricks but PS3 can do a little more simultaneously

The hands-on evidence is beginning to mount up. We're talking about a machine barely superior to Xbox 360 - not by any significant margin. It's certainly obvious this machine is not "twice" as powerful as 360, let alone a generational leap ahead. But the gap could become bigger: "Realistically, as libraries and experience with both machines grow, I think the PS3 will start showing things the 360 will choke at," offers the source. "But Sony will have to make available to us libraries and new routines for that to happen - something they've been severely lacking at so far."

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