Life with my PS3 (slight 360 compare)

[madd74]

Okay, so, due to the evil that is Wal-Mart and a PS3 with 10 free Blu-Ray movies, along with 5 free mail in. So, on Saturday, my PS3 was born... Prime. He comes with Motor Storm.

When I first set the system up, and did my extremely expected system update, I started messing with configuration. It was very familiar as it uses the same as a PSP, thus navigation was simple. I did a test of the internet connection, and found that some internet pages (as expected) load strange, however, it looks as if it is the better of the non-computer systems out there.

What I really look forward to is the ability to communicate with my PS3 from my PSP over any internet connection. As I found out today, it appears any internet connection will work, including ones that otherwise block chat programs and FTP.

There is a neat program called Folding@Home that comes with the PS3. Some people would be familiar with this concept if they ever ran software on their computer that "shared" information about looking for life on other planets and the like. The premise is, you use your computing power (along with many others), so that the people in question can use your computing power.

Processing power from PS3 users is greatly contributing to the Folding@home project, and PS3s have overtaken all other participating operating systems in teraflops contributed. As of April 23, 2007, more than 250,000 PS3 owners have allowed the Folding@home software to be run on their systems, averaging over 400 teraflops and peaking at over 700. By comparison, the world's most powerful supercomputer, Blue Gene has a peak performance of 280.6 teraflops

How is that for power? I will have more information about this process in another post.

So, the graphics, of course, look wonderful. At this point, I do not have much to compare with. I will say, that my HD-DVD movies appear to look better than my Blu-Ray. Of course, there are some settings I believe I am overlooking, and the two movies I used were 300 and Fifth Element for Blu-Ray, while I only have King Kong on HD-DVD. I will have more on that later as well.

For now, I will say I am extremely pleased with Prime. Media interaction (the playing of multimedia like music, movies, and pictures) seems better on the PS3. Of course, 360 has the Marketplace that provides way more content than the Playstation Store. There is most certainly more to do on the 360, with it blowing PS3 to another existance with on-line content. So that, and title selection, appear to be the 360's trump card.

I still have a lot to check out before I get the best flavor of the PS3 (especially compared to the 360). As of right now, things are starting to look very nice for the PS3!!

[madd74]

Well, I checked out a PS2 game for the first time on the PS3. My candidate was Graduis V (this was also the first game I played movnig into my house, Oct 13 2006).

I am not sure how the hardware PS3 look when rendering PS2 games, however, the new software emulation did the game excellent justice. I noticed the TV went from 1080P to 420P then back to 1080P. So the upscaling worked as far as my TV was concerned (as it shows you what resolution it gets). I played a quick game just to check things out (and found out how rusty I am with Graduis V). It looked much better than when it was hooked through my PS2 (which is hooked up through composite). So yay to the PS3 for that.

The biggest concern from hardware to software emulation was backwards compatibility issues (see also a xbox to 360). Last I remember, there are about 2,500 PS2 games that are supported. So, I will go through all my games to see what works and what is out of luck. While I am confident that all my PS2 games will work, since of all my major systems it has the least games, I am not sure about my PS1 games. I do have a few PS1 games I would still like to play (and in some cases, open, hehehe). So, more on the backwards compatability later.