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.

Nearly twelve years since Sony entered the gaming space, PlayStation's legacy remains untouchable and its leadership barely challenged. But the industry has never seen one company stay on top this long, and a reorganised Sony is surely hoping it won't be third time unlucky for PlayStation 3.

But Sony's silence - deafening ever since the legendary unveiling at Sony Pictures Studios last May - is raising more questions every day. We haven't much of a clue when the next concrete news on PlayStation 3 will turn up - we know it has to be soon, but analysts and gamers alike are seriously beginning to question the machine's ballsy 'Spring' launch date - not to mention its potential, ever since it transpired that the better proportion of its E3 trailers were not the performance indicator we wanted to believe. And that's putting it politely.

Now, we are thrilled to provide at least some form of update for anxious gamers - a behind-the-scenes look at PlayStation 3 with a controller in our hands, leaving no doubt as to the realtime authenticity of what we see on the screen. Last month Sony shipped final development PS3 hardware to many developers - albeit a month behind the latest schedule - and Kikizo has been able to sneak in some time at not just one, but three PS3 developers in multiple territories - one very prominent, and boasting some of the strongest experience working on PlayStation 3 in the world to date.

Naturally, the hardware is not completely final (but pretty damn close), and as you can imagine, all of our access was utterly privileged on condition of complete anonymity for those who helped us get on the inside. We're not supposed to be shown anything on the format, and software we have played is nowhere near final. Disappointingly we can't mention any games or be specific about any game scenarios whatsoever. But we can tell you everything else about our first, intimate experience of getting our hands on PS3, and offer our educated guesses about the larger implications of what it all means and where things might be going next, resulting in what we believe is the first public PS3 hands-on report of its kind.

Firstly however, the box. The stylish PlayStation 3 casing design that SCEI boss Ken Kutaragi revealed last year is, and always has been, empty - and no signs of a final, tangible casing solution appear to be in sight. "I think to fit everything that Sony wants in there AND leave space for a 2.5 inch hard drive," explains one senior developer working on a final kit, who will be our guide for much of this report, "the machine would have to grow. The models they're showing off are way too small for what they want."

Integrated into an imposing tower set-up, the PS3 development kit is playable using pretty much any standard USB controller, but developers are designing games with the familiar DualShock 2 controls in mind. PS3 controller specifics are "nothing we need to be concerned about as developers," explains the techie.

So we have a USB controller plugged into a machine and we're playing a game off a hard disc with not a trace of BluRay technology evident in the building. "PS3 isn't going to have writing capabilities and for us that's of no concern right now. Our stuff runs off a Hard Disc at the moment and won't exceed DVD capabilities; we're programming the game as if it will be written for a 10-speed DVD drive. Anything less would affect load time."

So far the experience isn't exactly the cosy Sony living room vision with an attractive box and a restyled, quick-response Bluetooth wireless controller. It might not be how PS3 is intended for any gamer - but shall we turn it on and give a chance first? Yes. I think we should.

RSX on a First Date

PS3's RSX graphics chip, dubbed "Reality Synthesiser" - a buzzword not tactically dissimilar from the "Emotion Engine" moniker given to PS2 - is based on Nvidia's cutting-edge Next Gen architecture, and allegedly twice as powerful as its GeForce 6800 Ultra. The goal announced back in May was to fully harness the mythical power and bandwidth available from the Cell processor, to use RSX's crazy multi-way shader pipelines and 128-bit pixel precision, and try to reach movie-quality visuals. Nvidia practically invented this shader stuff, so it's got to be straightforward from here. We expect the visual quality and vivid realism you get from pre-rendered special effects in movies, right now, in realtime on PS3, because that's what has been promised. Now that we've played it, have they reached that goal? Really reached it? The short answer is no, of course not - but it's not an ugly picture by any means.

As game technology moves on, so does CG animation, and it seems the former might never catch up with the latter. Our developer offers his view: "We will never reach [up-to-date] Pixar-quality visuals at 1080p, sixty frames per second [in games]. Realtime graphics [technology development] moves fast, but so does CG - you just can't compare realtime games with things that takes a team of 200 people working on render farms for 18 months to make a bunch of stills for a 90 minute movie. If you look at the first animation movie Pixar did, it's stuff that a demo coder could now make with little effort in realtime on a Nintendo 64 or even a PS1."

The Enemy of Graphics

Perhaps the biggest bombshell we've learned in the world of PS3 development right now is that many (if not most) games are simply running in 720p - not the ambitious, bleeding edge 1080p "Full HD" standard that Sony had us so excited about. And certainly, not two of them stuck together for a ludicrous 32:9 double-1080p.

Nvidia was on the money with its President's comments last May: resolution is indeed the enemy of graphics. Our insider explains: "Sony wanted 1080p, but we're working at 720p and 1080i, same as on the Xbox 360. Even with [final hardware] in mind, reaching good frame rates at 1080p with next-gen graphics is almost impossible. Instead many developers, ourselves included, are reworking so they run at 720p. PS3's output takes care of upscaling it - so no native 1080p, but it still looks killer." Perhaps there was always a specific reason why Sony felt it should say "up to 1080p"?

But the vast majority of PS3 gamers may not see this apparent hiccup as an issue; the tiny (projected) proportion of players lucky enough to own Full HD 1080p sets will see little difference; both 720p and 1080i are already visually stunning, and PS3 competently upscales. Even if it couldn't, most 1080p screens will supposedly upscale pretty well by themselves. Some developers even see this situation as a positive one: "It's not going to be a big deal for players, but it helps conserve CPU cycles so it's certainly a big deal to us."

So is the 1080p dream lost? It's hard to say for sure, but the developer suggests some games will still support it. "I think native 1080p games will be in the minority. Getting the best effects and performance is easier at lower resolution, so we can offer the gamers more thrills. I don't think this situation will change much."

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.

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."

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."

Some developers are finding other ways to get the most out of things, though. For example, a middleware application called SpeedTree effortlessly creates lifelike 3D trees with fully detailed branches and leaves, although it's nothing bleeding-edge anymore: "We're not using SpeedTree at the moment, but it's something that can already be seen in Project Gotham 3, so why don't you go play that instead of asking me stupid questions?" our flustered source barks. "Programmable shaders need huge power... the increase in power means that skilled artists become more important; games will look incredible thanks to the skilled artists."

Sure, there's still some framerate optimisation to go in this particular game build, but generally, framerate shouldn't be an issue for long. SCEI's Masa Chatani describes PS3 architecture as elegantly simple with outstanding performance, and developers say they love the streamlined Open GL environment. But our guide adds: "Cell is weird and difficult to work with... coding has progressed with high speeds and paper specs in mind, it's one of the reasons framerate specs aren't met yet. We've been anti-aliasing through software which also means a performance hit, although the 720p upscaling minimises that problem a bit."

Cell is technically capable of more sophisticated volumetric physics, and while there were some decent highlights during our playtime in this regard, we haven't exactly played anything that made us gasp in the same way as Half-Life 2's physics, and we've not yet seen anything to illustrate how the increased power could potentially be used to improve a gameplay scenario in any significant way yet.

That's not to say that someone, somewhere, has not already thought of creative new ways to do just that. "Everything will continue to depend on developers," it's pointed out. "Some things that weren't possible before are now possible, and some previous ideas can now be made into games." And of course, there are many other original applications for Cell's power as it becomes more flatteringly unlocked - high definition IP webcams is just one example that keeps us excited.

Ain't Got Nothin' But Real Time

One memorable point in another game build altogether observed some intense character based interactivity. Finally being able to control on a PS3 the sort of visual quality we realistically expect, with convincing and varied human facial expression, did feel like a moment of relief - this stuff is realtime after all. We had lighting effects and specular highlights used to great effect, shadows forming realistically on wrinkles of skin, precise colours, ultra-detailed rippling materials (though the ripple needed some work) - and that's not even talking about the surrounding environment, which had its own moving objects and particle elements. As far as "emotionally believable" experiences go, this moment was more solid than we've experienced in a past generation title. It was nothing we couldn't imagine running to the same sort of effect on Xbox 360, but it was reassuring to see it in genuine realtime and with some developer perseverance, a few required improvements seem within reach.

Later, one non-interactive (but, based on playable sections that followed, clearly realtime) cut-scene also demonstrated exceptional draw distance (think perhaps Great Wall of China in terms of its setting - distance, geometry, texture variation) that 'felt' next generation - like a feeling of legitimacy, of confirmation, that we've only occasionally felt towards the new generation so far. We were also hoping to see some water and maybe take a swim or something, to see if water looked as amazing on real hardware as we've previously seen in the TGS trailer of WarHawk for example, but we'll have to wait a bit longer.

Another thing we've not been able to see on real hardware is hair: with increased speed, there's a likelihood PS3 will be able to handle free-flowing hair with the authenticity seen in Nvidia's impressive "Luna" demonstration. With Xbox 360's Dead or Alive 4 fresh in memory, one graphical element in the Team Ninja game that stood out as disappointing was the long-haired characters; their hair just crumpled around in blocks unrealistically and clipped into shoulders and clothing - frankly we've seen better hair coded on past-gen systems. So wavy hair is still something we want to see on a real PS3.

Come to think of it, we want girls to look like exactly like Luna.
Generally speaking we're playing stuff that easily has potential to offer realism and believability, but again for the sake of detail, it was marred by early glitches and offered something of a grating experience. If we looked past this, then our PS3 virginity-busting experience pretty much had us convinced for now - and now that our early gameplay craving is satisfied, we're dying to see more complete products coming together and seeing them as they're intended.

I Want to Believe

Everyone knows that the Killzone trailer was rendered to reflect what the developer thought they might be able to achieve on PS3 architecture, but some of Sony's most talented studios will be questioning the ambition they showed nine months ago. In hindsight, there was some stuff that looked decidedly more like what we've been playing now - UbiSoft's Killing Day seeming like it was a good, honest estimate. Rewatch that below, and consider this is comparable to the technical visual quality of what we've played, and you'll likely conclude that this is, for now at least, really same-generation stuff next to Xbox 360.

We'd previously seen PlayStation 3 in "realtime" action in three demonstrations - the stunning Metal Gear Solid 4 trailer taken into a simulation to show off game engine and graphics, Sonic the Hedgehog's realtime demo at TGS, and also a realtime demo of Sega's Fifth Phantom Saga, also at TGS (all available to watch below). Based on what we've now played for ourselves, we can answer a question we all asked back at E3 2005. Does PS3 really look like the Killzone trailer? No way. Does it look like Metal Gear Solid 4? Sure, near enough, although now that it's on near-final hardware, things just need a little polishing to look as complete as what was shown by Kojima-san in September.

What we played was still extremely early, but we've been able to build a healthier picture of things. Another point of reference is the aforementioned Fifth Phantom Saga realtime demo from TGS, which we daresay is a slightly more honest representation of today's exact PS3 graphics status, and closer to current playable content than anything fuelling PS3's notoriety since E3 last year.

The difference in physics, detail and scene complexity between the Killzone or MotorStorm trailers and MGS4's realtime demo is quite severely obvious, and it's now abundantly clear to us that everyone's early PS3 gaming experiences will be a whole lot more like the latter, but that's not exactly a bad thing. We'll have dynamic range and depth of field optics, maybe even a 'solid' sixty frames. But MGS4 stands on its own as the single most impressive thing anyone has seen on a sufficiently convincingly box to date. Based on what we've seen and played, launch software will look like nice Xbox 360 material - Dead or Alive 4, Gears of War. The main issue now is when is this "launch" actually going to happen?

Based on this evidence, things aren't exactly rocketing ahead, and we wouldn't be the first to question the potential of some kind of delays. Our developer is first to chip in: "We think that in Japan it will most likely release during Summer, Q4 in the US, and Europe in Winter or Spring 2007 - these are our internal projections." And right now, it seems most observers would agree.

But Spring could mean as late as late June, which is pretty much Summer. Some, including the folks at next-gen.biz, have pondered whether Sony's recently appointed British CEO might change traditional strategy and focus an initial launch in America, where it's argued that the most vital battle PS3 will be fought - BluRay's battle. But the other school of thought suggests that Howard Stringer would need to have been running the show a bit longer to reasonably affect significant plans for the company's most important project, relatively late in the day. But then, nobody seems to know for sure yet.

The cost of a final PlayStation 3 is the other issue, and some are remaining hopeful, considering PSP launched well below its projected price thanks to publisher pressure on Sony. Could it be a similar story with PlayStation 3? Sony could do well to absorb some creator investment costs, but BluRay's success against HD-DVD is more vital to Sony, particularly compared to its relatively insignificant aspirations for UMD.

Yet, the sheer scale and cost of PS3 is surely looking like an increasing problem for some creators, as many had predicted. Having more power is great, but the real challenge is going to be filling 25-50GB with material that's as convincing as it is compelling. Reaching anywhere near MGS4 standards - let alone impossible Killzone standards - is still going to be tough for everyone but the most elite developers, and achieving photo-realistic scenes is as much about committed creators as raw power.

Nonetheless, Sony has already sewn up the developer support it needs more effectively than Microsoft has been able to, with Edge reporting that one publisher for example is committing 50 per cent of resources to PS3, 30 per cent to Xbox 360, and 20 per cent to Revolution - so on a needs-must basis it could be a traditional territory roll out after all. If only some early hands-on time could also answer questions about date and price, we'd be much happier.

Marks Out of Ten

Sony's showings of PS3 to date have been seriously sexy. But the reality, while still impressive, is nowhere near the leap beyond Xbox 360 Sony wants you to believe, and it seems many projects are still at an early enough stage for things to start getting a little worrying. We don't have much idea why Sony has been so quiet about PS3 lately, but in light of today's manufacturing and development status, one theory is that it's simply having a bit of an internal think about how best to proceed, and of course, how best to communicate their strategy to the industry and gamers, without taking the slightest PR setback in the process. In fact, considering Sony, they'd be more likely to turn it all around back into massive excitement all over again. Based on what we've played versus the hype of the last year, it's impossible not to be slightly disappointed, yet we're still hugely excited and most of all, relieved that all the claims, confusion and debate now make more sense.

We can't wait to get more of PlayStation 3 to draw some more specific conclusions, so we'll see you for more hands-on with final, cased hardware (and presumably a final controller) in surely not much longer than a couple of months' time. And, if ours (and many industry) estimates are accurate, then maybe everyone will need to mark 'summer' on the calendar as the time to get sued for importing their final Japanese PS3.

The Future Is Almost Here... and even in 720p, it looks bright.