E3 PlayStation 3 The New Consol Hardware Revealed

Developer: Sony PlayStation

'Third time lucky' may be the saying, but absolutely nothing has been left to chance when designing PLAYSTATION 3. Incorporating new, cutting-edge components, the console - unveiled at yesterday's joint SCEA/SCEI conference (Monday, 16th May 2005) - is staggeringly, almost incomprehensively powerful. Watching today's presentation, it's hard to believe this sort of performance is so near - the launch date being touted as Spring 2006 (TBC for Australia).

The keys to the system's amazing power are the Cell processor (jointly developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba) and the RSX graphics processor, co-developed with Nvidia and SCEI. Working in tandem, the new components produce an astounding two teraflops of floating point horsepower - a simply unprecedented amount of processing power. See the article on the games that were shown elsewhere on this site, for a look at how the system's sheer grunt will change interactive entertainment forever.The hardware design innovates in plenty of other ways. Bluetooth enables up to seven controllers to connect to the console without troublesome wires, and expect plenty of connectivity between PLAYSTATION 3 and PSP (PlayStation Portable) via the Wireless capabilities (802.11 b/g standards are both supported).

Storage is taken care of with a detachable HDD (Hard Disk Drive), and the system boasts unparalleled connectivity. Six USB 2.0 slots allow a multitude of devices to connect to the system (including the controllers, which are charged via USB), while Memory Stick, SD card and Compact Flash media all boast their own slots.High-definition visuals come as standard, with resolutions of up to 1080p supported. To make the most of this mind-blowing leap in visual fidelity, Blu-ray Disc - a new breed of high definition DVD capable of storing up to 54GB - is supported, as is pretty much every kind of DVD and CD you can get your hands on. This includes PSone and PS2 games, as PLAYSTATION 3 fully supports all the games released for its predecessors.

Simply put, PLAYSTATION 3 will be the centrepiece of any entertainment system when it is released next spring. The high definition, realtime visuals shown at the conference were truly astonishing to behold, and the tech demos that were demonstrated hinted at the sheer extent of the leap in power we can expect as PlayStation moves into the next generation.

Highlights among these tech demos included a bath full of hundreds of rubber ducks, each displaying perfect physics as they bobbed in the gloriously modelled water. Even more impressively, Dr Richard Marks (the inventor of the technology behind EyeToy) showed the potential for huge processing power to transform the EyeToy experience. Holding two brightly-coloured cups in front of an EyeToy connected to PLAYSTATION 3, he manipulated two cups on screen, filling them with bathwater and pouring the liquid between the two.

Other tech demos focused on the graphical grunt of the system, and the level of detail was frankly hard to comprehend - it's going to take some time to appreciate that visuals this astonishing are really possible in real time, and we're really going to be seeing it so soon.

We're still struggling to come to terms with the enormity of what we've just seen: PLAYSTATION 3 is truly going to revolutionise what we can expect from gaming. Just goes to show, really - never underestimate the power of PlayStation.