Ask PS3 Fanboy: Volume 2
by Colin Torretta 
{ Jun 24th 2007 at 9:00PM }
Welcome to Ask PS3 Fanboy: Volume 2: The bad news edition! Today I disappoint people on a variety of topics, including Eight Days and 720p game upscaling. Read on to have your hopes crushed! And as always, you can e-mail me with your questions and comments, and I'll do my best to answer your questions during next week's column.
Q: I've read in the manual for PS3 that EDY viewer is only available on PS3 systems sold in Japan. Is their any way of using this system on American PS3 units?
A: No, unfortunately the EDY integration is something that's limited to only Japanese systems right now. And since the EDY system is purely a Japanese service, it's unlikely that this will change any time soon. If the service is ever rolled out to Europe and America, like originally planned, than maybe we'll see our PS3s updated -- but thats a pretty big if.
A: Eight Days was one of the most impressive titles shown at last year's Sony E3 event, but has completely fallen off the radar since then. Earlier this year there was rumor swirling around that it was going to be turned into an episodic game, with each day consisting of one episode, but it turned out this was just a case of mistaken identity. The rumor actually applied to a point-and-click adventure title for the PC, called 8 Days. Overall, I'm pretty skeptical of the game actually coming out though. The complete lack of information for over a year is never good and the trailer was pretty clearly a mock-up. Info may come out at next month's E3 -- but if it doesn't, there's a very strong possibility that this game DOA.
Hit the jump for the last e-mail!
Q: And word on 720p games upscaling to 1080i?
A: This is a popular question and one of the top complaints about the PS3 (now that background downloading and DVD/PS2 game upscaling have both been implemented). Unfortunately, right now Sony has not given any indication when/if this feature will ever be added. All is not lost though, Sony was similarly skittish about the possibility of DVD/PS2 upscaling but came through in the end, and according to a recent interview - they have 30-40% more that they can do to improve the upscaling quality. This could very well mean that 720p>1080i upscaling for PS3 games is coming, unfortunately we just don't know when.
That's it for this week, sorry for all the bad news. Hopefully next week will be better!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Consolcwby @ Jun 24th 2007 9:43PM
WTF??? No 8 Days???!!! =<
thanks for ruining my life... next thing you know, you'll tell me my wife ran away with the garbage man - 'cause he had more to offer her. =<
Meanies. =,
Andy @ Jun 24th 2007 10:15PM
I was really looking forward to 8Days as well. Afrika hasn't had any solid news in two years yet it looks like a possibility. Especially that real time explosion using only the PS3. It took my breath away.
apease @ Jun 24th 2007 10:34PM
On upscaling: The extra 30-40% refers to what they can do with DVDs, keeping in mind they have nearly the entire Cell and RSX to throw at scaling, since DVD decoding takes very little CPU power. Same thing with ps1/ps2 games. Blu-Ray decoding only takes 3 of the 6 spus, so again, plenty of spare power.
PS3 games can take all 6 spus, the RSX, and almost all the memory. Unless Sony can squeeze in a scaler in the OS reserved memory using the seventh spu, don't expect anything. One spu should be fast enough, but doing it in a way that doesn't screw up current games may be incredibly difficult.
Andy @ Jun 24th 2007 10:38PM
This feature is much better than IGN's mailbag. Just thought I'd inform you. I watched the 8DAYS trailer again. Wow if they could make it look that good.
bsd107 @ Jun 25th 2007 3:04AM
Keep in mind that the "30%-40%" improvement comment applied to the DVD upscaling algorithms. Read in context, they are saying that there is still some room for them to optimize the DVD playback to do better noise reduction for playback of DVD Recorder media. I.e. when DVD recorders are used to record live analog television, there is more noise in the recording (since it came from analog!). Noise reduction of playback of that kind of material can be improved - that's the 30-40% they talked about.
Eugene @ Jun 25th 2007 5:22AM
Eight days will be at E3.
hurlyburlycurly @ Jun 25th 2007 6:14AM
Whats EDY???
chris ciancanelli @ Jun 25th 2007 10:42AM
I'm not sure about all this scaling 720p to 1080i business being as intensive as everyone is saying. I understand that the architecture of the hardware makes a big difference, but the Xbox360 GPU can scale the images to anything that you set your TV to. If the 360 can do it, I'd be really surprised to see the PS3 not able to do the same.
The way I see it (and I'm no engineer, so I'm very likely wrong) is that it is not rendering the images in a 1080 image, but refitting it, or scaling the image to fit that screen. It wouldn't make sense that the only way to scale an image that was 720p would be to render it at a higher resolution. If this is the way that it works, and the PS3 actually has to do that type of calculation, then I would say someone at Sony really dropped the ball on that part of the hardware design.
Travis @ Jun 25th 2007 11:10AM
@chris ciancanelli:
The difference is the 360 has a dedicated scaling chip. As far as I've heard, the PS3 doesn't have one so the scaling would need to be done by the the extra SPU that isn't being used during gameplay.
I have heard people in comments claim that there actually is a scaling chip but they currently have it disabled. But since I've only heard that in comments and never from an official source, I think that's probably just wishful thinking.
Asher @ Jun 25th 2007 11:34AM
No! Eight Days looked so good!
Mir @ Jun 25th 2007 5:20PM
Any news on RockBand ?
BulletToothTony @ Jun 25th 2007 12:38PM
so because we haven't heard from it. that means that it was a lie?? well we haven't heard from killzone either.. i hate people making assumptions and throwing more gas into the fire and people bashing the ps3.. until we don't hear something official, people shouldn't be making assumptions..