Sony Emotional About PS 2?

On Tuesday, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. and Toshiba made a joint announcement at the 1999 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco regarding a new microprocessor called Emotion Engine.

The purpose of the conference was to talk about the chip's potential for "future computer entertainment applications." Considering that SCEI's only business is the PlayStation, the natural assumption is that Emotion Engine will not only be the heart and soul of the PlayStation 2, but also its grins, frowns, and eyes.

Sony claims that the .18 micron process 128-bit chip runs at 250 MHz and has the capability of running 5 billion floating-point operations per second, and 2.1 million instructions per second. Graphically, the chip can spit out 55 million polygons per second without any effects turned on. As effects are added, the chip gets slower: Adding parallel lighting slows the chip to 34 million; adding lighting and fog will drop it to 30 million; and with lighting, fog and bezier curves turned on - it drops to 13 million polys. In case you don't have the time to add up all the polygons rendered to screen when you play your favorite titles, read this: The current PlayStation runs 360,000 polygons per second with a 32-bit processor running at roughly 33.9 MHz.; the Dreamcast's max output is 3 million polygons per second running at 200MHz and capable of running 1.4 billion floating-point operations per second.

In short, the tech guys at Sega may be investing in Huggies diapers today.

While we know that Sega was under the suspicion that Sony's next console would be using a high-end process called NURBS to render environments and characters, Sony has apparently taken a step back to help introduce some new concepts in what could be the next big thing for consoles - emotion. The Emotion Engine hopes to bring more fluidity to characters and facial expressions. The only other example of this type of approach is Square's upcoming film for Final Fantasy. and as we've We've seen the first sample video of the movie - the facial expressions look amazing. Sega is just beginning to try this approach with Shen Mue. But more polygons can only make facial movements look better and this is where Sony's 13 million polys could really hurt Sega. If Sony can achieve near-perfect facial emotions, games are about to become amazingly complex (and programmers and artists can kiss their cozy sleeping habits goodbye).

Sony's official word on the chip doesn't indicate if the chip will indeed power the next PlayStation but the company pointed to the chip as a forward-looking experiment that will "enable software developers to synthesize realistic behavioral animation that make characters appear as though they act and move on their own will." How many other characters need 13 million polygons rendered to screen for any other Sony product? The second concept of interest is the Bezier curve. Over the past few years this has been on of the major goals of consumer games. Why? It comes down to curves. Current titles render curves through a series of smaller or large square angles. Back in the early days of desktop publishing, this made large text look blocky on curved areas. Bezier curves helped take a series of dots and then draw a line between each or those dots. The more dots in a pattern, the more complex and graphically pleasing the curve looks. While iconnecting dots may sound simplistic, it takes a great deal of computing power to achieve. In the Emotion Engine, just turning this feature on in hardware drops the maximum output from 30 to 13 million polys. The use of bezier curves could help build breathtaking organic-looking environments, smooth characters, and realistic blood... just imagine anything that requires a curved edge.

While Sony is reluctant to call the joint announcement of the Emotion Engine chipset an announcement that PlayStation 2 is on the horizon, there is some word that top-tier developers have already received development kits to help begin the long process of building PlayStation 2's first generation of titles.

Also, no one appears to know if the new machine will be DVD or CD-ROM based. While DVD-ROM will hold more data and offer gamers the option of running DVD movies (the Emotion Engine also decodes MPEG-2), the current cost of DVD drives isn't cheap, while CD-ROM drives are relatively inexpensive.

The Emotion Engine sounds powerful but also pricey. Sony would want to make sure a PlayStation launch would be successful, given that cost is a big factor with home consoles. Considering that the chip also requires a sound chip, controllers for managing input and output, and more chips to deal with dishing out graphics to screen - the machine's cost could get even higher. One solution would be to build two types of PlayStation 2s. One PlayStation would be for those gamers with a little extra cash who want to play DVD. And there could be another PlayStation 2 with a less expensive CD-ROM for those who didn't want to pay as much. The only downside to this scenario is that developers tend to support either DVD or CD-ROM, not both.

Rumors have indicated that the US launch of the Dreamcast may include a special DVD version of the console just in case Sony decides to embrace DVD.

One thing is clear. Sony has some big decisions to make in the next few months. And considering the popularity of the PlayStation - gamers will be listening.