So everyone is all warm and fuzzy these days and jumping on the Sony bandwagon since after two full years the ps3 is no longer a running gag in sw but what has begun to bother me just a bit is what could have been.

We all saw the reports that the original PS3 had an $800 (or so) manufacturing cost and i can only imagine what the PS3 would have been like had that money gone into game processing power as opposed to blu-ray, Cell processing and bluetooth support.

Here we are blowing up screenshots to 500% and looking at side by side comparasons with almost no difference when the PS3 could have had a conventional design, a dvd drive and could have made the 360 look like the colecovision in comparason

As many of us predicted the PS3 has finally begun to show up the 360 but my question is what could the PS3 have been had Sony just built a conventional system?

What could that $800 have been used for? Two gigs of ram? 250gig hdd? state of the art (for 2006) gfx cards?

[QUOTE="SpruceCaboose"]Sony did not add Blu-ray to the PS3 to benefit the PS3. They added it to push it as a standard, and it worked great. If Sony went DVD, they would have been more competition for the 360 initially by having a normal MSRP at launch, but to say it would have made the 360 look like a Colecovision is being very naive as to what hardware was capable of in 2005 when the system was being manufactured. There simply was not enough tech to cram into a PS3 in that year to do that, and as for RAM, RAM is super cheap. They could have went a gig or two of RAM with very little added costs, but they did not hear developers saying they needed it, as at the time 512 seemed rather adequate. [/QUOTE]well BD itself is just a storage medium for ones and zeros and has no bearing on games at all, i'm more interested in the gaming side of things, i believe that money could have gone into enough tech to make 360 games look last gen by contrast but instead there is hardly any difference at all.

I don't want people to get all sidetracked by BD here, that has been done to death, i'm more interested in what that money could have been used for to make games better

[QUOTE="PBSnipes"]

[QUOTE="Riverwolf007"]

well BD itself is just a storage medium for ones and zeros and has no bearing on games at all, i'm more interested in the gaming side of things, i believe that money could have gone into enough tech to make 360 games look last gen by contrast but instead there is hardly any difference at all.

I don't want people to get all sidetracked by BD here, that has been done to death, i'm more interested in what that money could have been used for to make games better

[/QUOTE]

Like Spruce said, you're being naive. The fact of the matter is that even if Sony wanted to create some super-powerful BR-less PS3 to retail at $500/600, they would still be limited by the hardware manufacturer's development schedules. You have to figure that in a best case scenario, they would get a slightly more powerful Cell and some GeForce 8000-series features in the RSX (as Spruce said, RAM was never a cost-related issue -- Sony and MS simply figured 512mb was enough), hardly the kind of hardware that would blow the 360 out of the water.

[/QUOTE]part of my idea was that the Cell (and bluetooth) would have been scrapped also in favor of a more conventional chipset that would have worked better.