If you were in charge of the PS3's technical specs, and had to balance between profitability for Sony while not screwing over consumers, what would you have chosen?I would've gone with AMD+ATI, doubled the RAM and still be able to sell at lower price.>PS3 (IBM+Nvidia):IBM inCell Processor256MB XDR RAMNvidia RSX 256MBPS2 Emotion Engine + Graphics Synthesizer (both eventually removed by these short-term-thinking money-grubbers)>PS3 (AMD+ATI):AMD Turion 64 MT-40 2.2GHz512MB DDR RAMATI Mobility Radeon X1600 256MBPS2 Graphics Synthesizer(and whatever R&D they wasted on inCell and RSX would've been spent on full PS1/PS2 backcompat)The PS3 sold okay later on thanks to GTA4, MGS4, and UC2, but the console would've been less of a loss-maker with the cheaper AMD and ATI parts (PS3 would still be sold at a loss due to the Blu-Ray drive), and game studios, including Sony's own first-party, would've wasted less development resources trying to figure out the complicated IBM inCell, essentially repeating the Sega Saturn's idiotic CPU design.Gabe Newell famously said of the inCell: "[PS3 is] a waste of everybody's time. Investing in the Cell, investing in the SPE gives you no long-term benefits. There's nothing there that you're going to apply to anything else. You're not going to gain anything except a hatred of the architecture they've created. I don't think they're going to make money off their box. I don't think it's a good solution."inCell had horrible production yield rates and they sunk over $2.3 billion on inCell R&D alone according to a 2004 InfoWorld article.Every developer, notably Bethesda and Polyphony, complained about the 256MB XDR RAM and would've preferred a slower but plentiful 512MB DDR RAM which was similarly priced at the time.AMD Turion 64 MT-40 had a PassMark CPU score comparable to the desktop AMD Athlon 64 3400+ despite being a 25W laptop chip:https://phavi.umcs.pl/at/attachments/2014/0115/152132-wyniki-testu-z-dnia-18-02-2013r.pdf
>>740302935One big issue. PlayStation doesn't use DirectX like Xbox. Switching to ATI is not so simple. They would have to redo their entire software stack to support unified shaders and other features. All this adds up to delays they could not afford the PS3 was already a year late to 360.
>>740304497Would've been early on in development, not at the last minute. If they're going to buy in bulk from ATI they'd obviously design LibGCM+PSGL for it. ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 did not have unified shaders, it's a Shader Model 3.0 GPU.
>>740304830Unified shaders would have been a big push as it's now the defacto standard today. It's like Nintendo deciding they shouldn't do HD everyone is fine with 480i/480p in 2007+ and they were wrong it looked ugly as hell on every HDTV.
>>740302935I would just make a PS2 but with better specs, so the tools used to make games on PS2 could be reused on PS3.
