Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutaragi has claimed that the PlayStation 3 will be capable of running games at an unprecedented 120 frames per second - and suggested that future television technologies will support these refresh rates.

According to Japanese news service Nikkei BP, Kutaragi's comments were made as part of a speech about the PS3 and the Cell processor delivered at the Tokyo International Digital Conference last week.

Kutaragi acknowledged that while there aren't currently any televisions capable of refreshing the screen at a rate of 120 times per second, he wanted the PS3 to be ready to make the best of the new technology when it arrives.

His comments are likely to be met with some scepticism, not least because the majority of movies and television broadcasts are shot at only 24 or 30 frames per second, while many modern games run happily at 30 frames per second, with some more action-oriented ones hitting 60 frames per second.

However, as a future-proofing step, the ability to output graphics at that frame-rate is unquestionably laudable - even if it seems unlikely that many consumers will ever take advantage of it.

Kutaragi also pointed out that the Cell chip can decode more than ten HDTV channels at a time, and can be used for rotating and zooming effects. He discussed some of the different ways in which it could be used - to display actual-size newspaper pages, for example, to show more than one HD channel on the screen at a time, or for video conferences.

Kutaragi also explained how a processing power of 25.6 teraflops could be achieved - by creating a Cell cluster server with 16 units, each madeup of eight Cell processors running at 2.5Ghz." [link]

¶ D.Vader // 10/31/2005 11:44:00 PM // PermaLink

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