PSP2 as Powerful as PS3 – “True”

Peter Chapman 42 Comments

According to a comment made to Eurogamer by the head of Codemasters, Rod Cousens, Sony’s as-yet-unannounced handheld is as powerful as the rumours suggest.

Speaking to him at the 3DS launch, Eurogamer managed to get the powerful (pun intended) sound bite out of the studio head while he was espousing the bright future he sees for handheld gaming devices.

In portable areas, you’re going to have statements, which are already out in the press, saying PlayStation Portable 2 is as powerful as the PS3 – which is true.

So you’re going to get mobile devices as powerful as what were considered notebooks. I just think it gets bigger.

So there you have it, Codemasters are upbeat on the future of mobile gaming and confident enough to make those impressive comparisons. This all leaves us even more keen to hear what Sony are going to talk about at their PlayStation Meeting on the 27th of this month.

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42 Comments

  1. Please please sony don’t screw up psp2 by giving it a expensive price. Not more than £299. Best would be £199 but that does not look like it will be so £249 would be a great price.

    • £200 max in my opinion. Any higher and you might as well buy a PS3 or an Xbox360, pushing its sales right down. They’ve also got to make sure they don’t price it much higher than the nintendo 3D DS otherwise the sales of the PSP wont be high. I believe at launch, sony failed to sell the PSP go due to its £250 price tag (I think), and the origional ps3 was overpriced at £425. Lets hope they don’t make a fatal mistake and overprice their consoles again..

      • £200 is still to much really just because a PS3 costs £250. As its handheld people expect it to be a lot less than the console

    • Hopefully Sony don’t disappoint us, roll on 27th

      • Your forgetting us Australians or other foriegns who often get slapped a 100% GST surchage on top of that. So £200 should roughly translate (through current exchange) to about $400 AU. When it turn it’ll more like the $600 range. Our Dollar is equal to that of the Americans who’ll pay what $300? Yet we get the extra surchage. Justified or not its unfair and belittles some of the tougher but smaller economies.

  2. It’ll be fascinating to see what the whole package is rather than individual specs. I know it’s only early days but there is no point in the PSP2 being powerful if it’s not backed up with a decent screen etc. I am sure that Sony won’t let us down…I think.

  3. I wonder if they mean “the results are comparable with the PS3” seeing as the screen probably won’t be 720p. Saying that, a high enough rez will do the trick regardless so that’s probably not far off.

    I just hope Sony market it properly.

    • There’s a long way between “hope” and “reality” and Sony just don’t like to market things well.
      Although saying that, AC:B was PS3 advertised, LBP2 and other games are getting the FIVE films and the (awful, just awful) Move adverts have been on a fair bit.

    • To be fair, we don’t know what resolution the PSP2 will be, it’ll almost definitely be higher than the original PSP, so it could come surprisingly close to 720p. Judging by Sony’s current offerings of OLED screens, I wouldn’t be surprised by maybe 940×540.

      • Actually, looking at current Android phones with OLED screens, I’m gonna go with an OLED 3.8″ 800×480 screen. Seriously, I would put money on that.

      • I thought we did know what the res was?
        640×480, compared to the psp’s 480×272

        btu obviously theres nothing ‘official’ yet

      • Ah, maybe, I’ve not been paying much attention to the rumors really, so yeah, that’s very possible, heh. Though 640×480 is a 4:3 resolution, wouldn’t it be something like ~850×480?

  4. Power isn’t everything. Sony need to back the PSP2 more than they backed the PSP. If they don’t its likely just to go down the same road the PSP has gone down at the moment. I really hope, for their sake, it is a fantastic piece of kit and that they really do support it and advertise it well.

    • They need too have a better protection against piracy so more developers develop games for psp2.

      • Hopefully they’ve learnt their lesson. Take what they did with the PS3s security, subtract the numerous mistakes (which have only recently been found), maybe hire Team Overflow and Geohot, then they’ve got a fairly good shot.

  5. This is still very vague though, saying the PSP2 will be as powerful as the PS3 isn’t the same as saying it will have the same amount of power as the PS3. You could take this in many ways such as, it will be the PS3 of the handheld world.

  6. The PSP2 is shaping up to be a beast, I’d say it’ll be selling for £279 with an RRP of £299. Either way, can’t wait to see the launch line up. Am thinking LBP2 & Uncharted spin off at least..

  7. Great Odin’s Raven!

  8. Doesn’t this really depend a huge amount on the screen resolution?

    I can’t really see the actual CPU being a match for the Cell, I’d expect no more than 2 cores, for one, but they’d be rather cutting edge, and could possibly get as much done as the main PPE of the PS3.

    However, even at launch the GPU in the PS3 was getting on a bit. It’s only because of being able to offload post-processing to the SPEs that the PS3 can do what it can. That, though, is at 1280×720 most of the time. Even if they match the dpi of Apple’s Retina Display, that’s only 960×640, roughly 2/3 the number of pixels, and they could easily drop further to half and not have a negative impact on how good the screen and games look.

    Having fewer pixels means that every single element in the games can run at a lower resolution, saving of fill rate. Post processing is much cheaper, and if necessary they can slash it even further down to 430×320, and the visual impact is minimal, so long as it’s not overdone.

    But the real important point is that this is just hyperbole. The PSP2 can’t literally be as powerful as the PS3, just as the PSP wasn’t literally as powerful as the PS2, it was just close enough that on the smaller screen it looks damn good, but when you ported a PSP game back to PS2, as was done several times, textures looked messy, models looked low on polygons, and it just wasn’t that great.

    So take it with a pinch of salt until it’s actually revealed to us.

    • I suppose the question is that if it ‘looks’ as good as the PS3 then does it really matter if it ‘actually’ is as good as the PS3?

      • Which I think you’ve pretty much hit on Teffers.

    • Whatever screen resolution it’s going to need a lot more processing if it has a 3D screen.

      • Does it have 3D? if so wicked but i’ve never heard anyting about that…

      • I just thought they might go down that route because of the 3DS, you never know.

  9. Power doesn’t really mean that much though, the whole System needs to be able to run at a high rate, but also for a good amount of time. There’s no point in having a powerful handheld if it doesn’t last that long…

    • look how weak the 3DS battery is.

  10. I’m thinking Sony are focusing too much on hardware specs, instead of the games, which (let’s be obvious) is what sell the console. And Sony needs to make a magical battery to make this thing run handheld for several hours of gameplay if it really is as powerful as the PS3. But yeah, as I’ve said before, I’m fairly certain that it’s not as powerful, but games will look as good due to the lower res screen.

    • To be fair, Sony hasn’t said anything about either, this is a third party making the comment.

    • It’s the same with Sony every time they launch a new platform. They always hype it like it is so powerful it’s out of this world. Even if it is true in this case, power in portable devices comes at the expense of a) an exorbitant price and b) battery life, so even if you have the money to get one, nothing’s going to change the fact that the battery is going to give up the ghost sooner rather than later.

    • If they’re using OLED, that’ll be one of the ways that they’re trying to save battery life. And to be fair to Sony, increasing the hardware specs to the level of PS3/360 will mean alot more games, ports yes, but that’ll probably still ensure a fairly good launch line up.

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