Wow, Phil must like being in the media because this is the second post in a row that is about him. Apparently he was recently caught in another lie and Bill Harris over at Dubious Quality called him on it.

Phil Harrison on the number of Blu-Ray movies available:

We have shown more playable games than ever before, so the signs are good, and right now there are more than 100 Blu-ray movies available today, in the US. More than 100 games are in development, and all the major third-party publishers have pledged their strategic support for the platform.

Bill’s retort:

Well, that sounds pretty good. I didn’t even know that a hundred movies were available on Blu-Ray right now.

Oh, wait–I didn’t know it because it’s bullshit. It’s only true in Sony Fantasy Land, where $600 for a game machine is a bargain and all ponies go to heaven.

And Bill would be right. Currently there are only twenty four Blu-Ray movies available. When the console launches, there will only be a little more than fifty available.

So Bill asks: why the hell should anyone believe what he and Sony says about the PS3’s capabilities when they’re being out-and-out caught in lies now?

That is a very good question.

When it comes to disc technology in the next-generation console market, Sony is making a Blu-ray drive standard on both the $499 and $599 versions of its PS3, whereas Microsoft has decided to play it safe by using traditional DVD-9 media with its XBOX 360. Even though Sony’s PlayStation 3 has yet to hit store shelves, Sony is already talking about its successor. Sony’s Phil Harrison believes that the PlayStation 4 will forgo discs altogether. In a recent intreview with Wired Magazine, Harrison said, “I’d be amazed if the PlayStation 4 has a physical disc drive”. He believes that in ten years all game and movie content will be had via digital distribution. Good job Phil. Way to impart consumer confidence in Blu-Ray.

It looks like I was pretty much right on target a few months ago when I questioned the importance of the PhysX cards and told everyone to wait a good while before buying one. The first sign that things were not so good was the AnandTech review of the BFG PhysX card in which the card actually hurt performance.

Now there is even more reason to doubt the importance of the PhysX cards. Many of you probably remember the Cell Factor game video shown to demonstrate the power of the PhysX card. The demo impressed just about everyone who watched it. But as it turns out, you don’t actually need a PhysX card to run the demo. My previous prediction that the demo would run fine on a dual core system turned out to be right. In fact, it runs pretty good on my own rig.

Looking at those benchmarks, I think it’s pretty clear that in its current form, the PhysX card is pretty much useless. I wish I could say that it has a bright future ahead of it, but things are not looking so good. With the recent glimpses at GPU-accelerated physics, it raises doubts about Ageia in both the long and short run.