@MikeB

Quote:

BTW, Lair scored 9 / 7 / 8 / 9 in Famitsu.

Definitely good not beating the 9 / 9 / 9 /10 Famitsu gave to Halo3 but very good none-the-less.

Lair and Heavenly Sword on both on my 'To Be Rented' list.

@Lou

Quote:

Oh, did anyone point out that HALO3, an FPS on the 360, beat Oblivion, a RPG on the PS3? Oh and both were NEW releases.

Oblivion was alreay available for the 360 and PC in Japan for quite some time. So not really a much anticipated release. We will have to wait and see if Halo 3 is even able to top Resistance: Fall of Man, surely it won't get remotely close to Everybody's Golf 5.

Last edited by MikeB on 04-Oct-2007 at 07:35 PM.

@Lou

Quote:

from GamesArefun.com which uses the true Mediacreate source

MediaCreate isn't the only Japanese tracking company. You and I don't know if MediaCreate's or Famitsu's numbers are closer to the truth.

@MikeB

from GamesArefun.com which uses the true Mediacreate source:
Quote:

Japanese software sales for September 24 - September 30: (Last week's rank) This week. Platform - Title - Publisher - This week's sales (Total sales) - Weeks on sale ( - ) 01. 360 - Halo 3 (Microsoft) - 59,000 (NEW) ( 3 ) 02. NDS - Pokemon Fushigi no Dungeon: Toki no Tankentai (Nintendo) - 55,000 (440,000) - 3rd week ( 1 ) 03. PSP - Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (Square Enix) - 54,000 (649,000) - 3rd week ( - ) 04. NDS - Tamagotchi no Puchi Puchi Omisecchi: Mina San Kyu (Bandai Namco) - 54,000 (NEW) ( 4 ) 05. NDS - Pokemon Fushigi no Dungeon: Yami no Tankentai (Nintendo) - 46,000 (389,000) - 3rd week ( - ) 06. PS2 - Bleach: Blade Battlers 2nd (Sony) - 31,000 (NEW) ( - ) 07. NDS - English Training 2 (Nintendo) - 28,000 (NEW) ( - ) 08. PS2 - Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters GX (Konami) - 28,000 (NEW) ( - ) 09. PS3 - The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Spike) - 27,000 (NEW) ( 2 ) 10. PSP - Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops Plus (Konami) - 25,000 (119,000) - 2nd week Total top 10 sales: 407,000 (down 93,000 from previous week) Previous week's sales: 500,000 Update - And because we missed them, here are last week's software sales: Japanese software sales for September 17 - September 23: (Last week's rank) This week. Platform - Title - Publisher - This week's sales (Total sales) - Weeks on sale ( 1 ) 01. PSP - Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (Square Enix) - 109,000 (595,000) - 2nd week ( - ) 02. PSP - Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops Plus (Konami) - 93,000 (NEW) ( 2 ) 03. NDS - Pokemon Fushigi no Dungeon: Toki no Tankentai (Nintendo) - 85,000 (385,000) - 2nd week ( 3 ) 04. NDS - Pokemon Fushigi no Dungeon: Yami no Tankentai (Nintendo) - 75,000 (344,000) - 2nd week ( - ) 05. NDS - Katekyoo Hitman Reborn!! DS Flame Rumble Kaien Ring Soudatsuen! (Takara Tomy) - 31,000 (NEW) ( - ) 06. Wii - Super Mario Strikers (Nintendo) - 28,000 (NEW) ( - ) 07. PS2 - Kiniro no Corda 2 Anchor (Koei) - 24,000 (NEW) ( 7 ) 08. Wii - Mario Party 8 (Nintendo) - 22,000 (779,000) - 9th week ( - ) 09. Wii - Samurai Warriors: Katana (Koei) - 17,000 (NEW) ( 8 ) 10. NDS - Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates (Square Enix) - 16,000 (331,000) - 5th week Total top 10 sales: 500,000 (down 741,100 from previous week) Previous week's sales: 1,241,100

Your source is bad.

Oh, did anyone point out that HALO3, an FPS on the 360, beat Oblivion, a RPG on the PS3? Oh and both were NEW releases.

Last edited by Lou on 04-Oct-2007 at 07:17 PM.

@BrianK

Quote:

This page shows Halo3 as #2 vis Famistu.

BTW, Lair scored 9 / 7 / 8 / 9 in Famitsu.

Good score!

Nomatter if Halo 3 was 1st, 2nd or 3rd. The sales data regarding Halo 3 is really close, no high profile new games were released for the week.

@MikeB
It appears that while one page at VGChartz does say that other pages say other things. This page shows Halo3 as #2 vis Famistu. The same page under 'From Other Sources :' also shows Halo3 as #2. This is frequently one of the issues with VGChartz they gather what data they have and depending upon day or how you look at their reporting one may get different information.

Also per the posting of the '65nm RRoD'. Reading the thread it appears the user at best didn't know that not all Halo Consoles are 65nm, the data on this console appears to be 90nm, or at worst he lied, there's been some comments about photoshop etc. I think there's enough info and admissions from the poster that this might be a 65nm but more likely it's 90nm.

@ALL
Halo3 breaks $300M in 1 week sales. They don't break down the # of each but it's probably a decent guess to believe they moved 4M+ copies this first week. Likely by the end of next week there may be more people playing Halo3 then owning PS3s.

@jtsiren

Quote:

Please acknowledge if you agree it doesn't seem to be a Falcon.

Sorry about that and I don't know if it''s a Falcon as reported or not.

@jtsiren

Quote:

jtsiren wrote: BTW I have been playing catch-up last few days with an old Xbox 360 launch title, Call of Duty 2, that was left in the dust of newer games and I can't tell you how much I'd hate it without rumble. (Fun game, I hope to finally finish it soon.) You really need to feel those guns, for me it basically is mandatory. I'm not looking forward to playing Resistance: FoM again until Dualshock 3 with hopefully a R: FoM update comes around. But when it does, I'm sure to have fun.

My problem is I buy Wii games, then go back to playing World of Warcraft after a couple of nights. Not the Wii games' fault...WoW is just ... wow! Although I did play Metroid for a bit this weekend...

@MikeB

Quote:

According to my sources a new 40 GB PS3 will become available around the 10th of October, most likely without card readers, 2 USB ports (instead of 4) and without Wi-Fi costing around 399 Euros.

Shoud sell well. Is it also without PS2 backwards compatibility? Sony is getting back to the roots, that is good - now get those games out there, wi-fi etc. not everyone needs (like was discussed with regards to Xbox 360 anyways). A smart move, even if funny considering some past bravado.

Now that PS3 UT3 is pushed to '08 that is one less game this Christmas. I actually played with PS3 today first time in weeks (months?), well not really, I updated the firmware and changed network settings to manual. :) Now, Ratchet, there is something to consider.

I think Sony will get its act together next year, maybe this Christmas won't be THE fight, but Christmas 2008 should finally be interesting with mature PS3 games out there (and finally some really hot exclusives I hope for the sake of my own investment) and Xbox 360 limits being tested perhaps... Should be interesting.

BTW I have been playing catch-up last few days with an old Xbox 360 launch title, Call of Duty 2, that was left in the dust of newer games and I can't tell you how much I'd hate it without rumble. (Fun game, I hope to finally finish it soon.) You really need to feel those guns, for me it basically is mandatory. I'm not looking forward to playing Resistance: FoM again until Dualshock 3 with hopefully a R: FoM update comes around. But when it does, I'm sure to have fun.

@MikeB

What was the point of that, Mike? The Halo 3 console is manufactured 2007-08-18, the earliest 65nm:s that have been spotted are 2007-08-24 manufacturing date. That is not a Falcon.

I was referring to those images and that quote, which is mistaken. The picture proves it is mistaken, unless all the facts that are known about Falcons out there seem to be wrong - 2007-08-18 (or is it 16?) is lot 733 and lot 734 is the one where 65nm's have been spotted...

The poster of that image a) did it on purpose or b) thought all Halo 3 systems are 65nm c) it is Falcon and the only one known with that manufacturing date. The post does not in any way explain why it thinks it is Falcon, in fact I saw the original post in the thread and it doesn't mention 65nm at all, it just mentions that a brand new Halo 3 system RRoD'd. (Which in itself is of course bad enough, but we all know the 90nm is rotten and the new heat sink does not seem to help with that.)

This does not mean Falcon can't RRoD. Of course inherently it can, because RRoD is an error message that covers many things. What is interesting will it hold regular failure rates compared to the industry or "regular" failure rates compared to 90nm Xbox 360s...

Please acknowledge if you agree it doesn't seem to be a Falcon.

Last edited by jtsiren on 04-Oct-2007 at 06:07 PM.

@MikeB

Quote:

MikeB wrote: @Lou According to VGchartz: 1 Pokemon Mysterious Dungeon 2 99,031 - Total 862,994 2 Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII 64,386 - Total 675,615 3 Halo 3 60,783 - Total 60,783

MediaCreate doesn't lie. That looks like a 2 week summary.

According to my sources a new 40 GB PS3 will become available around the 10th of October, most likely without card readers, 2 USB ports (instead of 4) and without Wi-Fi costing around 399 Euros.

Edit: sorry I''m a bit tired, so the article is mistake?


First press report of 65nm XBox 360 RRoD:

"It didn't take long, but the first reports of the new 65nm CPU / GPU (code named Falcon) overheating has just surfaced. Seen on the picture is a limited edition Xbox 360 Halo 3 edition. This system incorporates the rumored 65nm chipset. "

http://n4g.com/xbox360/NewsCom-71365.aspx

Last edited by MikeB on 04-Oct-2007 at 06:25 PM.
Last edited by MikeB on 04-Oct-2007 at 03:37 PM.

@Lou

According to VGchartz:

1 Pokemon Mysterious Dungeon 2 99,031 - Total 862,994
2 Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII 64,386 - Total 675,615
3 Halo 3 60,783 - Total 60,783


Wii 23,443
PS3 13,546
PS2 12,772
X360 5,361

PS3 + PS2 > Wii hardware sales? I wasn't expecting this to happen in Japan so soon. Mario Galaxy will probably give the Wii its much needed push.

Halo 3 did well for its first week, worse than Blue Dragon but that was expected considering it's a FPS.

@BrianK

Quote:

1 is on reserve, can be drawn on by the OS at anytime.

I've learned that this is not even true, everything in the original post was based on comments made by certain Beyond3D posters and they've said this was made up as they've never stated anything of this sort. They cannot find the reason why this would have been interpretted based on what was actually stated.

IMO reserving one SPE for the OS makes sense as developers are not even scratching the surface of the performance potential offered by the other SPEs and Sony is still adding features to the OS.

@Lou

Quote:

HELL has frozen over. Japanese software charts for last week: 01) Halo 3 (Xbox 360) 59,000 copies

WOW!
The least popular 7th gen console in Japan selling a FPS, supposedly the least popular game in Japan, was able to break into #1? Impressive.

@All

Oh... By the way...

H ELL has frozen over.


Japanese software charts for last week:
01) Halo 3 (Xbox 360) 59,000 copies
02) Pokemon's Mysterious Dungeon: Toki (DS) 55,000
03) Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core (PSP) 54,000
04) Tamagotchi (DS) 54,000 / New
05) Pokemon's Mysterious Dungeon: Yami (DS) 46,000
06) Bleach Blade Battlers 2nd (PS2) 31,000 / New
07) English Test 2 (DS) 28,000 / New
08) Yu-gi-oh Duel Monsters GX (PSP) 28,000 / New
09) Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (PS3) 27,000 / New
10) Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops + (PSP) 25,000

As CPUs are moving from dual to multicore the questions come up for gaming developers on what the proper core count is for a game. Here is an answer from one of the ID-Software developers....

We had the opportunity to talk with Jan Paul van Waveren, programmer at id Software, about AMDs triple core approach.

PCGH: Is there enough space „between“ Dual and Quadcore CPUs to optimize for? I.E. is it feasible to optimize for two cores, three cores etc. or rather optimize for „many cores“, regardless of the exact number?

Jan Paul van Waveren: So far most game engines have exploited task parallelism to take advantage of multiple cores. Separate tasks are identified and executed on different cores. Typically the game engine is considered a pipeline and this pipeline is broken up into multiple steps/tasks, where each step runs on a different core. For example QUAKE 4 breaks the pipeline into two steps:

1. game code + renderer front end
2. renderer back end

Going to three cores you can split the pipeline further:

1. game code
2. renderer front end
3. renderer back end

Going to even more cores the pipeline can be broken up further, or other parts of the code can be split off and run in parallel:

1. AI code
2. effect physics
3. game code
4. texture streaming & de-re-compression
5. sound engine
6. renderer

The above is close to what the Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars game engine does. Having 6 separate tasks, or steps in your pipeline, does not necessarily mean the engine scales all the way up to a system with 6 cores. Some tasks may take more time to complete than others, and multiple tasks and their associated threads may run on a single core. Exploiting task parallelism can be very effective. However, it is not always easy to identify different tasks that take up similar amounts of time such that all cores are tasked equally. Furthermore, it typically requires a lot of programmer time to cleanly separate the task such that they can run in parallel.

PCGH: What kind of differentiation can you imagine for gaming workloads to be distributed between three cores?

Jan Paul van Waveren: To scale well on systems with an arbitrary number of cores it is more effective to exploit data parallelism. In this case each core performs the same task but on different pieces of distributed data. For instance, instead of running the AI in a separate thread, each AI character can run in a separate thread. Each thread performs the same task, in that it advances the state of one AI, but each thread works on a different AI character. Another example would be texture decompression, where multiple threads could be used to decompress subsections of an image, as opposed to having one thread decompress a whole image.

PCGH: Is a console-game, especially a Xbox360 port, a „natural” to profit from three but not necessarily four cores?

Jan Paul van Waveren: Current high profile game engines are designed for multiple platforms, including the PC, Mac, XBox 360 and PS3. As such the engine is not specifically designed for a fixed number of cores. Instead the engine is setup to have enough separate tasks, or exploit enough data parallelism such that it scales well on all platforms. From a programming perspective the ideal number of cores is one single super fast core. However, with a definite trend to a growing number of cores on today's CPUs there is no easy way around it, and more programming time will have to be spent to take advantage of all the cores.

@MikeB

Quote:

It's going to take some time before dev tools and 3rd party game engines and middleware tools are fully optimised for the PS3 architecture. I don't think many developers will digg into assembler, just C and C++ to program the SPEs. Even the devs behind the impressive Super Stardust HD didn't do that. Currently we are still very much in the experimentation phase, there's a lot of headroom for developers to explore:

I agree it will take time to learn and optimize the 3rd party tools.

But as the PS1 and PS2 were both MIPS based I'd assume the carry over of knowledge was a bit easier then a PS2 to PS3 shift. Yes of course new things would be learned on the PS2. I'd assume for the PS4 that Sony will freshen the Cell architecture. Sure there'd be new things to learn but I bet an easier transition then what they are up against this generation. We'll see when the PS4 is released.

Quote:

The shading computation ran at up to 85 Hz at HDTV 720p resolution on 5 SPUs and generated 30.72 gigaops of performance

This is all well and good and probably why the info about the PS3 came out that the Cell would do everything. Later we found out a GPU would be added. An issue with doing this in a game is that 7 SPUs are allowed to be used 1 is used for the OS. 1 is on reserve, can be drawn on by the OS at anytime. This gives developers the other 5 SPUs for their game. But if those 5 SPUs are dedicated to shading where's the AI and physics going to go? There's only 2 threads on the main CPU likely not enough processing power for the additional needs of a complex game. I'd really question how useful shading would be in this manner. I'd bet most developers will rely more heavily on the GPU for shading.

Though perhaps this could save some money for Sony's future PS3 revisions. Limit developers to using the 5 SPUs for graphics and remove the GPU.

Last edited by BrianK on 03-Oct-2007 at 08:19 PM.

@BrianK

Quote:

As the future consoles will even be more powerful I think the amount of developers that feel they need to hit the hardware directly will be reduced. Sure there will always be those developers who hit hardware but I think we'll see even more developers rely on 3rd party engines and tools to be optimized so they can instead focus on their game instead of spending cycles creating new engines and subsequently optimizing them.

It's going to take some time before dev tools and 3rd party game engines and middleware tools are fully optimised for the PS3 architecture. I don't think many developers will digg into assembler, just C and C++ to program the SPEs. Even the devs behind the impressive Super Stardust HD didn't do that.

Currently we are still very much in the experimentation phase, there's a lot of headroom for developers to explore:

For example with regard to using the SPEs as pixel shaders, an older article as introduction:

"This paper studies a deferred pixel shading algorithm implemented on a Cell-based computer entertainment system. The pixel shader runs on the Synergistic Processing Units (SPUs) of the Cell and works concurrently with the GPU to render images. The system's unified memory architecture allows the Cell and GPU to exchange data through shared textures. The SPUs use the Cell DMA list capability to gather irregular fine-grained fragments of texture data generated by the GPU. They return resultant shadow textures the same way. The shading computation ran at up to 85 Hz at HDTV 720p resolution on 5 SPUs and generated 30.72 gigaops of performance. This is comparable to the performance of the algorithm running on a state of the art high end GPU. These results indicate that a hybrid solution in which the Cell and GPU work together can produce higher performance than either device working alone."

"We have explored moving pixel shaders from the GPU to
the Cell/B.E. processor of the PLAYSTATION®3
computer entertainment system. Our initial results are
encouraging as they show it is feasible to attain scalable
speedup and high performance even for shaders with
irregular fine-grained data access patterns. Removing the
computation from the GPU effectively increases the frame
rate, or more likely, the geometric complexity of the models
that can be rendered in real time.

We can also conclude that the performance of the Cell/B.E.
is superior to a current state of the art high end GPU in that
we achieved comparable performance despite performance
limitations and despite using only part of the available
processing power. Our current implementation loses
substantial performance due to DMA waiting. This results
from the fine-grained irregular access to memory and is
specific to the type of shaders we have chosen to
implement. We have explored shaders based on shadow
mapping [15] which require evaluating GPU fragments
generated from multiple viewpoints. These multiple
viewpoints are related to each other by a linear viewing
transformation. Gathering the data from these multiple
viewpoints requires fine-grained irregular memory access.

This represents worst-case behavior for any memory
system. "

http://research.scea.com/ps3_deferred_shading.pdf


I think this article sheds some light on how the SPEs are currently used in Killzone 2, and addresses the advanced deferred rendering techniques Guerrilla Games already implemented for the game so far.



Deferred Rendering in Killzone 2

Another interesting read, this time from Insomniac regarding their new igPhysics system.

Introducing SPU shaders:
http://www.insomniacgames.com/tech/articles/0907/files/spu_shaders_introduction.pdf

Benefits of SPU Shaders to igPhysics
● Pipeline well defined and completely SPU-driven
● SPU processing completely asynchronous
● Data well-organized and well-defined.
● No (or minimal) PPU intervention

Last edited by MikeB on 03-Oct-2007 at 06:06 PM.