@wegster
Quote:

While I don't think this is unsurmountable, especially IF Sony gets their act together, and matches the 360 dev kit offering, and steps down off it's high horse (the 'they don't help developers' comment is NOT a good one..), and they sell more units, this will improve.

I think Sony is waking up to this problem in 2 ways. First working directly to help port the Unreal engine -- shows their willingness to help developers. Second by adding Phyre - remedy issues with their DE. It's little surprise to me that Microsoft's strength in creating developement environments, ease of use, and software is at play here.

@MikeB

Quote:

The RSX is pretty special though in the sense that the GPU was designed to work hand in hand with the Cell processor. Cell + RSX >>> Xenon + Xenos

yes the PS3 has more top end performance power then the 360. But, the GPU for the 360 too was designed to work hand in hand with the processor. The Xenon can help the Xenos too. But not to the extend the Cell can help the RSX. Of course the Hollywood GPU of the Wii too was designed to work with the CPU.

@BrianK

Quote:

BrianK wrote: @wegster Quote: While I don't think this is unsurmountable, especially IF Sony gets their act together, and matches the 360 dev kit offering, and steps down off it's high horse (the 'they don't help developers' comment is NOT a good one..), and they sell more units, this will improve. I think Sony is waking up to this problem in 2 ways. First working directly to help port the Unreal engine -- shows their willingness to help developers. Second by adding Phyre - remedy issues with their DE. It's little surprise to me that Microsoft's strength in creating developement environments, ease of use, and software is at play here.

Yep, agreed all around. Do you have any good liks to Phyre?

It's just unfortunate (from someone that would rather prefer Sony over MS, and PS3 owners, and PS3 devs) that this is 'typical Sony'- they think they're at the top of the food chain, and don't have to 'compete' to stay there. I think the mess with BD/HD-DVD as well as PS3 has _hopefully_ shown them a lesson, and they don't continue to repeat their past mentality.

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@wegster

Quote:

Do you have any good liks to Phyre?

Sorry no. Sony showed it at GDC 08. It's their cross platform development engine and it does both OpenGL and Direct3D. It was used to create DiRT and flOw. So throw PhyreEngine into your favorite search engine.

@MikeB

Quote:

Down to the core it's basically 96 (Xenos) vs 136 (RSX) shader ops per clock.

G70 class GPUs has issues with concurrent texture and pixel shader operations.

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@Hammer

We'll just wait and see, IMO the PS3 already has some of the best looking games and it's still very early into the game.

Anyway some interesting comments from leading PC game developers.

Crytek:

" Well there is no doubt that porting our engine to the PlayStation 3 is the more challenging of our two ongoing conversion projects, but that works to our advantage in the end."

"The surprising thing has been how well the consoles can perform visually, once this tailoring is in place. We expect the final outcome will result in games that look like they're running at high settings, or nearly high settings, on a PC."

http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/865/865020p1.html

Far Cry 2 devs:

"One thing that we realized pretty quickly as we started R&D on PS3, was that the hardware architecture had a very nice fit with some of our technical design decisions. We were positively surprised by how efficient the SPUs (the Cell processing units) were to do such things as run our vegetation simulation, our animations or our physics systems. So while it did require quite a bit of R&D to understand how to use the system correctly, once we started having results we saw that it was a very capable console and that FC2 could run on it."

Tech Director Guay is also impressed by the potential of Blu-ray and PS3's hard drive for streaming games in real-time. "The hard drive and Blu-ray are making our life easy considering FC2 is an open world continuously streamed around the player. That streaming bandwidth and disk space is very appreciated. So, in terms of AI, game structure, physics, dynamic time of day, open world gameplay, dynamic weather system, destructible vegetation, all of those things where we had really pushed the envelope technically, they run well on PS3."

Some 3rd party devs seem to be making good progress. But the exclusive devs are the ones who are going to take the best advantage of Blu-Ray and the Cell, as there are fewer cross platform consideration. Developing companies also don't want to upset 360 fans too much, so for now on par is good enough, only when the gap between cross platform titles and exclusive titles becomes too big we may start to see similar developments as was the case with regard to Amiga / Atari ST games.

Todd Howard (Fallout 3’s Executive Producer) - from Oblivion developer Bethesda - understands that PS3 “has more than enough power. No single game is using it all yet - not even close”.

Richard Baker (COD4 developer): "This just reaffirms how vital of a role the SPU's are to the PS3.", " PS3 games are now going to be setting the bar higher than ever before."
Mark Rein (vice president of Epic Games) - 'PS3's UT3 graphics better and runs better on PS3 than Gears on 360' 'We've surpassed what Halo 3 offered'

Leading PS3 exclusive developers:

Insomniac: "What's most exciting is the way things are headed right now I think we'll see just as big a leap from our second generation engine to our third as we did from the first to second."

Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

Last edited by MikeB on 11-Apr-2008 at 11:24 PM.

A small Resistance 2 teaser (full videos coming on June 13th):

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/32739.html

This game will be far more busy than Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction (a very busy game, with lots of moving objects at 60 FPS).

Last edited by MikeB on 12-Apr-2008 at 07:43 AM.

@MikeB
Sadly, it's just a cut-scene, instead of any gameplay

I still don't think Resistance was the 'great' game you made it out to be, but it was fun, and I'm sad it was stolen along with my first PS3. I may yet pick up a used copy of Resistance to replace it, and will likely be getting Resistance 2.

I expect Haze to probably be my next new PS3 game. Crysis probably, if/when it's released on PS3 - mainly because i don't have a PC hooked up to the projector, and the PS3 is, and some games really tend to be better on 106" versus 20-24" I'd be on on the PC.

I still remain unsure if I'll get GTA for PS3, or wait for PC, though. The PS3 exclusives, few as they are, or the console (PS3 and 360) it's an easier decision, but always tougher to decide between PC and PS3 titles like GTA will be, and if I decide to ever pick up UT, etc..I usually buy on PC, then, although I expect my current PC's video card may be below PS3, at 2 years old or so.

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@wegster

Just a small realtime cutscene peek of what's to come like I said, IMO gives a nice idea what kind of busy environments we should be expecting, Can't wait, IMO Resistance: Fall of Man is a great game, best PS3 launch game by far! I would recommend the game to any FPS liking PS3 owner, at least to experience the story to get set for Resistance 2.

Haze looks like a nice game and I read a preview stating the gameplay and design is pretty well done, but Killzone 2 and Resistance 2 are the FPS games I am going to get this year. MSG4 can also be played as FPS and I am getting GTA IV, that's enough shooters for me this year.

I am certainly not going to get the PC version of GTA IV, wireless controller sitting in front of a big screen HDTV is so much more appealing to me. I had fun with GTA: San Andreas on the PC, but feel I can't go back to really enjoy the experience on my 17 inch monitor with mouse and keyboard controls...

Resistance 2 looks set to become quite a showpiece title for the PS3:



Larger capture:
http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff287/gafpics/rres2.jpg

"Propriety game systems are now being heavily farmed out to the PS3's SPUs, keeping the central PPU as a sort of traffic cop that organizes what gets attention at any given moment. In simple terms, the game is taking much better advantage of the untapped potential of the console. In regard to visuals, the expanded use of the SPUs means more enemies on screen, significantly more complex AI from all of those foes and dramatically expanded options for special effects."

8 player co-operative campaign, hopefully in settings like this concept art:

The game is said to include unique epic boss battles unlike we have ever seen in a FPS before:
http://i29.tinypic.com/15f6p6r.jpg
http://i31.tinypic.com/iwhp38.jpg

@MikeB

Post #486. The descriptions given aren't indicative of your claim 'ironically this will benefit 360/PC ports as well. '. They seem to just say optimization on the PS3 produces better PS3 games. I think everyone will agree with you. Clearly writing the game first on the target console yields better results for that target console. So are you trying to support PS3 first means better 360 game claim or just saying PS3 games be pretty?

COD4 compared to Halo 3 is a comment for marketing not performance. Halo 3 wasn't developed to pushed the 360 fully, it was to just be a fun game w/ a good enough approach.

'Resistance 2 teaser ' -- I hate trailers that are non-gameplay. Final Fanasty has always been horrid at this. Show the boss trailer not the actual gameplay. Things are closer now but we'll wait to see the actual gameplay before I get all excited.

""Propriety game systems are now being heavily farmed out to the PS3's SPUs, keeping the central PPU as a sort of traffic cop that organizes what gets attention at any given moment" -- Hey they finally figured out how to follow the design of the processer. Woke up to the paradigm shift...

"http://i31.tinypic.com/iwhp38.jpg" -- Put the Gears of War spider boss in lava battle to be a spider boss in water battle. Copycats.

@BrianK

Quote:

Post #486. The descriptions given aren't indicative of your claim 'ironically this will benefit 360/PC ports as well.

That reply was to Hammer, it did not specifically regard PS3 game engine development and how this benefits game engine design in general. These are (and I have more if you need them):

A PC/360 developer responded to this presentation (developer for the PC/360 game Prey, in reply to the Insomniac document linked to earlier):

"Sure you can just about get away with bad code now on the 360"

"Regardless of managed memory or cached memory, the concepts and methods Mike has presented is highly portable. In the case of cached memory, that method results in optimized cache locality and cache utilization (something extremely important when multiple threads are sharing L1 on a single core, and multiple cores are sharing L2), and a predictable way to optimally prefetch. Good data locality, minimal sync points, branch elimination, and vectorization are all required to be able to extract great performance out of the 360 as well."

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=47057

Heavenly Sword dev comment from NeoGaf, currently working on a 360/PS3 project.

"Using PS3 as a 'lead platform' is the right thing to do if you are going to make a game that has to run on 360 and PS3. The reason is very simple: on PS3 designing your data structure in the proper way is paramount to achieve decent performance (and to scale up..), while your PS3 friendly data will be also 360 friendly data in the vast majority of cases.
This is a big win cause you will definitely be able to get the most from BOTH platforms."

Another 360/PS3 dev, who admitted his company did some quick & dirty 360 ports to the PS3::

"We all agree given the time we'd like to architect for the SPU's first then work back... giving us cache-friendly algorithms by design "

Sadly Beyond3D is currently down, so I can't find the thread in question.

Last edited by MikeB on 12-Apr-2008 at 02:55 PM.

@wegster

Quote:

1 case, huh? ... I'd be interested in knowing if there's a way to 'emergency re-flash' the firmware, though.

It still only seems to be a harddrive problem though.. Not actual hardware..

Yes I hope they do add some better error checking to their file system so removing
bad sectors can be done within the PS3. Then this issue would be a noissue

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@MikeB

Quote:

MikeB wrote: @BrianK Heavenly Sword dev comment from NeoGaf, currently working on a 360/PS3 project. "Using PS3 as a 'lead platform' is the right thing to do if you are going to make a game that has to run on 360 and PS3. The reason is very simple: on PS3 designing your data structure in the proper way is paramount to achieve decent performance (and to scale up..), while your PS3 friendly data will be also 360 friendly data in the vast majority of cases. This is a big win cause you will definitely be able to get the most from BOTH platforms."

This doesn't sound good to me. Here's how I read into it... It's like saying design for the lowest common denominator because it will still work fine on the more powerful platform. That's like telling people to design on the PS2 because then porting to the Xbox will be a breeze. How can you not see that for yourself.
From the sounds of things, it seems like the compiler is not up to snuff for cache optimization and devs have to go back in and re-arrange code so that it is "better" optimized for CELL. Where as on the 360, less optimization is needed for 3 identical cores to work closer to their max utilization.

...

Perhaps in 2 more years, everyone will have figured out the CELL and then it's games will really start to shine. As of right now, I see Blu Ray as the only thing that makes one want a PS3 over a 360. Microsoft should bite the bullet and install a Blu Ray drive. For consumers, when pre-ordering games, they should be allowed to choose the format for games that would be released on multiple DVD's, either the multi-disc version or the BR version with possibly installs more to the hard drive where needed to make up for Blu Ray's slower disc access. It seems like a win in the long run for MS if they do this and could extend the 360's life cycle. They should also offer a service to retro fit BR drives into older 360's.

...

Hey, a Lair patch was released to add analog controls! I'm suprised no one noticed...

@MikeB

Thanks for helping clear up the understanding.

Quote:

"Sure you can just about get away with bad code now on the 360"

Every system allows you to do this to some extent or the other. Heck isn't the Amiga terse and functional operating system due to hardware that's more limited then our dual core desktops, which in turn we get VISTA for. When hardware is faster, has more memory, and is cheaper it's less impacting to be lazy and not optimize the code.

Quote:

We all agree given the time we'd like to architect for the SPU's first then work back... giving us cache-friendly algorithms by design

On one hand we have 6 threads in a tri-core CPU design (360). On the other hand we have the PS3 with 2 threaded CPU and 7 helper threaded SPUs. The SPU is optimized for what it does but is not as general purpose as another Core. It makes sense to me that one would program for the slightly more limited SPU and migration to a core on the 360 would be less problematic then programming for the general purpose core then having to go back and optimize for a more limited SPU.

The next question is going to be what programming environment is best suited to the goal of the developer team. I think Sony did see they needed to enhance their development tools and a reason they introduced PhyreEngine which can not only do OpenGL (PS3) but DirectX/Direct3D (360) functions. If it turns out as good as many developers hope we may see people switching into the PS3->360 porting method.

@Lou

Quote:

perhaps in 2 more years, everyone will have figured out the CELL and then it's games will really start to shine

Also in 2 years I expect to start seeing the 3rd Gen Xbox console, announced at least. Intel has shown off a few things. One is a Cell-like concept, Teraresearch Chip. Another was an 80 core CPU. The other is a 16 core CPU w/ on die graphics processing. AMD has also shown off high core counts with on die graphics processing. I could see the later 2 being something Microsoft would consider as it'll keep the hardware complexities and expenses reduced, something needed in a console. Programmers cell knowledge will benefit them programming for the 3rd Xbox, IMO.

@Lou

Quote:

This doesn't sound good to me. Here's how I read into it... It's like saying design for the lowest common denominator because it will still work fine on the more powerful platform.

The dev also stated the PS3 is much more powerful than the 360 on public forums. Some design decision are crucial on the PS3 and only beneficial on the 360. The gains will be much bigger.

Do not forget about the Amiga, some early Atari ST ports to the Amiga were inferior. Later games were far superior.

@MikeB

Ahh, right..I forgot about KillZone 2. That I will be buying, but it's release is much later, isn't it?

Quote:

eel I can't go back to really enjoy the experience on my 17 inch monitor with mouse and keyboard controls...

Ok, it's SO time to upgrade that CRT, Mike!

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@Samwel

Quote:

Samwel wrote: @wegster Quote: 1 case, huh? ... I'd be interested in knowing if there's a way to 'emergency re-flash' the firmware, though. It still only seems to be a harddrive problem though.. Not actual hardware.. Yes I hope they do add some better error checking to their file system so removing bad sectors can be done within the PS3. Then this issue would be a noissue

Check the links again. I believe it was put forth on at least one of them, it seems to have been related to corrupted firmware, causing the drive data corruption, etc. I'm NOT saying I believe this is a widespread issue, but also, 'emergency firmware flash' or ability to do it somehow, might be useful there. Basically, make a backup copy of the previous or currrent firmware, with a means to fall back to it, etc.

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@wegster

Quote:

Ahh, right..I forgot about KillZone 2. That I will be buying, but it's release is much later, isn't it?

Rumoured release date for Killzone 2 is September and Resistance 2 November.

Quote:

Ok, it's SO time to upgrade that CRT, Mike!

What was that?