What exactly happened to the Playstation 3? - Page 3

So now we have gone from "all the game projects will be behind schedule and total disasters" to "middleware companies will have to do some technically demanding work".

But that's exactly what the middleware companies do. They do the hard stuff so others wouldn't have to. In the house I worked at for a short time, they had the best programmers I've met, period. They supported lots of platforms, from the even-more-difficult-to-program PS2 to mobile handsets. Not to mention what the product actually did. One key developer was well on his way to computer science doctorate for the research he did for this. I have no reason to think it's different elsewhere - it's simply the kind of task that attracts coding maniacs. They had no use for anyone who wasn't a skilled coder or just about to become one. (Not gratuituous self-promotion. I worked a different task. )

And if getting the middleware and engine guys going is a problem, it's a problem in the beginning, not at the end. There is lots of stuff for the PS3 already. The PS3 is over that particular hump. Sony licensed Unreal Engine for development last year.

I'm not convinced the devs at run-of-the-mill studios will have to tap into the SKUs a lot beyond what their middleware building blocks and engine will do on their own. Some studios that want to distinguish their game with intensive in-house AI or something else will have their developers figure the technology out. At worst it should perform like the 360, but there is some additional potential there for when someone wants to utilize it. The 360, on the other hand, will be easier (which is not a bad thing) if you want to keep most of the development in-house.

I know the 360 is multicore, it has 3 cores and 6 threads, the PPC core on the cell is dual core.

As a clarification, I think it would be easier/better all around if the PS3 had general purpose cores, but 1+7 is hardly the end of the world or a cause for massively delayed game projects. (Or more delayed, anyway. They never seem to be on time.)

Gameplay >> Graphics
Way too expensive for a console
Blue-Ray / HD-DVD war is far from over
And...it's a huge, ugly beast of a console

This is great for the PS3. Having games, it has lots of excellent gameplay.


It'll come down in price in a year, which is when the general public starts buying things anyway. We've seen this with every other system launch ever.


This is irrelevant, PS3 will get huge games delivered on a realistic format for next generation games even if HD-DVD takes over for movies.

Remember, not having CDs killed the Nintendo 64, and not having DVDs killed the Gamecube.

This is where XBOX and Wii are going to be hurting in a year or two.


I'm assuming you haven't seen an XBOX 360, then. :/

i'm by no means a console gamer, but frankly, the WII is much more appealing to me than either of the other consoles. I like the fact that it's not too expensive. I like the new gameplay with the controller.

So I think the wii is going to "win" this round. what is clear as day to me, is that unless the price of the PS3 comes down to compete with the 360, it will lose. If the ps3 is hard to dev for, and its not got a huge installed base, then people will just start making games for the other consoles. This will kill the ps3 faster than anything.

sony needs to get the price of hte ps3 down fast. It needs to be 299$ and 399$.

600$ for a game console? Why? WHY? W H Y ??? That's insane!

i saw a blog where some guy lost 9 pounds playing WII sports. I like the idea of a game console that gets you off your ass. I think it's cool that it's not just the twitch of your fingers but how you move the controller.

Gon, you seem to have a better idea of what is going on.

1+6 is not a total disaster. But it is proving to be a real problem out in developer-land. I have heard some real horror stories. It is especially bad for studios not relying heavily on middleware. And where exactly are these middleware games?

The 360's 3+3 hardware is causing far fewer problems. Teams get it, use the free middleware and ship games. The games are getting better. It is a bizarre thing, I know, but Microsoft have actually done something right. OK so they still have not done enough to attract the right sort of developers. Microsoft should have bought Square and not Rare in my opinion. And they should release the Zephyr as soon as possible.


C.

No it's not. But it does have its own Alitvec unit. And it does something like "hyperthreading" Perhaps that's what you mean?
Actually it's a little worse than that. Because the PPE has to act as "conductor" for the SPEs. Which means you can't fully utilise it as a general-purpose processor. It has chores to perform.

C.

My opinion for PS3.. if you just have an old regullar tv, not an HDTV, no matter how good the graphics are, the quality isn't going to show up on an old television. There also don't seem to be too many games yet for the PS3 that spark any interest for me. I haven't gotten a Wii yet, however the controller seems really cool and it is a way to really get into the games more physically. I have seen videos of people playing it and it seems real cool.

This is completely absurd.

My XBOX 360 looks phenomenal compared to the original XBOX on my really crappy 26" TV.

The next generation games aren't shitty polygons and shitty textures at higher resolutions (well, maybe the Wii is...). They're incredibly complex polygons and incredibly detailed textures. At higher resolutions.

While none of the games on the PS3 interest me enough to buy one yet, the games currently out there look great compared to last generation's games. The resolution is only one part of that.

right from the link spline model provided...Maybe the guys at IBM, you know the people who designed it, dont actually know what it is they built...

"It is a dual-core PowerPC®-based element, called the Power Processing Element, or PPE for short. The other eight processing elements, however, are a different story."

Yes, it is. At least, IBM seems to say so. IBM is also pushing a lot more marketing and development muscle behind the cell than they are behind the Xenon. There are no Xenon blades on the market. Xenon is not being used to make super computers. Cell is here to stay, like it or not. (Well, I know you don't like it).

Concepts that come out of VLSI-land always seem to take a few years to really catch on with programmers. Spin the clock way back and there were people badmouthing the 4004. In a few years the software development community will have embraced the Cell and will instead be whining about having to adopt the next next big thing.

Cell2 runs at over 5ghz

I do like it. Cell is a great supercomputer part. But not a games chip. It's like putting a jet engine into a rally car. Lots of power, but entirely the wrong sort of power.

Xenon is a reasonable games chip. Not a supercomputer part.

As far as I know - and I am a flawed mortal .... The Cell variant which ships in the PS3 has a single core PPC ( with hyperthreading style fast register swapping.)
There are 8 SPEs on the silicon. Of which only 7 are programmable ( to improve yields -one can be broken).
1 is fully reserved by the Sony "OS" and one is partially used by the Sony "OS" - giving a 1+6. Although as I pointed out. The PPE is compelled to fulfill various chores - servicing its harem of SPEs.

My assertion is that the PS3 - although containing some cutting-edge technology, is actually a poorer solution for delivering videogame content than the 360.
This is based on....
...the complexity of the hardware demanding more programming effort for a given outcome.... the paucity of the support software and documentation ... the way the GPU is an afterthought.... the inexcusable lack of a dedicated scaling chip .... the lack of texture bandwidth and texture memory .... and the fact there is NO BLOODY RUMBLE in the controller.

I have only one remaining question:

At this precise moment in time - everyone accepts that right now the 360 has more impressive games. - So....at what point do you guys concede, based on evidence?

A) By the European launch of the PS3 ?
B) By the launch of Halo 3 ?
C) By the launch of Oblivion ?
D) By the launch of the first Unreal 3 title ?
E) When Howard Stringer loses his job?
F) When a world-famous developer breaks the silence and flames the PS3?
G) Never ?

C.

When Microsoft turns a profit.

Why, tell me, does Toshiba want to put the cell into their HDTV sets if it is not good for graphics? The PPE is a varient of the PPC processor to take cane of the other stuff.

The Cell in the PS3 has the same two-core PPE as all Cells. The only difference is that it has one SPE disabled, so there are only seven SPEs. This is done to keep the yields higher.

The argument that the Xenon is better for programming games is a bad argument, because a game itself is quite detached from the finer points of programming concepts. I find it hard to believe that Sony and IBM would sit down for five years to develop a high-performance processor -- designed initially to run games on a PS3 -- without giving any thought to how elements of games can be programmed. What you should be saying is that the Xenon is better for running legacy C/C++ code that has been used in games before. All it takes are a few good libraries for PS3 game programming and all of the sudden the tables turn.

We've conversed about this ad nauseum. At this point I'm satisfied to let time finish this debate.

You mean like how devs can depend on having a HDD and not streaming from a 12x DVD drive? Or they can have more than 8GB of content on one disc?


Programming the SPE's aren't as horrible as you make them out to be. Yes, it does require more handholding and potential to shoot yourself in the foot. On the other hand getting the best performance out of hardware often requires hand tuned code anyway and the SPE's offer power. And no...C with SPE intrinsics doesn't look much like assembly...more like Altivec code.

On the plus side for the 360...MS makes some of the best tools on the market and for 360 development it shows. Sony...not so much.

Vinea

Xenon=3 PPEs of course. With VMX-128 (enhanced Altivec, basically) as well.

And a PPE is single core, dual thread. Not dual core.

As for tools, well Microsoft put a lot of effort into their tools, Sony didn't although this has started to change it's a little late for the first wave of games.


The premise of the thread, that Sony screwed up, is entirely correct. Please note I really don't have a dog in this fight. The last console I owned was the Sega Dreamcast and although I might buy a Wii it won't be for a year or so.

Sony failed to secure exclusive titles despite developers quite literally asking them. Furthermore relations with developers have not been that good.

Sony has at the moment a horrendous relationship with the press (PR lies, basically).

They spent a vast amount of money to develop the Cell (excluding IBM's PPE development) and then for much less money Microsoft just stuck together 3 PPEs and got nearly the same performance. Presumably Cell will make money for them elsewhere, but not for a little while. It was a major delay in the launch.

The Blu-Ray drive is expensive and slower than a regular DVD drive and was a major factor in the delay of the launch. Although it does store more data that doesn't really matter given that most games don't need it, and most of the ones that do will just be sticking very long very pretty movies on it.

Development tools sucked.


All this aside they have a console which is marginally more powerful than the Xbox360 and which has both a decent HDD and an off-the-shelf replaceable one. They have close ties with the PSP (don't know how much that will help them). Most importantly they have the Sony Playstation brand namethough I'll point out how much Sega's and Nintindo's brand names helped them face off the original Playstation.

Did Sony screw up? Absolutely. Has it, and will it continue, to hurt them? Yep. Can they come back from this? Sure.


I don't really care who 'wins' a console war (by profit earned that looks likely to be Nintendo, anyway) but there does seem to be a lot of vested interest, at least in this thread, in a winner.

So I'll say this. Why does it matter? Everyone will take away lessons from this round just like they did from the last. Odds are all three main players will be up for another round in a few years and we'll see who learned the lessons best.

I don't have a dog in the fight. But I was once bitten by Sony.

Good post. (grin)

C.

Yes, the 360 has more impressive games, meaning it has a small handful of nice titles out where the PS3 has none. I fail to see how this is a cause for fanfare, especially looking at how long the 360 has been out.

I'd like to play GoW, Dead Rising and Viva Pinata. What else in the lineup is good?
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/xbox360games.htm
Do they add up to something worthy of the entry price to get on this platform?

The Wii has interesting title parity with 360 at this point, IMO. By the end of 07, PS3 will also. (No, I don't think those consoles are good deals either right now.)

The new consoles actually have very tough competition from the last generation. For someone getting into consoles right now, I'd actually recommend a PS2, slim version, off a sale or used. You can pay half of the price of the new consoles and end up with a console and a big stack of best-on-the-system games to boot. I just finished God of War. Before that, it was We Love Katamari. Shadow of the Colossus is on hold till later. Even the releases haven't dried up. I'm currently waiting for Okami PAL release and Guilty Gear Slash US NTSC release, both of which I think are due next month. God of War 2 also. All exclusives.

Can't go wrong with a Gamecube either, with all the top notch older games and Twilight Princess. Releases have very much dried up, but I expect they will be revitalized with Wii as with the similar hardware it's going to be a breeze to back-port all the games that suit a classic controller. I don't believe Nintendo can afford to abandon the installed base. Some art will have to be redone to lower the hardware intensity, and it will look slightly worse, but meh.

XBox has the best hardware and works great especially after modding, but I find it hard to get excited about almost any title on it.

Might not score any bragging rights, but the older consoles rule if you care about the actual titles.

It would be interesting to hear about the "getting bit by Sony" thing you mentioned. Anything you can fess up without contract breakage.

Anyone here with a PS3 successfully get a Bluetooth enabled Mac to connect to it? I was just thinking about this, havent tried yet, but will when I get home later.

Uh, then who cares if it was a "well-documented disaster" of an architecture? It clearly succeeded. Really, how much of a disaster could it have been? Obviously those obstacles were overcome. Sure, Sony's marketing helped, as did their relationship with game developers. But the former wouldn't help if the product sucked. Great advertising with a shitty product actually makes the product fail even more. That's well-documented.

"The King's new outfit is the smartest thing you ever did see! Everyone agrees."

PS2 was an utterly crappy hardware, but despite that, fierce brand-loyalty and Sony's steroid-pumping marketing muscle made it a success. The crapness was perhaps more apparent to developers than it was to end users. and it was the developers that paid the price for the weakness in the hardware.

But people have memories, and there is only so many times that the old bait-and-switch trick works. It's clear that less people are being fooled this time around.

Suddenly a voice cries out, "Hey everyone! The King is stark bollock naked!"

More evidence - The Ebay prices are now less than the store prices.
Analysts are touting a price cut. And developers are showing declining confidence in the PS3.

C.

I will say you are very brave. Someone may quote you on that in about six months.

It'll take longer than six months. A couple years probably...midway into the lifecycle of this generation of consoles.

PS2 vs Xbox vs GameCube there was rough parity.

Wii is fun and the best console of 2006 IMHO but not next gen.

PS3 vs Xbox and you don't have rough parity in two important areas:

1) Developers can't count on a HDD for their games for the 360. This means they are limited to 12x DVD rates (15.9MB/s) and 7GB usable space. Using the HDD is a crutch but one available to PS3 devs.

2) Developers can't count on HD-DVD for their games. Same limitation as above. Yes the 12x DVD has a higher peak rate for streaming (double...12x vs about 6.5x) but BR is large enough that folks like Bethesda have duplicated some data to reduce seek times and they still ultimately have more storage space. I also believe the 360 drive is only 8x for dual layer discs.

Looking how PS2 games started on CDs and ended on dual layer DVDs this will be an issue if past trends continue.

Vinea

FFS how is 7GB a limitation?
PS3 & Xbox games have had DVD for years - and most games barely use over a single gigabyte for storage. The production cost of games assets is becoming astronomical. The very idea of >10gb of binary assets in a game is ludicrous. The majority of PS2 and Xbox games are actually shipped on CD and not DVD.

Games simply don't require that much storage. If they did, optical drive loading times would be immense (breaking the TRCs) and the authorship costs immenser.

There is only one way that games spend more on storage - and that is with BIG BIG files. And the only such files is what we in the games-biz call FMV video. But with audiences expecting movie-quality-visuals - these sequences are costing $250,000 per minute or more. Trust me, if the PS3's killer game is The Seventh Guest 2 - then I don't think Microsoft has much to worry about.

C.

Six months ago 360 was looking weak and everyone said PS3 will be the sure-fire winner of this round.

Six months later and suddenly stuff has changed. Opinions are split. Consumers, press and developers are hedging their bets like crazy.

Six months from now, things will have changed again. On the 360 side we will have seen Halo3, the launch of Zephyr. Perhaps these events will be linked.

But on the PS3 side what do you see as an event that could restore the credibility of the platform?
I'm happy to stick with my statement. Dude, you can totally see the King's ass!

C.

640k ought to be enough for anyone

PS2/XBOX games had pitifully tiny textures, and for the most part, incredibly low-res polygons.

Simply exporting current assets at HD sizes would take up more space than a DVD could handle.

If you genuinely don't think that the DVD format is going to limit the XBOX 360, I'd say you're off your rocker.

As a game developer, I do actually have a clue about what I am talking about.

In a modern Next-gen game - the polygon data is tiny. Texture data has grown - but we have texture compression nowadays.
The latest games struggle to make 3 gigs. Throw in ten hours of audio and ten mins of HD FMV and we get to 4.

Read the post - Imagine if a game *could* have 8gigs of polygon data and 10gigs of compressed textures. (in a console with 256megs of RAM!!!!) It would be unplayably slow, and unaffordably expensive to create. It's not going to happen.

You are just repeating Sony's marketing nonesense which implies that features included to play DVDs are in some way beneficial to a games console.

C.

You definitely come off as a software developer, since most developers I know are constantly bitching about technologies that require or simply recommend them to change their ways. But at the end of the day the team that sells the best product wins, regardless of how much bitching goes on. The PS3 definitely has a higher ceiling than anything out there at the moment, and you're foolish to think that lazy developers are going to somehow pull rank on management.

People always want better graphics. This means increasing poly count or using spline-patch rendering. The cell has enough FPU brawn to preprocess spline-patches. Texture-mapping is perhaps the most glaring detractor to computer generated imagery. Using displacement maps in the modeling process is easy and yields a vastly superior image at the cost of a lot more polys, but if you can do it, it's worth it. For the record, I refuse to use texture-maps, ever. Granted, product-vis isn't real-time, but the point is that texture maps are one of the last remants of unrealistic-looking CG.

The average size for 2005 games on the XBox was 3.2GB.

GOW (360) around 6.5 GB
Dead or Alive 4 (360): 5GB
NBA 06 (360): 4.5GB
RFOM (PS3) 7GB FMV (720p), Audio 2.24GB, Game Assets 6.12GB: 17GB
Blue Dragon (360) - 3 DVDs (tons of FMV that the Japanese market likes)
Genji is like 12GB (at least the ISO is)

So much for struggling to get to 3 GB Mr. Uber Game Developer.

Launch and early titles. Yeah...give devs more space they'll find a use for it. FFXIII will probably be a dozen discs given Square's history... In any case, textures and polys can be streamed into that 256MB and remember the PS2 only had 32MB. Memory grew more than disc space (8x vs 3x).

And the PS3 has a HDD to stash textures and data on for faster streaming. Something that I had wished Bioware had done for Jade Empire in a few spots. The <talk to NPC> <loading> <Fight in Arena> <loading> <talk to NPC> <loading> <Fight in Arena> repeated a dozen times was majorly aggravating.

Hopefully Mass Effect (the only 360 exlusive title I'd buy the platform for) will be somewhat better at this.

Vinea

PS Procedural Synthesis is a useful tool but limited. Games will still require lots of assets to look good and not repetitive. Good for forests. Not good for dungeons.

It seems like most PS3 supporters are forgetting a few majors things...

BTW I just browsed through this, so some points may not be relevant to everyone

1) While the PS3 will go down in price, so will the 360.

2) The 360 is much easier to program for, meaning newer developers would much rather program on the 360 than the PS3

3) Many games that were exclusive to Sony just aren't anymore. The ones that aren't will be beat out by the Xbox games anyways. FF will be beat by Blue Dragon (by the original creator of the FF games), MGS by SC and so on.

4) The 360 has a MUCH better online service. I never would have imagined last year that in a year from then I would be talking to a friend with my wireless headset while playing oblivion, while downloading Mortal Combat while getting messages and video messages from people all at once. Live is just ingenious.

Well there you go, some major points to consider.

Seven gigs of FMV! - oh my goodness, it's amazing that with sooo much storage it can be such a disapointing title. How can that be?

Like I say, the if the one unque aspect of PS3 is FMV , then heaven help us.

Yes the PS3 has a phat optical drive. But I never met a game developer who wanted more storage since the days of cartridges. More Ram, yes. More texture bandwidth, yes. More (real) processors. Yes.

Look, Sony's engineering team are out of control. Have been for a while. Like the PS2 - the PS3's engineering has been done by a team who have never produced anything other than graphic tech demos.

Last time around, the developers took it. They soaked up the pain and created games on the PS2 because there was no choice. Sony owned the market. The sales of the console were massive. There was no commercial alternative.

It's different this time.

C,

If lazyness means profitable - then I'd be happy to be called lazy any day.

lazy = faster = cheaper = profitable
higher ceiling = difficult = expensive = unfit for purpose



Splines!. Welcome to 1990! Milli Vanilli are playin' on the radio and this dude is all about modellin' with the splines. That sounds very non-rational to me.

Back in 2007 we are groovin' to Bloc Party and we have a little something called subdivision surfaces. They have the major benefit in that you can actually animate them properly. One of the things that developers liked so much about the 360 was its ability to do sub-d's on the fly. You know like on the GPU.

If you had the Cell doing all this clever stuff to geometry, you'd then have to ship the geometry out of the Cell and into the GPU. Oops! Now children, can anyone tell me why would that be a bad idea?

C.

Try reading the thread. Those points have basically been made. They will be unlikely to determinne the success of the console. Developers will come out with great games, exclusive or not.

We'll talk in a year or so, when the PS3 has a more complete catalog of games. Then we can start comparing sales data.

It can be because you are biased. R:FOM by most reviews is a decent game. There are still 6+GB of game assets and lots of audio (although multi-lingual).


The Cell should be a good performer once the tool chain gets more efficient. Of course given your anti-Sony bias you prefer to call SPE's "not real" implying "not useful". Given the PS3 has more ram, more bandwidth over the PS2 I guess it fits the bill in the other respects too.


Well they now have a console. Pricey but nice and actually fully next generation. Of course that may not make them successful.


Its still early. The 360 will certainly take more share than the XBox will. Will it be a PS1? Perhaps. A PS2? Not given the current landscape.

Vinea

Lazy = dev unwilling to learn new things = dev ready to become management.

In any case the Cell isn't that annoying and Sony can improve its tool chain. Not to the same level of MS but MS is a software shop with tons of investment already into dev tools and some of the best of breed products. VS is an awesome IDE and XNA a great framework.

Hmmm...had an amusing idea but there's no networking in XNA yet...I wonder if that means no decent reliable UDP implementation/DirectPlay stuff or no networking. I wonder how much effort it is to port MDX code to XNA...and I guess I have to do that anyway since MDX is effectively dead.

Or switch to Java/JOGL. Shudder.

Vinea

Are you saying that you're the top of the game developer food chain? If not, then you're point is not valid.


Believe me, I know the scene of things. Spline-patch rendering costs less memory that polygon rendering. It also costs more CPU/FPU. If you have a scenario where you have a lot more FPU than memory, it makes a lot of sense to consider spline-patch rendering. Considering that 80%+ of modern CPUs are cache, it's possibly more cost effective to load on more cores and pursue a spline-patch rendering methodolgy. Sony actually had been experimenting with this. If it can provide a better visual experience on the same platform, I see no reason to pooh-pooh the idea, and I'm not sure why you're so adversarial about new concepts and ideas that have potential to improve the end product. The only conclusion I can come up with is that you ultimately don't care about improving the product.

I wish I was at the top of the food chain! Lol! I am more in a bottom feeding role right now.

Splinemodel - the world has moved on. Apart from product design - everyone uses sub-ds. Subdivision surfaces have all the benefits of splines - without the disadvantages. Checkout Pixar's recent work etc.

This article might interest you. it describes exactly what you were saying about using the CPU to generate geometry on the fly....

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paed.../xbox360-1.ars

C.