PS3 "not hard" to develop for News

Actually, please read the comments on that blog entry. There are comments from senior Sony developers there including Richard Marks (#269) and Mark Danks (#294, #307 and #323).

What the heck? No arrogance at all here, just reasonable insights about PS3? This blog really could be something and do some good for Sony's horrible PR reputation.

And by "doing more" he actually means "spending more time on it".

The more multithreaded your architecture is the more complex it becomes. This is a standard fact of software development. That is what you learn in University and what you learn in life as a software developer. Case closed.

MS's response:

"Sony is facing the fact the Xbox 360 (thanks to being available a year earlier) is the default development platform for almost every game studio and publisher in the industry. It’s been built into the tool chain and processes, and primary development is happening on the Xbox 360 for almost every game you can find.

There’s a reason why the Xbox 360 version is almost always the version shown to press and analysts for new titles – often, the PS3 version isn’t even started yet, or is well behind in development."

"The more multithreaded your architecture is the more complex it becomes."

6 HW threads over 3 processors on the X360 against 6 usable SPU's and an additional 2 HW threads on the Playstation 3...when viewed in these terms there I don't see much of a difference.

But todays GPU's with 100+ cores, that must be a bitch to develop for, right?

You sure that was a university you went to?

@disc
Thanks for pointing those out - saved me the time of sifting through the crap :)

>"But todays GPU's with 100+ cores, that must be a bitch to develop for, right? "

?

Maybe you are from the future?

>"6 HW threads over 3 processors on the X360 against 6 usable SPU's and an additional 2 HW threads on the Playstation 3...when viewed in these terms there I don't see much of a difference. "

Haaa.. so they are the same? Well cool.. explains why there is no difference in games.

No arrogance at all here

"Since PS3's Cell processor allows more features - better physics, more complex graphical processing, lighting or sound, etc. - there is inevitably going to be more cost in supporting those extra features."

"Xbox 360 is a different machine with good, but lower powered hardware in a different architecture..."

No, of course not. ;)

But it was so subtle :)

@Qbert2k That's why Haze and The Darkness are shown on PS3 most the time then!!

Sony is facing the fact the Xbox 360 (thanks to being available a year earlier) is the default development platform for almost every game studio and publisher in the industry.

So, MS admits themselves and brags, in fact, that it is all simply due to being in the market a year earlier, not due to this "vastly superior hardware".

This, and the "encouragement" MS is renowned of giving to developers: $$$

"It's not that PS3 is harder to write for, it's just that you can do more with it"

No, it's that the PS3 is harder to write for. Sony's tools are quite simply the worst.

Comments from senior Sony engineers to the contrary on the blog aren't going to change that - seriously, what do you expect them to say?

As for actual developers - they're not going to go public and criticise Sony PS3 development, because Sony has them all under strict NDA and if they say anything about it, things will get very difficult for their company, and then they're quite possibly screwed. Amazingly, they don't want that. Most developers can't afford to piss off Sony, so they keep quiet.

"6 HW threads over 3 processors on the X360 against 6 usable SPU's and an additional 2 HW threads on the Playstation 3...when viewed in these terms there I don't see much of a difference."

Go to Wikipedia and read up on Shared Memory vs Distributed Memory Architectures. They go bash yourself in the head with a book on parallel algorithm design.

"But todays GPU's with 100+ cores, that must be a bitch to develop for, right? "

GPUs have 100 cores? Mine only has the 1 and I only brought it a few months ago! Technology sure moves fast these days.

Are you sure you don't mean ALUs?

Here is an intresting article on the matter:-

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/200...

"@Qbert2k That's why Haze and The Darkness are shown on PS3 most the time then!!"
It's funny about Haze. Nekotcha (one of the Haze devs who posts here) was quite critical of the ps3 from what I recall, which makes me suspect this whole leading on ps3 business, now it's a timed exclusive, is nothing more than pr.

Of course with multiplatform engines like Unreal 3 doesn't this make the whole thing redundent? I guess not what with the delays in Vegas etc...

"Go to Wikipedia and read up on Shared Memory vs Distributed Memory Architectures. They go bash yourself in the head with a book on parallel algorithm design."

It's not like I don't see that. The argument was that the ps3 would somehow be "more multithreaded" than the X360, according to Dizzy. That's why I took the stance of only looking at cores and threads, which simply isn't the distinctive factor in this discussion.

By the way: video HW companies like Ati themselves refer to their multiple ALU's as 'cores' or even 'processors', and mostly the term ALU is only assigned to those building blocks calculating the simplest of operations (even an FPU isn't technically an ALU anymore). So there you go.

If you wanna know what its like coding for the PS3, its not quite as simple as "same number of hardware threads as Xbox". It's like having a normal PC to code for, then to have 6 other CPUs with no memory, just a large cache.

According to gamesTM, during their interviews, etc., they say that most multiformat developers working on PS3 and 360 games all agree that the PS3 is slightly more powerful than the 360.

The PS2 was an absolute bitch to program for not helped by Sony's poor development kits (apparently) and the same thing seems true of the PS3. In time though developers will master the hardware and multi-threaded coding will become the norm. You only have to look at the difference between first and last gen games on the PS2 to see how much developers got out of that machine so we're in for some real treats on the PS3 in time I'm sure, especially as the machine has an HDD as standard and a larger capacity disc format which the 360 lacks. Both of those give the PS3 a slight advantage I think, in the same way that the Xbox had the advantage over the PS2 due to its built-in HDD. I think releasing an HDD-less 360 as the lowest common denominator that developers have to cater for will prove a costly mistake for Microsoft...

The issue most developers seem to have is the barrier to overcome before the effort-to-gain ratio becomes acceptable. More powerful or not, Sony need to give priority to getting their devkits up to current industry standards of high level accessibility.

It's just a pity that regardless of the potential power of the PS3's PPU and SPUs, the RSX cannot compete with the 360's graphics card *in any way*, so even using the full CPU power of the PS3 to generate the most amazing and realistic environments the PS3 would still struggle to render it all.

Tonga: Thankfully you're not an engine programmer.

I think the article is kinda silly as the title is along the lines "PS3 not hard to develop for" but then explains why the PS3 is harder to devlop for. To be honest the PS3 has always been more powerful overall than the 360 on paper and things like always having an HDD makes a lot of sense (blu-ray makes sod all difference to programming/power aside from slower read times).

But power is nothing unless you use it and the vast majority of games aren't (as seen by most games being ever so slightly worse than their 360 equivilents). Also there are a couple of serious bottlenecks in the PS3 infrastructure which will take time for developers to work around (the slower readtimes in a blu-ray can be nullified by using the HDD, graphical memory is trickier) but this does make the PS3 harder to develop for which means multiplatform games will stay around the 360 level for the forseable future and PS3 exclusives will look even better with time. But how much time? And will they look £150 (or what ever the price difference will be) better than 360 exclusives?

@Tonga
I'm with disc on this one. F1 is a prime example of SPUs helping out the RSX.

Snotty comment from me, sorry Tonga.

I'm just tired of explaining how CPUs act to offload GPUs in all games... and having the resources to offload in even better ways (and they are quite substantial) coupled with the fact that the GPU can read and write from both the main XDR memory and the GPU memory makes it quite capable to handle all the things the 360 can. The unified shaders and the embedded framebuffer does give the 360 an edge on other things.

Doesn't seem too arrogant to me either. Fair enough he subtly says the PS3 is more powerful than the 360, but he hardly raves about it. If that's his opinion and it may well be fact anyway, surely the guy is allowed to say it without being accused of being a moron?

disc: Why? Would that make the RSX worse than it is? My comments weren't just conjecture, it's fact. I'll admit that the SPUs are powerful enough to make up for it's lack of vertex processing power, and can take the load of the GPU when it comes to things like Skinning and Vertex Deformations; it could even be used to 'simplify' geometry on the fly before it's passed to the RSX; but when it comes to raw pixel processing power, it just cannot compete and the SPUs are no substitute for that, just do the maths.

CPU-wise, I completely agree the potential is definitely there for massive gains with proper use of the SPUs, but not on the GPU.

Tonga: The GPU can read+write from both it's local memory and the main memory at the same time.

I know. At the best that allows balancing the load on the cache's and allows for the vertex processing on the SPUs to be more efficiently accessed from the RSX. It could also be used to read specific textures from main RAM, that have been created by the SPUs, but the RSX still falls down on it's pixel processing power and the SPUs aren't powerful enough for any kind of full screen rasterisation, general rendering.

I do agree with you that they can be very very useful to generate data to be used by the RSX, but this data can't contain more vertices, or use more complicated shaders than it would on the X360. This is really good news for procedurally generating assets, and dynamically changing assets, but not more visually complex assets.

@Tonga
Simple example:
Very complex scene, trying to draw a humongous landscape. One machine has CPU power advantage, the other GPU power advantage. The latter can draw it very lovely. The former can calculate exactly which segments the player is looking at, and so can draw a much smaller area equally lovely.

"the SPUs are no substitute for that, just do the maths"
So yes, they are.

Tonga:

1. SPUs can help with decreasing overdraw, increasing culling, packing vertices, calculating the size polygons take up on the screen and selects correspondingly complex shaders.

If anything this allows more complex scenes than just throwing everything at the GPU and hoping that it will cope.

2. Reading textures from two banks of memory can double the texture throughput. Those 48 pixel shaders active on the 360 wont be up to much good if you cannot feed it with textures...


Can't you see?

It must be, I can't believe it's not.

YAAAAAAAAWN! Yes, yes Sony we know your console is ever so slightly more powerful than your main competitor, and maybe one day you'll actually get around to proving it, because IMO there's still not even anything on the horizon (excluding the benefits of extra Blu-Ray space) for the PS3 that looks like it couldn't run just as well on the 360.

"1. SPUs can help with decreasing overdraw, increasing culling, packing vertices, calculating the size polygons take up on the screen and selects correspondingly complex shaders. "

This is very true. I think in the future a lot of PS3 development will be devoted to utilising the SPUs to efficiently cull and simplify geometry before it hits the RSX. In reality though, certain types of environment are very difficult to efficiently cull. For example lush foliage involves layer upon layer of visible polygons which all have to be drawn and don't provide much in the way of depth coverage for efficient depth culling. Other types on the other hand are much easier, and would be more suited to these techniques for culling.

"2. Reading textures from two banks of memory can double the texture throughput. Those 48 pixel shaders active on the 360 wont be up to much good if you cannot feed it with textures... "

Can *theoretically* double the throughput, although they all have to go through the same cache before use and a lot of texture reading can be hidden by other operations in the shader anyway. It also isn't much use if you're not limited by texture bandwidth, but rather how quickly it can rasterise pixels... Swings and Roundabouts. ;)


I am very interested in the uses for the SPUs though and I do think that in the future when developers get used to them we could start to see some very clever and creative uses. There's a lot of power to use there. :)

'Xbox 360 is a different machine with good, but lower powered hardware'

What is this 'power' measured in? Watts, brake horses, litres? It's all a load of twaddle.

Bring on the games which justify this exotic hardware Sony - let the software do the talking for you...

"This is very true. I think in the future a lot of PS3 development will be devoted to utilising the SPUs to efficiently cull and simplify geometry before it hits the RSX."

Wait.. when did GPUs stop doing this? That is the job of Vertex shaders.

OMG you guys I got tired of reading all about he threads, GPUs and shit... I fel like when I was first intrested and read all about it for the first time when i was a kid and got my first badass VGA card ( back in the days ) lol. you all got some energy in typing about it don't you? :p

The man said it himself... Harder to develop for... To reprogram for.. To go online with... The basic platform to program for is 360... Pay more to even try making the game on a PS3.. What else did he have to say? Finally he had the guts to at least admit some stuff that others couldn't. I give him that and I respect that. First one for a Sony dude. But since he wants programmers to consider them as diferent machines and not just one platform, can he tell me then how happy he feels when he looks at the Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness ? It was the first Tomb Raider I didnt bother playing on the pc cause it was so SO buggy since they first created it for the PS2. They made me hate it so much and I was so anxious to play that game. :/

Seriously? It's Sony's fault Angel of Darkness was buggy on the PC?

It was a load of crap by design, the bugginess saved you. :)

"there is inevitably going to be more cost in supporting those extra features."

Higher dev costs and longer cycles... Just what the small studios are looking for.

It seems to me that the CELL is the EMOTION ENGINE all over again.

thats richt wath they say a consule is for to learn from, ubisoft en take two ar just lazy basterd,s
why we have to take always the port,s of the games this is lazy work with the port,s :P

Ok what did anyone expect him to say?, especially looking at Sony's situation right now, they know people are thinking the PS3 isnt as powerfull as they said it was(because its not) and they dont have many selling points other than Blue-ray right now. They need to get some of that hardcore market back but people can see with their own eyes whos been more honest out of MS and Sony.

All PS3 has going for it is Cell(and even that still has yet to prove itself on any level... physics, sound or otherwise... in a GAME) and blueray, we've known what these consoles can do for a while now on a theoretical level atleast(pretty even overall dissmissing the heavily inflated and pretty meaningless PS3 flops figures and the equally missleading 360 bandwidth figures). Theres no point in listening to anyone but devs who are seeing real results from now on because thats what matters, as for which one is performing best so far... it has to be the 360(so as I predicted 360 is easier to develope for and has the edge in first party developement progress so far, in terms of "tapping into those potentials") . I'm going to stick to my guns and say Cell is going to struggle when they try make it do too much because its not that kind of processor, if they want to really push physics aspects then the rest will have to take back seat(standard AI, lighting ect) its more specialised than Xenon is and more of a parrallel design(in-order) which will add further difficulty balancing the workload. Also remember although Cell is a stronger CPU overall... its hasnt got Xenon beat in every important area either. Lets not forget the memory architecture, frame buffer and pixel bandwidth, GPU and overall efficiency - all of which is in 360s favour, but we dont need to go through all that again do we?