id Says Rage on 360 Runs Faster Than PS3, Brings the Ruckus

[Aura Guardian]

Valve and id software have problems developing for the PS3. Well Sony, what do you have to say?

Get over it and just work?so far, it seems easier said that done I dunno, you'd think people would get used to the PS3's hardware by now, but seeing as how id is primarily a PC developer like VALVe, I can't imagine them becoming masters overnight on their first game (to my knowledge, I'll retract that partially if wrong) on the PS3That sounds reasonable. 360, maybe, that's similar to PC, but even then it's all pretty different.

Besides, RAGE is supposed to be so big that it fills a Blu-ray disk and needs 2 or 3 360 discs, so take that Xbots!Nintendo Fanboy here. So I could care less. Plus, I haven't touched my 360 in about a month and this game looks ok. I know my friend is gonna buy it so I'll try it when he buys it and I'll let you know if it requires 3 disks

{EDIT}Wow, am I off today with spelling

 

[Nutcase]

"The rasteriser is just a little bit slower - no two ways about that...processing wise, the main CPU is about the same, but the 360 makes it easier to split things off, and that's where a lot of the work has been, splitting it all into jobs on the PS3."

Actually, according to id it seems they've already done a large portion of the offloading to SPUs. It is likely that the performance hit is more due to the GPU. They might rewrite some shaders and redo some of the rendering code to work more effectively with the PS3's GPU. They may yet find a more efficient way to distribute the workload on the cell, though who knows.

I think you are right. Many things you would push onto the GPU on the PC, and some things you would push onto the GPU on the 360, you are supposed to do on the Cell on the PS3. I understand the Xenon on the 360 is a more complex, stand-alone part while the RSX' design requires more support from the CPU. RSX probably got rushed due to circumstances, too.

Carmack saying "the main CPU is about the same" sounds weird. Is he comparing the PPU to all of the 360's cores? I don't believe they have all SPUs loaded.

As for the FPS controls, what you said is simply false. There's a reason id Software said they were focusing on bringing out some great controls on the consoles, and that's because they've got all the mouse/keyboard controls to where they like it. The input coding from id Tech3 all the way up to Tech4 didn't change much at all. If anything the input code for Tech5 is not much different.

If the game were a traditional FPS, then sure, KB+M are better than a gamepad. But it's not. ID says it's going to be dominated by vehicles, vehicle combat and heavy weapons. A pad is better at driving for sure, and if the heavy weapons have a limited turn rate, then the pad wins there as well.

 

[ChromeAlchemist]

now why is unclear but in speculation this is exactly what the developers of the "new" generation need a F'ing challenge every developer got so cozy(no idea how to write that)
with the current coding and stuff that they keep releasing the same games with different themes which have practically no innovation at all >.> . i say good on you sony make them work harder so their skills as programmers actually gets better instead of staying the same!

The challenge shouldn't come from the coding. The challenge should come from the task of making a high quality game. The games didn't end up being the same because of the coding being easy, it was because they sell. If you have an artistic vision that you want to fulfil, the last thing you want to be doing is fighting with your tools while you're fighting against the clock.

The worse thing is that Sony did this out of greed an arrogance (which in defence to them, is genius in a sense if it worked, because it means porting an existing PS3 game to another console is impossible without making it again), making the PS3 hard to develop for was a bad idea, and they lost their exclusives partly because of that (as well as companies like Valve), it seems, as well as high development costs.

I'm pretty sure it isn't Sony's fault...

Surely it's just how they've programmed it? If they cant access the PS3's power correctly, their programming skills aren't efficient enough.

Whoooaaah now. You see all those developers out there? They have two gods. One is Shigeru Miyamoto, and the other is John Carmack. He's in a league of his own when it comes to programming.

 

[Travdelosmuertos]

Coming from Carmack, that's quite a surprise. Makes me wonder just how much of a pain in the neck the PS3 is to develop for.

Well, it is supposed to be intentionally difficult to develop for.
But you probably knew that.

Intentionally? What sadist engineer at Sony made that decision? It's more people getting used to the new architecture.

Well the issue is that the PS3 is difficult to program for. Just ask any developer out there, hence why the PS3 lost a bunch of exclusive titles that turned into multi-platform titles. Spec wise the PS3 is absolutely more powerful than a 360, the catch is re-designing your code to take advantage of all that horsepower, with budget issues and deadlines, it makes coding for the thing very difficult.

But heck, Sony wants it that way...

When John Carmack says the power is the same, I believe him. But yes, I agree that there is a huge architectural difference and that's going to make porting difficult. Still, it shouldn't be that bad!

 

[theklng]

given the statements about the ps3's intricate dev kit, i'm not surprised at all.

 

[Jumplion]

Valve and id software have problems developing for the PS3. Well Sony, what do you have to say?

Get over it and just work?so far, it seems easier said that done I dunno, you'd think people would get used to the PS3's hardware by now, but seeing as how id is primarily a PC developer like VALVe, I can't imagine them becoming masters overnight on their first game (to my knowledge, I'll retract that partially if wrong) on the PS3That sounds reasonable. 360, maybe, that's similar to PC, but even then it's all pretty different.

Besides, RAGE is supposed to be so big that it fills a Blu-ray disk and needs 2 or 3 360 discs, so take that Xbots!Nintendo Fanboy here. So I could care less. Plus, I haven't touched my 360 in about a month and this game looks ok. I know my friend is gonna buy it so I'll try it when he buys it and I'll let you know if it requires 3 disks

{EDIT}Wow, am I off today with spelling

Heh, I read "and I'll let you know if it requires 3 dicks" and thought you meant the Co-Op part of it XD Nice save.

 

[Aura Guardian]

Valve and id software have problems developing for the PS3. Well Sony, what do you have to say?

Get over it and just work?so far, it seems easier said that done I dunno, you'd think people would get used to the PS3's hardware by now, but seeing as how id is primarily a PC developer like VALVe, I can't imagine them becoming masters overnight on their first game (to my knowledge, I'll retract that partially if wrong) on the PS3That sounds reasonable. 360, maybe, that's similar to PC, but even then it's all pretty different.

Besides, RAGE is supposed to be so big that it fills a Blu-ray disk and needs 2 or 3 360 discs, so take that Xbots!Nintendo Fanboy here. So I could care less. Plus, I haven't touched my 360 in about a month and this game looks ok. I know my friend is gonna buy it so I'll try it when he buys it and I'll let you know if it requires 3 disks

{EDIT}Wow, am I off today with spelling

Heh, I read "and I'll let you know if it requires 3 dicks" and thought you meant the Co-Op part of it XD Nice save.

Hahahaha. Thanks. But disk! I'll let you know. I'm in tears btw.

 

[sturryz]

Just make it PC exclusive at first then port it over. for petes sake.

 

[SaintWaldo]

Well if anyone can do it, it's John Carmack, right

Indeed. Carmack's no Newell.

 

[Flunk]

They just need to code the worker threads to run on the SPEs, rest assured ID will have it running at 60fps by the time it's released. PS3's graphics system is only slightly slower than the 360s after they do a little reworking it should be nearly as good as the 360 version.

PS, PS3 cell processors have 6 SPEs available to the programmer. Only 1 is disabled and 1 is used by the OS (of the 8).

 

[The Bandit]

Instead of trying to comprehend what sinister death just wrote, I think I'll ask something that could be a stupid question. What is Rage and why should I care?

This.

A thousand times this.

I love you. Run away with me.

 

[AceDiamond]

Actually if I recall, I'm pretty sure Carmack said they're going to somehow get Rage onto one XBox 360 disc because they have to.

 

[SinisterDeath]

With that I can say with confidence, CPU is not such a limit on frame-rate, in fact Carmack explicitly stated that it was the rasteriser (i.e. GPU, he uses the older term because he has been in the business for so long) that was the problem, which is completely separate from The Cell. In fact everyone has been incredibly sidetracked by the hype around The Cell since graphics are mainly rendered in a GPU, not CPU. The entire reason GPUs invented was because CPUs are so inefficient at rendering multi-polygon and large textures i.e. what makes games today look good. Some effects can be effectively offloaded to a CPU but they are still inefficient and need very careful resource management = hard to program.

But you forget, the cell is designed to actually offload some of the processing from the GPU on to the Cell. Thats the way they designed it.
Go play Uncharted, or MGS4, All those cutscenes, Are rendered in REAL TIME. They are able to DO that by putting the processes between the CPU and the GPU. The SPE's are incredibly powerful, They are fast, really really fast. And there are six of them.


The CPU isn't inefficient at rendering multi-polygons, its inefficient because its running the OS, running everything involved with the game, all the physics, particles, AI, ect. Its doing a LOT of stuff at the same time. All the GPU is, is a 2nd Proccessor dedicated to graphics. If you put a 2nd CPU in your pc and dedicated it to graphics it would virtually do the same thing. Nvidia Is, I believe, making there own GPU/CPU that will supposedly replace Intel/AMD.

Also, I know enough about the PS3 to know the PS3 only has FOUR Synergistic Processing Units' (SPU) available rather than 6 as was originally touted. This is because Teh Cells used in PS3s are basically all units that fail Sony's quality control for other commercial use (mainly supercomputers, servers, etc), where one of the 6 cores is faulty so is disabled so only 5 physical cores are active. On top of that the 5th core is ALWAYS reserved for PS3's background operating system, that 5th core is not available to developers now and no sign of it ever being made available in the future.

Actually you got that wrong, the SPU's also called SPE's, and about a dozen other things, there are EIGHT in the Cell, 2 of the SPUs are locked. 1 is locked for the Core System (Aka it runs the OS), the other is locked because it is faulty. Its a cost saving measure. They have 8, 7 are good, 1 is defaulty, what are they going to do with the shitty one? They have to have ONE for the OS, and they can't apparently give devs an 'odd number' of SPU's.

The SPUs are so complex the main Power Processing Element (PPE, actually almost identical to one of the three cores in Xbox 360's Xenon processor, only at a lower clock rate) is almost totally devoted just to managing the 4 + 1 SPUs.

Its main processor I believe is a 2.4ghz Single Core Processor. It might be 3.0, (was 360 3.2?) It isn't devoted to the SPU's, but thats part of its job. THIS IS WHY people who made ports 2 years ago, sucked. THEY PUT EVERYTHING ON THE SINGLE PROCESSOR!

So it is a lot more like 3 vs 4 in terms of sheer CPU power of 360 vs PS3 but bottlenecks like the rasteriser that Carmack has mentioned is a bit like having a 1000 horse power engine in a car yet spindly bicycle tires; if you can't transfer the power to the road then you aren't going to get the speed you expect.

Again, you fail at reading its still 3 vs 8. 7 SPU's, and one main central processor.

Also, Your last analogy fails.
Never heard of the Tweel?
http://www.gizmag.com/go/3603/

/fail!

 

[Booze Zombie]

Get ready for John Carmack to make the PS3 his *****!

 

[SinisterDeath]

I'm suprised though, didn't ID make UT3? Woulda thought they'd have known going from ps3 to 360 = easier then 360 to ps3.

Isn't it just as easy to argue though that the approach you were suggesting is counter intuitive to a programmer like Carmack (and ID) who has worked with Direct X for so long that they find it easier to use? It's kind of like taking a person who has driven a car his whole life and expecting him to ride a motorcycle. He may be passable, but he won't be doing any tricks or taking any hairpin turns on it for a long time.

Not really.
Look at it this way, Making the game is the simple part. If you get it to work well on the ps3, Getting it to work on 360/PC is just going to be easier. Look at all the 'good' multi-plat games. And by Good I mean, they look damn near identicle. GTA4 for example, started on ps3, then was released on all platforms. They were both argueably identicle.
Oblivion? started pc/360. HORRIBLE on ps3.

Consider this Lets say the development cycle for the game to work on One system is Nine Months. If you use one system as the 'base', and work from there, working on the PS3 as the base, and nearly at the same time, using the same assets to work on the 360 environment, it'll probably take an additional month or two.

But if you start with the 360 as the base, you may as well add another 6 months to the time when getting it to be compatible with the ps3. The architecture is so vastly different, its only 'easy' to go one direction, and thats ps3 as the base, out. If it means it'll take 1 year to get the game to work on ps3/360, using ps3 as a base, and 18 months to get it to work on 360/ps3, as 360 as a base. What do you think, as a publisher/designer you'd rather choose?
Time is money! Hell, if you got everything 'working' within that year, thats an additional '6 months' (if thats yoru launch window) to make sure you get all the bugs out.

Rage 'may' be, being worked on parrallel, but that don't mean there isn't a 'base' system. That 'base' is most likey the PC, and PC/360 architecture is very, very similar. (they mostly just have to tweak the graphic settings to work on the 360 at 60fps.)

 

[Straitjacketeering]

Butbutbutbutbutbut The PS3 is shinier!!!

Lolz

Putting my immature douchebaggery aside I heard this game might be the next coming of christ... If it's as good as it seems I hope everyone for all consoles get to play it.

 

[Escapefromwhatever]

id Says Rage on 360 Runs Faster Than PS3, Brings the Ruckus

id Software and John Carmack caused, in their own words, a "ruckus" by revealing that the 360 version of the developer's upcoming FPS Rage runs twice as fast on the 360 as it does on the PS3.

Wow, the 360 version of the game runs half as fast on the PS3 as it does on the 360? I'm amazed it runs at all =P

 

[Sewblon]

Sony said that they wanted the PS3 to be hard to program for, so they win. Rage still sounds too similar to Fallout 3 for me to buy, sorry id.

 

[SomeUnregPunk]

I have been reading about the Cell over at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergistic_Processing_Unit#Power_Processor_Element

and I think I understand why the PS3 is so hard to code for but I do have two questions for all those people here smarter than me...

What is the difference between cores and threads? Is one software and the other hardware?
Does this have something do with why Intel Core series of processors is better than having a quad core processor?

 

[SADASS]

Get ready for John Carmack to make the PS3 his *****!

Oh. My. Gandhi.

Please. Not another Diakatana.

Any way. Nice reference