ZippyDSMlee said:
Meh there is nothing on the PS3 that probably wont run better on the 360. People forget the PS3 is still a pain to code for and that takes up alot of its power still.
Also uncharted is a decent series, better than halo SP wise at least....*hides*.
Thats not true at all.
For example, PS3 has the highest score of any other computer, for a very special type of calculation. I believe they said it accelled at floating point calculations? But vector? Calculations it has to emulate, so it nose dives.
http://gizmodo.com/246664/breaking-ps3-triples-folding-at-homes-computing-power-to-over-500-tflopspflops-in-spitting-range
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats
We balance the points based on both speed and the flexibility of the client. The GPU client is still the fastest, but it is the least flexible and can only run a very, very limited set of WUs. Thus, its points are not linearly proportional to the speed increase. The PS3 takes the middle ground between GPUs (extreme speed, but at limited types of WU's) and CPU's (less speed, but more flexibility in types of WUs). We have picked the PS3 as the natural benchmark machine for PS3 calculations and set its points per day to 900 to reflect this middle ground between speed (faster than CPU, but slower than GPU) and flexibility (more flexible than GPU, less than CPU).
But, just because its a 'pain to code for' (which still isn't true) doesn't mean it uses more power to do the same thing. The differnece between 360 and ps3 coding wise is, the Ps3 Can't just dump all the 'code' on to 3 CPU's and let them decide what to do with it. With the PS3, they can decide which SPE does what, how often it does it, ect. Thats why they are able to put sound on one SPE, Physics on another, leaving the main CPU, and other SPE's to work in conjunction to do the work of the 360's 3 cpu's. (Not to mention each of the SPE's are all sitting at the same clock rate as the main CPU, But while they may not have a huge cache, they are able to move data in and out really fast...
While it may be true in General CPU calculations the Main CPU + The SPE's + the video card can not compare with the total raw power of the 360, the PS3 makes it up in other areas.
The way the 360 works is like that of a pc. (Generally, the systems are virtually identical, the only difference is, every 360 is the same, were as every home pc is different, making 360 easier to develop for)
But theres a cost to this.
The PS3 REQUIRES you to write an efficent program.
The 360 does not.
If you just make a standard pc game, not taking into any consideration of efficency (like single core CPU vs duo core vs quad core. Right now, Quad cores technically are better hten duo core. But no game developers are even trying to develop for quad cores right now. Instead they'd rather put it all onto 2 cores, which means the Quad core is oging to work 2x as hard to do the same thing. Its called optimization and efficency.)
You can effectively just make a program and 'throw it' at the 360s CPUs, it'll decide what to do with it. You don't need to tell it "well, we want graphics here, sound and AI here, and Physics there." No, The way its set up is the CPU basically 'decides' where to throw everything. IT puts all the graphics on the GPU, AI/Sound/Physics on the CPU.
On the PS3, the developer has to tell the PS3 where it wants everything to go. That makes it 'harder' becuase they are used to not making very optimized or efficient programs. They can't afford to. They are used to the PC methodolgy. They can't afford to make the game Optimized for ANY ONE SYSTEM, they have to worry about making it work on a THOUSAND different configurations! Thus why we have general purpose CPUS! They are all meant to run the same way, They may not be efficient or optimized for any one system, but they give you the 'raw' power that'll let the programmers not have to worry about trying to optimize there game for every possible combination of a PC out there.
Could you imagine if you had to make a game that could run on PC's that were as different from each other as 360/ps3/wii?
Sony knows what they are doing, they've been in this buisness alot longer then microsoft has. THey don't know programming but they know Hardware.
Look at the Ps2, or even the Ps1. Ps2 compared to 360 had horrible graphics. But look at the 1st games they came out vs the end of the life span games. Look at the orginal PS1 games vs the end of hte life span ps1 games. The graphics between them is like looking at the PS1 compared to the Dreamcast in terms of just how much better they got. This is simply because of this optimization/efficiency I was speaking of.
As your coding becomes more efficient and opptimized for a console, What starts as taking 'twice as much code' starts getting smaller, as they (the devs) start leaning all these new tricks that let them run the code more efficiently, thus they can start doing more, start pushing further because there code is more efficient for said system.
Fortunately for 360, an optimized game on the Ps3 is far easier (and far better looking) when ported to the 360, then vice versa. From all the press releases from developers of games, they all have one thing in common. Porting from Ps3 to 360 is far easier then vice versa.
Trying to re-code a game where you jsut 'throw it at' the cpu and it does what it does, into being sent to a different cpu, 6 spe's, a gpu, and hoping it works is asking for trouble.
But since the games already coded with multi-core support.... (And they already have stuff assigned to just one CPU, which is slower than the 360s 3 cores) its just a few steps of combining and splitting those processes from working on 6 spes to working on a 3 core cpu.
Some Image refrences of resitance vs uncharted.
http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/action/insomniacshooter/images/0/20/
http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/action/uncharteddrakesfortune/images/0/10/
Before I forget.
Ps3
256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz Main Memory CPU
256MB GDDR3 VRAM @700MHz GPU
360
512 MB GDDR3 RAM @ 700 MHz DDR (SHARED)
It may only be able to move 256MB of memory on the XDR max at a time, its able to move it roughly 4 times faster than the 360s memory.
http://www.n4g.com/tech/News-41514.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)#Synergistic_Processing_Elements_.28SPE.29
http://www.itvidya.com/playstation_3_vs_xbox_360
