Well, in reality there were 2 people cheering when Kaz shouted it the second time. But those cheers didn't last long.OuroborosChoked said:
Sony claims PS3 was made deliberately difficult to program for.
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Think of it like this:SinisterDeath said:It makes sense if you understand the ps3.
In most comparison tests, the ps3 and 360 are equal.
The Cell Processor however, CAN be more powerful, like, 10x more powerful than the 360's cpu & GPU, if used CORRECTLY.
And that 'correctness' mostly has to do, with programming games, around the cell. They could have made it 'easy', so to speak, but that would make the 'total power' that the developers working on, less. Making it 'harder', will allow them to do 'more'...
Kinda think of it like this.
Its easy to carry a brick of gold up hill. But the reward is significantly greater, if you can carry several bricks of gold up hill.
Now, what Sony COULD have done, if its as 'deliberate' as the OP made it sound. They could have released 'advanced' tools for the 'advanced' games, and 'easy' tools, for the 'easy' games.
The cell processor accepts binary instructions transferred on the electronic level. These binary instructions are generated from a program called a compiler. This compiler has the job of converting a "High Level Language", such as C/C++/Ada/Java/etc, into the binary instructions.
Add to that, developers normally provide standard libraries to go with the platform in the case of consoles. These libraries typically handle simple but frequently used tasks - for example, screen rendering, transferring data to the graphical processors, transferring texture data to the graphical memory, etc, etc.
Now, assuming that the OP is primarially refering to the libraries, that is easy to get so that the developers can have an easy time coding for it, and for the end product to be of equal quality.
If they where refering to the archeitecture of the processor, which affects the way you code in the high level language, a few tools would have made it easier to code for the platform.
In essence, imagine you have 2 carts loaded with gold. One is the PS3, and has alot of gold in there. The other represents the XBox, Wii, and to some extent, PCs. This cart has alot less gold. The PS3 cart is being pulled by a baby calf, awhile the other is being pulled by a donkey. Whilst, technically, the PS3 cart is richer, you and the calf will starve to death before you can get your riches somewhere were gold is more than a shiny heavy metal. The other cart will happily ride off into the sunset.
If Sony had provided a donkey or horse, the situation would be totally different. As is, they seem to have considered removing one of the calf's legs so that it would take even longer to get up the hill.
I think other consoles should be embarassed that they didn't get that much further away from a last-gen console like the PS2, which is still pretty damn good in this day and age.bad rider said:Credit where credit is due, he has a point. If you make things difficult to program for your options get larger and more varied, whereas simple programming = simple options. That said I think Sony tends toward the extreme instead of going for the middle ground. But hey, they wanted to build a big powerful behemoth and thats what they are built.
Pretty much sums it up.
Still, I kind of understand where the guy's coming from. The fact that it's hard to program for means the real experts will make games for lnoger, to squeeze more potential from it. Risky, but then the PS3 has been risky from the get-go.
No.SinisterDeath said:It makes sense if you understand the ps3.
In most comparison tests, the ps3 and 360 are equal.
The Cell Processor however, CAN be more powerful, like, 10x more powerful than the 360's cpu & GPU, if used CORRECTLY.
And that 'correctness' mostly has to do, with programming games, around the cell. They could have made it 'easy', so to speak, but that would make the 'total power' that the developers working on, less. Making it 'harder', will allow them to do 'more'...
Kinda think of it like this.
Its easy to carry a brick of gold up hill. But the reward is significantly greater, if you can carry several bricks of gold up hill.
Now, what Sony COULD have done, if its as 'deliberate' as the OP made it sound. They could have released 'advanced' tools for the 'advanced' games, and 'easy' tools, for the 'easy' games.
GPU
"The 360 GPU is more powerful. It has more powerful fillrate, and far more pixel and vertex processing horsepower. Part of the reason is their choice of memory, and architecture of pixel and vertex procesing. I can't get into details but the same vertex shader will run much slower on the PS3 than the XBOX 360. The 360 also has a clever new way rendering high definition anti aliased back buffers. To accomplish the same effect on PS3 is prohibitively expensive. For this reason I think many games will have no choice but to run in non-HD resolutions on the PS3 version, use a lower quality anti aliasing technique, or do back buffer upscaling. The end result in all cases is going to be noticeably worse image quality."
---------------
CPU
"Theoretically, the Xenon can achieve a maximum performance of 116 gigaflops, while the Cell, in combination of the PPE and the 8 SPEs can achieve a maximum of 205 Gigaflops. But in reality, these numbers are never reached, due to inefficiencies in the architecture. But the question here is, which CPU gets closer to its maximum theoretical performance? For this, we have to identify where in the architecture potential bottlenecks can occur.
In the Xenon, each core is independent of the other, meaning what goes on in one core does not affect the other. In the Cell, the SPEs are dependent on the PPE for tasks to be issued to them. This may not be a problem normally, but if the PPE is under significant computational load, that can affect how it handles the SPEs, thus the SPEs may end up waiting for an overworked PPE to deliver them tasks. Additionally, the Cell only supports two hardware threads, raising the possibility that not enough tasks can be put on two threads to keep the SPEs busy, in some situations. The Xenon supports 6 hardware threads (2 per core), allowing to be more effective at multitasking. Thus, the cores can be kept busy more of the time.
Another issue is the element interconnect bus (EIB) on the Cell. Originally, IBM had wanted to use a crossbar to connect all the cores, but the number of transistors would have become prohibitively high. So to save die space, IBM went with a ring bus-type interconnect. This has lower bandwidth and higher latency than a crossbar, which can induce delays within the CPU, especially during periods of peak data transfer. The cores on the Xenon communicate over a crossbar and through the shared L2 cache, much like how cores communicate on Intel's Core 2 Duo architecture.
The SPEs in the Cell are also limited in what types of instructions they can execute. For any instruction that cant be handled by the SPEs, they must be handled by the PPE. This limits the Cell's capability in some instances. It also puts more load on the PPE and again can overload the PPE, leaving the SPEs waiting for tasks to be issued. The Xenon has 3 cores that can handle any type of task given to them. While not as powerful as the Cell, it is more flexible.
Yet another issue brought up is the Cell's on die memory controller. It has been claimed that this gives it an advantage over the Xenon, as had been said about AMD's CPUs compared to Intel's. However, with the advent of the Core 2 Duo, the memory controller claims were debunked, the location of it has a negligible impact on performance, whether on die or not. It should be noted that the Cell uses a serial bus to connect to the memory. The XDR RAM used is designed by Rambus and is based on RDRAM. For anyone who remembers RDRAM, it had more bandwidth than the parallel DDR modules used at the time, but the latency was very high. So high in fact that it negated any speed advantage it had over DDR, and was eventually phased out. While XDR is improved, it still has higher latencies than the GDDR3 memory used on the 360.
Also, it should be brought up that you don't have all 8 SPEs in the Cell available for gaming. One is disabled for yield improvement, one is reserved exclusively for the operating system, even if not being used. Another can be taken by the operating system if needed. This only leaves 5 SPEs available to the game at any given time. It should also be noted that the SPEs lack branch prediction. One of the claims made is that the Cell is far better for AI and physics. While this is true for physics calculations, AI code is extremely branch intensive and is filled with conditional statements. Thus, the Cell's performance suffers when it comes to AI, as only the PPE features branch prediction. The Xenon is better suited for AI in this case, as all three of its cores include branch prediction.
Despite its shortcomings, the Cell is still an incredibly powerful processor. However, the Xenon is not too far behind. And the fact that the R500 features a programmable tessalator may even negate any speed advantage that the Cell has - when it comes to gaming anyways."
/thread.
SuperFriendBFG said:
Breakdown on development:
PS3:
A full course meal with all culture foods full of flavours and intresting smells
but it's from a 5 star chef meaning you gotta dig into the wallet to afford this perfect meal but in the end after you eaten it and digested and taken that oh so releiving crap
you think to yourself on how hard it was to eat all that but so satified with what came out at the end.
360:
like a sandwhich it's easier to make ,it can go against many strong restruants and it always leaves you satified but sometimes it just frustrates you by knowing the fact that it can get rotton or it won't always last long but in the end after eating it you feel cool for knowing you made that and it was good.
Wii:
it's a happy meal so you have to flip a coin on whether you did it right or not
(That was a breakdown on development NOT the actual console rundown)
Ahem.. killing the mascot isn't the same as bringing out sequels. Sequels are fine and aslong as you don't overexpose the cherished figures (like shows, books or bad spin off games) then you aren't killing anyone or even loosing credibility.Don said:
I'm really sad to have seen the Jak and Daxter series get stale, but apart from that they have done a lot better job at keeping the IPs under control
I'm reading it now, and I have to say, I'm shocked at this. Not that its hard to develop for, per say, but because of his crippling bad explaination of the reason.stinkychops said:
Quote:
""We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that (developers) want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is, what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?" explained Hirai.
Huh? But his explanation didn't end there.
"So it's a kind of--I wouldn't say a double-edged sword--but it's hard to program for," Hirai continued, "and a lot of people see the negatives of it, but if you flip that around, it means the hardware has a lot more to offer.""
Let me repeat: "because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do"
Yes, thats right. There is NO, repeat, NO advantage to making the hardware difficult to program for than "It'll make newer games seem better because earlier attempts will be crippled by bad coding as developers at that time had no experience with the PS3"
EDIT:
What they are saying is they made it so you had to wait longer for God of War 3, Killzone 2, and any other good PS3 games, and with a greater risk of bugs and failures. Because it would made the console seem to be up-to-date for longer. Not because it'd make the hardware better.Mazty said:
Exactly! Jesus, as if making games wasn't hard and risky enough for developers, Sony seem to want to thin the pack even more.stinkychops said:
"You may only cook in our kitchen if you are a master chief. Even then, we will add random spikes to the room and utilities so that if you fail to be masterful enough, you will die. And from this, we shall make the worlds best Restaurant! Muhahahaha...hey, where'd everyone go?"
I can see the twisted, horrifyingly abstract logic at work here, and it reminds me of the crappy logic in labour unions and the car industry in general in the UK in the 1980's. To put that into context, no UK car company exists now, or they are a branch of a foreign company.
Ye but the Pc has been doing that for years and its not exactly hard to program for, depending on what your using.Indigo_Dingo said:
Oh my god a chart!!! It must be true!!!bad rider said:Credit where credit is due, he has a point. If you make things difficult to program for your options get larger and more varied, whereas simple programming = simple options. That said I think Sony tends toward the extreme instead of going for the middle ground. But hey, they wanted to build a big powerful behemoth and thats what they are built.
Pretty much sums it up.