Why does 360 look (and run) better than PS3? (multi platform games)

[Aries_Split]

Apparently the Sony consoles are notoriously hard to program for

Someone hasn't read the thread...

They are more difficult to learn yes, but not hard to program for.


Those that learn it, are exceptional at it.

 

[Woe Is You]

My point still stands though, developers had complained that the PS1/PS2 were hard to work with but in the end they got used to it and stopped complaining.

You pretty much missed the two points I tried to make. The first being the fact that the PS1 wasn't that hard to work for (compared to other consoles, at least). I'll be clear: that developers were complaining that it was hard to work for is the first time I've heard of this.

The second part was that while the PS2 was hard to program for, it afforded to be like that. When its main competitors were out, the developers were well on their way with their second or even third generation games for the PS2 and there was a ton of games for the system. Microsoft was a newcomer and Nintendo was under Yamauchi's iron fist (who was sort of notorious for his anal politics); both were late in the game and behind the curve. Not terribly good prospects there.

The PS3 is the underdog in this gen. There's much less of an incentive to learn its quirks and changing programming methods to accommodate for it.

Those that learn it, are exceptional at it.

...aaaand here is a comment that makes no sense whatsoever. A simple exercise in logic should be enough to figure out why.

 

[Aries_Split]

Those that learn it, are exceptional at it.

...aaaand here is a comment that makes no sense whatsoever. A simple exercise in logic should be enough to figure out why.

ARGH, That totally came out wrong. I'm sure you got the gist of it though?

 

[Cyclomega]

I think we pretty much rounded up the question of why multiplatform games are a bit less pretty on a PS3, right
*desperately trying to look like he still cares to justify what follows*

Spoiler: useless memes-related rant

Uncyclopedia ? *facepalms*
And that kitten pic existed long before ICHC ruined Caturday making it LOLcats...
Learn2series of tubes, and leave 4chan alone at least once, anti-chan stance is as annoying as pro-chan, is it really useful to bash the chans every day ?
Seems to me like some believe it's cool to hate the chans to justify their own edgy stances, one question, what for ? Now don't get me wrong, both the chans *and* their opponents are edgy to me. And I am too.
The more you obsess with decrying the chans, the more they show up.

 

[Zer_]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5PsL89oTtE

Ignore the sales and all that crap, that's the usual crap that 360 fanboys put on the table.

To be honest, I actually searched for any "Why the 360 sucks" videos but they were all just a bunch of pictures showing us the RROD and useless crap like that. Yes the 360 had a high failure rate, such is not the case anymore and RROD doesn't happen nearly as often anymore.

In my early years as a QA tester I'd find that there were quite a few 360 failures, but after a while (when we'd get new consoles) they would happen a lot less. And in the time before I quit there were actually more PS3 failures then 360 failures. The only good things about the PS3 is that I was able to put a box of Tim Bits on it in the morning and expect them to be warm and delicious by break time. Oh yeah and you can install Linus on the PS3 and play Quake III, but why do that when I can do it on my PC anyways? I actually caused a PS3 to fail while testing TFU. I turn it off and waited 30 minutes, it didn't work anymore.

 

[Cyclomega]

No... I won't answer, to me your analysis is wrong (and Dave Chappelle's jokes are mostly niggers jokes, except when a black dude makes ****** jokes it's all fun and cool, even though I laughed at his Lil'Jon skits, it's 12yo-level half-racist humor, nothing better than /b/, in fact, exactly the same, but paid and syndicated on Comedy Central), and I'm bored arguing on that...

http://lurkmore.com/wiki

EoD

 

[Tyranicus]

Cause 360 is build by Microsoft. Microsoft is not some evil corporation they do in fact make some damn fine products. Look at everything from XP and back.

 

[Cyclomega]

I see what you did there...

 

[blarggles]

The PS3 isn't more powerful that is just marketing Hype. Learn a bit about the hardware and software tools and you realise neither is faster they are both fairly even in capabilities.

They just have different architecture so porting titles from the 360 to the PS3 causes issues. Porting the other way is generally much easier. Which is why you find a lot of companies now leading on the PS3 when creating multi platform games.

Just down to the way memory is managed and the tools at their disposal.

This is bullshit. You obviously know nothing.

I was going to tell you why you were wrong, but sense your so arrogant as to tell someone ELSE to go look at the hardware that I won't even bother.

As to the topic at hand, The 360's programming language XNA, is extremely similar to the PC's. The PS3's architecture isn't hard to use, it's just foreign. Most developers develop on the 360 and port to the PC, or the other way around, and do a quick and dirty port to the PS3, not really optimizing the code nor taking advantage of the hardware.

That's why when a developer takes the time and really works hard on PS3 exclusives, they far out class most of the 360's games.

I am arrogant. Pot, Kettle, Black.

I did go into further detail later on that everyone could understand about why the systems are roughly similar in performance. Lets be honest now. The RSX GPU in the PS3 is virtually a Generation behind that in the 360. And the CPU in the PS3 while amazing at Floating Point Arithmetic doesn't really help hugely in a games environment which is more general.

Add in the other points I said about how the PS3 cores are utilized. And the Memory footprint of the PS3 OS being much bigger than the one used in the 360. PS3 last count I am aware of was 84mb. Likely to be slightly lower now though. However the 360 uses only 32mb for it's OS. Meaning more memory available for software. Which is back onto the unified memory thing and why porting games is difficult but less so the other way around. Oh the SPE's on the Cell also require memory from system ram as they use it for cache. And each is capable of utilizing a further 2mb if I remember correctly. So yeah less memory available still forgot about that.

The CPU thing is actually not too bad. Both systems are multi threaded with the 360 capable of handling 6 threads. PS3 slightly more.

Seriously before you start calling me arrogant. At least read my other posts that I tried to put across so everyone could understand them. I also just wanted to give a general simple answer to say that neither system is better. Just different. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. But in the grand scheme of things they are quite evenly matched when it comes to general gaming hardware capabilities. In other areas the PS3 absolutely flies ahead of the 360 but that isn't in gaming which is the point of this topic.

 

[Syphonz]

Err, Dave Chappelle is a genius when it comes to comedy.

Yah, how did Dave Chappelle get dragged into a console arguement?

 

[Parsley]

Um... question.

Who cares?

Seriously... we're talking about MINOR differences in graphics and load times being measured in the SECONDS or less. I remember when Oblivion came out and people were comparing screen shots for that... and even with both side by side... people still couldn't decide which was better looking. I think that should've ended this line of discussion right there.

We're not talking NES vs. SNES here. The level of differences is so minute and wavering (sometimes better on one, sometimes better on the other) at this point that bickering over which is better is a waste of time. Games are games. Play the system that has what you want and end the fanboy bullcrap.

End of topic.

This is one of the best points made in this discussion. Who cares which is better as long as they have fun whilst playing it.

 

[D_987]

It runs better because most PS3 games are developed for the 360 then ported.

But oh well, the 360 has Fable 2 and Gears of War so

(quote of someone earlier )

 

[Nifty]

Could be that maybe ATI had the edge over nVidia when they developed the graphics chips for their respective consoles.

 

[Jumplion]

My point still stands though, developers had complained that the PS1/PS2 were hard to work with but in the end they got used to it and stopped complaining.

You pretty much missed the two points I tried to make. The first being the fact that the PS1 wasn't that hard to work for (compared to other consoles, at least). I'll be clear: that developers were complaining that it was hard to work for is the first time I've heard of this.

The second part was that while the PS2 was hard to program for, it afforded to be like that. When its main competitors were out, the developers were well on their way with their second or even third generation games for the PS2 and there was a ton of games for the system. Microsoft was a newcomer and Nintendo was under Yamauchi's iron fist (who was sort of notorious for his anal politics); both were late in the game and behind the curve. Not terribly good prospects there.

The PS3 is the underdog in this gen. There's much less of an incentive to learn its quirks and changing programming methods to accommodate for it.

Sorry, but I thought you/we were talking about how the Saturn failed because the developers couldn't get the hang of the hardware? If that's not the case, then I apologise, but either way the Saturn failed mostly from SEGA's poor marketing along with developers not being able to use it properly.

PS1 and PS2 were admitedly short for any competition, which allowed developers to get used to the hardware. back then there was really only 1 or maybe a second succesful console. It's the same thing here, with the 360 being this generation's PS2. But what i'm saying is that with every generation of the Playstation brand, the developers have always complained about it's structure. It doesn't matter if they had all the time in the world to get used to it (PS2) the point being is that they still had to get used to it.

I don't remember developers complaining about how to work with the Xbox because it was very similar to a PCs structure, and I don't know how the Gamecube was recieved, but the developers still complained about how hard it was to work with the PS systems and will continue to do so with the PS3.

 

[Galletea]

Cause 360 is build by Microsoft. Microsoft is not some evil corporation they do in fact make some damn fine products. Look at everything from XP and back.

Yeah right, coz vista is reeaally good. not
and their stuff never breaks down....more than 20 times a year

 

[Aries_Split]

The PS3 isn't more powerful that is just marketing Hype. Learn a bit about the hardware and software tools and you realise neither is faster they are both fairly even in capabilities.

They just have different architecture so porting titles from the 360 to the PS3 causes issues. Porting the other way is generally much easier. Which is why you find a lot of companies now leading on the PS3 when creating multi platform games.

Just down to the way memory is managed and the tools at their disposal.

This is bullshit. You obviously know nothing.

I was going to tell you why you were wrong, but sense your so arrogant as to tell someone ELSE to go look at the hardware that I won't even bother.

As to the topic at hand, The 360's programming language XNA, is extremely similar to the PC's. The PS3's architecture isn't hard to use, it's just foreign. Most developers develop on the 360 and port to the PC, or the other way around, and do a quick and dirty port to the PS3, not really optimizing the code nor taking advantage of the hardware.

That's why when a developer takes the time and really works hard on PS3 exclusives, they far out class most of the 360's games.

I am arrogant. Pot, Kettle, Black.

I did go into further detail later on that everyone could understand about why the systems are roughly similar in performance. Lets be honest now. The RSX GPU in the PS3 is virtually a Generation behind that in the 360. And the CPU in the PS3 while amazing at Floating Point Arithmetic doesn't really help hugely in a games environment which is more general.

Add in the other points I said about how the PS3 cores are utilized. And the Memory footprint of the PS3 OS being much bigger than the one used in the 360. PS3 last count I am aware of was 84mb. Likely to be slightly lower now though. However the 360 uses only 32mb for it's OS. Meaning more memory available for software. Which is back onto the unified memory thing and why porting games is difficult but less so the other way around. Oh the SPE's on the Cell also require memory from system ram as they use it for cache. And each is capable of utilizing a further 2mb if I remember correctly. So yeah less memory available still forgot about that.

The CPU thing is actually not too bad. Both systems are multi threaded with the 360 capable of handling 6 threads. PS3 slightly more.

Seriously before you start calling me arrogant. At least read my other posts that I tried to put across so everyone could understand them. I also just wanted to give a general simple answer to say that neither system is better. Just different. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. But in the grand scheme of things they are quite evenly matched when it comes to general gaming hardware capabilities. In other areas the PS3 absolutely flies ahead of the 360 but that isn't in gaming which is the point of this topic.

Sigh...

Spoiler: LONG POST

SX shares a lot of inner workings with NVIDIA 7800 which is based on G70 architecture. Since the G70 is capable of carrying out 136 shader operations per clock cycle, the RSX was expected to feature the same number of parallel pixel and vertex shader pipelines as the G70, which contains 24 pixel and 8 vertex pipelines.
550 MHz on 90 nm process
300+ million transistors

337 million transistors in total
500 MHz 10 MiB daughter embedded DRAM (eDRAM) framebuffer on 65 nm process.
105 million transistors
500 MHz parent GPU on 65 nm TSMC process of total 232 million transistors

So as you can see, the PS3's GPU is clearly more powerful. 550 MHZ is 50 more than the 360, it has about twice as many transistors. Just because something isn't current generation, doesn't mean it's not as powerful.

Your right in the CPU department, but the PS3 wins the in the GPU.

 

[Galletea]

And you'd expect the ps3 to be behind gen wise considering the mods microsoft have made to the darn thing, its like the 360 no.6 now or something