Am. Football games 2008 PS3/X360

[morlock]

This is an apple to oranges comparison. There is a *huge* difference between an indoor game vs an outdoor game with regards to how much rendering power is needed. Making an indoor sports game run at 60fps is cake compared to an outdoor arena title. Aside from some obvious elements like needing far more geometry for things crowd, city scapes, large arenas, etc, the lighting is also far more involved. You also have to deal with weather, sky, and on and on.

I was thinking the opposite, soccer vs basketball. Soccergames uses top-down camera with small characters on screen 'cos of large playingfield and thus smaller characters with less detail needed. Also the crowd should should'nt need as much detail. Regarding the ligting i don't see the difference, an indoor arena are very heavily lit also.

But I'm no dev so I this is just my take on it.

Here are an interview with Erich Waas on NBA 08 for the PS3 wich is running at 1080p@60fps. Very heave PR dude thou...

3. What did you do on this game that you couldn’t do on another platform?
Thanks to the PS3’s cell processor, NBA 08 runs in Full HD — 1080p and 60fps. Not up-scaled to 1080p. Not a choice to run at 1080p OR 60fps. True Full HD. At the same time, we have detailed sweat that you can see rolling down players’ faces, head and eye tracking and facial animation for all 10 players at once. Additionally, thanks to the cell processor, we simulate cloth not just for the 10 players on the court but the bench players for each team as well. We also have such a variety in our arena crowds that you’ll only see 2 in every 2048 crowd members with the same model, wearing the same clothes and doing the same animation. And we do this from our “Behind the Player” cam which is more demanding on performance (because more is being drawn) than the sideline or broadcast cam you will see in other basketball games. There is also a lot of new ball physics that has been added to NBA 08 as well as a total of 2,000 unique animations within the game and 4 times the amount of AI routines for greatly improved variety of gameplay. With art assets created with native 1080p in mind as well as audio, we also have more data than can be stored on a dual layer DVD.

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2007/06/27/inside-the-developers-studio-erich-waas/

 

[Cheezdoodles]

I was thinking the opposite, soccer vs basketball. Soccergames uses top-down camera with small characters on screen 'cos of large playingfield and thus smaller characters with less detail needed. Also the crowd should should'nt need as much detail. Regarding the ligting i don't see the difference, an indoor arena are very heavily lit also.

I know several people who use different camera angles than top-down in soccergames. And besides, your going to get zoomed in whenever there is a corner\freekick\penalty etc.

Size of the characters btw, has little to do with the performance, just the level of detail and how many characters there is. In soccer we got 22 players on the field, vs what? 10 in basketball?

That right there should make life harder for soccergames.

 

[morlock]

You are probably right. But I can't see a big difference.

NBA Live 06 PS2

FIFA Soccer 06 PS2

 

[joker454]

I was thinking the opposite, soccer vs basketball.

Ah ok. I was thinking more of NFL or MLB, both of which have broadcast cameras that love to show half the darned stadium at once sometimes, which is quite the render load. Especially in MLB, since the ball often gets hit into the stands and the camera will follow it there.

Here are an interview with Erich Waas on NBA 08 for the PS3 wich is running at 1080p@60fps. Very heave PR dude thou...

Yup, heavy pr I have no clue what cell has to do with running at 1080p. Going from 720p to 1080p makes no difference on 'cpu' processing load unless they happen to be doing some post processing effects on the cpu. What typically changes is more system bandwidth gets used, and the pixel shaders get run way more often.

In any case, I believe you'd be better off running at 720p with better/more complicated pixel shaders than at 1080p with simpler shaders. The typical consumer is more likely to see an improvement from better shaders than they are from the 720p to 1080p jump, given that most people have tv's <= 50" in size. When we all have > 50" tv's then I'll change my tune on that

Most of the other stuff is no big deal to do on 360, but I can see why a PS3 only dev may think some are significant. For example, his talk of 2048 unique crowd. On PS3 you would do the skinning on the spu's, which depending on your crowd models could be a staggering amount of math. So I could see how he would think that only Cell would allow this compared to the competition. Of course it's moot because on the 360 you would just let the gpu do the skinning, so zero cpu time is needed. Likewise, updating the animations themselves isn't a huge deal either since crowd skeletons tend to be small, with ~18 or so bones.

He is probably right on the cloth simulation though. If they are running a full cloth sim on all the players, and everyone on the bench then that is pretty impressive. I don't think you'd have enough cpu to do that on the 360.

 

[Cheezdoodles]

He is probably right on the cloth simulation though. If they are running a full cloth sim on all the players, and everyone on the bench then that is pretty impressive. I don't think you'd have enough cpu to do that on the 360.

Depends on how accurate you want the cloth simulation to be

 

[pipo]

Thanks for your info joker!

 

[betan]

Yup, heavy pr

Well it is their offical PR blog, after all.

I have no clue what cell has to do with running at 1080p. Going from 720p to 1080p makes no difference on 'cpu' processing load unless they happen to be doing some post processing effects on the cpu. What typically changes is more system bandwidth gets used, and the pixel shaders get run way more often.

Again "Thanks to CELL" is their trademarked PR phrase, but isn't it possible that higher resolution also necessitates higher poly count where CPU can help, especially if RSX sucks more at vertex shading than pixel shading?

In any case, I believe you'd be better off running at 720p with better/more complicated pixel shaders than at 1080p with simpler shaders. The typical consumer is more likely to see an improvement from better shaders than they are from the 720p to 1080p jump, given that most people have tv's <= 50" in size. When we all have > 50" tv's then I'll change my tune on that

I agree and prefer 720p (even 480p sometimes), but if PS3 has any advantages on 1080p it may be wise to advertise their title as true HD. Typical consumer is more likely to notice the True HD logo than any visual differences. Also I believe other basketball titles started to go for native 1080p.

Most of the other stuff is no big deal to do on 360, but I can see why a PS3 only dev may think some are significant. For example, his talk of 2048 unique crowd. On PS3 you would do the skinning on the spu's, which depending on your crowd models could be a staggering amount of math. So I could see how he would think that only Cell would allow this compared to the competition. Of course it's moot because on the 360 you would just let the gpu do the skinning, so zero cpu time is needed. Likewise, updating the animations themselves isn't a huge deal either since crowd skeletons tend to be small, with ~18 or so bones.

I am sorry but game crowds tend to suck in almost every aspect including animation. I would welcome more complex crowd animation (as well as geometry, skinning etc).

 

[Darkon]

What is your team using those 6 spe's for ? joker

 

[one]

I think Sony got the message though and they are significantly more helpful today with things like Edge, GCMHud/Replay, Spurs, PS3Devcon, etc...

My assumption is that the delivery for these tools (especially Edge) were too late for games to be released in 2007 Q2/Q3.

 

[almighty]

I have no clue what cell has to do with running at 1080p.

Would'nt Cell be used more because RSX would require ALOT more rendering information for 1080p as oposed to 720p? Thus Cell due to its huge though put would not bottleneck RSX at 1080p resolutions were as other CPUs would? Im no expert im just babbleing.

Also joker you mensioned that your game is using all 6 SPE's now, would be able to go into anymore detail about that? Like what each SPE is doing? How much of an improvment utiliseing the SPE's made to the game and its performance?

My assumption is that the delivery for these tools (especially Edge) were too late for games to be released in 2007 Q2/Q3.

I also agree one, IMO those games were to far along in the development process to able to take advanage of EDGE and any other help from Sony.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Would'nt Cell be used more because RSX would require ALOT more rendering information for 1080p as oposed to 720p?

Generally speaking, no. The GPU needs polygons. If you you send it the same models regardless of rendering resolution, the CPU has to do the same amount of work to process those models prior to sending (such as animation). Going to 1080p, you're doubling the shader and fillrate workloads on the GPU side of things, which the CPU isn't involved in. I guess if you're doing some pre-rendering tests on CPU, some of those would increase in workload.

 

[joker454]

Well it is their offical PR blog, after all.

True. I can't really blame them though, they need to start pushing Cell and Bluray hard, thats there big advantages over 360.

I am sorry but game crowds tend to suck in almost every aspect including animation. I would welcome more complex crowd animation (as well as geometry, skinning etc).

Ya they do, but we're working on it It's much harder to have better crowd in NFL/MLB compared to a small NBA indoor arena though, especially when you can have 55,000+ attendance and a game camera that loves to focus on all of them!

 

[joker454]

What is your team using those 6 spe's for ? joker

Hooboy, all kinds of stuff. I can't paint out our exact roadmap, but we're now doing gpu helping tasks like backface culling and skinning (big gains from these), as well as ppu helping tasks like visibility calculations, lod calculations, animations, etc. I'm currently moving the particle system over.

When you port a 360 game over to PS3, you can initially end up in the odd situation where you are cpu bound, since your packing code that used to run on 3 cores onto 1. I say it's odd because the idea of being cpu bound on the PS3 is kinda ludicrous/embarrassing Thats a thing of the past now though, our PS3 ppu has plenty of breathing room thanks to the spu's.

Also joker you mensioned that your game is using all 6 SPE's now, would be able to go into anymore detail about that? Like what each SPE is doing? How much of an improvment utiliseing the SPE's made to the game and its performance?

We're using spurs, so each spu is not assigned a fixed task. We basically have this bank of 6 uber processors and we just keep hurling tasks at it. Amusingly enough, the spus keep belching out the data we need right when we need it. They are quite the marvel I must say! I'm very happy with them, and thanks to spurs its not that hard to use them really. The gpu related helper tasks are a bit more involved, but moving ppu logic to spu's is actually pretty darned easy once you've rearranged your data.

Ironically, this rearrangement of data has actually resulted in a small cpu performance gain even on the 360 build, presumably due to better use of cache. So it's been an all around win-win situation for us. In the end I can't say enough about Cell, I'm extremely happy with it.

Performance wise, our last years PS3 title was around 20-30fps, whereas currently we hit 30+fps easily. Hitting 60 will be quite the challenge though.

 

[joker454]

My assumption is that the delivery for these tools (especially Edge) were too late for games to be released in 2007 Q2/Q3.

Ya, too late for Q2. I'd think some of it may be useful for Q3 though. For example, GCMReplay could be useful to catch a bottleneck during performance tuning near the end. It may be enough time to use spurs as well. Moving just one performance heavy task away from the ppu could be a gain. It would not be enough time for the gpu helping tasks like culling though.

 

[patsu]

Hooboy, all kinds of stuff. I can't paint out our exact roadmap, but we're now doing gpu helping tasks like backface culling and skinning (big gains from these), as well as ppu helping tasks like visibility calculations, lod calculations, animations, etc. I'm currently moving the particle system over.

When you port a 360 game over to PS3, you can initially end up in the odd situation where you are cpu bound, since your packing code that used to run on 3 cores onto 1. I say it's odd because the idea of being cpu bound on the PS3 is kinda ludicrous/embarrassing Thats a thing of the past now though, our PS3 ppu has plenty of breathing room thanks to the spu's.



We're using spurs, so each spu is not assigned a fixed task. We basically have this bank of 6 uber processors and we just keep hurling tasks at it. Amusingly enough, the spus keep belching out the data we need right when we need it. They are quite the marvel I must say! I'm very happy with them, and thanks to spurs its not that hard to use them really. The gpu related helper tasks are a bit more involved, but moving ppu logic to spu's is actually pretty darned easy once you've rearranged your data.

Ironically, this rearrangement of data has actually resulted in a small cpu performance gain even on the 360 build, presumably due to better use of cache. So it's been an all around win-win situation for us. In the end I can't say enough about Cell, I'm extremely happy with it.

Performance wise, our last years PS3 title was around 20-30fps, whereas currently we hit 30+fps easily. Hitting 60 will be quite the challenge though.

Cool ! I am very happy that you guys are finally picking up steam on Cell. I look forward to your titles next year then.

It would be great if Insomniac, Factor 5, Naughty Dog and Ninja Theory could share more in upcoming devcons. Those guys have shown amazing things so far. I am particularly interested in Insomniac's decision to exploit RSX without SPU help. Mike Acton's note (e.g., optimized data for PS3 will help other platform too) seem to ring true in your game also.

 

[djskribbles]

@ joker54, if you don't mind me asking, who do you work for and what games have you worked on/are you working on? from what i gather from your previous posts, you're a multiplat developer.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It'd be unwise for joker454 to answer that. If he happens to say something the emplyer wouldn't like, or accidentally infringes the NDA's Of Death with a casual comment, anonymity can prove very valuable! Those who's identities are known need to be a bit more cautious and wary of ninjas, or...whatever MS employs. Probably NDA Cowboys. Which might explain the frequent leaks of MS docs prior to XB360's release!

 

[KongRudi]

Dosn't the console-manufacturers have special rights for sports-licenses?

Sony should concider to beef up their sports-division again, and put it more in direct competition with the EA and T2 games, it's much better than travel to fix everyones problems with the PS3-port each year.

I couldn't care less about the american football-titles, except for sympathy with american PS3-owners, but I'll be pretty furious in 2009, when EA informs me that they had to remove features wich were in Fifa 2008 (real football), since it's not room for them anymore due to new features, and then I'll see the exact same crap on 360, wich coincidentally have 1/3 space of a single layer bluray disk. :-/

It would be nice to have an alternative then (crosses fingers for Konami, *cheer*), so I could buy the product from the company wich didn't piss on me, and delivered the gimped down version. :-/

However I don't want PS to become like Nintendo-platforms either, that the only thing worth having is the stuff wich comes from 1st party.. :-/
I can understand a delay the first year, people knows it will take abit until developers get to the grips with the newer hardware, but shipping a gimped down version is annoying, especially if you don't have any sort of bandaid's on the version wich takes advantage of PS3's strengths (*point at HDD* , *point at free space on Bluray*).

It's strange how this console-war have turned out:
Sony's developers delivers great new IP's for their platform with a few small european developers also chipping in, while Ubisoft, EA, Epic, Capcom and Take 2 seems to deliver the great new IP's for Microsofts platform, wich gets to be called 360 exclusives even when half of them really are multiplatform and cheaper and better on PC.

Microsoft 1st party hasn't really delivered anything really good new IP yet, but they've done a few good attempts with projects from Rare and Mistwalker.
They've been a dissepointment really.
And concidering the console breaks if you sneeze at it, and noone seems to mind at all, and it scratches up the disks whenever a car passes the house, is also no problems.

But the sturdy PS3 Bluray-disks seems to deliver on the promise to be more reliable against scratches and similar, and still it's only 'oh the horror, the dreadfull medium Bluray drove up the price a 100$!! Burn in hell, Ken K!!'.

It's like quality dosn't matter anymore, money is all that matter.
I guess that is the american way.. :-/

Didn't mention Sega, everything AM2 touches kind of becomes gold, no matter where it is.
We know that AM2 is great, the rest is try first..

My suggestion of what should be done with PS3-football games:
Give the PS3-owners some incentive to buy the product on PS3, and feel like they are valued customers.. :-/
If it's a simple port of the same game, with half the frames, sell it for half price minus the 5 extra dollar royalties Sony takes.
Or use the Bluray to put something cool on it (i.e. video of the Playmates wich usually have a match right before the superbowl, or anything wich can make us feel like valued customers aswell, the sky is the limit), or atleast take advantage of the HDD's, so we don't have to look at loading screens.

 

[NovemberMike]

Joker, now that the PS3 is getting some more support from Sony, what is your opinion of the differences between the two platforms? I noticed you said that the cell was now noticably faster than the Xenon, so how much of an increase in performance increase are you seeing?

 

[Nesh]

I noticed that the downgrades on the PS3 may be getting less and less. I ve seen the darkness comparison video at gametrailers and they look the same with the PS3 version looking slightly better in colors to me