Recent content by ERP

To a point yes, but very few games start from scratch these days so there is something playable very early, so QA is involved very early on. Often way too early IMO. The games industry in general does not have a history of formally testing things, engineers obviously test their own code, but...

There is a big difference between test at MS and test at most game developers, the latter just have people play the game and report bugs. At MS test engineers write test code, they used to have a SDET designation, that differentiated them from the SE's (Software Engineers) but I thought that...

Yes as far as I am aware they wrote all of it.

Then anandtech is incorrect. Though I believe the shader compiler is based on AMD code, libgcm etc. were written by the ICE team. Obviously AMD provided technical support.

The ICE team wrote the "driver" on PS4, ATI was not involved. I'd imagine the same was true on the MS side of things.

It' rarely a question of difficulty, and always a question of priorities. Code has to be written and tested, and for a feature like that, I'd imagine the test cycle would be very long, you'd probably want to test against the bulk of the available 3D disks.

I'm not sure that was true, I was in the office of the CTO at the time so it's possible my experience was atypical, but the big issue was the numbers were so large that when it got handed down the chain, the only practical way to deal with it was to just indiscriminately axe teams regardless of...

If they are laying off 5500 people in the pre-nokia acquisition MS, that's roughly the same size as the last layoffs which were not pretty, it was very random and pretty much no group went untouched. If it's like last time the bulk of those will come from Redmond and that's about 5% of the...

Nope that's true of me as well. about the only things I purchase on BD are 3D, anything else I'll stream because it's good enough, and I try and minimize the amount of physical media I have to deal with.

Adding to this, circa DirectX 3 many games did accidentally render in lock step, there were API's to wait on the GPU, and many games did. When DX5 was released, they took out all of he synchronization primitives because the result of synchronizing was a lot of idle GPU time. I doubt there are...

When you take investor money, you give up some ownership, so it's not usually done lightly, the idea is you have to increase the value by taking the money more than you gave up to get it. Growth is hard to manage, and there is an expectation of growth when you take outside money, to get it you...

There was never a lot of belief in Vita in the short term in the US even from Sony internally, I think the surprise for Sony was how poorly it did in Japan. In the US outside the development Sony was paying for, they just couldn't get 3rd party support.

That's because EA mandated all their internal engines were replaced by Renderware when they bought Criterion, and as a result lost a lot of talented people, had virtually every game released that year delayed, and/or sub standard. They have one engine internally now because with that mandate...

If the company your buying has 800 employees and you are only interested in 2 IP's, you wait until they go under and buy the pieces.

Bizarre I looked at the link yesterday and I'm sure the price was $250. Now much more reasonable.