Recent content by shaderguy

I think they are still finishing their design -- for E3 the goal was to say whatever it took to appear more powerful than the Xbox 360. But now they need to make a box that won't bankrupt them. They have to cut all the frills in order to afford that super-expensive blu-ray drive. I expect...

Sure, you would want to cut corners everywhere, but the areas you mention are not PS3 specific. I guess I should have said "in addition to cutting the normal corners, PS3 budget games are going to have the additional handicap of having to cut SPE development."

The way to make a cheap PS3 game is to ignore the SPEs, and just treat it as a stripped down PC. Sort of an Xbox 120 if you will.

That picture looks like a very bad photoshop job of a normal white Xbox 360 publicity shot. Xbox 360 beta kits are black -- you can find fuzzy pictures of them posted by developers who are breaking their NDAs. MS could technically make Xbox 360s in any color they want, but they haven't...

Probably because these games aren't floating point bound, so there's no reason for developers to waste time increasing the fp performance. It wouldn't make the games noticably faster. The developers probably just compile their code with the default compiler floating point settings, which use...

Yeah, it must have just been an accident that MS designed in a large cache, and three general purpose cores. No doubt IBM was running a three-cores-for-the-price-of-one special that week. A much more likely explanation is that they didn't realize how much traction Sony would get with their...

Because Sony and IBM publicly announced much of the Cell architecture and PS3 performance targets several years ago. There were also the various papers and patent applications publicly available which gave many details. It's true that many of the details were not revealed, but overall...

Of course people are free to make up their own terms, but in the current standard CPU design engineering terminology, integer performance means "integer, branching, load/store". As opposed to floating point perf, or streaming perf. It's true that general purpose performance would be a less...

I think the confusion is that you're thinking performance relative to PC CPU designs, and I'm thinking performance relative to Cell. It seems that Microsoft analyzed the Cell design, and came up with an alternative design with half the floating point performance and 3 times the integer...

I'm just a caveman, and your tables of very large numbers frighten and confuse me. :-) http://snltranscripts.jt.org/91/91gcaveman.phtml So... bottom line, based on existing high-end PC 3D games, do you think MS was right to optimize for integer performance?

Microsoft is betting several billion dollars that their CPU design is the best design. (As is Sony, of course :-) ) Both companies probably considered a wide variety of CPU architectures before they chose their current ones. In particular MS chose their architecture after Sony had announced...

Gamecube was a fixed-function DX7-class part, if I recall correctly. Not much point in a shading language for that. If Rev uses a modern GPU it would be a DX 9-class part, and could use cg/HLSL or GSLang. It would seem that technically any of the three shading languages would work, but...

IBM developed the SPEs too, as well as the SPE interconnect bus. So even without a PPC core in Cell Sony would have to pay IBM royaltees for the SPE and interconnect bus IP.

It's a fine article, and raises some good points. But the author doesn't seem to have much real-world experience with the areas he's talking about. He's more of an armchair quarterback. He seems to give the PS3 every benefit of the doubt, which doesn't seem to be a good way of arriving at the...

If you're going to nickel and dime the memory allocation, don't forget to add 10 MB of EDRAM. Also, even though the Xbox OS reserves 32 MB of RAM for the OS, it uses some of that RAM to implement features (like user sound tracks) that would otherwise have had to be implemented in the game. So...