So in the end I really don't understand all this complaining, it's not really that hard nor complex to overcome these 'problems'.
I think part of my point was missed. Sure, theres a million tricks out there, using the sign bit is nothing new. My beef is that you have to do this on PS3 just to help rsx keep pace, you have to baby it. We do these tricks anyways because in many cases they not only benefit PS3, they also benefit 360 so why wouldn't we use them? So, clever tricks alone won't get you to 360 frame rate because the 360 usually benefits from the same tricks as well. Hence why I was saying the only way I believe to get rsx to complete is to use spus to help it deal with its inadequacies.
I was almost laughing at the GOW comment..I wonder what's so impressive in GOW that RSX could not do.
Not sure why you'd laugh, its the most visually impressive console title to date. You need to play a few hours into it to see some of the best graphics though. Even if you assume that rsx by itself could do it, you then run into other PS3 limitations like less free memory available. Both boxes may have 512MB, but you have less to work with on PS3. Maybe only third parties like us are affected by this, but on our end the free memory difference is fairly large with 360 giving us lots more room to play. So, textures somewhere have to get cut down. This may be one of the reasons a common complaint on PS3 games is that "the textures up close are muddy", probably because they are cut down. For example, I'm guessing thats why the crowd in Fight Night looks all pixelated on PS3, but ok on 360. They may have run out of memory on PS3 and had to get memory from wherever they could.
Even barring that, you run into other PS3 limitations. A game like gears I don't believe will be doable in 1080p on either machine, I don't think they have the bandwidth for it. So you do it in 720p. But on 360, I can hardware scale it to 1080p free. You can't do this on PS3 because its 720-1080 hardware scaler is broken, so you'd have to scale it in software which takes up more of those precious cycles.
At this time I really fail to see how 360 titles are so much better that PS3 titles graphics wise.. (while devs have more experience on the former platform..)
Both gears of war and resistance fall of man are first generation titles for their respective developers. Both were in development for roughly the same amount of time. No knock to Insomniac, they are a top notch crew, but gears looks way better.
I think the 'more experience on the former platform' isn't a valid argument. 360 games have all mostly been old gen ports. In other words, all shaders had to be written from scratch, and all new game assets had to be made. That's what happened to us, most of the time was not spent having fun with the 360, it was spent scrambling to get everything re-written. PS3 games on the other hand have mostly been 360 ports. Huge difference! Devs were able to save tremendous amounts of time since the same shaders can be used (I'm simplifying here, but you get what I mean), and they were able to use the same art assets. There still is a bit of a time advantage for 360 devs, but it's no where near as huge as people make it out to be.
GPU wise I think 360 and PS3 have more or less the same power
I fully respect your opinion of course, although this is the first time I've heard a dev say that
And I'm even talking about old school programmers that hate Microsoft with a passion! Even they, privately, give the nod to 360 in graphics. Although they will usually immediately follow it up with a lengthy discussion of the joys of cell
once devs will start to use SPUs to speed up RSX things will start to be even more interesting (and a few titles are already doing that..)
Yup, totally true. Although nothing stops you from doing the same on 360. If you have a free 360 hardware thread, why not use it to precull? I'm certainly gonna try. Sure, it's no where near as suited to the task as spu's, but since I've gotta write the code on PS3 anyways, I'm gonna try leveraging it on 360 on the geometry that would benefit the most, solid models like characters that are usually half backface culled anyways.
The spu's are certainly the PS3's ace, but I'm wondering, will they let that box eclipse 360 performance, or just match it? I don't really know the answer to this so we'll have to see.
