Developers Discontent With PS3 Development Tools

I'm a bit surprised at the level of comparisons going on here, especially for systems that are 6 months apart in release dates, based on a few snippets of information gleaned from the press.

Trying to figure this out, considering: state of development tools, state of hardware, developers familiarity with IDE's, level of support, and amount of effort/dollars being put into the development makes this an exercise in insanity.

Fafalada, are you doing any PS3 development?

 

How is this even being debated?

You have PS3 alpha kits with a 7800GTX, and a 2.4Ghx CELL. That's pretty damn close to final specs, they have an extremely similar GPU, with more bandwidth, and they have the final CPU at around 70% of the speed. It doesn't have the FlexIO and some other stuff, but it's pretty close.

Compare that to X360 alpha-kits where they had a much weaker GPU, the X800, they had a COMPLETELY different CPU, dual core OOO Apple G5's.

This goes right in the no-brainer column, of course the PS3 devkits are much closer to the final machine than the X360 devkits were. Just look at the hardware.

 

Well it's obvious who watched MS's E3 presentation and who didn't!

SE, came on stage and ran a 60second or so demo, it showed a cityscape, zoomed around, and was the same level of quality as the FF7 demo.

The reason you didn't hear about it much was because A) it was short b) it wasn't FF7 so it wasn't all that exciting c) it showed no characters, no physics,

Regardless, the texture wuality, lighting, draw distance, everythig were just as good, it was just a much shorter demo.

 

i recall dual G5 running game code better than on final kits ,no SLI 6800 in early ps3 dev kits, and a poor pci express between 2,4 ghz cell and the Gpu.This ,not even having a glance on the software side of things.

I (personally ) wouldn' t really bet a rat on what you think is fact on the matter.It's more a bad mix of speculation on hearsay ,partial information and PR than real factual usefull information.

 

I thought the PS3 kits had 6800, not 7800.

 

aamof, some even nicer men intend to get to your first with exactly the opposite intentions.. so you may or may not have to face the second wave of nice men depending of factors like your willingness to cooperate : )

 

I do remember that demo, just didn't remember it was a Square-Enix demo!

 

Guess who wasn't paying attention to the E3 demo . It didn't show a cityscape but a sort of crystal palace/pier type building. It had people, not many and moving rather rigidly. There was a lot of architecture. Good design. Draw distance was limited ot the building though. In the distance was water and an island or some other bit of landmass. The texture quality I couldn't make out from the low-res movie and general darkness, but as the area modelled was quite compact there's no need for low quality textures. There wasn't any amazing lighting. The water was quite cool when the winged critters flew past and dipped their wings in.

In comparison to the PS3 tech demo, both had rather rigid character animations except for PS3's complex animations on the two major characters, including cloth motions and flowers bobbing in the basket. Of course we don't know from that video if these are precalculated or being resolved in realtime. Neither had amazing textures or lighting, or shaders. A lot of the PS3 demo could have been baked on lightmaps onto simple geometry, given the fixed viewpoint. As for draw distance, need I remind you the PS3 zoomed all the way out on the whole city, past the big central structure while still looking at the point where the girl was?! Also AFAIR this was rendered on Cell. I could be mistaken, but it came in the Cell demo's section. That is, it could have been a glut of prerecorded data streamed off disc and sent to a GPU, which any decent PC could manage now, but the point of the demo was that the Cell on it's own was doing this. As just a graphics showcase the PS3 demo was useless!

 

I cant possibly imagine how you go from 75% of CELL to 75% overall performance.

 

You're pulling numbers out of thin air and the link you provided claiming to support your "And here's a report stating the E3 dev kits were using only 75% the power of the final PS3:" assertation was a complete misinterpretation. So now you're switching to a non internet based source? Sigh.

 

Common sense looks are more than two components of a system to judge overall system performance. The way the devices communicate together is very important.

 

okay can we get back on topic?

 

> "And here's a report stating the E3 dev kits were using only 75% the power of the final PS3:"

From the link you provided:

"ITmedia revealed that the Cell chip used in Sony's PS3 developer's kit is running at only 2.4GHz, just 75 percent of the machine's final spec of 3.2GHz."

Now treat that as fact, and everything else as fantasy.

 

Nope. Earlier kits had single 6800's (note that there's never been a revision of PS3 devkit with SLI), while current kits have a single 7800.

 

Lurking around on these next-gen threads, this is the following impression I get:

There are some that thinks RSX is just an overclocked 7800 and nothing new. The same set of people will debate to death how much better xenos is compared to the R520 when in fact the relative performance of both the ATi (relative to each other) chips came from the horse's mouth, ATi themself.

Sony must be pretty poor in making deals or nVidia just knows how to sell their tech if they to get $5 royalty for a near-of-the-shelf product going by the above impression.