Developers Discontent With PS3 Development Tools

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Shifty Geezer said:
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Though that is true. From what we know of the first XB360 kit, it had an ATi 9800 GPU. That alone is a fraction of the GPU performance of Xenos. The CPU too didn't have the vector power of XeCPU, so was much weaker in that respect. PS3's kit, the earliest I know of, had 6800s (were these SLI'd?) which were much closer to final GPU performance than 9800 is to Xenos, and a Cell (2.4 GHz I think) that had the same level of performance, just underclocked.

Yes 360 Alpha kits had X800s(some had 9800s) and dual G5s. PS3 Alphas had SLied 6800s w/ 2.4 Ghz Cell. Not only were the PS3 alpha kits a lot more similar to final performance, but they were also more similar in architecture as you've stated. This is no slight to the PS3's power like some f@nboys here are trying to think, two 6800s being 70% the power of your one card solution is crazy powerful. But in comparision the 360s Alpha kits were so weak, I find it pointless when people try and compare the 360's E3 games against PS3's tech demos considering the vast difference between each systems alpha kits and what their final performances will be.
 
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?
 
Nesh said:
Any link confirming this?

i think that was just an assumtion.No one has an idea of how far or close PS3's alpha kits were to the final hardware.

Actually I believe it was very far from the actual hardware judging from some slides I ve seen :???:

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.
 
avaya said:
Square Enix only showed off FFXI online coming to X360, the trailer they showed had graphics from the PC version of the game, needless to say they were in no way comparable to the FFVII demo.

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.
 
Hardknock said:
Yes 360 Alpha kits had X800s(some had 9800s) and dual G5s. PS3 Alphas had SLied 6800s w/ 2.4 Ghz Cell. Not only were the PS3 alpha kits a lot more similar to final performance, but they were also more similar in architecture as you've stated. This is no slight to the PS3's power like some f@nboys here are trying to think, two 6800s being 70% the power of your one card solution is crazy powerful. But in comparision the 360s Alpha kits were so weak, I find it pointless when people try and compare the 360's E3 games against PS3's tech demos considering the vast difference between each systems alpha kits and what their final performances will be.

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.
 
Fafalada said:
It's too late for that, you've been identified with the rest. Nice men are already on their way over to erase any memories we might have of ever enjoying anything about it. :oops:

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 : )
 
scooby_dooby said:
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 do remember that demo, just didn't remember it was a Square-Enix demo! :)
 
_phil_ said:
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.

Listen here buddy, I don't bullshit. If I state something as fact it's because I have ample proof to back it up. I don't succumb to this f@nboy bullshit of pulling shit out of my ass.

Have you ever wondered what the PS3 dev kit looks like? Well, wonder no more. This is an early dev kit reported running at 2.4GHz on a modified GPU slower then the RSX. This is due to the fact that it's based on current SLI technology using the 6800 PCI-E (4-lane, only for test purposes). The software environment currently does not automatically split jobs up into threads (I wouldn't really expect that though), but you can create your own threads, and choose from 3 different scheduling algorithms which the system will use to assign them to the SPEs automatically. The development tools will obviously improve once the RSX and the rest of the PS3 is finalized. Like I said, early dev kit. Also, this is what was used to run the E3 demos.

Picture of Dev Kit:

http://blogs.itmedia.co.jp/.shared/image.html?/honda/images/ps3.jpg

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

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/06/22/news_6128031.html

Now if I was you I'd refrain from making myself look any stupidier by commenting further ;)
 
scooby_dooby said:
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.
Guess who wasn't paying attention to the E3 demo :p. 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!
 
Hardknock said:
And here's a report stating the E3 dev kits were using only 75% the power of the final PS3:

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/06/22/news_6128031.html

Now if I was you I'd refrain from making myself look any stupidier by commenting further ;)

[UPDATE] 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.

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

I actually said 70% of the overall performance. It's not rocket science. 2 6800s in SLi or a 7800 are roughly about 75% of RSX(actually that might be a little generous). RSX only has a 10% clock increase over a 7800(none of us are really sure of any other changes, but we do know it's BASED on 7800, so it's not likely to have any radical changes.)

Now the reason why I say 70% of the overall performance is from a comment about it in a Playstation Magazine by one of the techs. I don't have the magazine handy, so this was all I could quickly find on the internet. Maybe someone else can supply the quote.
 
Hardknock said:
I actually said 70% of the overall performance. It's not rocket science. 2 6800s in SLi or a 7800 are roughly about 75% of RSX(actually that might be a little generous). RSX only has a 10% clock increase over a 7800.

Now the reason why I say 70% of the overall performance is from a comment about it in a Playstation Magazine by one of the techs. I don't have the magazine handy, so this was all I could quickly find on the internet. Maybe someone else can supply the quote.

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.
 
Mmmkay said:
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.

Maybe you missed the common sense part. Either you have it or you don't. *sigh*
 
Hardknock said:
Maybe you missed the common sense part. Either you have it or you don't. *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.
 
> "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.
 
I think people are being a little fool-hearty to believe the PS3 will be more than 30% powerful than a dev kit that has a 2.4GHz Cell and two 6800s in SLi/7800GTX. Keep in mind RSX is based on the 7800 and only has a 10% clock increase. But whatever floats your boat people ;)
 
wco81 said:
I thought the PS3 kits had 6800, not 7800.
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.
 
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