Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2011]

[KKRT]

Where did you get the employee numbers from? Are they even current?

Anyway considering that we don't know how many games are under concurrent development at Turn 10 nor whether that employee headcount included contracters needed to finish a game or regular FTE numbers we cannot make any real comparison between them. I know that Turn 10 did mention they were interested in making other games aside from racing games however.

Actually not that current. Turn10 had 200-250 ppl on Forza 2 and 300-350 on Forza 3. Polyphony has 110 developers, but in peaks they had 140 ppl working on GT 5 and they started with 50 team members after GT 4.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4144/racing_evolution_forza_3_and_the_.php

 

[Rangers]

300 people at Turn 10? Really? Seems kind of a lot for a genre/game that doesnt even sell that great (Forza sells a lot less than GT). I'm skeptical.

There was a rumor that Turn 10 was doing PGR5 also I think though, which would explain some things. Still seems pretty odd that MS who doesnt have that many devs, would throw so many at a niche genre.

ehh, if you look at the gamasutra link, they talk about outsourcing a lot of artwork to India and Vietnam, and theyre including that in the total employees.

 

[Gitaroo]

think someone mentioned Turn 10 has to outsource all their interior modeling even. Probably why they can release 3 games in between the release of GT4 and GT5; they get things done quicker with much larger team.

 

[KKRT]

300 people at Turn 10? Really? Seems kind of a lot for a genre/game that doesnt even sell that great (Forza sells a lot less than GT). I'm skeptical.

There was a rumor that Turn 10 was doing PGR5 also I think though, which would explain some things. Still seems pretty odd that MS who doesnt have that many devs, would throw so many at a niche genre.

ehh, if you look at the gamasutra link, they talk about outsourcing a lot of artwork to India and Vietnam, and theyre including that in the total employees.

It was never about niche, but about stealing GT fanbase which is bigger than Halo's one.

Yeah, it is with outsourcing, but they were working full-time for Turn10 for a whole development period.

And maybe Turn10 is/was making PGR, we dont have any proof of that. We have rather 3 version of Forza this gen [one still in production].
BTW Polyphony made Tourist Trophy and GT PSP in meantime [dont even mention other smaller project like GT-R panels] and more features [whole engine from ground up too].

 

[Rangers]

Bigger than Halo's? We do not get exact worldwide sales for GT or Halo so there's no way to make that claim. I would say it is close at best.

 

[KKRT]

Bigger than Halo's? We do not get exact worldwide sales for GT or Halo so there's no way to make that claim. I would say it is close at best.

We know actually.
34m copies of Halo games sold WW, before Reach launch
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2010/sep10/09-14reachlaunch.mspx

And about GT, everything is on their website.
http://www.polyphony.co.jp/english/list.html

 

[Arwin]

We know actually.
34m copies of Halo games sold WW, before Reach launch
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2010/sep10/09-14reachlaunch.mspx

And about GT, everything is on their website.
http://www.polyphony.co.jp/english/list.html

It would be more about yearly sales than total sales, though, I hope.

But it should be clear that Microsoft had a lot to gain in getting a credible competitor to GT both in terms of platform strength and in terms of potential for making a good profit.

 

[(((interference)))]

Having just started playing RDR (I bought it ages ago but had a backlog of games to finish first) , all I can say is wow - it actually looks really impressive, a huge step over GTA4, I'm especially impressed by how detailed the vistas look, foliage everywhere, no blocky polygonal landscape features, virtually seamless LOD transitions, fantastic lighting and shadowing, animation is great (love how realistic the horses seem) texture work is pretty impressive too for an open world game.

It looks better than many linear games.

 

[joker454]

Having just started playing RDR (I bought it ages ago but had a backlog of games to finish first) , all I can say is wow - it actually looks really impressive, a huge step over GTA4, I'm especially impressed by how detailed the vistas look, foliage everywhere, no blocky polygonal landscape features, virtually seamless LOD transitions, fantastic lighting and shadowing, animation is great (love how realistic the horses seem) texture work is pretty impressive too for an open world game.

It looks better than many linear games.

Yup it's very impressive, but wait until you get much deeper into the game and make it to Mexico, it looks even better there believe it or not.

 

[Barso]

No doubts, it's a very accomplished game.
I just wish they hit 720p on PS3.
Such a shame they couldn't.
It always reminds me of the comment from a developer that said the xbox360 had nearly double the pixel filtrate than the PS3.

 

[ultragpu]

Looks like Grandmaster should have tried the killzone 3 preview demo code by today, I hope he would do a technical analysis in regard to the improvements and tweaks since the E3 footage.

 

[dragonelite]

Hope they do some performance test on crysis 2 demo and bulletstorm tuesday will be a awesome demo day.

 

[bkilian]

It's amazing that games like RDR run better on 360, at higher visual fidelity despite having no HDD to cache to and running solely from DVD.

We have tools specifically for optimizing your data on the disc. Also, our drive spins a lot faster and has a higher data throughput than the BD in the PS3. Thus the ridonkulous noise.

Those exclusives don't just set the bar visually, but in the audio department as well! Plus, Killzone 2 had plenty of RAM left over, according to dev screens. It must be magic, right?!

If they had RAM left over, they were doing something wrong. Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

Technically, which is the more powerful machine? The xbox360 or the PS3?

In theoretical FLOPS, the PS3 should be way more powerful than the 360. As we've found in the last 5 years, there's a difference between theory and practice.

This is because Microsoft is not seeking profit but sales volume. If you look at financial statement, despite great game sales, millions of gold live accounts, and low hardware cost, and very high hardware margins on well selling accessories like Kinect, hard-drives, wifi, etc, xbox division still loses money.

That's incorrect. EDD has been net profitable for a couple of years now.

 

[Rangers]

Ehh, the theoretical flops edge on PS3 is in the CPU though, where it's hard to get at them to actually make the games look better, which is what everybody actually wants

If the flops edge was in the GPU I'm pretty sure we'd be talking about a different story.

 

[Squilliam]

We have tools specifically for optimizing your data on the disc. Also, our drive spins a lot faster and has a higher data throughput than the BD in the PS3. Thus the ridonkulous noise.

Any word on any attempts to reduce said ridonkulous noise such as rubber mounts ala modern enthusiast PC cases such as the Antec P182?

 

[kagemaru]

Ehh, the theoretical flops edge on PS3 is in the CPU though, where it's hard to get at them to actually make the games look better, which is what everybody actually wants

If the flops edge was in the GPU I'm pretty sure we'd be talking about a different story.

Actually IIRC, the big difference in FLOPS was due to the GPU:

CPU: Cell Processor

• PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz
• 1 VMX vector unit per core
• 512KB L2 cache
• 7 x SPE @3.2GHz
• 7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs
• 7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE
• * 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS

GPU: RSX @550MHz

• 1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance
• Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels
• Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines

Any word on any attempts to reduce said ridonkulous noise such as rubber mounts ala modern enthusiast PC cases such as the Antec P182?

I thought they already did things to make it quieter, like moving exclusively to the benQ drives. My older falcon and new slim are both quieter than my original launch 360.

 

[Squilliam]

I thought they already did things to make it quieter, like moving exclusively to the benQ drives. My older falcon and new slim are both quieter than my original launch 360.

I think they could to better if they isolated the drive from the main chassis of the Xbox 360 even then.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Well, the drive in the X360 S was specifically manufactured and modified to make quieter in operation. It's the main reason the X360 S wasn't slimmer as they had to stay with a full sized drive versus a noisier slim unit.

Regards,
SB

 

[Lucid_Dreamer]

If they had RAM left over, they were doing something wrong. Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

With one of best graphics, A.I. (it won awards from the A.I. community), etc.; I like the way they were "doing something wrong." I wish more developers would do just that.

In theoretical FLOPS, the PS3 should be way more powerful than the 360. As we've found in the last 5 years, there's a difference between theory and practice.

Really? I thought the best game graphics award, for the past 2 out of the 4 years the PS3 has been around, has gone to PS3 exclusives. Feel free to come up with whatever excuses you like.

 

[Squilliam]

Really? I thought the best game graphics award, for the past 2 out of the 4 years the PS3 has been around, has gone to PS3 exclusives. Feel free to come up with whatever excuses you like.

That award has also been won by Wii games.