Because it is a technical forum where people interested in the general topic asks questions about such and people who work in the industry can give us glimpses to how things are in reality, not rumors fanned by flames and PR BS.
how hard is PS3 programming? *
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Because it is a technical forum where people interested in the general topic asks questions about such and people who work in the industry can give us glimpses to how things are in reality, not rumors fanned by flames and PR BS.
So in other words programming on the PS3 is generally "easy" considering its a new introduced hardware with such an architecture right?
I am not a tech geek but just using some common sense in there trying to put 360 in the discussion its probably the CPU's flexibility and some familiar tools and libraries that help at the relative easiness.
From developers' comments I think both are "easy" for such complex pieces of hardware, they are both harder to program than previous hardware but 360 is just a little easier.
So if both are in general "easy" (notice the "") I see no problem with either. Just because 360 may be a bit easier doesnt mean PS3 is troublesome or "hard".
Some people translate the fact that 360 is easier than the PS3 as "PS3 is troublesome very complex and hard for developers to developed on compared to 360 or anything else and this is VERY bad"
There's degrees of 'easiness', though.
You can talk about the difficulty of reaching a certain entry point in terms of performance versus using a chip effectively and extracting its best performance. In terms of the former, things probably are easier this generation versus PS2 - or at least that's my impression - but in terms of the latter, I think the question becomes much more difficult.
Havok was speaking at a workshop IBM held in Dublin last week on Cell, and they were reiterating the point that it's going to take some time to get the most out of Cell. A porting approach only gets you sofar, and while they think they've made a decent effort to date, they apparently see their PS3 stuff being completely rearchitected over time, and they expect great returns from that. That perhaps illustrates the point of getting to a certain point with perhaps relatively less effort, but beyond that..
You can talk about the difficulty of reaching a certain entry point in terms of performance versus using a chip effectively and extracting its best performance. In terms of the former, things probably are easier this generation versus PS2 - or at least that's my impression - but in terms of the latter, I think the question becomes much more difficult.
Havok was speaking at a workshop IBM held in Dublin last week on Cell, and they were reiterating the point that it's going to take some time to get the most out of Cell. A porting approach only gets you sofar, and while they think they've made a decent effort to date, they apparently see their PS3 stuff being completely rearchitected over time, and they expect great returns from that. That perhaps illustrates the point of getting to a certain point with perhaps relatively less effort, but beyond that..
he was saying that because i sed that as well lol
You don't have to worry about code on the 360 (unless it's big and thrashes the cache) but with data you do much the same thing as you do in the SPEs, you have to move it into the cache first to process it. This is the same on any processor if you want to get good performance, on Cell it's just made explicit rather than implicit.
I agree. From what I understand the co-processors of the EE and the SPEs rely very much on DMA transfers of data/code, which requires a certain programming paradigm. PS2 programmers can bring that experience over to the PS3.
Though this should be easier on SPEs as a lot more stuff can be written in a high-level language.
In addition to my previous points I think I should add another.
I only referred to getting the most from the processors, if you just want to do a quick port from the PC I think it could be a different story.
Not only are the tools the same but getting a basic port done should be pretty easy providing you're not pushing the system. The performance is likely to suck but it should work.
Porting from PC to PS3 is a different story, not only will the tools will be different but you'll be stuck to the PPE unless you do a load more work.
The natural assumption should be that this will lead to better 360 ports but I wonder if it will have the opposite effect, companies will want to do the least work to get something out the door and that could mean basic sucky 360 ports appearing while the extra effort is put into getting the PS3 version working.
I've no idea if that'll happen, what do youse think?
I only referred to getting the most from the processors, if you just want to do a quick port from the PC I think it could be a different story.
Not only are the tools the same but getting a basic port done should be pretty easy providing you're not pushing the system. The performance is likely to suck but it should work.
Porting from PC to PS3 is a different story, not only will the tools will be different but you'll be stuck to the PPE unless you do a load more work.
The natural assumption should be that this will lead to better 360 ports but I wonder if it will have the opposite effect, companies will want to do the least work to get something out the door and that could mean basic sucky 360 ports appearing while the extra effort is put into getting the PS3 version working.
I've no idea if that'll happen, what do youse think?
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