New dev tools ? PlayStation 3 Edge

[ShootMyMonkey]

Have any devs begun working with Edge yet?

A couple of my coworkers who went to the Edge talk made it sound as if the related tools and such wouldn't actually be available early enough for our purposes, though I don't know what their definition of "early enough" was, nor do I remember any of them saying when it would be available. Short of a few who might get special treatment or those who willingly dove into the frying pan of working with [Sony] beta software, I don't know if anybody has it yet.

Some of the generic ideas presented in Edge and the use of SPURS for managing SPU jobs are certainly in use.

 

[DJ12]

Wasn't the Killzone video supposed to be a tech demo of the Edge tools and what they are capable of, rather than a sneaky peak at the actual game?

I'm sure I read that somewhere on here and it makes complete sense for the first team to be using the tools to be an inhouse Sony developer.

 

[almighty]

Wasn't the Killzone video supposed to be a tech demo of the Edge tools and what they are capable of, rather than a sneaky peak at the actual game?

I'm sure I read that somewhere on here and it makes complete sense for the first team to be using the tools to be an inhouse Sony developer.

But EDGE is being written by alot of Sony studios, maybe the KZ dev's were contributing code to EDGE while using it at the same time

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

I'm sure I read that somewhere on here and it makes complete sense for the first team to be using the tools to be an inhouse Sony developer.

Hence why I added the part about "devs who might get special treatment, etc., etc." I would imagine 2nd party studios who are working on major flagship titles also have early access to it, though I would imagine that the ones we like to talk about such as HS or Lair are way too far along to make any meaningful use of it at this point.

 

[Butta]

Hence why I added the part about "devs who might get special treatment, etc., etc." I would imagine 2nd party studios who are working on major flagship titles also have early access to it, though I would imagine that the ones we like to talk about such as HS or Lair are way too far along to make any meaningful use of it at this point.

I find it hard to believe that something along the lines of GCM Replay would not be usable regardless of how far along a game is?

 

[betan]

Hence why I added the part about "devs who might get special treatment, etc., etc." I would imagine 2nd party studios who are working on major flagship titles also have early access to it, though I would imagine that the ones we like to talk about such as HS or Lair are way too far along to make any meaningful use of it at this point.

I am under the impression that at least parts of EDGE had been available to first/second party developers for sometime. IIRC, EDGE presentation mentioned Resistance, F1:CE and Motorstorm using EDGE stuff. And those were the launch titles, why wouldn't HS or Lair?

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

I find it hard to believe that something along the lines of GCM Replay would not be usable regardless of how far along a game is?

Well, GCM replay isn't really a feature or a concept or something that automatically makes things better. It's a profiling tool, and IIRC, it's one that does involve code augmentation to use, and any sort of profile-driven modifications still has a threshold point where it's too late to be messing with things (e.g. triage). That aside, it is mainly meant to feed you information more so than do anything on its own, so I don't know that I'd say it's meaningful by itself -- other than the fact that what I've seen of it in the slides has some features that put PIX to shame.

IIRC, EDGE presentation mentioned Resistance, F1:CE and Motorstorm using EDGE stuff. And those were the launch titles, why wouldn't HS or Lair?

I'd have to listen again, but I don't think they said EDGE itself was in use in any of those titles, but that concepts and features that EDGE happened to do were being used in those games (which again, is something I said in my original post). For instance, SPU culling is done in Lair and F1, but that is different from saying that Lair is using EDGE's SPU culling. Similarly, Warhawk does skinning on the SPUs which is one of the EDGE modules, but I don't know if it was said that Warhawk specifically uses the EDGE module for this. I do vaguely remember something about at least one game that's already out where what they were doing ultimately got worked into a particular EDGE module, but it wasn't really "EDGE" when they were working with it.

 

[Arwin]

I understand it's more likely the reverse - first party stuff has been shared among first party from day one, and Edge exposes this code to 3rd party devs as well.

 

[joker454]

I understand it's more likely the reverse - first party stuff has been shared among first party from day one, and Edge exposes this code to 3rd party devs as well.

This is how I understand it as well, first party devs had access to edge related code far before we could get it. We'll be getting it soon enough though, then we'll have to decide what parts to use. We've already got a 3mil+ poly scene, including 11,000+ human meshs rendering at 60+ fps on 360, so now we're hoping the code in Edge will let us get similar results on PS3.

 

[Butta]

So what is the general consensus on Edge... have not heard much from anyone with the exeption of this small blurb from Buzz.

Brighton-based UK studio Relentless, co-creator of the Buzz series of quiz games, has been discussing yesterday's announced move towards PlayStation 3 development in the latest issue of Develop.

Echoing the culture shock many studios have encountered in moving from previous gen to new hardware, development director and co-founder Andrew Eades described the venture onto PS3 for an unannounced title as "a strange journey". :

"We were really comfortable making PS2 games, but when it comes to PS3 we found it harder than we thought it would be," said Eades. "We didn't think it would be a walk in the park, but we found it harder than we should have. We had some missteps in the art style, and that slowed us down - we were a bit worried at first but now it looks like a true next-gen game. Now we've got in place everything we need - with the right technical people and art people – and PS3 is starting to reveal its power to us."

Added Eades: "When we're walking around the studio we're starting to see things on people's screens that really make you stop in your tracks to look at. It has taken us longer than we would have liked, but we're really happy with what we're seeing for PS3."

Creative director and co-founder David Amor also had plenty of praise for the support Sony is offering with it's new PlayStation Edge technology suite, a collection of tools put together by SCE studios that worked on the first wave of games for the PS3.

"PS3 is quite a complicated machine to write for," said Amor. "But PlayStation Edge is a great help. I remember when I spoke to the Media Molecule guys, one of them said to me 'the Insomniac guys, they've cracked the SPUs, they got it.' So now those tools are available for third-party studios, it's good news for all of us."

Source: http://www.developmag.com/news/26951/Relentless-PS3-is-starting-to-reveal-its-power

 

[Heinrich4]

This is how I understand it as well, first party devs had access to edge related code far before we could get it. We'll be getting it soon enough though, then we'll have to decide what parts to use. We've already got a 3mil+ poly scene, including 11,000+ human meshs rendering at 60+ fps on 360, so now we're hoping the code in Edge will let us get similar results on PS3.

Sorry all for of topic

But in another thread you say with only use Xenos vertex capabilities can reach 1.2 mill polygon/frame at 60fps ...where come the others 2 million polygons? From cpu Xenon ?

On psEdge when we will have resulted effective in games with this tool?

Since now thanx in advance for any information.

 

[joker454]

Sorry all for of topic

But in another thread you say with only use Xenos vertex capabilities can reach 1.2 mill polygon/frame at 60fps ...where come the others 2 million polygons? From cpu Xenon ?

On psEdge when we will have resulted effective in games with this tool?

Since now thanx in advance for any information.

My post in that older thread was referring to the geometry of just one particular subsystem not the entire scene, hence the smaller number. A typical frame in our game will have 3+ million verticies in total. You need to optimize your shaders to get 60+fps with that much geometry, but you don't need to use the cpu to do it on 360. Alot of the stuff in Edge (backface culling, skinning, zero area triangle culling, zero pixel triangle culling, etc) are not necessary on 360, just feed everything to the gpu and it will happily rip thru them. I tried doing cpu skinning on the 360 for the hell of it, and the gains were negligible.

Our next years PS3 title will use Edge ideas, but not Edge itself. Being multiplatform, it's easier to just take the pieces we need from Edge and implement them in our framework ourselves. Using GCMHud and GCMReplay we've been able to get some estimates and it looks promising so far!

 

[jonabbey]

My post in that older thread was referring to the geometry of just one particular subsystem not the entire scene, hence the smaller number. A typical frame in our game will have 3+ million verticies in total. You need to optimize your shaders to get 60+fps with that much geometry, but you don't need to use the cpu to do it on 360. Alot of the stuff in Edge (backface culling, skinning, zero area triangle culling, zero pixel triangle culling, etc) are not necessary on 360, just feed everything to the gpu and it will happily rip thru them. I tried doing cpu skinning on the 360 for the hell of it, and the gains were negligible.

Our next years PS3 title will use Edge ideas, but not Edge itself. Being multiplatform, it's easier to just take the pieces we need from Edge and implement them in our framework ourselves. Using GCMHud and GCMReplay we've been able to get some estimates and it looks promising so far!

How far behind do you find RSX to be at a similar 3 mil polygon workload? Is the issue primarily the vertex setup?

 

[Crossbar]

"disc" who apparently is a dev shared some information about EDGE over at GAF.

The Playstation Edge libraries are mostly focused on vertex processing in various forms (I have the presentation here) and offloading the GPU by doing a lot of these processes on the SPUs of the Cell. To have that is excellent and it is something 3rd party developers could have developed themselves (and possibly have done) if they had the manpower to do it.

Playstation Edge consist of several things.

GCM Replay (Which has been released) - A tool for capturing GPU output and for testing out various SPU optimizing routines. EXCELLENT tool and something similar is available for the Xbox 360.

Playstation Edge libraries - Various SPU jobs that can do skinning, culling, morphing, blending, compression/decompression for vertex processing. It's main focus is to offload the CPU and the GPU.

Well it's not really the same thing. The GCM Replay tool is much much more useful tool than the Performance Analyzer was on PS1/PS2 (and PS3).

The Perfomance Analyzer basically just showed you lots of bars highlighting what functions were running and how much bandwidth was used on each bus.

The PS3 performance analyzer (And various other tools) was available quite early on. But with a lot of processing having moved over to the GPU a similar and better tool is needed for the GPU.


With the GCM Replay tool you can basically be running your game, wonder how applying one sort of optimization to the scene might affect the scene and without writing a line of code just test it out. You can also do similar things to what the Performance Analyzer does but GPU specific. You can check and debug the shaders, you can examine everything that is done to render a frame. You can step back and forward in the render pipeline. All in the tool. It's an extremely useful tool for getting good performance out of the rendering on the PS3. And it's available now.

 

[Nesh]

What do all these mean in games and performance?

 

[one]

What I wonder now is why they couldn't offer GCMReplay before the PS3 launch especially since RSX is not an abnormal GPU. Assumptions in forums were like NVIDIA's strength is their software support but it seems their presence is very little here and SCE saved money on that. Or does GCMreplay have a special function not found in generic debuggers?

 

[Crossbar]

What I wonder now is why they couldn't offer GCMReplay before the PS3 launch especially since RSX is not an abnormal GPU. Assumptions in forums were like NVIDIA's strength is their software support but it seems their presence is very little here and SCE saved money on that. Or does GCMreplay have a special function not found in generic debuggers?

This quote indicate some hard coupling to Cell.

GCM Replay (Which has been released) - A tool for capturing GPU output and for testing out various SPU optimizing routines.

Making powerful robust testing tools like this is delicate business because the tool fiddles with low-level hw interfaces and at the same time it monitors the performance and provides some kind of high level UI, and everything must not interfere with the performance measuerments of the code you want to test.

Having 1 PPE, 7 SPUs and X Shaders in the GPU, all of them interacting in some way there are so many things that can screw up. It probably has taken them some time to get the tool stable enough.

With the GCM Replay tool you can basically be running your game, wonder how applying one sort of optimization to the scene might affect the scene and without writing a line of code just test it out. You can also do similar things to what the Performance Analyzer does but GPU specific. You can check and debug the shaders, you can examine everything that is done to render a frame. You can step back and forward in the render pipeline. All in the tool. It's an extremely useful tool for getting good performance out of the rendering on the PS3. And it's available now.

The way he describes it, it sounds really impressive. I wonder how long it will take before we will see games from third party developers benefiting from these tools: 6 months, 1 year?

 

[archangelmorph]

What I wonder now is why they couldn't offer GCMReplay before the PS3 launch especially since RSX is not an abnormal GPU. Assumptions in forums were like NVIDIA's strength is their software support but it seems their presence is very little here and SCE saved money on that. Or does GCMreplay have a special function not found in generic debuggers?

Because developing such a feature rich tool that caters to the profiling and tuning needs of developers, meeting a broad range of common requirements and providing such an large increase in productivity takes time to develop...

Seriously I don't why some people believe code (for any "known" hardware platform) grows on trees and can be slapped together into a bespoke application in no time..

 

[Shompola]

Because developing such a feature rich tool that caters to the profiling and tuning needs of developers, meeting a broad range of common requirements and providing such an large increase in productivity takes time to develop...

Seriously I don't why some people believe code (for any "known" hardware platform) grows on trees and can be slapped together into a bespoke application in no time..

Nah. People compare to the closest rival, which is MS and their toolsets. They ask themselfs, MS could do it in time, why couldn't SONY?

 

[slider]

Nah. People compare to the closest rival, which is MS and their toolsets. They ask themselfs, MS could do it in time, why couldn't SONY?

I remember an interview with Robin Saxby (ARM) a few years ago and he kept saying "hardware is always done before the software".

I know what you mean though. MS have an seemingly equally complex box and had the tools ready.

Mind you, MS are a software company and (you could argue) Sony aren't - (I'm not sure where I stand on that!) and with the same logic you could start comparing supposed hw failure rates.