Question for developers... PS3 and framerate

Okay, enough teasing !

Since they are not true, can you at least tell us what 4, 7, 11 versions of stories you heard :) ?

EDIT: On second thought, may be not. I don't want to see all 22 versions on newspaper headlines tomorrow.
 
Plus one of them is probably true even if no-one knows which one, which would, somewhere along the paper trail, be NDA breach and Sony Ninja Death.
 
being a newbie, from your words i can synthetize RSX is the very weak point of PS3 architecture....far less performing than xbox360 xenos
 
being a newbie, from your words i can synthetize RSX is the very weak point of PS3 architecture....far less performing than xbox360 xenos

Most devs prefer Xenos, both GPUs excel each other at certain areas though.

Neither of this GPUs are great
 
Last edited by a moderator:
New Streaming tech

So then I must ask all those with knowledge on the subject how new advances in streaming tech affects the future developing environment? Esp. pertaining to the ps3 and its split memory design. Will Blu-ray have a part in how this tech. is implemented?
 
Initially it was probably a bit of both, today its just GPU. Remember though that multiplatform devs have it much harder than PS3 only devs. The main reason is because PS3 specific devs have only one version of the game, and hence nothing to compare it so. So, no one will be comparing Uncharted 360 to Uncharted PS3. The reason this makes life much simpler for them is because then you can take all kinds of tricks and shortcuts to get the game running faster and most will not know any better because there is nothing else to directly compare it to.

Multiplatform devs don't have that luxury, both versions need to look as close as possible. The little tricks that the PS3 only devs can do on their versions would get us killed on our multiplatform versions because sites like IGN, Gamespot, etc, will almost certainly do an A to B comparison between our 360 and PS3 versions and cry foul when they detect that version A has a triangle someplace that version B doesn't. Worse yet are sites like this one, where its almost certain that someone will plaster up screenshots of both and people will tear apart the one version because of x, y and z differences. So we have to get the same assets working on both platforms.

So, I've noticed that ports are recently getting better, and in some instances the PS3 version even seems to exceed that of the 360 = (Dirt, Oblivion, The Darkness, etc.) I take it there have to be modifications to the original assets while making it look no such modifications have been done. How do you propose stable framerates on the PS3 are to be achieved?

Perhaps I'm kind of reading into this post too much, but I get the feeling that it's basically saying visually any game done on the PS3 could be done better on the 360. Ninja Theory, and Naughty Dog talk a lot about motion blending, etc. are these features where the PS3 really dose shine, or in honestly, are there really no advantages in trying to make a game for the PS3 over the 360?

Oninotsume
 
Last edited by a moderator:

I'm not really sure what that is supposed to show, but anyway, perceived differences between the titles aside, I'm more interested in knowing:

1. How do multi-platform devs make ports that perform the same on the PS3 and Xbox 360? i.e. Apparently Call of Duty 4 = 60fps. on both platforms, and looks the same as far as videos and screenshots show.

2. What is the advantage, if any, for developing for the PS3? What feature set does the PS3 offer in terms of development?

Oninotsume
 
1. How do multi-platform devs make ports that perform the same on the PS3 and Xbox 360? i.e. Apparently Call of Duty 4 = 60fps. on both platforms, and looks the same as far as videos and screenshots show.

One multi platform studio (which shall remain nameless) did it by taking away the 360 dev kits of many of the developers, and forced them to make it work on PS3 first. Apparently it worked, as I hear both versions are running similarly. I don't think that would work at out studio though, as taking away Pix would lead to severe bloodshed.
 
Pix is very cool indeed, though I think it lost its throne :)

Not yet! GCMReplay still crashes alot on us when processing the more complex scenes. We sent our crash issues to a friend that works on the GCMReplay tool, and apparently one of the issues was that our game has too many verticies. No joke! He was slightly perpexled with I added that we're running 60fps with 4xmsaa on 360 ;)


Oninotsume said:
...are there really no advantages in trying to make a game for the PS3 over the 360?

Missed this one earlier. Yeah, there are definite advantages to going PS3. One that for some odd reason isn't mentioned as much is it's standard hard drive. Personally I think thats the PS3's biggest advantage this gen. Many games stream assets nowadays, and with both optical and hard drive sources to stream from, this gives it potentially an edge. You can also pre-install frequently accessed data on the hdd, use it for caching, and so on.

The other obvious one is blu-ray, so uber games like Metal Gear, etc, don't need to worry about space issues. It also helps with copy protection.

Or...if you have a game for which RSX rendering alone is enough, yet you need piles of cpu power, then PS3 is your platform of choice. I presume Little Big Planet will fall into this category.

The catch with all of the above is that requiring them effectively shuts you out of the 360 market.
 
One multi platform studio (which shall remain nameless) did it by taking away the 360 dev kits of many of the developers, and forced them to make it work on PS3 first. Apparently it worked, as I hear both versions are running similarly. I don't think that would work at out studio though, as taking away Pix would lead to severe bloodshed.

Factor5 suggested this approach in one of their interviews.

I think Mike Acton mentioned something to that effect too (Good data design benefits both PS3 and Xbox 360, but I think it probably benefits PS3 more).

EDIT: It is not surprising that Xenos can process more vertices than RSX because of its unified architecture (RSX should have more pixel shading power in comparison, if I remember things correctly). That's why RSX is designed to work with SPU in vertex processing ? And if GCMReplay is more feature rich than Pix, then it would be less painful, more effective if developers happen to work on PS3 first. It is great that you guys pushed the vertex limits on GCMReplay, it would improve the tool even more.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Not yet! GCMReplay still crashes alot on us when processing the more complex scenes. We sent our crash issues to a friend that works on the GCMReplay tool, and apparently one of the issues was that our game has too many verticies. No joke! He was slightly perpexled with I added that we're running 60fps with 4xmsaa on 360 ;)

Man, I would love to see a future conference presentation on the work you (?) have done for the title. Maybe I'm reading a bit into it too much, but "high vertex count + tiling + high framerate" sounds pretty nice. :cool:
 
Joker: I'm clearly referring to features that Pix doesn't have, I guess they will need to play catch up a bit, which is why competition is good :)
edit: it's also quite easy to throw a lot of geometry to a unified shading architecture without paying a huge perf cost for it, but I stopped getting excited about vertices/triangles per second figures this gen cause those numbers are not really representative of what you see on screen. As I stated many time we should get better at distributing geometry on
screen, we often manage insane polycounts (2-3M triangles per frame or even more) without having a good return in term
of image quality.
 
Last edited:
I think Mike Acton mentioned something to that effect (Good data design benefits both PS3 and Xbox 360, but I think it probably benefits PS3 more).
Well, I've often said it in the opposite tack, in that poor data design hurts both the PS3 and the Xenon, but it hurts the PS3 a lot more. :p

In our case, we didn't try to formalize multithreading until we looked at PS3 first. We also emulated SPURS jobs on on other platforms -- lo and behold, we got a pretty darn sizeable gain out of Xenon and PC as well. Not only that, but compared to the approaches Microsoft has been recommending, it was utterly no contest.

Of course, PS3 is still lagging behind for us because we have so many systems already in place that simply aren't anywhere near as optimized. Just getting 20 or 30 MB of code into PS3-worthy shape doesn't do anything for the other 350...

As I stated many time we should get better at distributing geometry on
screen, we often manage insane polycounts (2-3 triangles per frame or even more) without having a good return in term of image quality.
2-3 triangles per frame... that is indeed insane. ;)
 
Back
Top