can't recall the last time somebody mentioned that of the Xbox360
Please reread this thread and specifically the links in the OP, where said poster himself noted issues (e.g. Xenon related issues, tiling, etc).
I know some of you believe this stuff (everything is always anti-Sony/MS), and there are definately leanings in certain areas among different posters, the reality is people tend to amplify the negative they dislike and ignore the kudos they agree with.
I do have to chuckle though about your 360 comment because in the last year we have had swarms of threads (not just posts, but threads) about lack of AF, lack of MSAA, draw call overhead, broken tiling APIs, thread swapping latency, inability to MEMEXPORT and Tile, and so forth.
Cell and Xenos, both, take by far the biggest lashings -- but also the biggest praises -- on B3D. RSX and Xenon, due to the lack of disclosure by Sony and MS, respectively, has kept discussion on both to a lower degree than the other two, although I think we have a lot better understanding of Xenon now than 12 months ago and I think MOST have come to the realization of what RSX is (although a little late for any interesting discussion).
For the most part, I think devs, especially, those with more even experience in both machines (or in general?), are usually not the ones to point out advantage in either machine...
I think fans tend to pit extremes too often.
The reality is that for multiplatform development, and the issues multiplatform devs face codeveloping a titles for 2 or 3 platform targets and typically under tighter annual deadlines and funding restrictions are quite different from flagship AAA 1st party title.
Neither position invalidates the other, they are just different. A perfect example will be Motorstorm and Heavenly Sword. They will be some of the first games (along with Resistance) to use a bit of the SPEs. Thus far multiplatform devs, due to the nature of the industry, have not had that luxury. What is a perk to one is neutral to the other.
And these sorts of check and balances vary greatly, not only based on exclusive/multiplatform, but also the type of game and technology you are trying to leverage.
IMO, what observers may best glean from this discussion (hopefully it stays calm) is that the hurdles, troubles, and difficulties of development for
some 3rd parties is different than those from
some 1st parties. Some of the things will be absolutely true for all developers within a confined context, many won't.
Personally, from a business standpoint, I find the opinions of 3rd and 1st parties interesting because their business models are so very, very different and compete and coexist in the same market, but by doing things very differently.
We've gotten around the split memory issue, but in our case we're seeing far less memory free in general. Out of the entire 512mb in each machine, both Sony and Microsoft reserve some for assorted reasons. We have somewhat more free memory on 360 for some reason. Maybe this is just due to the sdk's we're currently using, I'm not sure. Whatever the case may be, we maxed out memory on 360 so that left us scrambling for ways to free memory to get it to fit on PS3. Do you guys see this? I've always been curious if its just us that's seeing less free memory on PS3.
I am not a developer, but from my browsing I think their are two main culprits most agree on:
1. Framebuffer. Since the eDRAM does all the heavy lifting for the buffers the GDDR3 pool primarily holds the finished framebuffer itself. On the PS3 your 720p 4xMSAA framebuffer is going to be about 30MB, on Xenos much of that data is stored on the eDRAM and tiled in to the system memory.
2. OS. Hard to get any hard figures from MS or Sony, but it seems nearly absolutely certain that the PS3 operating system is a bit larger than the Xbox 360 operating system.
I think those would explain your available memory resource differences. Those and different storage formats and such which you already mentioned.
This one interested me because we're actually seing the opposite. We actually had a very specific case to deal with where a cutscene was running slower on PS3 and we tracked it down to being pixel shader bound. It was using a 'crazy expensive' pixel shader which stressed even the 360, but it was able to maintain 30fps. Hard to say for sure why we're see different results though.
I think the reality is depending on your enigne and shader code the 360 or PS3 can come out on top. Which would come out on top, most regularly, would be hard to tell even in an "ideal" world because even if one of the two chips was faster on 7 out of 10 shader codes, who is not to say that the 3 of those 10 are more common or important (in general or to a certain games design)?
We run into this problem all the time when benchmarking applications. What is better, GPU-A that edges out GPU-B by 5% in 7 out of 10 games, or GPU-B which edges out GPU-A by 25% in 3 applications? And when you dig deeper--like how many of those situations were at 30fps or below, and so forth--can make crowning a winner very difficult.
And the reality that you guys have hit on is there is more than 1 way to skin a cat. As you guys dig deeper into the consoles some of the different architectural decisions as well as featuresets may become more relevant. You may even find that to get a similar end result on screen you take competely different approaches and different technologies to get there. Personally, I expect over the next 2 years to hear stuff like, "We did ABC on an SPE" with a response, "We just used vertex texturing to do that on Xenos" and "We used tesselation on Xenos for this" with a response, "We didn't need RSX to do that because we did it on an SPE".
What really will matter is how the tools and hardware MS and Sony gave all of us makes for better games. The PS3 and Xbox 360 are so similar, yet frighteningly different. But in general performance envelope they are in the same general ballpark and most games with some adjustments will run on either, and should quite well. Of course, as your original thread vented and hit on, the time frame differences and price disparities and the obvious ****** attraction of every microcosmic event really blow things overboard and can make the discussion process, even in friendly disagreement, an act of frustration at times. For that I deeply feel bad for you devs! Almost as bad as I feel for myself
I think I can speak for everything when I say we appreciate having another developer here, especially a multiplatform developer (not many of those here who are vocal) and one who has worked on the Xbox 360 (before a couple months back ERP was pretty much it, but Cal and Fran have joined recently, but that is still a very small number compared to the number of PS developers here). Hopefully goodwill will prevail in the coming year and we can all learn something new, even if we have to agree to disagree.
We do
Although we are definitely not using them as effectively as we could. We're only using 1 spu at the moment as well. Shamefull, I know ;( But, I plan to devote a chunk of 2007 to making better use of threads on both PS3 and 360. My current thought is to make numerous 'threadlets', each being an extremely simple process that has one specific purpose, and snoozes and waits to be fed data for processing. We'll definitly be making full use of the spu's in '07.
It will be interesting to hear the results. SPEs are 'crazy fast' when you lean on their strengths. Please keep us updated for the sort of algorhythms you get up on the SPEs. It would be very neat to read a developer diary discussing the development process in detail, hurdles, false starts, restarts, and accomplishments (and dare I say compromises, corners cut, and failures) that occur from the planning, to designing, implimenting and finally to shipping stage.
Alas I am afraid that is a time consuming project and probably would not be NDA friendly.
