SO this is what I am getting out of the 360 and PS3...

[Acert93]

So you have Kirk who is anti-Unified Shader at this point bemoaning it; and ATI who is pro-Unifided Shader singing its praises.

Who to believe?

Actually, the most curious thing about that interview is that he was admitting they will have to do it; he was just downplayng it for now.

His comment on developers liking it raises the question of what he actually heard - did a developer say they didn't like it? In which case, why, as its transparent to them; or did just he hear some devs may use the CPU for VS work (which is something that MS designed the CPU to be able to do), and he just put the rest together?

Good summary Dave And Welcome Back!

With lots and lots of work to do for the PS3, the target of 30fps seems acheivable. Its fairly common even without a new platform for games to be under framerate at this stage of development.

That sounds more than reasonable. From the time of the E3 footage you guys have at least a year, if not much more, to not only finish the game content but the streamline the engine. 5-20fps is really not bad considering how early in development you are... considering you are on hardware a good couple notches less powerful/streamlined as the final target doesn't help either.

I cannot wait to see what you guys do for a 2nd gen title from scratch!

 

[seismologist]

I mean there are still alot people who prefer gt4´s grafik over forza´s grafik, despite missing mipmapping, missing aa, less texture detail ...

And the difference between ps2<->xbox is huge compared to the difference betwenn ps3<->xbox360, where we most certanly will not see a clear winner.

That's what I'm starting to believe.
PS3 has the edge in raw performance. Xbox has the edge in ease of programming. So in the beginning the two will balance each other out.

Though Sony does have some talented developers on their side who would be able to quickly extract maximum performance from the PS3.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I don't know how intrinsically easier XB360 is to program for than PS3. Both need personal approaches. I think development ease will be mostly attributable to tools, which will change over time.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Though Sony does have some talented developers on their side who would be able to quickly extract maximum performance from the PS3.

It took like 5 or 6 years until ps2 stopped getting garbage like Red Faction, and began gettin amazing games like GOW and GT4.

i wouldn't call that "quickly"

 

[NaMo4184]

but xbox was still better looking

This is not true. The xbox1 CPU ( mi P3 mi celeron ) did 1.4 GFLOPS/s, and the EE of PS2 did 6.2 GFLOPS/s ( its more than 4 times more powerful ), and it shows ! Its really 4 times more powerful in real performance, look at multiplatform games, on xbox the CPU run the gameplay code + AI + physics. The EE of PS2 run the same gameplay code + AI + physics + geometry ( the EE was used as a vertex shader loosely speaking ) + lighting + shadows + particle effects + any special graphical effect you see on screen ( the EE was used as a pixel shader without texture calculations, loosely speaking ) !!! And this is unbelievable, and it shows you the power of the revolutionary EE, and how much GFLOPS/s calculations are important. Simply the cpu of xbox cant do all of this, because it doesent have the necessary power of floating point calculations.
The GS ( graphics synthesiser, the GPU of PS2 ) was used only as a ROP + textures. ( and what textures ! without good hardware texture compression, which was the worst stupid thing of ps2, from all the choices of kutaragi )

Even though the PS2 had a great and powerful CPU for graphics design the xbox still looked better. Last time it was 4 times as powerful this time its only twice as powerful. Though 100 flops is a huge difference in absolute terms.

The information I am itching to know how will PS3 be able to fully exploit Cell and RSX at the same time. the felxio is the key but nobody really knows "how" it will be done.

 

[Acert93]

I don't know how intrinsically easier XB360 is to program for than PS3. Both need personal approaches. I think development ease will be mostly attributable to tools, which will change over time.

Can we clone you or something?

You hit the nail on the head, without taking a jab or inserting some side comment at either MS or Sony fans.

You are a machine, huh? Toying with us mere mortals

Keep up the good work Shifty.

 

[Brimstone]

Re: but xbox was still better looking

The PS3 CELL CPU doesn't have a dot product instruction, while the Xbox 360 CPU does.

The SPE's on CELL will take a big performance hit when it comes to branch misperdicts. The Xbox 360 CPU cores should be a little for forgiving when dealing with branches.

 

[Titanio]

Re: but xbox was still better looking

The PS3 CELL CPU doesn't have a dot product instruction, while the Xbox 360 CPU does.

So? In a competition of dot products I know where my money would be

The SPE's on CELL will take a big performance hit when it comes to branch misperdicts. The Xbox 360 CPU cores should be a little for forgiving when dealing with branches.

True. But with profiling and hints, where there is a non-equal probability of taking one branch over the other, you should mostly take the right branch. In some instances, might "programmer predicition" (hints) not be a little better than hardware prediction, even?

 

[3roxor]

In some instances, might "programmer predicition" (hints) not be a little better than hardware prediction, even?

Most likely not..but the spe's aren't going to work with branch heavy code/tasks anyway.

 

[Embedded Sea]

"I think development ease will be mostly attributable to tools"

If that's the case, MS has won that war already. They have three huge teams dedicated to making development tools and helping out third parties, in addition to the Xbox Base Software team which is the largest MS Xbox team. It's not even a contest.

"SPEs are evil little bastards" will be the new quote of next generation

 

[3roxor]

If that's the case, MS has won that war already. They have three huge teams dedicated to making development tools and helping out third parties

dunno..there are also hundreds of people at IBM working on cell development tools and Linux integration. Another potential is that IBM made it open source.

 

[Fox5]

Though Sony does have some talented developers on their side who would be able to quickly extract maximum performance from the PS3.

It took like 5 or 6 years until ps2 stopped getting garbage like Red Faction, and began gettin amazing games like GOW and GT4.

i wouldn't call that "quickly"

Really? To me it seemed by the time Xbox and Gamecube were out, PS2 had just about caught up with their graphics. PS2 never caught up in IQ of the image though, though some GameCube and Xbox games got worse in IQ.(I think Halo 2 and Resident Evil 4 both have rather bad IQ)

BTW, anyone think Nintendo might win ease of development?

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

If that's the case, MS has won that war already. They have three huge teams dedicated to making development tools and helping out third parties, in addition to the Xbox Base Software team which is the largest MS Xbox team. It's not even a contest.

It's true that MS's tools are always really nice and Sony's tools have always been little more than a pile of garbage in the form of 0s and 1s. Even so, we're forgetting that PS3's tools are largely the work of IBM, so it's not quite the 1000:1 difference that you'd expect.

Either way, I expect MS's tools to be no different than they've always been - clean, simple, easy to use, and prone to crash. I'm still of the impression that this whole XNA thing is overblown. If there's anything I'd expect IBM to have the edge on, it'll be the compilers.

IBM and Microsoft aside, the big thing missing from both of them (and probably always will be) is just art pipeline. Art is always going to be the expensive part of things, and at the same time, the most important. So what if XNA will enable me to get my renderer up and going quicker? Is it going to help my artists produce quicker at lower cost? Is it going to make it any easier to get content into my engine? Is it going to enable me to get by with a smaller team of artists?

 

[Tap In]

.... Is it going to help my artists produce quicker at lower cost? Is it going to make it any easier to get content into my engine? Is it going to enable me to get by with a smaller team of artists?

Isn't that what improved use of procedural synthesis is going to allow? (at least as I understood Anand's article to say)

 

[ERP]

It's true that MS's tools are always really nice and Sony's tools have always been little more than a pile of garbage in the form of 0s and 1s. Even so, we're forgetting that PS3's tools are largely the work of IBM, so it's not quite the 1000:1 difference that you'd expect.

Nope not the work of IBM.
Sony even turned down the IBM compiler, arguably one of the best multithreaded compilers around........ They are using the Gnu compiler again.

There is currently no way to debug native SPE code in the Sony toolset, and just single stepping is a hideous operation in the debugger.

Sony has a LONG way to catch up to MS on the tools side. I do know that in the long term they are committed to getting there, but they're certainly not there yet.

 

[Titanio]

Isn't that what improved use of procedural synthesis is going to allow? (at least as I understood Anand's article to say)

Procedural stuff can't be used for everything. And you need both programmer and artist input for that, usually - programmers to actually code the stuff, and artists to tweak the parameters and so forth to ensure it looks good. You wouldn't necessarily save time with it, depending on what you're doing - though in some cases, you would, yes, and it could be very worthwhile.

 

[Fafalada]

The PS3 CELL CPU doesn't have a dot product instruction, while the Xbox 360 CPU does.

And 360 CPU has 2-3x longer instruction latencies. You know how they say nothing comes for free

The Xbox 360 CPU cores should be a little for forgiving when dealing with branches.

Obviously since the prediction is automatic - but when the mispredict does happen, the penalty is worse on XeCore then on SPE.

Sony even turned down the IBM compiler

No need to be nice about it - they were probably just being cheap not wanting to pay licensing to IBM for it

 

[DeanoC]

Sony even turned down the IBM compiler

I found it highly amusing that the IBM Cell FFT presentation was using XLC not GCC...

 

[Titanio]

The Xbox 360 CPU cores should be a little for forgiving when dealing with branches.

Obviously since the prediction is automatic - but when the mispredict does happen, the penalty is worse on XeCore then on SPE.

Sort of OT, but: I guess this is due to the longer XeCore pipeline? Also, do you know how exactly branch hinting in the SPEs works? If you have 3 branches, do you simply hint "go with branch b", since b is the most common case, or are there more sophisticated options available (like based on the last branch taken etc.)?

 

[nAo]

Re: but xbox was still better looking

The SPE's on CELL will take a big performance hit when it comes to branch misperdicts.

SPEs will not take a performance hit when it comes to mispredicted branches..cause SPEs don't have a branch prediction unit!
IIRC, if a branch has not been previously hinted, a SPE assumes a conditional branch is always taken.
If the branch is not taken (and it's not hinted) then there would be a severe performance hit.