Sony running out of PS3 dev kits
- Thread starter mckmas8808
- Start date
And then he explained why it wasn't "clear cut," because it was frames rendered individually and stitched together into a 60fps video.
The only thing he was unclear on was what level of a dev. kit the renderer was running on for that exercise. Seeing as how I believe his company is now a Sony 2nd party or something, they may get better access to development hardware as it becomes available as well.
creon100 said:
Isn't that the definition of prerender? A pentium1 with no 3d card could make Toy Story that way. Of course it would take 300 years.
Anyway back on topic. I'm sure there will be some hurdles for all these exotic CPU's in manufacturing that will hold up dev kits. I forsee some clock rate changes hitting the rumor mills.
mckmas8808
Legend
He meant PS3 dev kit hardware custom made by IBM.
two said:
No, the tearing is just due to miss-matched refresh rates on the camcorder and the video projector.
And about the short supply of PS3 dev kits, that's entirely believable. Early test boards of pre-production chips are typically custom built and need lots of refreshes to keep up with silicon revisions and board bug fixes. Developers will want the latest greatest board faster than Sony can fix bugs--that's just the nature of early days.
Pozer said:Isn't that the definition of prerender? A pentium1 with no 3d card could make Toy Story that way. Of course it would take 300 years.
If you find the topic where Deanoc discussed Heavenly Sword you'd see that the video was rendered using the actual in-game rendering engine (except for the face in the beginning since he said the close-up facial animation engine isn't finished). He also said the indoor environments are already very playable, but that the big outdoor army scenes need some optimizations.
Sony just wanted a 60fps video to show for the press conference so they created the video the way he described to make the video.
So, yeah, you COULD call it pre-rendered, with the caveat that it's not being done in some animation package like Pixar uses with effects that would be impossible to pull off in the real game engine, and the fact that certain areas are already running at playable framerate in the real game.
This must be a dumb question, but how many devkits are needed per game, on average?
Does every programmer need their own devkit station? Or do some of the programmers use just a normal PC or mac. Most (all?) of the code should be programmable anywhere anyway.
What about artists? I'm sure most of them can use any computer to create the content.
Are the devkit stations used only at the stage when everything is put together and debugged and such?
?
Does every programmer need their own devkit station? Or do some of the programmers use just a normal PC or mac. Most (all?) of the code should be programmable anywhere anyway.
What about artists? I'm sure most of them can use any computer to create the content.
Are the devkit stations used only at the stage when everything is put together and debugged and such?
?
rabidrabbit said:
Generally in an ideal situation one per programmer and if you can swing it one per artist.
Having said that most modern devkits can be shared amongst multiple programmers since they connect via a network connection, and the tools generlally run on PC's..... but it's damn inconvenient.
During early prerelease days it's not uncommon for devkits to be in very short supply. MS is pretty good about getting alpha kits in quantity, Sony isn't, but their alpha kit has hardware that is closer to final.
Regards Heavenly Sword : Deano said they have the game working, but not full frame rate, not at 1080p. All the stuff you see in the video is in game engine. The only thing he confirmed wasn't was the closeup of the red-head girl used in promo shots, I think because of the skin shader something-or-other.
So Sony were given a choice. Show a game WIP as it currently plays, with jerky frame rate and fearsome jaggies (ike MS did) or piece low frame-rate screenshots together to get to the probably final product. They chose the latter. It's in game, it's what to expect. Maybe Ninja Theory will miss their mark. Maybe aa won't be so high, but to all extents and purposes HS should be appearing as we see it there. Remember it (the current game engine) was running on a single thread, not using the SPE's, so there's LOADS of room for improvement. And the AI shown (all those troops have rudimentary AI, ducked out the way of the missile and so forth - I asked!), millions of troops...everything there IS running NOW on PS3 development hardware, in much the same way XB360 games in development are.
I understand the same of the other movies. There were concept movies, rendered offline using a raytracing package say, of what devs were aiming/hoping for, and there was pieced together, 'optimised' footage showing WIP games enhanced to something more presentable, taking a game that's been in development for 6 months and projecting the level of quality expected in 12 months. People can argue if this is fair or not, but in no way does it mean there's no working games on PS3!
Regards only 100 Dev Kits, this doesn't necessarily mean bad Cell yields by any stretch. A dev kit will need a custom mobo and chipset to use SLI'd 6800s on FlexIO. There won't be any production run on these things as demand is so small (1000s say) so they'll be manufactured by small parties on small scale. Until we know the limiting factor (mobo chipset, Cells) jumping to conclusion isn't going to offer any useful insight.
So Sony were given a choice. Show a game WIP as it currently plays, with jerky frame rate and fearsome jaggies (ike MS did) or piece low frame-rate screenshots together to get to the probably final product. They chose the latter. It's in game, it's what to expect. Maybe Ninja Theory will miss their mark. Maybe aa won't be so high, but to all extents and purposes HS should be appearing as we see it there. Remember it (the current game engine) was running on a single thread, not using the SPE's, so there's LOADS of room for improvement. And the AI shown (all those troops have rudimentary AI, ducked out the way of the missile and so forth - I asked!), millions of troops...everything there IS running NOW on PS3 development hardware, in much the same way XB360 games in development are.
I understand the same of the other movies. There were concept movies, rendered offline using a raytracing package say, of what devs were aiming/hoping for, and there was pieced together, 'optimised' footage showing WIP games enhanced to something more presentable, taking a game that's been in development for 6 months and projecting the level of quality expected in 12 months. People can argue if this is fair or not, but in no way does it mean there's no working games on PS3!
Regards only 100 Dev Kits, this doesn't necessarily mean bad Cell yields by any stretch. A dev kit will need a custom mobo and chipset to use SLI'd 6800s on FlexIO. There won't be any production run on these things as demand is so small (1000s say) so they'll be manufactured by small parties on small scale. Until we know the limiting factor (mobo chipset, Cells) jumping to conclusion isn't going to offer any useful insight.
MS's alpha kits were PPC cores and ATi GPUs, right? Can't Sony provide something similar, with a single PPC core, Linux, and SLI'd 6800s to begin with, to at least give a coding environment for PPE+graphics to be starting off with. It'd be similar to the MS alpha setup in not really being representative of the final hardware, but having the same basic coding setup.ERP said:
I remember DeanoC said they used some post processing to because for example the numerous flags in one scene didn't flow as smooth as hoped in the build.
Or something like that.
Somebody dig up that old thread before Deano comes.
Or something like that.
Somebody dig up that old thread before Deano comes.
jvd said:
They meant realtime, interactive on stage. Not realtime period. And I'd expect them to make a point of it - Sony had originally suggested they simply be part of the video reel, but Epic were eager to demo it live on stage instead.
Shifty Geezer said:
Maybe Sony feels a "regular" PPC core is too far from the final hardware. Possibly further than X360's tricore setup.
And I think it plausible that the bottleneck could as easily be with the rather peculiar hardware connecting all these parts together (cell to 6800 SLIs etc.). When actual parts are available, if they still are having supply probs, then I'd be more worried.
Alpha_Spartan
Regular
PC's. It's easy for an art studio to make a 5 minute CGI movie without PS3 hardware.ralexand said:
Shifty Geezer said:
FWIW This is pure speculation I think the issue is software.
MS will have written 3 graphics layers by the time they ship a final unit, and large portions of the OS will go through significant changes.
I just don't think Sony is setup to support multiple hardware platforms over relatively small periods with OS software and tools.
It could just as easilly be philosophy, Sony get something much closer to real silicon out sooner (relative to launch) than MS. In the end though Sony is a hardware company and MS is a software company.
