What is Epic's rationale?

[mckmas8808]

How is it again that people are getting the idea that Epic is hyping PS3?

They're not hyping it, they're just telling us the truth about the PS3. Read the following comments. I put the PS3 comments in bold and the X360 comments in italics. In a way they do kinda talk more about the PS3 and then kinda say something about the X360 kinda fast at the end.

Sony's cell demos were extremely cool and inspiring but are totally achievable, and over time even surpassable, by third developers like us because, as Tim Sweeney said, the development environment is made up of parts we're already intimately familiar with: OpenGL, NVIDIA graphics, Linux, and PowerPC. Think about Epic's experience, for example. We rock on NVIDIA hardware. We have been doing OpenGL since Unreal 1. We regularly ship our games on Linux and we've won several Macintosh Game of the Year awards including a special World-Wide Design Award directly from Apple for UT2004. We're going to be able to kick serious ass on PS3, and so are a lot of our licensees and other 3rd party developers, in a way that wasn't remotely possible on past consoles.

I should add that we're in a similar position for Xbox 360.

Mark Rein: Sony signing up with nVidia: as soon as we heard that we were screaming and high-fiving around the office, that just kinda solidified it. We were worried about who Sony was going to go with, everybody was rumour mongering that Sony was just going to put another Cell in there.

Mark Rein: There's been this whole thing about Sony doing OpenGL, but we've been doing graphics in OpenGL for years, so we're quite good at it, and Microsoft's obviously Direct 3D, clearly another area that screams expertise for us. The Microsoft SDK is basically an extension of what we did on Xbox one, so you saw Unreal Championship 2, so obviously we've played a little with that, and then Sony, well basically their dev kits are based on Linux, and we shipped Linux since the original Dk, so...

Mark Rein: And then there's the graphics chips. Obviously we've been Nvidia's poster boy for a while, they built the theatre for us in their booth last year, and we're the only ones they've ever done that for.

Mark Rein: Obviously all the Playstation 3 stuff on Monday was phenomenal but I like both the presentations for different reasons. I thought Sony's was a technical tour de force and Microsoft was very much a "system" presentation.

I think Sony showed off a huge amount of technical prowess and had just amazing demos. Clearly they are in very good shape. And the system erases one of the things that was a stumbling block for us in the past in that it's really easy to develop for. It's on par with what Microsoft's got now.

And I thought Microsoft did a really good job showing the rich user interface of the machine, which if they are ever going to sell a billion—I don't know about that number—that's certainly the right thing to do

I was totally blown away by the idea of an HD IP camera for my PlayStation 3; I will definitely be buying one of those and sending one to my parents so we can do video conferencing and show them our kids growing up because we live a couple thousand miles away

One of the questions that the Chairman of NVIDIA was going to ask in his speech was, "How hard was it to take your shaders from PC to PS3?" But it's like we scratched the question because we don't take them from one or the other. We just play them—they're the exact same, no conversion, nothing. And the same with Xbox 360.

 

[ralexand]

Those are very telling quotes. They even admit to being nvidia's "poster child".

 

[Titanio]

Those are very telling quotes. They even admit to being nvidia's "poster child".

Doesn't really explain other quite interesting cell comments though (mckmas8808 hasn't posted any of them though).

I would think that having MS as as publisher would make them at least as disposed toward X360 bias...I wouldn't write off their comments.

 

[mckmas8808]

They did have CELL quotes but for some odd reason I can't find them know. I know I read of at least 2 or 3 times where they complement the CELL.

 

[ralexand]

Those are very telling quotes. They even admit to being nvidia's "poster child".

Doesn't really explain other quite interesting cell comments though (mckmas8808 hasn't posted any of them though).

I would think that having MS as as publisher would make them at least as disposed toward X360 bias...I wouldn't write off their comments.

I agree but it seems like bad business if they praise one console more than the other which it seems like they are doing even if they are significantly more impressed by one than the other. The 360 is usually a footnote when they are talking about next gen consoles.

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

Um..

Right, those comments would all be telling if the questions had been about both consoles, or their work in general and they went off on pro-PS3 banter and only barely mentioned the X360.

As it is, those comments are telling because the questions were directed about the PS3, yet Epic still tossed in Pro-X360 comments in their responses.

Those questions weren't a "Tell us what you're doing that's cool", those questions were "Tell us why the PS3 is cool" and they responded with "The PS3 is awesome because it can walk the dog and cook dinner at the same time! .... oh, and X360 can do that too".

 

[Titanio]

Those questions weren't a "Tell us what you're doing that's cool", those questions were "Tell us why the PS3 is cool"

Actually..what were the questions? Many of them, in fact, didn't mention PS3 or consoles at all, or mentioned it equally alongside X360 or PC.

For example (I'll bold the questions here, italicise the PS3 comments):

Freeman: First of all how do you pronounce [Ageia]? Is it ah-geea?, or ah-jeea?

Sweeney: It's 'ah-jeea'.

Freeman: Okay. How will that affect the performance of Unreal Engine 3 running on a hardware physics engine as opposed to a software physics engine?

Sweeney: Well, the big thing there is how we'll be able to put far, far more physical effects, with things like particle systems, and fluid effects, where without the Ageia system, we'll have a particle system with only a few hundred particles, and with the system, we could have tens of thousands of particles there. And it's really nice, because it mirrors the kind of non-traditional processing power that's available on the Playstation 3 with the Cell architecture, so it's a factor of ten times more computing power, but it's very special-purpose.

GS: The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 will both have extremely powerful multicore processors capable of doing a lot of physics calculations. Is that going to make it difficult for developers to port console games over to the PC?

MR: The PlayStation 3 Cell architecture is very similar to the hardware design of the Ageia chip, so the PC will be able to get superaccelerated also. The Ageia NovodeX API, when they bring it over to the PlayStation 3, will be very fast, very powerful--similar to the Ageia [chip]. But the cool thing about that is if someone's lead moneymaking platform is the PlayStation 3, they're going physics up the wazoo because they have so much power. That makes it a very economical choice for PC users to just pop a [physics] chip into the PC and then have the full physics effects that will be available on the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360.

 

[therealskywolf]

I think they talk about CELL, because they tought it was going to be tough to use it, but now that they have played around with it they feel free to talk good about it, Cell is the only "new" CPU, so its only normal that they will talk about it more in an interview since people want to know more about it.......the Xbox 360 CPU, is not really "new" so people already kinda know how it will work and whatnot.

I wouldnt call it BIas, and that interview was made right after the Sony PC if i'm not mistaken.

But thats regarding the CPU, regarding the GPU, man expect EPIC to be very biased, they are in Nvidia's bed, because of Nvidia Epic now considers the PS3 to be the graphical powerhouse, if it was an Ati Gpu they wouldnt be nearly as excited or as Pro Ps3.

 

[shaderguy]

I think what we've got here is a classic case of "shiny new toy" syndrome. Epic's programmers are excited about Cell because it's got a novel architecture that sounds powerful and interesting to program for.

But Epic doesn't actually have much experience with Cell yet. If you read their comments carefully, you'll realize that all they've done is port their existing single-threaded game engine from a PC to the main PowerPC core of Cell. They have not tried to use the SPEs yet. And we have no idea how well their engine performs on Cell, because they aren't showing the results publicly. It could be running at 8 frames per second, for all we know. (And of course they aren't using the final GPU either...)

Let's see how excited they are about Cell vs. Xbox 360 _after_ they've shipped their game.

 

[ralexand]

I think they talk about CELL, because they tought it was going to be tough to use it, but now that they have played around with it they feel free to talk good about it, Cell is the only "new" CPU, so its only normal that they will talk about it more in an interview since people want to know more about it.......the Xbox 360 CPU, is not really "new" so people already kinda know how it will work and whatnot.

I wouldnt call it BIas, and that interview was made right after the Sony PC if i'm not mistaken.

But thats regarding the CPU, regarding the GPU, man expect EPIC to be very biased, they are in Nvidia's bed, because of Nvidia Epic now considers the PS3 to be the graphical powerhouse, if it was an Ati Gpu they wouldnt be nearly as excited or as Pro Ps3.

The xbox cpu is newer than the cell. They actually have cell chips to work with but they only recently shipped the tricore xcpu and it development is definitely more recent than the cell which was started 10 years ago.

 

[Titanio]

It could be running at 8 frames per second, for all we know. (And of course they aren't using the final GPU either...)

It was running pretty smoothly on just the PPE at E3 (much smoother than 8fps certainly!)

They actually have cell chips to work with but they only recently shipped the tricore xcpu and it development is definitely more recent than the cell which was started 10 years ago.

Work on Cell did not start 10 years ago. They started discussing Cell in 99, I believe. Work proper started in 2001 with the establishment of the STI design lab in Austin. The final design you see today wasn't finalised till much later - recent articles even mention Kutaragi throwing out designs and having the team start from scratch. It was being designed for mass production in 2006.

 

[BlueTsunami]

Um..

Right, those comments would all be telling if the questions had been about both consoles, or their work in general and they went off on pro-PS3 banter and only barely mentioned the X360.

As it is, those comments are telling because the questions were directed about the PS3, yet Epic still tossed in Pro-X360 comments in their responses.

Those questions weren't a "Tell us what you're doing that's cool", those questions were "Tell us why the PS3 is cool" and they responded with "The PS3 is awesome because it can walk the dog and cook dinner at the same time! .... oh, and X360 can do that too".

HUH? tell us why the PS3 is cool? Where did it say that? Way to spin something....the majority of those questions wheren't about the PS3, it was Ageia that made reference to the PS3. It was nice enought that they interjected with the XBOX 360 also being nice. But if your pointing fingers at anyone it should be Ageia not that interviewer....