PS3 is not ahead of its time. This is corporate spin that Sony wants you to believe. It's their way of explaining why it's doing so poor ("Oh, the system is so advanced that developers haven't figured out how to use all that power yet"😉
Sony's Reasoning for Cutting BC from PS3
That may be so but the fact remains that it is a system's specs, not how well it is used that dictates its actual power. It may or may not be that companies are using PS3's power to make ports to it better, but it's certainly true that it will indeed have at least some games that do. I'd be shocked if MGS4 did not use the PS3's power to its fullest extent(of course, I'd also be shocked if Hideo Kojima did not find yet another way to piss us off with it, but that's another topic).
franpa wrote:exactly, the 360 would kill the ps3 before anyone becomes proficient in coding for the ps3.
I must disagree. I point you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgaea_3 and its awesomeness. I want a PS3 now just for this. :kitty:
The thing is that the PS3's strengths are very clear to lay out, and not nessisarily something you can apply in the real world. You have the CELL processor, the Blu-ray capacity, and the standard HardDrive to count on.
Blu-ray can help, though depending on the type of game, multipule DVDs would have worked too. The hard drive caching can make a big difference, but not nessisarily. The 360 has a 16X DVD-ROM drive which is quite fast anyway. The CELL processor, truely is capable of moving alot of memory around/doing "things". The problem is the real world use of these "things" it can do. In a scientific use like the folding program, you can probably take full advantage. But in a video game, it's probably alot harder to really use all the potential CPU power in any way that helps, not to mention it would take special care which developers don't like to do these days. No one wants to have to figure out the PS3's setup and write a game specifically to work best on it. They want to make an engine that runs on both PS3, Xbox 360, and maybe even PC.
So yes the PS3 has alot of potential in it, but I doubt it will really matter. The PS3 and Xbox 360 are more or less on equal footing and the 360 has gotten much better software support and a 1 year lead that really helped.
MottZilla wrote:The thing is that the PS3's strengths are very clear to lay out, and not nessisarily something you can apply in the real world. You have the CELL processor, the Blu-ray capacity, and the standard HardDrive to count on.Blu-ray can help, though depending on the type of game, multipule DVDs would have worked too. The hard drive caching can make a big difference, but not nessisarily. The 360 has a 16X DVD-ROM drive which is quite fast anyway. The CELL processor, truely is capable of moving alot of memory around/doing "things". The problem is the real world use of these "things" it can do. In a scientific use like the folding program, you can probably take full advantage. But in a video game, it's probably alot harder to really use all the potential CPU power in any way that helps, not to mention it would take special care which developers don't like to do these days. No one wants to have to figure out the PS3's setup and write a game specifically to work best on it. They want to make an engine that runs on both PS3, Xbox 360, and maybe even PC.
So yes the PS3 has alot of potential in it, but I doubt it will really matter. The PS3 and Xbox 360 are more or less on equal footing and the 360 has gotten much better software support and a 1 year lead that really helped.
This neglects one major factor.
Remember when PS2 first came out and no one was using it to it''s full potential? Remember what happened? MGS2 that's what After that developers did indeed start using the console properly. And I'm not hard pressed to believe that MGS4 may do the same for PS3.
Anarchy_Balsac wrote:This neglects one major factor.Remember when PS2 first came out and no one was using it to it''s full potential? Remember what happened? MGS2 that's what After that developers did indeed start using the console properly. And I'm not hard pressed to believe that MGS4 may do the same for PS3.
There's a key difference though. The PS2 still followed the normal setup. You have a CPU, a GPU, and a SPU (Processing, Graphics, Sound) setup. This is like most machines. The problem with early PS2 was the tools just didn't exist, people didn't have any support from Sony, it was the wild west.
The PS3 does too have development problems, but now you have a complex multicore cpu sort of design. The PS3 to get good performance must have the game using the SPEs effectively. The Xbox 360 and the PC have much more standard ways of doing these things. The 360 has 3 cores, and a PC having one or two, and I've heard of four. The PS3 has 7 of these little units you need to use. It's rather ridiculus really.
All I'm saying is expect them to start making better quality and more solid games, but don't expect as much of a leap as we saw with PS2. I'm sure MGS4 will be a high quality title and certainly one PS3 owner will love. But I'm also not convinced we won't see MGS4 ported to X360.
MottZilla wrote:There's a key difference though. The PS2 still followed the normal setup. You have a CPU, a GPU, and a SPU (Processing, Graphics, Sound) setup. This is like most machines. The problem with early PS2 was the tools just didn't exist, people didn't have any support from Sony, it was the wild west.The PS3 does too have development problems, but now you have a complex multicore cpu sort of design. The PS3 to get good performance must have the game using the SPEs effectively. The Xbox 360 and the PC have much more standard ways of doing these things. The 360 has 3 cores, and a PC having one or two, and I've heard of four. The PS3 has 7 of these little units you need to use. It's rather ridiculus really.
All I'm saying is expect them to start making better quality and more solid games, but don't expect as much of a leap as we saw with PS2. I'm sure MGS4 will be a high quality title and certainly one PS3 owner will love. But I'm also not convinced we won't see MGS4 ported to X360.
Although you have a point about the PS2 having different development problems, that's still no reason that a little competition from konami can't still spark things in the PS3's favor the way it did for PS2. Companies can accomplish something if they want to, it's just that they don't see it in their feasible profit margins for now. But with MGS4 bringing fire to their feet, I can easily see things begin to shift. And yeah, MGS4 could be ported to the 360, but only in the same sense that DOOM could have been ported to the NES. They might still bother to do it, but 360 customers will be missing out bigtime on the detailed gameplay, I'm not simply talking pretty graphics either.
Just throwing this out there, but Sony has lost over a billion dollars over the past two quarters.
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/fr/07q2_sony.pdf
I dunno what else I can say about this other than "holy shit".
Sadly developers are just going to have to deal with it. Its standard now to see PCs come with Dual Core processors, with Quad Cores sometime in the future. With chip designers trying to squeeze every ounce of power out of their processors, single core chips are a thing of the past. You can only process data so fast in such a small space without overheating. Everyone wants more processors, more cores, more power, faster load times, better graphics, bigger enviroments...and sooner or later something has to give. You scoff at the Cell Processor for being so ridiculous. For what? Because it has more cores than the others? Its just a matter of time before other chip designers have just as many. 5...10...15 years from now? Its just going to get worse. Sure, Sony may have made some poor business decisions about the PS3, but does that make the technology inside the PS3 any worse than others? Media, People, Fanboys...all make out that because Sony is such a company with all the mistakes they've made, the PS3 itself is a reflection of it. The PS3 may not be leaps and bounds above competition, but its nothing to laugh at.
The only problem I really see is that Sony has no clue on how to market the PS3 in order to sell it; removing or adding things here and there trying to find the sweet spot. You get fluctuating prices and changes in the hardware, and the people that suffer from it are the consumers.
Just my $.02
The problem is the way the CELL works though. It's not the same as having 7 AMD64 cores or 7 Intel Core2 cores. Hell for gaming you'd be better off with just an AMD64 X2 or a dual core Core2 from Intel. Slamming as many cpu cores as you can into a machine doesn't help. They have to have a reasonable purpose. And it makes PS3 an oddball. 7 SPEs you need to spoon feed, where Xbox 360 has 3 cores, and I think atleast 5 threads the developer can use.. and then the PCs generally might have 2 cores these days. But no one has 7 or a need for 7 and each CELL SPE I doubt can compare to a AMD or Intel core.
CELL also suffers from overhype. They were hyping this shit so bad you'd have thought it was going to make everything else obsolete and a pile of dust. Not true at all.
MottZilla wrote:The problem is the way the CELL works though. It's not the same as having 7 AMD64 cores or 7 Intel Core2 cores. Hell for gaming you'd be better off with just an AMD64 X2 or a dual core Core2 from Intel. Slamming as many cpu cores as you can into a machine doesn't help. They have to have a reasonable purpose. And it makes PS3 an oddball. 7 SPEs you need to spoon feed, where Xbox 360 has 3 cores, and I think atleast 5 threads the developer can use.. and then the PCs generally might have 2 cores these days. But no one has 7 or a need for 7 and each CELL SPE I doubt can compare to a AMD or Intel core.
That's like saying, "We don't need a faster car, so why learn to drive one?" Yes its more complex than that but simple fact is, while it may take time for companies to get adjusted to the PS3, they'll probably go ahead learn it once pressure is on them to do so. To say they won't use something better simply because they don't need something better, no, I'm afraid that doesn't follow. Some will be lazy, but when non-lazy competition is beating them out they'll have to either get off their asses or take a hit to their profits.
Edit- And the CELL thing, that's just presupposition and not fact. I may go dig up the specs on those things later on when I have time, which atm I do not.
But that's assuming that the cell is better. The problem though with it has to do with things like the program's critical path. There's really only so much parallelism that can be extracted from a particular application. So at some point, throwing additional cores at the problem doesn't actually garner any sort of improvement in performance. In addition, the design of the cell architecture is a bit backwards, making it near impossible to keep enough instructions in each core's instruction queue to keep them busy all the time.
Is the PS3 capable of better than what it is currently doing? Probably. But is it a supercomputer that is way ahead of the 360? I'm not sure it is even on par with the 360.
Yeah, I agree with you Mott. Sony hyped the Cell Processor as the next best thing since sliced bread, but thats the media. That doesn't really have any outcome out how well it performs. If it under-performs, or exceeds expectations, the media can't directly affect that. Unfortunately, it affects the consumers. At the end of the day though, you're still left with what you had to begin with.
Cloral, I'm glad you brought that up. I've not looked up specifics on processors nor do I really care to, and I sure haven't created any applications using them. So you'll be more experienced with this than me. I'm curious as to how exactly the Cell Processor is sub par to the Xbox 360. I don't believe its above par, and I don't doubt that the additional cores are wasted space where you don't have any processes to keep it busy. But what exactly makes it "sub par"? Is the processor itself just poorly designed compared to AMD X2 or Intel's Core Duo?
Cloral wrote:But that's assuming that the cell is better. The problem though with it has to do with things like the program's critical path. There's really only so much parallelism that can be extracted from a particular application. So at some point, throwing additional cores at the problem doesn't actually garner any sort of improvement in performance. In addition, the design of the cell architecture is a bit backwards, making it near impossible to keep enough instructions in each core's instruction queue to keep them busy all the time.
Yes but you're assuming they would reach that limit, and it takes a LOT to reach a limit with 7 processers, be they subpar or not. Was the cell overhyped? Maybe, but even then that doesn't mean it's bad, just that it isn't as good as hyped. But really, all systems have their specs hyped so saying that the PS3 isn't any different is certainly not a reason to say it isn't better than the 360.
The PS3 has some issues with memory bandwidth and the like. I haven't dealt too much with the lower-level aspects of the system (we've got a guy for that), but this is what I've gleaned:
* There is effectively less memory on the PS3 than the 360. Both have the same amount of total memory, but the PS3 segregates between VRAM and DRAM, while the 360 allows all memory to be used for any purpose. In addition, the PS3 system software uses more memory than the 360 system software, leaving less available for the game.
* The shared bus architecture makes it difficult to keep enough instructions in all the cores all the time, meaning that frequently there are cores sitting around doing nothing.
* It is possible to offload graphics operations to some of the cores. This means that the PS3 is actually capable of more complex graphics than the 360, but it also means that the graphics routines have to be a lot more complex to harness this extra power.
* The Blu-ray drive is slower than the DVD on the 360. However, the extra space on the blu-ray means that the data can be replicated several times, which helps reduce seek times. This actually helps enough to make load times slightly faster on the ps3 than the 360 when this technique is applied.
Cloral wrote:The PS3 has some issues with memory bandwidth and the like. I haven't dealt too much with the lower-level aspects of the system (we've got a guy for that), but this is what I've gleaned:* There is effectively less memory on the PS3 than the 360. Both have the same amount of total memory, but the PS3 segregates between VRAM and DRAM, while the 360 allows all memory to be used for any purpose. In addition, the PS3 system software uses more memory than the 360 system software, leaving less available for the game.
Be more specific than that. The reason I say that is because if one system has 8 MB for all purposes and the other has 6MB for VRAM and 6MB for DRAM, then to say that the former has "effectively less" memory is nothing short of number crunching.
Cloral wrote:* The shared bus architecture makes it difficult to keep enough instructions in all the cores all the time, meaning that frequently there are cores sitting around doing nothing.
You don't have to use all processors simultaneously, in fact, it is better that the ones you don't need are "sitting around going nothing" because that conserves power, memory, and allows the others to process faster. If the 360 doesn't allow this, which by your post I am guessing that it doesn't, that's bad.
Cloral wrote:* It is possible to offload graphics operations to some of the cores. This means that the PS3 is actually capable of more complex graphics than the 360, but it also means that the graphics routines have to be a lot more complex to harness this extra power.
So? You always need more complex routines to make use out of systems that are more advanced. Is it really necessary to point out that better graphics=more work? I mean I understand not wanting to work hard, because I'm a lazy person myself, but it goes without saying that to get more, you have to work more.
It is true that more advanced systems sometimes try to make things easier and even come with tools that can do so, but even then you almost always still have a harder time producing more quality than you did producing a previous system's quality without said tools.
Take character models for instance. I promise you'll have an easier time producing 10 8-bit sprites than you will producing 1 128-bit character model. That example is indeed extreme, but it's about as lamen's terms as I can get with it.
Cloral wrote:* The Blu-ray drive is slower than the DVD on the 360. However, the extra space on the blu-ray means that the data can be replicated several times, which helps reduce seek times. This actually helps enough to make load times slightly faster on the ps3 than the 360 when this technique is applied.
And a slightly faster drive is a good thing right? I know what you are saying though, but that last part just demonstrates my point which is blu ray != DVD. Even with an initially slower drive and more processing and all it is still faster(even if slightly), which is pretty good.
Anarchy's posts remind me of this:
I wasn't saying all those things are bad. I was pointing out some of the differences between the consoles. And as you point out, the last point actually turns out to be a good thing for the PS3.
As for the memory, both systems have the same amount of total memory (i.e. the DRAM + VRAM on the PS3 = the general RAM on the 360).
Anarchy_Balsac, apparently you don't know what you are talking about if you think the more cpus you cram into something the better. Like Cloral mentioned, there's only so many ways to do things in a game, and only so many ways you could utilize additional processors. Often times in multi cpu setups you waste alot of that power because one cpu is waiting for another to finish its work before it can begin it's own. And that is bad because why even have two processors if they can't both be working at the same time? That's the whole point! CELL strikes me as more useful for boring number crunching uses, and not as practical for video games.
Anyway, it's pretty obvious you have no clue what you are talking about, especially with this comment about it being "good" that cores sit idle to "save power".
Cloral wrote:I wasn't saying all those things are bad. I was pointing out some of the differences between the consoles. And as you point out, the last point actually turns out to be a good thing for the PS3.As for the memory, both systems have the same amount of total memory (i.e. the DRAM + VRAM on the PS3 = the general RAM on the 360).
Fair enough. I did double check this and it seems this is indeed the case.
Mottzilla wrote:Anarchy_Balsac, apparently you don't know what you are talking about if you think the more cpus you cram into something the better.
Yeah, good one, you're correct and the person you're arguing with is wrong because you say so. Could we do without ad hominem attacks? Yes, cramming more processors into something does work better, it may be only one factor, but it is a major one. I mean to deny that is to deny that an individual processor having less burden due to the presence of another processors will increase speed, and I'm afraid that is not something I could conceivably deny.
Mottzilla wrote:Often times in multi cpu setups you waste alot of that power because one cpu is waiting for another to finish its work before it can begin it's own. And that is bad because why even have two processors if they can't both be working at the same time? That's the whole point! CELL strikes me as more useful for boring number crunching uses, and not as practical for video games.
PS3 can in fact run all its processors at once, so this is irrelevant. It has to run at least 2 at once at any given time anyway because one of them is reserved for the OS. The only exception to this being when it's running no games.
Is it harder to get them all running at once? Well 6(which is all that developers have access to with the 7th being exclusively for the OS) vs. 3, yeah 6 is going to be harder, but that's how it is. It would be nice if it was easier to do more than less but it isn't. Now it may or may not be more difficult to get 2 running at once on PS3 than it is to get 2 running at once on 360, but it is possible to get all 6 of the processors which developers have access to all running at once.
Mottzilla wrote:
Anyway, it's pretty obvious you have no clue what you are talking about, especially with this comment about it being "good" that cores sit idle to "save power".
And tell me how it is that a core wastes power by doing nothing. See, the problem is you think a core would waste power sitting idle in the same way your computer does. However when your computer is sitting idle it is in fact doing something, specifically it is running it's power supply and a few other things to keep itself on.
An idle processor is idle because there is no power running across it, which means no power used. At least that's it in a nutshell, what's usually going on is actually much more complicated than that. There is no way for me to put this in lamen's terms, but the answer is that they are what's called integrated circuits, and as such unless they receive the correct series of signals they act like a disconnect, which is what the "off" part of a light switch is, and so they would waste no more power from not running than your light switch does in the off position.
Now it may be true that the power saved by processors not running is minimal if they are in parallel(which I'm guessing that they are if it's called "parallel process"😉 but it certainly doesn't waste power.
Anarchy_Balsac wrote:So? You always need more complex routines to make use out of systems that are more advanced. Is it really necessary to point out that better graphics=more work? I mean I understand not wanting to work hard, because I'm a lazy person myself, but it goes without saying that to get more, you have to work more.It is true that more advanced systems sometimes try to make things easier and even come with tools that can do so, but even then you almost always still have a harder time producing more quality than you did producing a previous system's quality without said tools.
Take character models for instance. I promise you'll have an easier time producing 10 8-bit sprites than you will producing 1 128-bit character model. That example is indeed extreme, but it's about as lamen's terms as I can get with it.
You know what other console was a pain in the ass to program for because of a novel design? The Sega Saturn.
Just because something has more 'potential' doesn't mean that people are always going to bother unlocking said potential. More than likely, they will get it 'good enough' and you then end up with PS3 ports that look worse than their 360 equvilents. Even first party titles don't have it easy either, take a look at how terrible Lair looks.
AlexMax wrote:You know what other console was a pain in the ass to program for because of a novel design? The Sega Saturn.Just because something has more 'potential' doesn't mean that people are always going to bother unlocking said potential. More than likely, they will get it 'good enough' and you then end up with PS3 ports that look worse than their 360 equvilents. Even first party titles don't have it easy either, take a look at how terrible Lair looks.
That is a good point. However I would argue good enough would mean that the PS3 titles still look better than their 360 counterparts, but just aren't as powerful as they could be.
Sadly though I think the saturn died because the hype was with sony and nintendo, I think the fact that it was tough to program for didn't help, but overall it was hype. Which is pretty sad because it just goes to show sensation>common sense in the gamming world. And in all fairness, MGS2 wasn't quite the epitome of PS2's full potential either, but rather just a decent use of it.
I do agree however, that there are pitfalls with making systems complex. As to whether or sony could have done a better job of making their system more transparent, well, they didn't do that so well with PS2 so I would not be surprised if this was also the case with PS3. All I'm saying is if MGS4 ends up being a decent demonstration of the PS3's true power the way in which MGS2 was for PS2(which at this point, it certainly looks to be), that PS3 could easily see a bright future beyond it's release.