I want your opinion

[rocketpig]

Sqrl said:
The phrase "is hard to program for" is actually fairly accurate. I have not programmed on a PS3 SDK, but I have done multi-threaded and multi-processor programming. Which is essentially what the PS3 is with the cell and its multiple processors.

Basically the difficulty boils down to a juggling act of sorts, usually a clear vision of how the program is to be written helps, but it isn't always available with every PM. Basically, it is an absolute fact that the PS3 is harder to program for than the 360 or Wii. However it is not much of an excuse for poor design and performance.

These guys are professional programmers working on the most popular programming jobs around and they have no reason to not have real world practical work and experience with these kinds of architectures. Quite simply, they are supposed to be good at what they do, and it isn't exactly a mind-bender of a puzzle until you are trying to squeeze the last drops of performance, but by then most people are satisfied with how a game turns out (cause if you are squeezing all you can get out of a system and it still runs like crap you are writing software ahead of the hardware).

Only if you ignore the fact that MS gives excellent tools to program for a simple tri-core chip while Sony gives weak tools to program for a hybrid multi-core/satellite chip system, it seems hard to program for one over the other.

While it is hard to program for multi-core chips, at least MS has consistent cores in their system and provides very good tools to work with (just read a few dev interviews about it) while Sony is going with a completely untested server chip as their main processor. Ever wonder why the PS3 folds so well? That's what it was manufactured to do.