SlorgNet said:
Um, no it isn't. Sports games, like beat 'em ups or certain action games (e.g. Devil May Cry) have limited amounts of bodies and animations within a limited field of play, so that's not an issue. If the PS3 really had such a tough time with framerates, then "Resistance" and "Killzone 2" would not be possible. I don't think EA is evil or got bought off by Microsoft, it's just budgeting and time schedules. The 360 has a larger install base than the PS3 (6 million versus, what, 1.7 million) so EA made the perfectly rational decision to focus slightly more developer resources on the 360 version. Remember, sports games have an unforgiving schedule - you HAVE to produce the title by a certain time. |
Basically that means that not everything a computer can do can be parallelized and all algorithms have some unparallelizable component. Complicating this is the fact that parallel algorithms are harder to write and aren't taught as much as traditional sequential algorithms.
The Xbox 360 has three equally capable cores that can be used like traditional processors so programmers don't have that much trouble adapting to it. The PS3 has one fairly weak main core and six highly specialized SPEs. If you can't break down a problem into smaller problems for the SPEs (which have some restrictions on how you can use them) to use you're stuck using the main core. This means that while you can take a traditional approach on the 360 you frequently have to rewrite your program to get adequate performance out of the PS3.
As you said, it really just comes down to budgeting and time schedules. You can either try to rewrite the game for the PS3 or half ass it and hope your brand name alone convinces people to buy it anyway.
