God of War III utilises 35GB of Blu-Ray space

[WilliamWatts]

joeorc said:

WilliamWatts said:

Sony had kits out at least in early 2005. They had samples of the hardware quite a bit earlier than the release of the PS3. The early Xbox 360 kits had less to do with the final hardware, they didn't have unified shaders they didn't share the full instruction set and nor did they have ED-Ram so they were effectively an early target. The official full spec kits were out about the same time for both systems and the PS3 had an advantage in that developers were already familiar with the Cells instruction set for the SPEs as they shared a common base with the PS2.

But I would say the distribution of early development kits for the PS3 had more to do with Sony wanting to give their developers an early lead and it 'dominate' the system than a lack of availability. Its typical Japanese console maker MO. So its not like they couldn't have gotten more dev kits out sooner they just saw it as advantagous for them to get a lead over the rest of the field because they saw technology as the key to high selling games. Too bad they were wrong, but thats what they thought.

not as many of them as you think!

I am going to disagree with you on the playing field because even though Sony themselves had kit's early 2005, Insomniac game's as an example had to help other developer's even inside Sony to help with the learning cureve, unlike THE majority of developer's for the xbox360 because the G5 was already out 2 year's prior to even one of thes kit's of the PS3 hitting the development community outside of Sony. there is a big difference between not having any experience with an hardware design at all and not having the most uptodate hardware that still did not stop the xbox360 development community from development, because even though these were beta the developer's had more experience with the hardware due to the fact that the very basic development kit was a G5, many artist's have already experience with G4's before the G5's so. that right there is a very big advantage, 2 year's experience with the base core hardware instead with the PS3 none was outside of Sony even had the experience with the Cell processor because hell the Cell was only first released to the public at  what year?

2004!

when was the first prototype?

feb 2005!

"The processor shown Monday was only a prototype, and it's likely that the high-volume shipments of the processor will come when the three companies are ready to make chips using a 65-nanometer processing technology, Glaskowsky said. That technology will allow the companies to shrink the chip and reduce their manufacturing costs,"

http://www.pcworld.com/article/119602/ibm_sony_toshiba_unveil_ninecore_cell_processor.html

and only 450 kits were released not because Sony was holding back it was because of the cell processor yields

 

 

 

They had development software still before they had the hardware itself. How else would Kojima develop a working engine for E3 2005 and how else would he have reason to be disapointed that the hardware he was told he was going to get never eventuated and therefore he had to tone down his game to fit the system? Remember the PS3 was meant to launch earlier in 2006 and it missed its launch date by 6 months. Its  not cut and dried that Microsoft got their kits out 'far sooner' when the early Xbox 360 games were on average even poorer than the PS3 titles at launch. I should know as I bought the PS3 first and the Xbox 360 second.

With regards to the Xbox 360 the biggest hobble on performance was the ED-ram and the biggest potential for gains was also related to this hardware. Whereas on the PS3 it was the Cell processor. They had prototypes out and working with full system specs pretty close to the same time, and only then could real development take place. There weren't any examples of unified shader architectures to work through and development for a unified shader architecture was still in its infancy so none of the tricks they have now worked back then.

The only real difference between the two systems is that on the Xbox 360 the developers were quicker to make use of the 3 cores due to the fact that they shared a common code base, not because the Xbox 360 was there first. It took time for developers to learn to use the three different programming techniques and the fact that the SPEs weren't used at first was more an artifact on the reality that they weren't needed at first to get the programs working.