Final-Fan said:
Cypher1980 said:
blkfish92 said:
Bull- why don't developers simply develop on the ps3 first then follow up by porting to 360 and/or wii?
-Side note it's a forum I have a say in any conversation.
|
Because then we have the same problem in reverse. The PS3 although powerful places heavy constraints on the game developers.
You cannot just start coding and hope for the best. Memory is such a finite resource in the PS3 that every subroutine and every texture has to be thought about in advance.
The 360 allows you to "share" the memory between CPU and GPU. People say this leads to lazy development and maybe it does to a point but the PS3 alternative is enforced development by straight jacket.
Effectively you can get away with a lot more "loose" coding for the 360 without taking a performace hit.
Try that on the PS3 and you are looking at low frame rates and screen tear city.
I think John Carmack said it best "The memory architecture of the PS3 was a curious choice" |
I think you are overstating the constraints. Instead of 512 unified it's 256 and 256, it's not like NONE of the 360's 512 is going to the CPU. I'd guess (and I admit it's a guess) it only feels like a "straitjacket" to those who carelessly wrote for the 360 without even considering that they would have to port it to the PS3 later. Cry moar, I'm sure there are some problems if people do the opposite as well.
Anyway, back when this debate was raging originally, I'd gotten the impression that the Cell processor (with its kind-of-independent SPUs) was the biggest problem going from 360 to PS3. Not so, or not anymore?
|
I believe that most of the learning curve regarding the Cell has been understood and adopted into Modern Game Engines. Its still a bit of a pain and its hard to extract every last bit of power but the Cell is powerful enough to match strides with the more conventional architectures.
The big problem now is indeed the memory constraints on the PS3. 256 MB is simply way too small for graphics nowadays. Imagine being a multiplat developer applying textures to your game on the PC dev kit (They nearly all are for multiplat) and constantly having a PS3 Texture limit reached warning crop up.
I honestly think the PS3 is a great machine held back by some terrible design choices. I expect the PS4 to have all these problems rectified.
