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Forums - Sony Discussion - Developers have had 3D development kits since january

disolitude on 23 April 2010
Squilliam said:
disolitude said:
Squilliam said:

Entry level price? Between $249 and $299.

Also it'd be cheaper for developers to make games in 3D than it would be to expend the effort making even more high fidelity assets for the next generation. One or two programmers are a lot cheaper than a team of 20-30 artists!

The reason? The next generation GPUs/CPUs are both more efficient and powerful for the same number of transistors given a limited power budget and the console manufacturers have easily got at least three times as many to play with. Not only will the next generation hardware be more powerful, it will also be more efficient and it will be able to reuse many of the products of the left eye render for the right eye as they happen at identical frame-time. This efficiency is a hardware level feature which is only present in DX11+ GPUs.

I don't know if I agree with the whole efficiency aspect. I mean the GTX 480 which just came out pushes the boundaries with whats physically possible with video cards given the specifications for PCI-E slot. If we look at the history, these video cards are getting bigger, hotter and consume more and more power.

I personally think we may see the first dual GPU console next gen...and a 1000 watt power supply built in the X720 :)

You have to remember that the current chips are 300M transistors, both the Xbox 360 and PS3 respectively. A modern GPU would be like the Xenos is to the RSX except it would likely have at least 4* the number of transistors. The Juniper GPUs from ATI are 170mm^2 and almost a billion transistors and they have about 5* the rated shader performance. On 28NM which is coming in 2011 they could fit 1.5B transistors into a space not much larger than the current Xenos die size.

You have to remember that the consoles are far more efficient in terms of how they use their resources and they don't have to use rediculous levels of AA and they can implement more efficient software techniques. A humble Juniper class GPU could match what the top of the range Nvidia chip can achieve if fitted to a console.

Yeah, you do have a point. Consoles do have an advantage of not requiring as much raw horsepower as PCs since they are purpose built for gaming and are much more optimized.

I do await the next gen talks to begin so we can see all the fans discuss the "GFLOPS" or the PS4 CPU vs the X720 CPU... Especially considering that all that stuff really doesn't matter as much.

Sony could have taken the cheapest Athlon "X2" cpu and put in a monster GPU (8800gtx or ati4850) with more ram on the side when they were making the PS3...which would completely annihilate whatever the current setup of the cell + RSX has to offer.

MS kind of knew this with the Xenos hence why 360 is visually competitive with the PS3 despite being put together in less than a year and being released a whole year sooner.



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BW_JP on 23 April 2010
disolitude said:

I don't think anyone thought that PS3s will have issues working on the new expensive HDMI 1.4 TVs.

What about the older 3D capable 1.3 TVs that use checkerboard? What about the true 120 hz monitors which use Nvidias HDMI to DVI cable? Finding this out would be key...

As far as dev kits, thats cool but all they really had to do is cut the PS3 in half...lol.

"Here yougo...make the game in 3D now" :)

I don't think you really get it. Producing a 1080p 60hz game in 720p 30hz in each eye isn't really halfing the power of the PS3, and there is a lot more to it than just producing the same output twice.

30hz in each eye is virtually the same as 60hz over both eyes, so you wont notice any loss in performance, what you will notice is the resolution drop of course, however each eye is going to be getting a 720p image, it's hard to say what the perceptional differences will be is it not? 

Also, this is the begining. 3D game development is fresh soil and these are ports of original non-3d games where the texture streaming and particle technology was not originally developed with this in mind. The usage of the PS3 SPUs is not optimized for 3D and I doubt it will be for some time. That being said, you wont have the massive processing bank on other platforms to be able to "force" 3d on games that do not natively support it. The cell is a wonderful beast for things like this, I hope they use it properly. babying this sort of technology will only end up with half assed products.

That being said, what we hear so far points to a mind blowing gaming experience and I cannot wait. 

 

"Yeah, you do have a point. Consoles do have an advantage of not requiring as much raw horsepower as PCs since they are purpose built for gaming and are much more optimized."

 

No, consoles themselves have no advantage over PCs. That is the developers choice. Consoles do not require less raw horsepower for the same image quality, Developers need to find ways to optimize their code for the hardware on the console. If developers went and optimized their code for dual core processors and nvidia GPUs it would be the same result on PCs based on that tech. It's not like the 360 has anything in it that makes it special for gaming. Likewise with the PS3, the Cell is a monster processor for any application, it's up to developers to use that technology in different ways. Engine Engineering on the PS3 is a brand new frontier. It's completely different than anything we've ever seen in ANY game development. It's done differently. The line of thinking and logic as to how you produce IQ is like night and day compared to the 360, Wii or a PC.

I suppose the point is that the consoles are not optimized, its the code thats optimized for the hardware. 

Alan wake, originally a launch title for Quad Core CPUS, was built with the same idea in mind, where it would only ruin in its true form on the Intel Quad Core CPUS. It was optimized for that Tech, but its not like the quad cores are optimized for gaming, as we've seen they are rather annoying for most games :P

It's interesting, the PS3 was originally supposed to ship with no graphics card. But they were forced to chuck one in there because of Multiplatform developers.

 

 

 



disolitude on 23 April 2010
BW_JP said:
disolitude said:

I don't think anyone thought that PS3s will have issues working on the new expensive HDMI 1.4 TVs.

What about the older 3D capable 1.3 TVs that use checkerboard? What about the true 120 hz monitors which use Nvidias HDMI to DVI cable? Finding this out would be key...

As far as dev kits, thats cool but all they really had to do is cut the PS3 in half...lol.

"Here yougo...make the game in 3D now" :)

I don't think you really get it. Producing a 1080p 60hz game in 720p 30hz in each eye isn't really halfing the power of the PS3, and there is a lot more to it than just producing the same output twice.

30hz in each eye is virtually the same as 60hz over both eyes, so you wont notice any loss in performance, what you will notice is the resolution drop of course, however each eye is going to be getting a 720p image, it's hard to say what the perceptional differences will be is it not? 

Also, this is the begining. 3D game development is fresh soil and these are ports of original non-3d games where the texture streaming and particle technology was not originally developed with this in mind. The usage of the PS3 SPUs is not optimized for 3D and I doubt it will be for some time. That being said, you wont have the massive processing bank on other platforms to be able to "force" 3d on games that do not natively support it. The cell is a wonderful beast for things like this, I hope they use it properly. babying this sort of technology will only end up with half assed products.

That being said, what we hear so far points to a mind blowing gaming experience and I cannot wait. 

 

"Yeah, you do have a point. Consoles do have an advantage of not requiring as much raw horsepower as PCs since they are purpose built for gaming and are much more optimized."

 

No, consoles themselves have no advantage over PCs. That is the developers choice. Consoles do not require less raw horsepower for the same image quality, Developers need to find ways to optimize their code for the hardware on the console. If developers went and optimized their code for dual core processors and nvidia GPUs it would be the same result on PCs based on that tech. It's not like the 360 has anything in it that makes it special for gaming. Likewise with the PS3, the Cell is a monster processor for any application, it's up to developers to use that technology in different ways. Engine Engineering on the PS3 is a brand new frontier. It's completely different than anything we've ever seen in ANY game development. It's done differently. The line of thinking and logic as to how you produce IQ is like night and day compared to the 360, Wii or a PC.

I suppose the point is that the consoles are not optimized, its the code thats optimized for the hardware. 

Alan wake, originally a launch title for Quad Core CPUS, was built with the same idea in mind, where it would only ruin in its true form on the Intel Quad Core CPUS. It was optimized for that Tech, but its not like the quad cores are optimized for gaming, as we've seen they are rather annoying for most games :P

It's interesting, the PS3 was originally supposed to ship with no graphics card. But they were forced to chuck one in there because of Multiplatform developers.

 

 

 


"I don't think you really get it. Producing a 1080p 60hz game in 720p 30hz in each eye isn't really halfing the power of the PS3, and there is a lot more to it than just producing the same output twice."

Actually I do "get it" as I've seen it with my own eyes 100s of times. My PC runs Street fighter 4 with all settings maxed out at 1080p at 70-90 fps. Turning Nvidia 3D vision makes the fps drop to 35-45 fps...still perfectly playable but performance is "cut by half". All the games I've played drop the frame rate down by 1/2 when playing in 3D.

You are right that 30 fps per eye is like 60 for both but the reason why Ps3 is able to do 30 fps per eye in 3D on Wipeout is because it drops the resolution to 720p. Hence "cuting the resolution in half". To make 3d work with existing games PS3 will have to cut something in half, or go back to the development table and try to squeeze more power out of the system. But I don't see anyone pouring development money in to a game which is finished in order to get it working on 3D until the 3d sales pick up by a lot.

 

"Also, this is the begining. 3D game development is fresh soil and these are ports of original non-3d games where the texture streaming and particle technology was not originally developed with this in mind."

Nvidia has been doing 3D development and drivers since mid 90s...you are fooling yourself if you think the PS3 is the beginning of 3D development which has lots of room for improvement (on PS3). The only way PS3 can do 3D with existing games is if they do some-sort of 3d interlacing (checkerboard 3d pattern?) or if they drop the resolution like they did in Wipeout. As far as new games, you are right that they can be optimized better to allow for 3D...but you will not see an uncharted 2 like visuals at 720p & 30 hz per eye in 3D on PS3. Since most console games are going to be played in 2D by 99% of the people even if they do have a 3D option, I don't see many developers willing to hurt the 2D visuals to allow for same performance in 3D...which is essentially what they will have to do.

"No, consoles themselves have no advantage over PCs. That is the developers choice. Consoles do not require less raw horsepower for the same image quality"

Everyone knows PC architecture depends on drivers and development tools as well as hardware which arent nearly as optimized as consoles are. My PC graphics card is about 20x more powerful than PS3's in theory(GTX295)...but due to lack of driver optimization I get only about ~8 x the peformance. Due to the fact that consoles have unified development tools and same specs for each console, its much easier to optimize a game than for a PC environment which is different for every user.