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Forums - Sony - God of War 3's anti-aliasing using the Cell's SPUs

Rpruett on 25 April 2010
nightsurge said:
MikeB said:

The PS3 is technically a lot more powerful than the XBox 360. This due to Blu-Ray, default harddrive and of course the Cell processor. Like Santa Monica stated God of War 3 is their first major effort on the PS3, they said look at where they are now and imagine what they will be able to do a couple of years from now.

Many don't realize the PS3's GPU is more powerful than the XBox 360 GPU, that 360 GPU is more flexible but the Cell is far more flexibile at the stuff it's more flexible at and a hell of a lot more powerful than the 360's CPU, allowing for a lot more game complexity (something which will not show in PS3/360 multi-platform titles).

And the only reason you haven't yet seen a 360 game visually striking as God of War 3 is because of the very well known fact that the current best looking 360 games are still using Unreal Engine 3.... a MULTIPLAT engine.  The only game so far to be using a new engine designed for the 360 is Alan Wake and we will see how visually striking that is in just a few short weeks.

Alan Wake has been in development since when?  And when Alan Wake doesn't look nearly as good as hoped what will the excuse be then?  While I don't think the difference between the 360 / PS3 is enormous, it certainly exists and has existed since Metal Gear Solid 4 came out and it was apparent to anyone who owned and played both systems. I truly hope we can witness one 360 game that bucks the trend but think the 360 will continue to take the back seat in terms of graphics to the PS3 titles.  With Uncharted 3 surely on the way and Gran Turismo 5, the 360 is going to continue to be cannibalized in this regard.



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MikeB on 25 April 2010
Luney Tune said:
MikeB said:

The PS3 is technically a lot more powerful than the XBox 360. This due to Blu-Ray, default harddrive and of course the Cell processor. Like Santa Monica stated God of War 3 is their first major effort on the PS3, they said look at where they are now and imagine what they will be able to do a couple of years from now.

Many don't realize the PS3's GPU is more powerful than the XBox 360 GPU, that 360 GPU is more flexible but the Cell is far more flexibile at the stuff it's more flexible at and a hell of a lot more powerful than the 360's CPU, allowing for a lot more game complexity (something which will not show in PS3/360 multi-platform titles).


John Carmack in 2005:

"PS3 is probably marginally more powerful, in terms of raw flops and graphic operations, but that’s not really the best way to look at things. When you look at these development cycles that stretch over years and years, being 20 per cent easier to develop on is much more important than being 20 per cent more powerful." http://www.megagames.com/news/html/console/carmackverdictonx360ps3power.shtml

John Carmack in 2009 explaining why Rage runs at only 30fps on the PS3 (360 versions runs at 60 fps):

"The PS3 lags a little bit behind in terms of getting the performance out of it," John Carmack told Edge. "The rasteriser is just a little bit slower - no two ways about that. The RSX is slower than what we have in the 360. The CPU is about the same," http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=220530

John Carmack is an unreliable source. Back when Doom launched he claimed the game couldn't run on the Amiga, with the source code released the game runs fine on older Amigas than old PCs are capable of running that game.

He is wrong. It's pretty simple to see for example the CPU isn't about the same already.



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales

MikeB on 25 April 2010
nightsurge said:
MikeB said:

Wow... more misinformation from MikeB.

I have corrected more PS3 technical misinformation on VGChartz than anyone else I believe. Nightsurge you are one of the major spreaders of misinformation. With all the evidence out there, I wonder why you decide to go on...



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales

Scoobes on 25 April 2010
nightsurge said:
MikeB said:

The PS3 is technically a lot more powerful than the XBox 360. This due to Blu-Ray, default harddrive and of course the Cell processor. Like Santa Monica stated God of War 3 is their first major effort on the PS3, they said look at where they are now and imagine what they will be able to do a couple of years from now.

Many don't realize the PS3's GPU is more powerful than the XBox 360 GPU, that 360 GPU is more flexible but the Cell is far more flexibile at the stuff it's more flexible at and a hell of a lot more powerful than the 360's CPU, allowing for a lot more game complexity (something which will not show in PS3/360 multi-platform titles).

Wow... more misinformation from MikeB.

The PS3's GPU is NOT more powerful than the 360 GPU.  No two ways around it.

And the only reason you haven't yet seen a 360 game visually striking as God of War 3 is because of the very well known fact that the current best looking 360 games are still using Unreal Engine 3.... a MULTIPLAT engine.  The only game so far to be using a new engine designed for the 360 is Alan Wake and we will see how visually striking that is in just a few short weeks.

Also, the whole "a hell of a lot more powerful than the 360's CPU" line is purely puffery.  In case you don't know what puffery means watch the latest Dominoes commercials....   Puffing generally is defined as exaggerated, vague, or loosely optimistic statements about a company that are deemed so immaterial and unworthy of reliance that they cannot serve as the basis for liability. The difference between a statement of fact and mere puffery rests in the specificity or generality of the claim.

I don't agree with MikeB that the PS3 is a lot more powerful than the 360, but the GPU in the PS3 is theoretically more powerful than the GPU in the 360 in terms of raw number crunching. Of course in real terms it doesn't quite work out that way and the 360 GPU is a lot easier to get performance out of, but it doesn't stop the statement from being somewhat true.

As for the CPUs, there are a lot of tasks that the Cell can do that the 3-cores on the 360 just couldn't, for instance, the anti-aliasing raised in the OP. For these tasks, MikeB's comments have some truth to them.




Get your Portable ID!

MikeB on 25 April 2010
Slimebeast said:

But, notice it took a whole five SPUs to do it,

You misunderstand what was written. The load is spread over 5 SPUs, but those SPUs aren't working on MLAA most of the time. Most of the time they are working on other stuff.

Some of this stuff:



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales

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jneul on 25 April 2010
Slimebeast said:
MikeB said:

Eurogamer/Digital Foundry comments:

"The more flexible nature of the CPU means that while such tasks can be more computationally expensive, you get a higher-quality result. "

"In the case of God of War III, any given frame typically takes between 16ms and 30ms to render, give or take a millisecond or two. The original 2x multisampling AA solution took a big chunk of rendering time, at 5ms. Now, the hugely more impressive MLAA algorithm takes a total of 20ms of CPU time. However, it's running on five SPUs, meaning that overall latency is a mere 4ms. So the final result is actually faster, and that previous 5ms of GPU time can be repurposed for other tasks. "

Now I have to say I am very impressed that the Cell CPU can do AA (theoretically of course we knew this, but in real-world applications it's impressive that they pulled it off).

But, notice it took a whole five SPUs to do it, and if they save 5ms of each frame that takes typically 16-30ms by the GPU to render, it's still makes it only ~30% faster (a 20ms frame gets rendered in 15ms instead). Meanwhile, assuming the X360 GPU is 20% faster than the RSX in PS3, the total power advantage to the PS3 is only ~10% plus a lil better image quality thanks to MLAA instead of 2xMSAA.


The SPU's was doing other tasks as well, also if you read what they have quoted they have said they have found even better ways of doing things code wise since then, the point here is this was Santa Monica Studio's first attempt at a PS3 game, and just look at how much they was able to achieve.

On Topic: I have been saying how Cell+RSX is more pwerful than 360 for a while, now meanwhile I have been laughed at a couple of times both by people at work(when I used to be a programmer) and here on the forums, that is because they did not either take their time to study the architecture of the PS3 and X360 or did not simply understand how the PS3 worked, but out come games that prove time and time again that I am right.

You only have to look at Alan Wake and Uncharted as examples of games developed specifically for each platform, Uncharted is with no doubt more impressive, seen as the pixel counters have got their hands on Alan Wake Screenshots (recent ones) and confirmed it to be 540p, wheras Uncharted is 720p, this show just how much difference there is between the two consoles.



it's the future of handheld

PS VITA = LIFE

The official Vita thread http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=130023&page=1

Slimebeast on 25 April 2010
MikeB said:
Slimebeast said:
 

But, notice it took a whole five SPUs to do it,

You misunderstand what was written. The load is spread over 5 SPUs, but those SPUs aren't working on MLAA most of the time. Most of the time they are working on other stuff.

Some of this stuff:

Oh. That's great.

Forget what I said about 10% faster than X360 then. It's quite impressive stuff what they accomplish to do on the CPU.



slowmo on 25 April 2010

Shame on you MikeB, you made this a 360 v PS3 thread with your vague PS3 GPU better than the 360 GPU phrase.

Interesting reading the original article, shame about the 3 pages of debating things that have been done a thousand times over on this site that detract from the OP.



gamelover2000 on 25 April 2010

I find this very intresting, so please all stop trolling and get back to your own forums? the green one?



Currently playing: MAG, Heavy Rain, Infamous

 

Getting Plat trophies for: Heavy Rain, Infamous, RE5,  Burnout and GOW collection once I get it.

 

Badassbab on 25 April 2010
flowjo said:
LOL no dude hes using hz as another way of saying fps , others have thought that but proven wrong. just look it up

the game is huge due to the textures thats why the 360 version is going to be at least 2 discs even if they remove the useless crap on the 360 dvd it will still be compressed and multiple discs.

the engine is made to run in 60 fps (hz in carmack terms) when it ships they will run the same and ps3 version will be slightly more clear due to less compression.

dude dont argue anymore there is no point , just accept it , its really no skin off your back its just technical mumbo , was FF13 that terrible to play on 360? not at all it was almost the same such minor differences

FFXIII was hardly a minor difference. 360 version was worse in just about every way. Everything was lower res and playback quality.