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Forums - Sony Discussion - What do Sony fans think of the PS3 hardware?

 

Would you have changed something of the PS3 hardware?

It's perfect, I wouldn'... 54 14.48%
 
Cell 39 10.46%
 
Memory architecture 88 23.59%
 
RSX 11 2.95%
 
Blu Ray 6 1.61%
 
More than one thing but not everything. 50 13.40%
 
PS3 was a disaster. Everything. 84 22.52%
 
See results. 41 10.99%
 
Total:373
anonim1979 on 29 April 2013

Well let me repost one thing I said somewhere else:

Many small things that added up:
the most imoprtant being weak GPU with broken scaller, memory in two pools, bigger OS that left system with less free RAM, Cell that was hard to program and had only one all-purpose core for 'normal' code and 6 co-processors that could only run specific code....

As one dev said:
http://gamingbolt.com/developer-explains-what-its-like-developing-for-each-console-ps3-being-the-hardest


"Xbox360: Other than the big-endian thing, it really smells like a PC —until you dug into it. The GPU is great —except that the limited EDRAM means that you have to draw your scene twice to comply with the anti-aliasing requirement? WTF! Holy Crap there are a lot of SIMD registers! 4 floats x 128 registers x 6 registers banks = 12K of registers! You are handed DX9 and everything works out of the box. But, if you dig in, you find better ways to do things. Deeper and deeper. Eventually, your code looks nothing like PC-DX9 and it works soooo much better than it did before! The debugger is awesome! PIX! PIX! I Kiss You!

PS3: A 95 pound box shows up on your desk with a printout of the 24-step instructions for how to turn it on for the first time. Everyone tries, most people fail to turn it on. Eventually, one guy goes around and sets up everyone else’s machine. There’s only one CPU. It seems like it might be able to do everything, but it can’t. The SPUs seem like they should be really awesome, but not for anything you or anyone else is doing. The CPU debugger works pretty OK. There is no SPU debugger. There was nothing like PIX at first. Eventually some Sony 1st-party devs got fed up and made their own PIX-like GPU debugger. The GPU is very, very disappointing… Most people try to stick to working with the CPU, but it can’t handle the workload. A few people dig deep into the SPUs and, Dear God, they are fast! Unfortunately, they eventually figure out that the SPUs need to be devoted almost full time making up for the weaknesses of the GPU."





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theshonen8899 on 29 April 2013

Almost everything except blu-ray was a problem. It was a very powerful system that only a few developers were interested enough in developing for it. The most impressive thing about the PS4 is how much of a difference it is compared to the PS3, in that it is much, much more developer friendly.



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Now Playing: Metroid Prime 2, Dark Souls, Fallout: New Vegas, The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, Persona 4: Golden

walsufnir on 29 April 2013
anonim1979 said:

Well let me repost one thing I said somewhere else:

Many small things that added up:
the most one being weak GPU with broken scaller, memory in two pools, bigger OS that left system with less free RAM, Cell that was hard to program and had only one all-purpose core for 'normal' code and 6 co-processors that could only run specific code....

As one dev said:
http://gamingbolt.com/developer-explains-what-its-like-developing-for-each-console-ps3-being-the-hardest


"Xbox360: Other than the big-endian thing, it really smells like a PC —until you dug into it. The GPU is great —except that the limited EDRAM means that you have to draw your scene twice to comply with the anti-aliasing requirement? WTF! Holy Crap there are a lot of SIMD registers! 4 floats x 128 registers x 6 registers banks = 12K of registers! You are handed DX9 and everything works out of the box. But, if you dig in, you find better ways to do things. Deeper and deeper. Eventually, your code looks nothing like PC-DX9 and it works soooo much better than it did before! The debugger is awesome! PIX! PIX! I Kiss You!

Ah, nice find! I can put this to my list of quotes which show how easy XBoxes always have been for devs!



paulrage2 on 29 April 2013
walsufnir said:
paulrage2 said:
The PS3 Memory architecture bring many problems during PS3 life cicle.


It was especially the amount but yes, also the classic architecture.

I think that 512MB it's OK. But the architecture split que memory... This was not a good decision.



walsufnir on 29 April 2013
paulrage2 said:
walsufnir said:
paulrage2 said:
The PS3 Memory architecture bring many problems during PS3 life cicle.


It was especially the amount but yes, also the classic architecture.

I think that 512MB it's OK. But the architecture split que memory... This was not a good decision.

Yes, today we see this but keep in mind that many smart people designed the PS3. Sony-engineers, IBM-engineers and NVidia-engineers. Before the actual hardware is fixed many test-runs are made and then the one with the best results get more consideration. So I think they made a good and reasonable decision back then but it turned out to be not essentially better than unified memory.



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slowmo on 29 April 2013

The bloated OS memory footprint (background running footprint), Microsoft managed to do so much more in the background in their OS and it showed.

The slow Bluray drive read speed

The lack of universal memory pool


The fact that each revision made it look cheaper and tackier, so glad my fat PS3 is still going strong.

Before some of the most devout loyalists jump on my opinion, bear in mind my list for the 360 would read a lot worse in terms of build quality and styling.



MakeAmazing on 29 April 2013

Initially it was a disaster imho. I remember seeing TV news reports of people queuing for the console, and thought it was laughable.. mainly because of the cost. I had to admit i did own a Ps1/2 and wasnt a massive fan, didnt get many games. So i wasnt too bothered by the Ps3.

I did get the wii on day of release though. For a few months, was happy with that, feeling i was getting some exercise.. but quite quickly getting sick of on the rails games and poor graphics. So got the opportunity to try out a PS3 from my wifes work, and then thought, ok this isnt as bad as i thought.

But probably in the last 2-3 years, i have loved the Ps3, its just got better and better. It certainly has it faults, sometimes poor 3rd party conversions... but from a 1st party machine, Ive had a blast.