| gebx said: % of developers questions 1) Aren't PS3 developing teams bigger then 360's? wouldn't that mean even more games will be console exclusive to the 360? And even more so for the Wii?? 2) The survey applied to mostly European and NA developers, how much would Japanese developers skew these results and too which side? |
1) Nope. More manpower isn't what solves the PS3 development difficulty. You just need people who can think outside the box a little. Throwing more engineers at the problem doesn't help at all. Developer's just need to put a little more thought into engine design for the PS3 than the 360. Being a "more difficult platform to developer on" doesn't mean you need to spend more money developing for it... it means you need to much more picky with your hiring practices -- especially at the senior engineer level. This isn't an easy task in the games industry, I can assure you. The good news is that, for cross-platform engines, the extra engine design work isn't wasted effort, since its been shown many times over that by developing applications to use parallelism efficiently you're going to perform better on the 3-core, no branch prediction, no out-of-order instructions 360 as well.
* You write your engine to use a primary thread + OS thread. There are 2 HW threads on PS3 PPU -- each one about 70% as fast as a single 360 core, all things accounted for, and just one core on the 360 can handle both these threads. I say 70% as fast, because each HW thread on the PPU runs at 50% the clockrate of the 360 cores, but, by nature, they spend a lot less time waiting on expensive performance issues, like cache misses.. especially if the 360 core is having to do SW multithreading.
* You use between 2 (360 -- faster job allocation, bigger cache/workspace, no real need to stream data) or 6 (PS3 -- slower job allocation, but faster, and more numerous, processors and the ability to stream data independantly) more threads for other tasks that will be easily sped up by mathematically-intensive parallelism (examples: animation, physics, particles, and some parts of the rendering pipeline).
This 2 vs 6 "helper" threads concept is the basic reason the PS3 can outperform the 360 in some circumstances (where animation, physics, particles, etc. are a performance bottleneck), and, at the same time, the relative simplicity of the 360 architecture is what allows less skilled developers to write a decently performing app on it, but not on the PS3 without some extra thought and design.
* Caveat: I guess you could claim that, its possible that PS3 developers need more/better tools to write their apps, if they are not doing cross-platform games, or do not have a PC version of their game engine. Better tools does actually require a few more engineers in most cases, but that's not a whole lot, in the grand scheme of product development, and its an investment in the engine -- you don't need to keep building new tools with every game you build from the same engine.
2) I'm sure Japanese devs would favor the Wii, and to a lesser extent, the PS3. Although many of the large Japanese dev hosues (the ones that do a lot of business overseas, of course) are obviously taking the 360 very seriously. Being able to have an engine which runs on a multi-core PC and the 360 early on, is a pretty big boon to early development, and I'm sure that's appealing to any developer, no matter where they hail from.
SW-
