Isn't dsome of what he's saying ALREADY known to be the truth?...namely that it is easier to program for the 360, than the ps3...as to the other technical mumbo gumbo...you've got me there. Unless a professional programmer, or at least somebody with some experience (i.e. any co-op/interns who have done some actualy programming work) can technically counter his arguements, it goes to show how you can spin spin spin to try to win, but it doesn't work.

lanjiaona said: Jason Booth, a game developer who has worked on both Guitar Hero games and Rock Band, has posted some interesting comments on his blog regarding "PS3 misconceptions and spin." "I read various game forums from time to time, and often see gamers complaining about 'lazy ports' to the PS3. They often mention how the PS3 is the most powerful game console and blame developers working on the console for doing a bad job. Sony has all of these people duped by impressive marketing spin... ports to the PS3 will never be as good as their 360 counter parts, and ...most PS3 exclusives will likely continue to suck," he says.

Hmm ok i agree that x360 has slightly better GPU , DVD streams data faster (at the cost of noise) and ps3 is much trickier to program for but seriously the bolded part is rediculus.

 

I believe the closest PC GPUs, if anyone wants to do any comparisons online, are the ATI Radeon X1800 XL (for the 360), and the NVidia 7800 GTX (for the PS3). Not 100% sure how close those are to the "real thing" though.  "Pretty darn close" is my impression.

I would like to point out that X360 games, since they always use the same GPU, can make much better use of the flexible pipelines of the GPU, than your typical PC game can with plain ole D3D 9/10.  You'll probably notice that, in the vast majority of comparisons between these two cards online, the NVidia card is the clear winner, except in a few cases involving AA.  Keep in mind the special mojo of having just that one architecture to work with, though.  Its a bigger deal than you might think, and it plays well into the 360's hand, for many scenarios.

Sadly, with regards to the topic, most games fall into the general usage category, and not into the "we have the whole scene in memory, and there's not much going on, lets use some serious textures!" bucket that RB/GH fall into.  The author of this blog post really needed to consider that the games he worked on were pretty special-case scenarios.

He may be a developer but he's clearly wrong.

The resolution isn't high enough for the GPU of the 360 to really be an advantage, as it can only go as high as a HD tv can go.

But the Cell is a relevant advantage as is blu-ray.

If the resolution was higher, than maybe the GPU would matter more.

So he developed Rock Band and Guitar Hero huh? Games with last gen graphics. Sure, I will take his word for it :)

Procrastinato said: I believe the closest PC GPUs, if anyone wants to do any comparisons online, are the ATI Radeon X1800 XL (for the 360), and the NVidia 7800 GTX (for the PS3). Not 100% sure how close those are to the "real thing" though. I would like to point out that X360 games, since they always use the same GPU, can make much better use of the flexible pipelines of the GPU, than your typical PC game can with plain ole D3D 9/10.  You'll probably notice that, in the vast majority of comparisons between these two cards online, the NVidia card is the clear winner, except in a few cases involving AA.  Keep in mind the special mojo of having just that one architecture to work with, though.  Its a bigger deal than you might think. Sadly, with regards to the topic, most games fall into the generic usage category, and not into the "we have the whole scene in memory, and there's not much going on, lets use some serious textures!" bucket that RB/GH fall into.

Both are pretty different with regard to design, the Xenos for example relies on EDRam, which is a significant bottleneck at higher resolutions while the PC variant unlike the Xenos has dedicated main graphics memory. The disadvantage of this design shows by having 720p graphics combined with AA and (significantly increasingly so) upwards. The optimal 360 resolution seems to be 600p with AA (for demanding games at 60 FPS), 640p without AA (but with wide range HDR like Halo 3 @ 30 FPS) or 720p with AA at 30 FPS.

Apart from larger than usual cache, the RSX mainly distinguishes itself from the PC graphics chips with regard to being adapted to take advantage of the Cell's SPUs and potential usage of the XDR memory simultaneously with its dedicated main graphics memory. Using SPU resources can result into up to ~50% additional graphics performance (taking workload off the GPU) according to developers.

For example with regard to Super Stardust HD (a game with over 20,000 moving objects and over 75,000 particle effects on screen at once) is drawn 60 frames per second at 1280x1080 (1080p resolution, upscaled to FullHD):

"Currently we do not use SPUs to pre-process the geometry for RSX — that will make a major difference. I estimate that we can further boost the graphics performance by 50%."

I think when everything is said and done (full optimization), the PS3's optimal resolution is probably 1280x1080 with AA at up to 60 FPS for demanding games like Gran Turismo 5. I think this resolution provides the best trade off with regard to perceived details and rendering performance, the vertical resolution being the most important for human perception, going higher with the horizontal resolution vs upscaling will probably not yield real perceptual gains, yet this resolution will still contain full detail when scaled down to 720p. Actual nearby texture detail may be well lower though, like is the case with all PC games running at such resolutions. I will have a more informed opinion with regard to this when I have finished Uncharted 2 (judging Blu-Ray/harddrive streaming quality), God of War 3 (usage of procedural textures) and maybe more relevant from a technical perspective a game like WarDevil.

I have yet to run into a PS3 exclusive that has sucked. What exclusive games has this guy played?

lanjiaona said: Sony has said that the PlayStation 3 has more power than Microsoft's Xbox 360, but that it requires a bit of patience and legwork to leverage that power. Jason Booth, a game developer , just doesn't see it happening. He thinks game designers are trying to match PS3 games to 360 games at best. Jason Booth, a game developer who has worked on both Guitar Hero games and Rock Band, has posted some interesting comments on his blog regarding "PS3 misconceptions and spin." "I read various game forums from time to time, and often see gamers complaining about 'lazy ports' to the PS3. They often mention how the PS3 is the most powerful game console and blame developers working on the console for doing a bad job. Sony has all of these people duped by impressive marketing spin... ports to the PS3 will never be as good as their 360 counter parts, and ...most PS3 exclusives will likely continue to suck," he says. First and foremost, Booth doesn't think PS3 really has a graphical advantage. Why? "Fill rate is one of the primary ways to measure graphics performance - in essence, it's a number describing how many pixel operations you can perform. The fill rate on the PS3 is significantly slower than on the 360, meaning that games either have to run at lower resolution or use simpler shader effects to achieve the same performance," he says. "Additionally, the shader processing on the PS3 is significantly slower than on the 360, which means that a normal map takes more fill rate to draw on the PS3 than it does on the 360. And I'm not talking about small differences here, we're talking roughly half the pixel pushing power." He also suggests that Blu-ray is not really an advantage: "[It's] great for watching movies, but not so great for games. Getting data off the Blu-ray drive takes about twice as long as it does to get the same data off the 360's DVD drive. That translates into longer load times, or god forbid if you're streaming from disk, tighter constraints on the amount of data you can stream." He acknowledges that with the greater storage space of Blu-ray "there is the potential to use that to do something cool," but he argues that "most developers who use the entire Blu-ray drive are doing it to work around other problems with the PS3 such as its slow loading." He adds, "For instance, in Resistance: Fall of Man, every art asset is stored on disk once for every level that uses it. So rather than storing one copy of a texture, you're storing it 12 times. If you took that entire game and removed all the duplicate data, it would likely fit on a DVD without any problem." Ultimately, Booth says "the performance centric research into the PS3 has been around making it easier for developers to get the same level of performance you get out of the 360 naturally... developers must spend significantly more time and resources getting the PS3 to do what the 360 can already do easily and with a lot less code... On top of this, there is shrinking incentive to do this work; the PS3 isn't selling." Whether these comments can be taken at face value is up to you; Booth adds at the end of his post that his remarks "might come across as a lot of Sony bashing, but it's just the reality from the trenches." It's an interesting perspective nonetheless.

jees, well with powerhorse games like those under his belt that really push consoles to the limits, he must be 100% correct!

 

MikeB said: @ sieanr Oh, and do you have any experience working in the industry? Ever touched a dev kit? Ever seen the sourcecode of a modern game? Yes, yes and yes. BTW, my Amiga dev kit is not from 1988 but from the current millennium, supports virtual processor code, C and C++. Picture taken from one of my reviews for OSNews, my old laptop here is running QNX RtP.

Oh, you didn't understand me. Thats probably my mistake since I thought you'd understand that this in reference to game design, but I guess the context of this thread didn't make that obvious enough.

So, do you work in the game industry? If so in what position and for how long?

I was also referring to a modern console dev kit, but again I guess that wasn't quite obvious enough.

Oh, and as for sourcecode I meant a modern PS3 or 360 game, not something opensource.

@ sieanr

No, but I had my own tech company in the past and know various games developers and low level programmers. I mostly quote low level games developers regarding the PS3's potential. If I quote myself, I would for example quote myself from long before the PS3 launched:

"It will probably take some time before developers manage to get the most out of this platform, as has for example also been the case with the classic Amiga chipsets."

Considering my experience, I would never have claimed the same with regard to the 360. And I think there originates some differences of opinion, many people seemed to have expected near optimal results from the PS3 early on, however IMO for this the used architecture was too different and innovative for its time, compared to tradional game engines.



I am not a games developer, I do however have a Linux/CellSDK installed on my PS3.