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Forums - Gaming - PS3 is Not More Powerful than Xbox 360, says game Dev!

Naraku_Diabolos on 11 April 2009
NinjaKido said:
WereKitten said:
He's saying a few known things: the 360 GPU is specced higher than the PS3's, and the PS3's BluRay has a lower transfer rate than the 360's DVD.
But he's also glossing about the parallel offloading to the SPUs on the PS and being a bit limited in his vision, probably because of the techniques he's most familiar with.

As an example: the BluRay is slower and still both Uncharted and Killzone 2 managed to stream huge quantities of data with barely noticeable hiccups and loading times.

As for the technicalities: for what I know the two GPUs have the same fillrate until you put multisampling AA in the picture. Then the 360's pulls ahead because it's implemented in hardware, but I think you can do the same on the PS3 using shaders and the SPUs.

As for the shaders he's only right about the fillrate on the 360 being higher if it can use more than 32 out of 48 pipelines (unified architecture). That means less vertex shaders, of course, whereas the PS3 has a fixed fill rate and a fixed vertex rate. You can dynamically adapt better on the 360, but the advantage is far from the 2x factor in most cases. And again, he is not thinking about using the SPUs for both vertex and pixel shading.

In the end he has given his informed opinion, but he comes off as a bit entrenched in a PC-centric (CPU(s)+GPU) view of what makes a powerful machine for games development, thus I understand that he finds the 360 more powerful.

 

How many times has that been debunked ?

 

http://uk.gamespot.com/pages/profile/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=23916169&user=skektek

 

"a game developer who has worked on both Guitar Hero games and Rock Band,"


Please , GTFO ?

"PS3 is Not More Powerful than Xbox 360, says game Dev!"

 

I'd seriously like him to proove it , there's developers that say the PS3 is more powerful , others that say the 360 is more powerful and some that say they are pretty much the same. Well i'll believe what I can see on my TV screen and it seems to indiciate to me that , individualy (Killzone 2) and cummativley ( Uncharted ,Ratchet & Clank, GT5 , Killzone 2, MGS4 ) the PS3 holds the title , what good is it being theoreticaly powerful if that potential isn't realised ?

 

 

I believe the developer from the first post was talking about multi-platform titles for making/porting games on. It seems to anyones belief that when a developer is making an exclusive for a system, they can utilize the full potential of the system to make a great game. Only developers that work closely with Sony are able to pull off most of the techniques that multi-platform developers would have trouble pulling off. This is why that when Killzone 2 was mentioned with little to no hiccups, it may because GG looked at the hardware specs and analyzed what and how they could use the system effectively.

Usually third-parties will have a tougher time to make the games balanced/equal for the content they can deliver visually and through audio. It is like putting weights on a scale and you have to even it out, is what I'm saying.



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Ascended_Saiyan3 on 11 April 2009
MikeB said:

@ nightsurge

The PS3's only real advantage is the Cell and the extra storage capacity. The Cell is not exactly the best processor for gaming tasks, though, and the blu-ray drive/disc has it's disadvantages as well, as described in the article.


Although everything has its stronger and weaker points, the Cell is most excellent for gaming (just looking at what kind of systems are running on the SPUs for various games already makes this pretty evident). Blu-Ray disc is far more modern technology and compared to DVD provides mainly advantages in this regard.

Of course it's new and different, thus requiring different care than was implemented for many legacy game engines. The Wii for example has the advantage of being very similar to the GameCube, it does not make the Wii a high spec console, but it allows developers to move over and enhance GameCube optimised game engines fairly easily. If there was no GameCube before the Wii launched, this would require far more effort from such developers.

To back that point up, here are some examples from a GDC 2009 dev slide on PS3 performance.

Large blur w.r.t. depth

- RSX alone: 15 ms+

- 1.5-2ms on SPU + 3 ms on GPU = 4.5ms to 5ms (3x speed up)

------------------------------------

SSAO:

GPU: 10+ms

2 SPUs: 6ms

---------------------------

Deferred Lighting on SPUs:

- 3 shadow casting lights, 100 point lights
2x MSAA, 720p
- Lighting performed per sample
- Apply tone mapping on SPU
Virtually free
- Performance: > 60 fps, 3 SPUs for 11ms each
- No MSAA: 2 SPUs for 11ms

-----------------------------

Volumetric Lighting:

- Effect is a bit too slow to be practical on GPU: ~5ms
- Do it on SPU instead
- Parallelises with GPU easily

- Takes ~11 ms on 1 SPU

--------------------------

Conclusion:

- New additions to your toolbox:
     - Tile-based classification techniques on SPU
     - Deferred lighting on SPU
     - Texture sampling on SPU
- Rendering is no longer just a GPU problem
     - Use general purpose nature of the SPU to your advantage

Here is the link to the developers' GDC PyreEngine (Deferred Lighting and Post Processing) presentation.  The PhyreEngine is available to ALL developers.

Nightsurge needs to start researching.  I wonder if he thinks that presentation is just "Sony lies", as if developers could make games on false numbers.

 



Megadude on 11 April 2009
Ascended_Saiyan3 said:
MikeB said:

@ nightsurge

The PS3's only real advantage is the Cell and the extra storage capacity. The Cell is not exactly the best processor for gaming tasks, though, and the blu-ray drive/disc has it's disadvantages as well, as described in the article.


Although everything has its stronger and weaker points, the Cell is most excellent for gaming (just looking at what kind of systems are running on the SPUs for various games already makes this pretty evident). Blu-Ray disc is far more modern technology and compared to DVD provides mainly advantages in this regard.

Of course it's new and different, thus requiring different care than was implemented for many legacy game engines. The Wii for example has the advantage of being very similar to the GameCube, it does not make the Wii a high spec console, but it allows developers to move over and enhance GameCube optimised game engines fairly easily. If there was no GameCube before the Wii launched, this would require far more effort from such developers.

To back that point up, here are some examples from a GDC 2009 dev slide on PS3 performance.

Large blur w.r.t. depth

- RSX alone: 15 ms+

- 1.5-2ms on SPU + 3 ms on GPU = 4.5ms to 5ms (3x speed up)

------------------------------------

SSAO:

GPU: 10+ms

2 SPUs: 6ms

---------------------------

Deferred Lighting on SPUs:

- 3 shadow casting lights, 100 point lights
2x MSAA, 720p
- Lighting performed per sample
- Apply tone mapping on SPU
Virtually free
- Performance: > 60 fps, 3 SPUs for 11ms each
- No MSAA: 2 SPUs for 11ms

-----------------------------

Volumetric Lighting:

- Effect is a bit too slow to be practical on GPU: ~5ms
- Do it on SPU instead
- Parallelises with GPU easily

- Takes ~11 ms on 1 SPU

--------------------------

Conclusion:

- New additions to your toolbox:
     - Tile-based classification techniques on SPU
     - Deferred lighting on SPU
     - Texture sampling on SPU
- Rendering is no longer just a GPU problem
     - Use general purpose nature of the SPU to your advantage

Here is the link to the developers' GDC PyreEngine (Deferred Lighting and Post Processing) presentation.  The PhyreEngine is available to ALL developers.

Nightsurge needs to start researching.  I wonder if he thinks that presentation is just "Sony lies", as if developers could make games on false numbers.

 

Murder murder! Your life's on the line! 360 as powerful as PS3? I don't believe you!

 



WarmachineX on 11 April 2009

There is no future for bluray in gaming. period

I doubt even sony will have a br drive on its next system* (if there is one)





Official member of the Xbox 360 Squad

Megadude on 11 April 2009
WarmachineX said:
There is no future for bluray in gaming. period

I doubt even sony will have a br drive on its next system* (if there is one)

 

It ain't gonna be no DVD player that's for sure. ;D



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WarmachineX on 11 April 2009
Megadude said:
WarmachineX said:
There is no future for bluray in gaming. period

I doubt even sony will have a br drive on its next system* (if there is one)

 

It ain't gonna be no DVD player that's for sure. ;D

 

I agree.





Official member of the Xbox 360 Squad

Ascended_Saiyan3 on 11 April 2009
WarmachineX said:
There is no future for bluray in gaming. period

I doubt even sony will have a br drive on its next system* (if there is one)

Is there a particular reason you believe that? I guess you think games will be larger than 400GB next gen. I expect a 6x to 8x Blu-ray drive (36MB/s). That would be faster than the 2.5 SATA hard drive in the PS3 now (30MB/s continuous). For those that don't know, there is a difference between "B" and "b" in the data world.

Ascended_Saiyan3 on 11 April 2009

Also, NinjaKido's link do drive speeds is accurate, but it doesn't mention that the X360's DVD drive is only 8x for DL-DVDs (almost all X360 games). That's what makes the X360's drive slower than the PS3's BD drive.



Squilliam on 11 April 2009
Ascended_Saiyan3 said:
WarmachineX said:
There is no future for bluray in gaming. period

I doubt even sony will have a br drive on its next system* (if there is one)

 

Is there a particular reason you believe that? I guess you think games will be larger than 400GB next gen. I expect a 6x to 8x Blu-ray drive (36MB/s). That would be faster than the 2.5 SATA hard drive in the PS3 now (30MB/s continuous). For those that don't know, there is a difference between "B" and "b" in the data world.

A 250GB HDD averages 50MB/S @5400RPM (2.5")

A 500GB HDD averages 63MB/S @5400RPM (2.5")

 

 

 



Tease.

Ascended_Saiyan3 on 11 April 2009
Squilliam said:
Ascended_Saiyan3 said:
WarmachineX said:
There is no future for bluray in gaming. period

I doubt even sony will have a br drive on its next system* (if there is one)

 

Is there a particular reason you believe that? I guess you think games will be larger than 400GB next gen. I expect a 6x to 8x Blu-ray drive (36MB/s). That would be faster than the 2.5 SATA hard drive in the PS3 now (30MB/s continuous). For those that don't know, there is a difference between "B" and "b" in the data world.

A 250GB HDD averages 50MB/S @5400RPM (2.5")

A 500GB HDD averages 63MB/S @5400RPM (2.5")

 

 

 

Speeds shouldn't change with increase/decrease in storage capacity.

Look at the "rotating disk" section of the chart.  May I see a link from you?