There we go :)

and L4D is awesome even with the "pigheaded" CEO.

It's all a matter of perspective, really. If you ask yourself: "which console is more powerful if I want to develop on PC/360/PS3 with minimal platform-specific optimizations and not licensing an engine" the answer is probably the 360.

That's the world of PC coding Valve - and probably this developer - come from. A world of abstracted interfaces, where the DirectX based 360 APIs really shine. And very very different from the world of old-style console game coding.

Great middleware such as the CryEngine3 or the Phyre engine for smaller developers will help a lot with coders that have this background.

If he's worked on "both Guitar Heros and Rock Band", I would wager he's a contractor, or temp of some sort, probably more design-oriented than engineering, and probably doesn't have the engineering experience to make such unfounded claims.

I suppose that a game like RB or GH might very well have most of its bottleneck performance issues around fillrate, however -- there's hardly anything else going on, gamewise. Fill is probably the bane of their light and shadow volume existance, since their game doesn't really do much else, from a technological standpoint.  Having no other potential performance bottlenecks, and if you're unwilling to rethink your pipeline, or use deferred rendering, etc. to render your scene more effectively, you're bound to think that the 360 is the bee's knees.

From his limited perspective, I'm sure he's correct, or at least is convinced that he is.  Ah the joys of working on simplistic games.

Valve employs talented programmers. But the CEO is just an ex-Microsoft employee, who got to become a millionaire there. He doesn't have the technical knowledge for making the comments he made and are clearly propaganda. Really, PS3 alledgedly being a waste of everyone's time. How more obvious can one be?

There are plenty of developers who love what the PS3 can deliver.

 sure lets hear them, why not. 

Also, just so everybody knows, the OP didn't post the full article.  It goes into a lot more technicle detail on what he is talking about.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=202976

For one horrible moment I thought you were serious.

Then I saw the last line.

Aaaah, blu-ray.
Plenty of room for hi res textures, but too slow to use them.

@Gergroy

Yeah, I read it all.
The missing part basically boils down to "yes, the SPUs are great but parallelizing is hard, so it is easier if the GPU can do everything _really fast_". Again, it's a divide that will never heal between those that stick to the PC way and those that are accepting to spearhead the hard work on parallel processing.

I wonder what the same developer thought when programmable shaders came up.

Btw, I think that dates back to October 2007. The same developer would probably not say the same things about PS3 exclusives sucking nowadays. Maybe some of his ideas about what is viable development would be different in their light.

Nostromo, a low level programmer / games designer for example posted on NeoGAF:

"Too bad PS3's bluray drive has faster transfer rates (on average) than 360's dvd drive.
PS3 is less noisy simply cause it's a better engineered piece of awesomeness."

Everything you need to know:

"For really old Blu-Ray drives (like 3 years ago). The PS3 uses a fairly compact triple wavelength OPU.

From my own personal experience testing a Sony BD-RE drive (actually uses a Panasonic drive mechanism) and a Hitachi-LG drive of similar specs, for similar sized data sets the BD drive typically has almost the same if not significantly faster random seek times. That's generally because data sets between 4-8GB span the entire disc for for DVD-ROM while only covering a third of a BD-ROM, so on average a BD-ROM is going to have seek times in the range 50-100ms with a worst case scenario of around 200-230ms. The DVD-ROM drive will average between 110-150ms with a worst case scenario of around 170-230ms.

Of course once you start getting into larger data sets that that Blu-Ray can handle the average and worst case scenarios (which is an entire disc sweep which takes around 350-400ms) will eclipse the worst case conditions on a DVD-ROM. That being said, even with 23+GB of data with a 100 randomly generate seek sectors I still get around 100ms on average. Besides, if you find the need to randomly jump around to random sectors greater than 4GB in span, then your title has bigger issues than the capabilities of the drive."

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread...t=speed&page=2

"2x Blu-ray Drive (72Mbps(9MB/s))
Single Layer (2http://www.neogaf.com/forum/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=10460097
NeoGAF - Reply to Topicx CLV) - Constant Linear Velocity (Same speed across entire disk)
Double Layer - Couldn't find any data but no games have been released on a double layer yet.

Entire Blu-ray Disk is read at 9MB/s.

12x DVD-Rom Drive SL (9.25MB/S-15.85MB/s(AVG ~8x(10.57MB/s) DL (4.36MB/s-10.57MB/s(AVG ~6x(7.93MB/s)
SL(DVD-5) 12x Max (5-12x Full CAV) - Constant Angular Velocity (Speed Varies from edge to edge)
DL(DVD-9) 8x Max (3.3-8x Full CAV) - Constant Angular Velocity (Speed Varies from edge to edge)

SL DVD is 1.57MB/s > SL Blu-ray
DL DVD is 1.07MB/s < SL Blu-ray

Majority of 360 games are on DVD-9."

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=42157

In addition to those PS3 Blu-Ray specs vs the 360 DVD drive, some more interesting data versus competing Blu-Ray movie players:



The bigger the above bar the better.



The shorter the bar the better.

More data:

http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=74197

With regard to gaming 12x 360 DVD drive vs 2x PS3 Blu-Ray drive:

A 360 dual layer DVD can hold 6.8 GB of game data, a single layer Blu-Ray can hold 25 GB of data, dual layer Blu-Ray disc can hold 50 GBs of data, it's claimed the PS3 is capable of supporting 1 TB Blu-Ray discs in the future (not that I think we will see PS3 games that big, but having technical headroom is great).

http://www.t3.com/news/pioneer%27s-1...-in-ps3?=37463

Some additional notes to keep everything in one post:

- 360 single layer DVD games are small enough to easily fit on any PS3's harddrive, which loads much faster. (this refers to identical 360 to PS3 ports, sporting identical assets)

- In combination with a default harddrive this provides the PS3 with a lot better streaming options (data caching) than it would have been without.

- Many 360 games ported to the PS3 are optimised for variable CD/DVD speeds which have been the standard for over a decade. To easily get around this, the part of the disc where a 360 Dual layer DVD is being read faster, the easy workaround (overkill in terms of what's needed) is to install this data onto the much faster harddrive. But starting from scratch it's much more easier to optimise for the far more easily predictable sustained reading speeds of Blu-Ray disc.

- Due to a much higher density of data per track of Blu-Ray disc, PS3 Blu-Ray discs have to spin much slower to read data quickly as compared to the 360. This results into less noise production and potentially fewer wearing issues over time.

- Blu-Ray discs are scratch resistant, you won't have to deal with scratched discs like many are experiencing with using the 360 DVD drive over time.

- For the usual game spreading data onto several discs will not exactly equal the amount of data on a bigger capacity disc.

What I mean if you have a game cramming 25 GB of data on a single layer Blu-Ray disc and trying to span this data onto dual layer DVDs in equal quality, this will normally not result into 25/6.8 = 3.67 (of course meaning 4) DVDs. This is due to even for linear games developers are usually re-using graphics and audio data from earlier sections in later sections as well. To prevent constant disc swapping developers will then duplicate re-used data for each disc. So this could mean spanning the content could actually require 5 or even 6 discs depending on the game.

With regard to disc swapping, it is sometimes believed by some gamers that by spanning data onto several discs this will not impact game design. In addition to what is mentioned above, developers will try to keep disc swaps and production costs (box size, disc production) to a minimum. An extremely linear game (like Blue Dragon) will usually lead to far fewer sacrifices, but by having a far more open world like GTA IV or other games where you will have to re-visit previously visited areas this poses far more a problem. Game designers in such cases will then usually make any kind of technical sacrifice to keep the game on no more than 1 disc.

I think that answers most questions people may have.

I particularly like the part about R:FoM, where he thinks that levels that "share textures" should not be stored in what is probably a right-to-memory kind of level format, and instead that you should save space and seek all over the disc looking for the individual textures?