MikeB said: MikeB said: @ Kynes RSX is a fillrate/bandwidth starved chip Someone forgot to mention this to Naughty Dog. And looking at your games library it's even funnier that you are upset. You only have retro games, technically low demanding PC games and mostly Wii games. So what's your opinion on the Wii's graphical abilities including anti-aliasing? Do you have a HDTV? I would at least have expected you to be a 360 fanboy or on some expensive highly specced gaming PC, someone upset about the gaming neglect PC gaming is receiving!?

That's why I'm more objective, because I don't have an emotional attachment to any of the HD consoles. I have problems with propaganda, and with people who blatantly lie, misleading with false technical reasons. Wii is great to someone like me, who enjoys local multiplayer, that's why I have it. But having a Wii doesn't mean that I don't have a strong technical foundation, probably something you lack being a therapist.

@ Kynes

That's the same bandwidth the Xenos has to its memory but has to share with the CPU as well.

The PS3's Cell processor has a dedicated bus to XDR.

It's also worth noting the RSX can access the XDR/Cell simultaneously together with the graphics memory if needed, considerably upping potential bandwidth.

If you confuse the Xenos' daughter chip's internal bandwidth, then remember the Cell has a higher internal bandwidth and you have to consider the tiling issues involved when rendering in high definition. For example would it have been beneficial if the Xenos had twice as much internal bandwidth but only 1MB of daughter chip memory? I think not.

If you are so smart as you say you are, this may clarify things for you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:X360bandwidthdiagram.jpg

First of all, don't put in my mouth words I didn't said. That's something you really love to do. I never said that I'm so smart. I said that I have a strong technical foundation that you don't seem to have.

It's funny that you always mention the tiling problems some developers have, but at the same time you say that the developers that don't extract the PS3 performance in the same level than first party studios are lazy. That's double standards, Mike, or you take into consideration all the strong points both consoles have, or you don't take them.

I'm not confusing Xenos internal bandwidth with total bandwidth, even when you don't use it to store the buffers (back and front), you can use that eDRAM as a high speed cache. The logic that the eDRAM chip has, it's what in a PC graphics chip is called a ROP. It's where the AA is resolved, so always when you do AA you use that 10 MB as a high speed cache.

The problem a lot of forumers have with your posts is that you strongly exaggerate the importance of the PS3 strong points, but dismiss the XBox360 ones. If you take the time to read my old posts, you will read something I've always said. PS3 is a great architecture if you have lots of time and a high budget, something that in the economical situation we have, it's a luxury that only first party studios have. That's why, even when the theoretical performance is higher than the X360, almost any game done with the same budget and timeline will be better in X360, because it's much easier to develop for it.

@ Kynes

I very much doubt that.



That's not what I said. I only said for performance demanding games to not tap enough resources from the Cell's SPUs IMO for such games you can't judge the true power of a system, just the state of the gaming engine. There are many references to my past statements.



I never did. It's easier to port most legacy game engines to the system and it has a cheaper entry pricing. Next to its exclusives I think those are the main strongpoints.

Looks like Gabe Newall was right when he said Cells architecture wasn't going to lead anywhere.

Good work Gabe!

RAZurrection said: Looks like Gabe Newall was right when he said Cells architecture wasn't going to lead anywhere. Good work Gabe!

Even in a worst case scenario he would have been horribly wrong, if the PS3 Cell would be a dead end with regard to CPU designs. SPU code is being designed by developers to be highly portable, it just forces them to be write their code in an efficient manner, so this will only result into long term benefits for future multi-core/cpu architectures with future game engines based on the same codebase.

He said the PS3 is a waste of everyone's time. Clearly a fanboy or malicious dishonest PR comment.

MikeB said: Even in a worst case scenario he would have been horribly wrong, if the PS3 Cell would be a dead end with regard to CPU designs.

Doesn't look like it to me, 4 years after developers got cells, they still can't achieve parity between the old-ass Xbox 360 and PS3.

If anything there's a bigger disparity between cross platform games this year then there was 2 years ago. Cod4 was closer then MW2.

MikeB said:4 SPU code is designed by developers to be highly portable, it just forces them to be write their code in an efficient manner, so this will only result into long term benefits for future multi-core/cpu architectures based on the same codebase.

But there isn't going to be any more cells, not even in the PS4. So it really was a lot of redundant work with no future-proofing. Back to square one again. It's no surprise Factor 5, Free Radical and Grin all folded up after using PS3 as a lead platform, the poor guys poured money into developing for a needlessly complex system for mediocre results even the current middleware would have toppled.

MikeB said:4 He said the PS3 is a waste of everyone's time. Clearly a fanboy or malicious dishonest PR comment.

He was just calling it like it is, in 2007 there was no long-term benefits in cell development, because there was no guarentee that Cells would actually take off. Now in 2009, where the architecture has been shelved. It really doesn't.

Gabe was just incredibly accurate in his prediction, much to the chagrin of PS3 fanboys, but much to the joy of all developers worldwide.

 

 

@ RAZurrection

Actually most games are as good as on par. Most users won't notice a difference without running side by side (and often won't agree on which version is better).

And the game engine enhancements required on the PS3 directly translate into better performing (more efficient) gaming engines on other platforms as well, including on the XBox 360 and the PC.

Like was the case on the Amiga vs the Atari ST it took years to clearly show off the hardware in exclusives. Some publishers like Ocean still continued to use the Atari ST as a lead platform for their multi-platform games, so despite most games running more impressively on the Amiga, their games stayed on a Atari ST level (which weren't bad, just lacking things like parallax scrolling, fewer colors, less technically impressive audio and such compared to other Amiga games of the time, they were still much better than PC games).



Nothing like that has been announced and the PS4 is still many years away.



Factor 5 was most criticized for their sixaxis support (which I greatly prefer in this game BTW), Lair needed more polish, better story telling and better characters, etc to make it really stand out. Lair didn't fail to get good reviews overall because of using the Cell processor.

Free Radical designed Haze as a multi-platform game. It was only intended to be a timed exclusive. Most criticism was directed against gameplay and story elements. I thought it was an ok game like Lair, but being PS3 exclusive (in the case of Haze, it was to be timed exclusive) seems to heat things up quite a bit.

Grin, did they ever do a PS3 exclusive?

Many companies have gone out of business the last couple of years, not only PS3 software developers.



lol

Kynes said: MikeB said: @ Kynes You said that Cell is great doing AA Compared to what? - I said it can do AA and flexibility is a benefit. - I said the 360 does not have a real technical advantage regarding anti-aliasing. I didn't say anything with regard to performance vs the RSX, however I can imagine this flexibility to provide for potentially big benefits and this approach to be used efficiently together with other deferred rendering techniques.   Any programable processor is more flexible than fixed function, but it doesn't means that is practical (ATI R520 is an example of a debacle due to not using fixed function to do AA resolve) Regarding to 360-PS3 AA: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241 RSX - The relation to the G7x series would mean that the ROPs are capable of handling 2 multisamples per pixel per cycle. Basically, in a bandwidth unlimited scenario, 2xMSAA or Quincunx is free. But do note that the double pumped Z-only fill rate is only effective without MSAA and that this can be important for certain effects such as rendering shadows; with 2xMSAA the z-only fill rate falls in line with the colour fill rate. However, with the use of multiple render targets or higher resolutions, the 22GB/s is very much a concern for framebuffer bandwidth. 4xMSAA would be very costly to fillrates, halving the rates compared to 2xMSAA and also doubling memory bandwidth consumption since the framebuffers scale linearly. Xenos - As noted in the B3D article, the ROPs are designed to handle 4 multisamples per pixel per cycle. All fill rates are full speed, and the Z-only fill rate is also double pumped. RSX is a fillrate/bandwidth starved chip. That's the reason why in some cases PS3 games have a blur filter instead of AA, because a blur filter is more compute intensive than bandwidth intensive. You can't help it's bandwidth problems doing AA resolve on a SPU.

that's also based on the idea that the RSX is based on the core of the G7X when it is been through some Opinion's that the RSX is based on 

something akin to the G9X, IT share's some N47 core technology's but it was also stated at the time that the RSX is twice as powerful as the GeForce 6800 Ultra.

which the G7x is not

RAZurrection said: Looks like Gabe Newall was right when he said Cells architecture wasn't going to lead anywhere. Good work Gabe!

right, so AMD and Intel with all their wisdom are also not going on an making Hybrid CPU/GPU chip's in order to compete with Nvidia and ATI yup Gabe was right all right..lol/sarcasm