oobob said: iLLmaticV3 said: I believe the Sony Playstation 3 Computer Entertainment System is a very powerful beast. Within the next year or two we are going to see games that completely showcase how powerful the system is. God of War 3 and Heavy Rain being two of them. Uncharted 2 already raised the bar also. Luckily with technology belief is minimized.  And it's a fact that they could have had the same power in a chip that didn't piss everyone off.  I own a ps3 and I would be so pissed to program for it.  I linked phrack - oh yeah, most video gamers have an illusion of technical knowledge supported by buzzwords.  The fact is in order execution cores like those in the xbox or ps3 strain developers enough.  Having to further optimize code over 6 processors makes optimization needlessly complex.  In my comp hardware course years ago a student asked the prof if he should write something in a convoluted manner that saved a little bit of programming time.  The prof immediately told him that he should write it clearly and the compiler would optimize it.  Writing it clearly was much more valuable for the next guy who worked on it and the complier takes care of the minor optimization.  Turns out this gen of consoles threw out the common assumptions programmers have made for years and placed a larger burden of optimizing command orders on them.  Then Sony further screws developers by making a parallel processor so complicated it's horrific.  I love my ps3 but I would hate programming it.  The reason multiplats suffer is only developer studios that Sony throws money at can afford to waste their time figuring it out. And they could have just put a faster x86 chip in there instead.  Perhaps more than 512mb of ram (this limitation is why the console versions of oblivion have unarmored horses while it's present on the PC).  Or a better GPU.  And it would have run just as well if not better!  For the price of the launch ps3 you could have built a mid-high end gaming pc that murdered it! Hey look, exclusive developers sony throws money at make great games.  Those multiplat guys might be able to keep up if they could afford spending extra time and effort on overly complicated development for the cell.  Who would waste their time like that to reach a smaller market than either of the two other consoles?  Sony's arrogance this gen is appalling.

Yes, yes I know its hard to develep for and costs third parties more time/money. And that mid-high end computers are more powerful (Including mine). But even through all the complexity, the Playstation 3 is still powerful for what it is and what it does.

They definitely should have gave it more RAM and a better GPU, that would make it way easier to develop for and port games, I'm pretty sure Sony has learned there lesson this time around. I get the feeling the Playstation 4 will be a monster also and less complex.

Its a funny situation. They produce the system to be expensive and go the distance for 10 years or so. However in doing so they help to create a situation where lasting 10 years isn't a likely or expected turn of events. In the end a lesser system technically would have probably lasted longer on the market and once the next generation consoles are out with full backwards compatibility its unlikely that the PS3 can compete in a cost vs performance metric.

KBG29 said: Well I am done playing this game for now. I will end with saying this. As an owner of both the Xbox 360, and the PS3 I know which one has more impressive games. I have spent 1000's of hours on each system over the last 3+ years, and I like them both. However, when you go head to head with games that were built directly for each system PS3 is the clear cut winner, across the board. From my experiance there is only 2 360 titles that match the feel of PS3 games, and thats Gears 1 & 2. Halo, Forza, Fable, Mass Effect, and L4D are not in the same league as Uncharted, Killzone, GT5:P, Ratchet & Clank, and Metal Gear Solid. Not in Gameplay. Not immersivness, and surly not in presentation. Now back to playing Banjo Kazooie Nuts & Bolts.

A imo would never hurt on such a hugely subjective point, I happen to think you're stark raving bonkers saying its clear cut either way. 

That being said I can't believe you're playing BJ, I got 3 hours in and thought it was boring crap, guess our gaming tastes are very different.

slowmo said: A benefit of Bluray isn't its streaming speed in any sense at all MikeB (not at 2x), that is actually FUD like you're accusing others of spreading. If you were to say that Uncharted 2 benefitted from using Bluray by amazing graphics largely due to a huge number of assets they could fit on bluray and indeed excellent audio and cutscences for this same reason too then you might have a point. The streaming speed the PS3 drive is not better than DVD or HDD so is not a benefit, the extra space however is. The Cell hasn't been a benefit for anything other than a handful of games so far, imo this shows it was a mistake to include such a complex architecture in a games console. The Sega Saturn did the same thing an despite it's amazing power it was just too hard for developers to bother trying to get parity with its rivals. If you want a vote of it was the right call for one percent of games released on the system so far then I'm afraid I cannot agree. Overall I'd say Bluray is a benefit when the game engine is built to stream and cache properly, the Cell has been a failure that has caused more harm than good (poor ports, ridiculous cost).

^This

MikeB said: @ Chrizum Uncharted 2 looks great, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't have anything to to with the Cell or Bluray (it could have been done on the 360 and PC as well). Not with this quality on the 360 according to these well respected developers. Their provided reasoning are also IMO solid. I think it's nice to see top devs being excited about what they can do with their future PS3 games.

You mean "according" to a 1st party ps3 developer lol, of course they will say its only possible on the PS3, doesn't mean its true, anything on the ps3 could be done on the 360 with ease including unchartered 2, the only issue would be space on the drive but graphics would be no issue at all seeing as the 360 has a better gpu and memory setup.

@ HappySquirrel

The Cell is very suitable for gaming development as has been proven already. It's not only great for scientists and militaries, first and foremost it's actually most suitable for games and multi-media.

The Cell is however a radically new approach, a direction the market is currently taking in general with the PS3 at the forefront. It was expected years before the PS3 released there would be issues porting legacy game engines to the PS3 or XBox 360 lead games (I know devs who ported old DirectX-bound games to technically capable, but different alternative platforms, the end results were superior yet it took an unreasonable amount of effort, being multi-platform friendly isn't Microsoft's priority).

Like many developers say, the Cell is not really that hard to develop for, but can be hard to port to if you have to port legacy game engines (and want good performance).



Unlikely for the PS3 I believe. I hope we get to see a WiiHD by that time, but it could well be such a device would be weaker than a PS3/wand combination. So such a device could be viewed as current gen and the Wii like the PS2 last gen, from a technical perspective of course.

So PS2 vs Wii and PS3 vs Wii2HD.

As for a new XBox, I hope Microsoft this time takes the time to properly design their hardware. They sacrificed a lot of the good console reputation the industry had and of course PC gaming is getting neglected nowadays to help XBox marketing success.

CGI-Quality said: Squilliam said: Rather than sniping at him you know you could post a response rather than skirting the side of flaming/trolling. How ironic. Since I'm in no mood to needlessly debate with you, I'll pass. I will happily dispute some of what Happy Squrriel said though, as nothing I said was incorrect. I have nothing against him. But to call the Cell a "mistake" and Blu-ray pointless was a bit off IMO, as we don't what was "pointless" or not. That is why I said that his post was well written and thoughtout, yes, just not all of it was factual.

Rather than just sniping and saying that it was factually inaccurate, the next stage which you should have performed was to show how what he posted was inaccurate. So why didn't you?

I would go with a mix of both beneficial and not why?

*beneficial because if developers actually have skill,time.resources the result of what they can get out of ps3 is amazing like MGS4 for example needs the blu ray space or Uncharted 2 currently best looking console game out that have impressed a lot of game reviewers shows what the cell can do if optimized.

*Not beneficial because the architecture is complicated and needs some learning which results to 3rd part developer having trouble getting their game running on the ps3 also there are small 3rd party groups out there that doesn't have the resource to put in time developing a game for ps3 plus the "cell" is not cheap to manufacture making the ps3 insanely expensive for the mass(launch)

Also the "U2 can be done on 360 easily blah blah blah" not knocking the 360's capabilities but I have been hearing this over and over and over and over and over again back @ MGS4. I want to see a actual game to show this instead of just words 360 has been in the market for 4 years and ps3 is late 1 year yet the improvement on it's exclusives are HUGE.

CGI-Quality said: Squilliam said: Rather than just sniping and saying that it was factually inaccurate, the next stage which you should have performed was to show how what he posted was inaccurate. So why didn't you? Highlighted for those who don't read. I said it wasn't factual, not inaccurate. Until there is solid proof that the Cell and Blu-ray were mistakes and pointless, it isn't a factual statement to post such. It may very well be "true", but at this point in time, it's all speculation. Either way I'm seriously done here with this. As I said, I'll happily debate it with Squrriel, as I know he's a reasonable poster.

You're obviously forgetting the important information here. I don't need to see it, I was addressing how you made your point which was very badly in this serious context.

@ Squilliam

Boy can you exaggerate.