October 11, 2007Why Is PS3 Harder To Develop Games For -vs- XB360?
Posted by The Ori
The Xbox 360 processor was designed to give game developers the power that they actually need, in an easy to use form. The Cell processor has impressive streaming floating-point power that is of limited use for games. Why? Game code is a mixture of integer, floating-point, and vector math, with lots of branches and random memory accesses. This code is best handled by a general purpose CPU with a cache, branch predictor, and vector unit. The PS3 SPEs have no cache, no direct access to memory, no branch predictor, and a different instruction set from the PS3’s main CPU. They are not designed for or efficient at general purpose computing. DSPs (SPEs) are not really appropriate for game programming. Xbox 360 has three general purpose CPU cores. The Cell processor, in addition to the 7 SPEs, has only one General Purpose CPU.
Dot products are critical to games because they are used in 3D math to calculate vector lengths, projections, transformations, and more. The Xbox 360 CPU has a dot product instruction, where other CPUs such as Cell must emulate dot product using multiple instructions (Emulation uses more of the CPU’s power - and more CPU cycles). Cell’s streaming floating-point work is done on its seven SPE processors. Since geometry processing is moved to the GPU, (Even ignoring the bandwidth limitations the PS3’s GPU is not as powerful as the Xbox 360’s GPU) the need for streaming floating-point work and other SPE style programming in games has dropped dramatically. Sony’s CPU is ideal for an environment where 12.5% of the work is general-purpose computing and 87.5% of the work is DSP calculations. That sort of mix makes sense for video playback or networked waveform analysis, but not for games. Cell is optimized for streaming floating-point, with 87.5% of its cores good for streaming floating-point and nothing else; this is the only place where XB360 falls short, by 50%.
So, why are games slow to arrive on PS3? Game programmers do not want to spread their code over eight processors, especially when seven of the processors are poorly suited for general purpose programming. Evenly distributing the game code across eight processors, one being a general purpose one (optimized for other code) , is extremely difficult. It’s almost a whole new way of thinking and programming, the developers were not prepared for.
that is why 360 rules sony right now.
If the 360 rules sony than why do their councels keep breaking, their a piece of $h!t, thats why, the ps3 may be harder to develop games for but it still leaves game developers a lot of power with its cell processers do do things that the 360 could never do in a million years, If you even mention the power of the ps3 to the 360 it’ll red ring just thinking about it.
Short answer: Because ATI chips always run hot. Go look at reviews of any PC based ATI card that talks about GPU temps, you’ll notice ATI chips have run hot for the last couple generations.
Excessive heat can cause warping and solder to melt. If the board warps, and the solder melts, that would cause a connection point loss. In systems which start to fail, the melted solder will usually bond with itself once more and it will work properly again.
However, if the board is permanently warped from heat the solder point cannot bond with itself again. Then the system has to be sent in for repair or it needs the x-clamp mod performed.
I don’t know how MS verified case design and the long term effects that are caused by extreme conditions such as heat, but apparently it was not long enough. If they had, they would have discovered the obvious fault early into production or within the first couple months of public release.
At least MS admits they fucked up and has made an effort to fix this problem. The same cannot be said by their competitor, Sony. Aside from my seldom used PS2, every Sony product I’ve owned broke. I’ve had 5 PS1s and they all died! So much for Sony’s quality being so superior, and lets not even talk about the faulty PS1 and PS2 lasers.
Why dont you all grow up!!!!!
Like this has anything to do with growing up. You must be a very sensitive person.
No im not sensitive, just fed up with fanboys. Its playground stuff. My console’s better then yours crap, my dad is way smaller than yours, I need to grow up, sorry.
yea but people flock to easier things than harder things. 360=easy , ps3=harder. more developers for 360
I like the ps3 and 360. They are both great. (i have them both) The 360 games are now a little better, but this is gonna be OK soon. Good games are gonna come out next year.
in the end ps3 & 360 will look exactly the same or close 2 the ps3 isn’t really more powerful
I have both a PS3 and XB360. The only reason I ever bought any Playstation product was for the Ace Combat or other aerial type combat series games. No XBOX or XBOX360 aerial combat type game ever matched up with a Sony console version, TILL NOW! On XB360, Ace Combat SIX is coming; download the demo, and you will see what I mean. I basically bought a PS3 for nothing (now that AC6 is on XB360) except the BR-D player. After seeing Konami jump ship, and go to XBox360, they FINALLY made a Air Combat game that is just like the ones on the Sony platforms. I am impressed with that game for XB360.
STILL, they both have their ups and downs, and right now, original game development for PS3 is its DOWN.
So basically it’s bullshit when programmers say that PS3 is hard to program for. It’s just a different idea and a whole different outlook on programming. What I’m trying to say is that the same thing could be said for 360 if the cell was the norm. The PS3 is not hard to program for, just different.
Just as with anything NEW, it is hard at first. So, in a sense, YES it is harder to develop for because it was something NOT expected. Code program for one CPU that runs it all in parallel, or SPLIT code into 7 processors, which is easier? Think of it as using one SPE for each aspect of the game: 1 SPE for A.I., another SPE for character movement & tracking, then one or two SPEs for graphic/scenery, and so on. Each CPU can run a seperate portion of the game, then TIMING it all right to work as one unit. Well, ONE cpu would have done that, but now with up to 7, you have to code across 7, and time it all to run together, little more difficult…
Oh yeah I’m a different bob and the above post is mine.
I don’t expect any differences in 5years or throughout the ps3 & 360 lifetime I expect the same graphics from what i read do anybody else agree
I believe that Ps3 will eventually take over 360 or Atleast give them some major competition. The Ps3 is far more powerful and yeah the price is kinda high but look at all the cool futures. Soon your going to be able to wirelesly access your ps3 from your psp and play games and stream your music. WTF!!! No one is doing that not Micro or Tendo. Ps3 is going to show there true strenght very soon.
You can already STREAM music using PS3 from other devices. You can access the PS3 wirelessly from PSP already. The PSP would have to support streaming to IT, because PS3 already can do it.
Microsoft does the same thing as far as steaming from other devices, with both XB1 and XB360. No M$ device has a wireles router in it though.
With homebrew on PSP, you can stream FROM PS3, but not with a stock bios unit. YOU say it will happen, then PSP will beed a Sony firmware update too.
You need to read up on what PSP and PS3 do together right now, and not SOON to be…