Harmonix Dev trashes PS3

Note that two kind of devleopers attack the PS3. One is the guy with enough cred in the industry, that he really doesn't care what Sony or Microsoft or any company thinks of their opinion.....Carmack, Gabe Newell, etc. The other is the guy who, for whatever reason, just doesn't care what Sony or Microsoft thinks of them.....like this guy on his blog.

The point is.....EA, Activision, Konami and Square and alot of other companies devs are thinking the same thing as this guy....they just ain't saying it.

The PS3, from a developers perspective, is a joke. Believe it or live in fanboy denial bliss....but the reality is that PS3 code isn't portable it isn't pretty and the architecture isn't designed to be optimized for gaming.....and this has and willl continue to be reflected in the games.

you simply cannot say things like that without actually knowing what the cell processor does, and everyone knows you dont because nobody knows what it does.

shroom76

Lol, it's like a glorious mystery.

Maybe it's just me, but I miss the days where developers focused on making games, rather then advancing the whole notion of system wars. I don't mind some talk here and there, frankly it's always been present, but this generation more then any other has seen developers constantly talking, praising, bashing, flaming, arguing and I just wish they would all shut up and make games.

Whether it's pro or anti this or that, I don't really care. I'm not a big tech head and I don't care about this crap. I want to play games, not constantly hear whiny developers going on and on about stuff that isn't relevant to people who just want to play. Sure it's interesting to know a few things, but I'd rather developers shut up, focus, and start releasing good games that take advantage of the system they are working on, and releasing them in a timely manner.

nyc05

I totally agree with you, I miss those days. The thing is Most Developers are lazy it seems when it comes to trying to figure out How Cell and Bluray work (EA, Ubisoft, just to name a few) instead of putting time into it to make great games. Instead we get these half-assed titles to hit shelves, and there only responses are: "Well it's better on 360, cause we've been used to DVd-format for about 7 years, so we just slapped the same formula on Blu-ray, but for some reason is worse."

http://forums.gametrailers.com/showthread.php?t=211558

First, lets debunk a few common misconceptions:

"The PS3 is more graphically advanced than the 360"

Fill rate is one of the primary ways to measure graphics performance - in essence, it's a number describing how many pixel operations you can perform. The fill rate on the PS3 is significantly slower than on the 360, meaning that games either have to run at lower resolution or use simpler shader effects to achieve the same performance. Additionally, the shader processing on the ps3 is significantly slower than on the 360, which means that a normal map takes more fill rate to draw on the ps3 than it does on the 360. And I'm not talking about small differences here, we're talking roughly half the pixel pushing power.

Is it just me or is this person just comparing the GPU? Devs and Sony have stated at graphical effects are able to be processed by the CPU (the cell), leaving much multitasking

Ok, fine, but the cell is like, super powerful"

In theory, sure, but in reality it doesn't work out that way. Game code simply doesn't split well across multiple processors. You can probably find a way to split a few things off fairly easily - put the audio on one processor, animation on another; but generally the breakup is always going to leave several of the SPUs idle or underutilized. On top of that, it's usually not CPU speed that restricts the visuals in games - it's fill rate.

That's what happens when you PORT a game. By building from the ground up, each processor can handle something different (i.e. physics or AI) and it's really the dev's choice whether SPU's are left on idle or not, meaning it depends on how they use it, not IF they can

"Uh, Blue Ray!"

Great for watching movies, but not so great for games. Getting data off the blue ray drive takes about twice as long as it does to get the same data off the 360's DVD drive. That translates into longer load times, or god forbid if your streaming from disk, tighter constraints on the amount of data you can stream.

This is where caching the data comes in. There's a reason why Sony put harddrives in all ps3's. Now you can have both speed AND content

"But it's got a lot more space than DVD"

Ok, you got me there - it does have a lot more space, and there is the potential to use that to do something cool, but thats unlikely to be realized in any useful way. There are tons of compression techniques available for data and I'd personally rather be able to get my data faster than have more of it. Most developers who use the entire Blue Ray drive are doing it to work around other problems with the ps3 such as it's slow loading - for instance, in Resistance: Fall of Man, every art asset is stored on disk once for every level that uses it. So rather than storing one copy of a texture, you're storing it 12 times. If you took that entire game and removed all the duplicate data, it would likely fit on a DVD without any problem. They do this to speed up load times, which, as I pointed out before, are painfully slow on the ps3. So in this case, the extra space is completely wasted.

Here, it's basically quality versus quantity, but once again, cache data. Also, with blu-ray, developers are trying to uncompress data, making for better quality and easier to both inserting data and stops the process of decompressing. This is all based on the developer though, and how much effort they put in. Last time I heard, Harmonix don't need tons of processing powerfor their games

Grantelicious

THE XBOX 360 CANNOT WILLNOT PLAY IN HD! IT DOES NOT PLAY ON A HI DEFINITION DISC! WTH IS THAT BS!

sure you can get component cables and hook tehm up so that the xbox upscales to the proper screen length, but.... uhg nobody gets it. it plays regular dvd's, while ps3 plays a hi def dvd (blu ray).

and 30fps is more than enough for any game, 60 fps is jsut rediculous and people are stupid for expecting it.

halo runs in 30 fps im sure, so hows that for your framerate issue.

and lastly, you simply cannot say things like that without actually knowing what the cell processor does, and everyone knows you dont because nobody knows what it does.

shroom76

Congratulations, you won the most biased uninformed comment of the day award!

Um, the 360 plays HD, you can store any kind of image on a regular DVD, hell, you could store a 1080p movie, but you could only get like half an hour or less. (but it wouldn't play unless you tricked the player to play it in HD, but that is irrelevant.) You could even store 1080p stuff on a SNES cartidge (you'd get like one model or less though...) and it would still play if you got the player to output it.

tl;dr 360 can play in HD