News PS3 hardware could be hobbled

He also failed to mention that GTA, Resident Evil 5 and Devil May Cry will also be released on the 360.

Oh, and 360 games appearing on the PC is irrelevant. Do you think people are not going to buy an Xbox 360 because they could wait two years to play a poorly ported 360 game on their PC? (Halo anyone?).

 

Indeeed. I was only replying to the claim that PS3 is going to get few mayor releases. Most developers don't seem worried at all about Cells's writing speed... For all the talk about how hard to program is and how underpowered is it's hardware, there seem to be no sortage of studios (PC sacred cows like Epic included) queing to have their mayor releases on PS3...

 

As I said, I was only claiming that there'll be no shortage of popular franchises in PS3 launches. I have yet to see someone who tries to dispute it. I've never denied that the X360 has a strong line as well. Only that a huge part of it is coming to PC. And if MS want to sell Live Anywhere to anybody, there'll be even more ports.

Btw is not very relevant, but DMC, as far as I know, is not coming to X360

http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/action/devilmaycry4/news.html?sid=6133413&mode=previews

And at to the list God of War...I don't know how I missed it the first time.

It's not irrelevant. First, many games will have simultanous releases. Second, it's not that you aren't buying an X360 because of that. Is that IF you choose to buy a PS3 instead, you'll still get accces to most of the more interesting X360 games in PC.

Would I wait 2 years to play, say, Halo in PC? Well, I would wait (as I've done with H2) to play it with mouse and keyboard.

X360 line has 2 weakness for me. More games will be on PC (and that's a very relevant if you plan to buy just one next-gen console) and those same games are better played on PC. For those who already enjoy PC gaming, the X360 can easily be redundant. The PS3 is much less likely to share games with PC.

As I too said, if you read my posts, it works both ways. For those who don't want to upgrade their PC every year, the X360 can be a blessing. You can play many PC hits without even touching a PC.

But there's a place for a PS3 in many homes and for many gamers. Not necessarily because they are dumb, spoiled or more eager to swallow SONY's hype than Microsoft's, but because they have different needs and appeals.

pd: Poorly ported games? You mean like Oblivion, that plays better and nicer on PC than X360? yeah...sure

 

I hate to bring this old argument up but...

£1500 PC versus £270 console.

 

they dont release it on the PC at the same time beacause they wouldnt move many X360's if it was at the same time, Everyone would just buy it on the PC, Keyboard & Mouse > Controller

Its not the platform, its their crummy proggraming, theres almost as many problems in the PC version as the X360 program

 

as for the speeds.....when i saw the read speed i thought, "read speed or is it write speed?" rubbed my eyes and saw it again, cra* it is realy the read speed.

For the analogy, what happens when you run out of ram and have to use virtual memory? the computer lags like mad, 16MB per second is realy slow, and the amount of data that will be read on the PS3 will be massive to create such massive graphics. its like running FEAR on a FX-60 with a realy realy slow hard drive and realy realy slow bus from the cpu to the HD that will make you wait a lot for each level to load.

i imagine the PS3 being called "the snack machine", each time you need to load a new level you will wait a lot and most often you will go to the kitchen to get a snack, as i did when i had a slow board and slow hard drive each time it was loading a level of pain killer, i mean if this happens this console will have some kind of warning, "loading times are realy slow, if you are fat please do not go get a snack, if you do you will get a heart atack and die and wont buy anymore games from us".

As for the exclusive games on PS3, i dont realy give a cra*, yes i can "bang my girlfriend" if i need fun, but if i dont want to have another kind of fun i will load some game on my computer and play it.

If i have a wii i will invite some friends around to get drunk and play with my wii (please dont tell me that the PS3 has a superior controler and that they have a realy fun product called the eye toy and that dance thing, MS invented the motion sensing controller and the form of the present controller is equal to the PS and PS2 controllers which i dont like for being so unconfortable, the eye toy was a cool idea but it sucks, and the dance thing was invented by someone else)

If i have a XBOX360 i will have the advantage of being able to play against people on computers, and being able to play from a computer against a XBOX360 player (i have my reasons).

and if you want exclusive and if you have been playing games as long as i do and a lot of this forum viewers have, you will know that wii will have TONS of realy fun and retro old school games that i realy love, now thats exclusive!

i hope they iron the bugs out before they send it out, when someone i know wants to buy something like a console or a coputer or a tv they come to me and i dont want to say that acording to benchmarks the PS3 sucks ass. yes it is a supercomputer but what happens when you put a FX60 on a asrok MB with 512 ram and a 20GB 5400rpm HD and a nvidia 6200? you get a realy sucky gameplay.

another thing

its like fighting a (7900GTX and intel PD 650) with a (6800 and FX62).

 

um...YEAH. OR you could use the RSX to read/write from the local memory :/ Problem solved. (Just like it says in the slide).
Like other people have said, this seems like an architecture problem that'll have to be resolved in future revisions of the processor.

Plus, a game programmed for X360 can easily be ported to PC via the XNA programming platform that MS has put out (and vice versa). Obviously, crap ports either way are usually associated with crummy programming (texture mapping on high-resolutions, menu's, etc. etc.)

It's not the end of PS3...

 

didnt the n64 having bigger write speed than this

 

well if their telling develpors not to use the local memory, i dont think they expect to fix it, They cannot have multiple versions of the PS3, some which can use the local memory, and some which can, it has to be 1 unified console

 

I wonder why. Doesn't it strike you as odd that the Sony expo showed previews of games runnung *on a PC*?

Well, they wouldn't, would they? Unless they fancy being sued by Sony.

Read around, most people who have had a chance to play the Wii say that it's absolutely brilliant. Bit-Tech did an article on it a while back and the prospects are looking good.

It is a well known fact that the Cell architecture is more difficult to code for and this will probably be one of the main problems faced by developers. If something is more difficult to code for, it requires more time. Time is money, so, if the same product can be made on a different platform in less time, devs are likely to go for that option. As for the games you mention, while they are good, they are also old and dusty. How many good, new games are launched for the PS? It's all good saying: we'll release Diablo 19 because the last 18 were good but sometimes a bit of innovation i.e: "Fable: The Lost Chapters" provides a much better experience to the end-user, simply because it's refreshing.

That's part of the appeal of it. I can sit and play my game on the PC because I prefer it to consoles and still have a multiplayer experience with my mate who cannot stand the sight of PCs. This is the difference. You have X360 on one hand which aims to work alongside the PC and the Wii and the PS3 on the other hand which says " This is all you need, if someone doesn't have a PS3, they're not worth playing with and you should be honoured that we're selling it to you, so we'll charge whatever we want."

Aside from notifying us that your girlfriend is cheap (give us her number), I fail to see the contributions made by your (pagelong) post.

As someone has said already, BD is Sony's proprietary format and they are trying to ram it down people's throat through the PS3. I, for one, will not buy into their silly little games.

I hope this clears some of your doubts. I don't mind them charging a premium for a premium product. Unfortunately, the PS3 isn't that product. IMHO

-ed out

 

they aren't telling the developers to use local memory. They are telling them instead of using Cell to read/write to local memory, use the RSX instead. Am a bit confused cos Cell as a whole has SPE's each with their own local memory (not cache). Dunno if the slide is referring to this local memory (which is a bit stupid) or some other local memory somewhere (L2 Cache??)?

 

The article is wrong... there is no problem here. This is the way the PS3 was designed. The slide shown in the article (http://www.theinquirer.net/images/articles/PS3_memory_bandwidths.jpg) is from a presentation about the RSX graphics processor. "Local memory" in this case is referring to the 256MB of video RAM attached to the RSX. The only part of the system meant to access the video RAM at a decent speed is the RSX itself.

Looking at this diagram of the PS3 http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20060329/3dps303.jpg it's no big surprise that the Cell cannot access the video RAM at any decent kind of speed - it's the same as the CPU in a PC reading the video RAM on your graphics card, i.e. very slow and not the normal kind of thing you'd want to do.

 

So they've confused the SPEs' RAM on Cell with the VRAM? I thought that asking RSX to handle main memory requests was a little odd

Nice one, Inquirer, real nice...

 

Ok, ignore previous. Just confusion on my part.

But seriously, do you have more information than that? I want all details cleared up where possible. Despite all this, there are still a lot of loose ends left to close in regards to the actual performance of the console.

 

as i understood it the local memory is the memory on the cell chip, the picture shows that the cell can only Read the local memory at 16MB/s
Why would external memory on the video proccesor be called local memory, that wouldnt make sense
Hmm after reading it, that could make sense, the video bus work at 22.4GB/s and the RSX can read/write local memory at 22.4GB/s
Still calling video memory "local memory" does not make any sense

 

I dunno...If the table is referring to the local memory on *each* of the processors then...I will retract my statement earlier saying that developers should use the RSX.
If the local memory does indeed refer to the local memory in SPEs then it really is a bottleneck!
I think they are calling video memory "local memory" might be because they like to refer to the RSX as an SPE. The Cell should have 8 SPEs but in the PS3 it has 7 - so I'm guessing the RSX takes up the 8th slot.

Im not a chip-engineer or anything like that (software engineer, lol) so it's not really my problem to solve but if I had to guess, it could be that the CPU is using alot of cycles accessing the local memory it wants (from a specific SPE) or something like that, bringing the read speed down or it could be that the SPEs have **** bandwidth to their local memory - or it's just......being really, really, REEAAALLLY, gay. Got an exam tomorrow so I should get to bed anyway.

 

the Cell is supposed to have 8 SPE's, however when they started making them the yields weren't very good (at least 1 spe would give errors at the required stock) so they disable the last 1, bringing yields up a lot more

 

If the slide was about RSX there would be no reason not to refer to the VRAM as local memory.

 

E3 '05 footage was captured directly from the game engine. It wasn't pre-rendered as such, at least not in the sence that Killzone or Motostorm was at the time.