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PS3 games list & SPE usages

MikeB

Banned
@ chris0701

If game X 's developer did not say anything about Cell (usuallly from cross-platform title),you could conclude that game X did not use SPEs at all?

I won't add LittleBigPlanet or Gundam Musou to the OP.

With regard to multi-platform developers, if they have a legacy engine they will have to do significant additional work to rework this. If they can get away with reasonable enough results by just using the PPE and RSX many will just go with that.

I think in due time with more demanding SPE enabled games becoming available developing companies will feel more and more pressed to compete and adjust their engines. (I think EA's upcoming Fifa 2008 may actually be their first game to do so!)

With regard to other smaller games developers, they are often dependent on available middleware like Epic's Unreal Engine. So now with Sony devs helping Epic with their engine, this will also become beneficial to many other 3rd party developers.

Developers will comment in private, but don't expect publishers to shout from the rooftops that they don't really tap into the power of the PS3. EA and a few others are exceptions.
 

tanod

when is my burrito
Tyrannical said:
These "theoretical" performance numbers mean nothing. More useless then vgchartzzzzz sales numbers. Game code is full of bottlenecks, and nothing runs remotely close to 100% effecivency EXCEPT for carfully made tests desigined to show how perful something is.

It would mean something if you could see a program that's using 90%+ of the processing power of Cell. Oh yeah, there's "Folding at Home."

Real world performance of the PS3 folding client vs. the PC folding client (the average PC folding is a Pentium 4 running XP) is that the PS3 is roughly 4 to 6 times faster at it.

So, at the very least, you have to admit that coding to get exceptional efficiencies on the Cell is possible and has already been demonstrated.
 

gofreak

GAF's Bob Woodward
tanod said:
It would mean something if you could see a program that's using 90%+ of the processing power of Cell. Oh yeah, there's "Folding at Home."

Real world performance of the PS3 folding client vs. the PC folding client (the average PC folding is a Pentium 4 running XP) is that the PS3 is roughly 4 to 6 times faster at it.

So, at the very least, you have to admit that coding to get exceptional efficiencies on the Cell is possible and has already been demonstrated.

The absolute performance of F@H vs other chips doesn't tell us how efficient it is at taking advantage of Cell's full power.

If F@H's implementation on Cell took advantage of, say, a third of Cell's floating point capability and the PC implementation took advantage of the same proportion of a PC CPU's fp capability, the PS3 could still outperform it by a large margin. You don't need to achieve high efficiency on Cell to outperform other chips if you cannot achieve high efficiency on those other chips either..
 

MikeB

Banned
artredis1980 said:
May 2005 - September 2007

People have not realised, PS3 can output 50 sparks and 360 can output 30 sparks
but 360 can output better looking sparks because of that GPU.

and that is what matters in the end. quality over quantity

Both matter, but the RSX has no issue with drawing endless sparks. ;-)

There is this rumour that the 360 would have a more powerful GPU than the PS3, but in raw numbers the RSX is more powerfull. However some developers state the Xenos is more flexible, however on the other hand other developers state the Cell is also extremely flexible, as well for assisting the RSX to take workload off the GPU.
 

MikeB

Banned
TheJollyCorner said:
FFXIII... where are you...? :(

It's probably worth the wait. :)

"it's not just about how pretty the graphics are but more of how much limited amount of movement we can put in one go and how big our imagination and ideas are. The PS3 is the machine that is closest to being able to express our imagination."

Source: Dengeki Playstation Magazine (Japanese)
 
MikeB said:
Both matter, but the RSX has no issue with drawing endless sparks. ;-)

There is this rumour that the 360 would have a more powerful GPU than the PS3, but in raw numbers the RSX is more powerfull. However some developers state the Xenos is more flexible, however on the other hand other developers state the Cell is also extremely flexible, as well for assisting the RSX to take workload off the GPU.

did you make up this rumour? just like you made up the fact that because a game developer hasnt talked of his games use of SPEs, so its using none of them when infact all the SPEs are used, just not all at the same time
 

Busty

Banned
artredis1980 said:
did you make up this rumour? just like you made up the fact that because a game developer hasnt talked of his games use of SPEs, so its using none of them when infact all the SPEs are used, just not all at the same time


Man, this has really rubbed you up the wrong way hasn't it?

I imagine that the likes of HAZE, Turok and Dirt are all almost certainly using the SPUs, but certainly the likes of Amry of Two and HL2:Orange Box I ca imagine only using the PPE and RSX due to time and budget restraints.

Hence the number of delayed UE3 games for the PS3 with the developers no doubt trying (and failing) to get UE3 working exclusively on the PPE and RSX.
 

DCharlie

And even i am moderately surprised
The question here is, if they aren't using Cell's strenghts, how in the hell is it keeping up so well with the 360?

The PS3 has other technological advantage compared to the 360. The system has overall more bandwith and the XDR memory operates at much greater speed. Like is the case with PCs, the unified memory architecture (CPU an GPU, using the same memory) is a technical disadvantage, a performance bottleneck. (On the PS3 both the CPU and GPU have access to both slower and fast memory)

so what this thread is turning out to be is yet another "Just wait for the *REAL* PS3 launch!" thread?

Because it`s matching the X360 with it`s hand tied behind it`s backs! ZOMGS!

buy now, the potential is worth it ! You`ll see... in 2009... maybe.

Anyways, can someone just reiterate exactly how much power you`d get out of using only the PPU and the GPU ? I`m guessin` 150 gflops would be low balling it ;)

Hence the number of delayed UE3 games for the PS3 with the developers no doubt trying (and failing) to get UE3 working exclusively on the PPE and RSX.

how do you come up with that reasoning? It wasn`t running well, therefore they obviously were only running the thing on the PPE and RSX?

is this going to be the big excuse for the next year or so?
 

theBishop

Banned
gofreak said:
The absolute performance of F@H vs other chips doesn't tell us how efficient it is at taking advantage of Cell's full power.

If F@H's implementation on Cell took advantage of, say, a third of Cell's floating point capability and the PC implementation took advantage of the same proportion of a PC CPU's fp capability, the PS3 could still outperform it by a large margin. You don't need to achieve high efficiency on Cell to outperform other chips if you cannot achieve high efficiency on those other chips either..

Also, its a big stretch to refer to Folding@Home performance as "Real World". Folding is a scientific application that is essentially one algorithm. Optimizing one function across the SPEs vs several gaming subsystems are two completely different pursuits.

F@H may be using 90%+ of Cell's theoretical performance, but we may never see that efficiency in an actual game.
 

DCharlie

And even i am moderately surprised
I can see it now. I new slot on the back of PS3 game boxes. "SPE Blastprocessing Redux"

oh, lets hope so!

Man though can you IMAGINE how AWESOME the games will be when they FINALLY STOP BEING LAZY and actually USE some of the AMAZING POWER of 7 SPES?

You can see from all the EVIDENCE AND SHIT that the games now are MATCHING and IN SOME CASE SURPASING the best of the X360. It must be a BAD DAY to be an X360 fan , i can tell you.

Please tonight try to IMAGINE how much better the PS3 will be. I`d say it`s a generation gap personally.

Sleep well brothers!

Strength through faith
dc.
 
PhatSaqs said:
I can see it now. I new slot on the back of PS3 game boxes. "SPE Usage: 2"

It does get kinda funny that Sony has this thing that game devs PR allways mention Cell, it's like hilarious "With the power of the Cell", it's not even "With the power of the PS3", it's allways the same line, and its sooo forced. They don't do that for any other platform.

Now you think "That's because the other platforms don't...." huh, stop right there. Let's backtrack to last gen, xbox. Did you see developers going "With the power of the XGPU" or "With the power of the XCPU", no you didn't. But you sure heard stuff like "With the power of the Emotion Engine". Oh Sony....
 

tanod

when is my burrito
theBishop said:
F@H may be using 90%+ of Cell's theoretical performance, but we may never see that efficiency in an actual game.

That's true, but the performance of F@H somewhat deflates the argument that the theoretical processing power is power that is not even remotely attainable and thus, an irrelevant measurement.
 

DCharlie

And even i am moderately surprised
Wow. The PS3 is a BEAST. Just imagine what games would look on it in a few years....WOW


Harvey_Williams_fish.jpg


;)
 

theBishop

Banned
Merovingian said:
It does get kinda funny that Sony has this thing that game devs PR allways mention Cell, it's like hilarious "With the power of the Cell", it's not even "With the power of the PS3", it's allways the same line, and its sooo forced. They don't do that for any other platform.

Now you think "That's because the other platforms don't...." huh, stop right there. Let's backtrack to last gen, xbox. Did you see developers going "With the power of the XGPU" or "With the power of the XCPU", no you didn't. But you sure heard stuff like "With the power of the Emotion Engine". Oh Sony....

Its the same example. Emotion Engine and Cell are more exotic architectures than P3-Era Celeron (Xbox) and G5-era PowerPC (Xbox360). So for programmers, the interesting area of performance is going to come from the CPU. If a programmer was saying "The Power of the PS3", that's more marketing-speak than referring to the CPU in particular.
 

lockload

Member
The real question surely is why did sony come up with such a complicated design that developers cant be bothered/dont want to invest the time in to use it

Unless the PS3 drastically improves it market share this will always be the case
 

tanod

when is my burrito
Labombadog said:
Wow. The PS3 is a BEAST. Just imagine what games would look on it in a few years....WOW

GT5: Prologue :O :D

Another advantage Cell has is scaleability, so for PS4, they don't need to reinvent the wheel. They just add a few more SPUs, updated graphics card and more memory and they're good to go.

All the tools currently in place for PS3 should make the transition extremely easy to PS4.
 

theBishop

Banned
tanod said:
That's true, but the performance of F@H somewhat deflates the argument that the theoretical processing power is power that is not even remotely attainable and thus, an irrelevant measurement.

Not really. F@H is the sort of program you would use to determine theoretical processing power. Its not much better than using a prime-number generator to determine real-world performance.
 
the shit we are seeing right now is crazy...in a few years it *may* look twice as good (if that's even possible lol)..a lot would have to do with the ability to draw hi res textures.
 

theBishop

Banned
lockload said:
The real question surely is why did sony come up with such a complicated design that developers cant be bothered/dont want to invest the time in to use it

Unless the PS3 drastically improves it market share this will always be the case

Compared to Emotion Engine, Cell is far less complicated compared to what most programmers are used to (read: x86).

But to answer your underlying question "why use a complicated design when there are simpler ones": the answer is because a design geared toward a specific set of tasks can be produced more cheaply and perform more effectively than a design geared toward general processing.

On a related note, games on Playstation consoles show noticeable improvements as the system ages because programmers discover areas of optimization.
 

Busty

Banned
DCharlie said:
oh, lets hope so!

Man though can you IMAGINE how AWESOME the games will be when they FINALLY STOP BEING LAZY and actually USE some of the AMAZING POWER of 7 SPES?

You can see from all the EVIDENCE AND SHIT that the games now are MATCHING and IN SOME CASE SURPASING the best of the X360. It must be a BAD DAY to be an X360 fan , i can tell you.

Please tonight try to IMAGINE how much better the PS3 will be. I`d say it`s a generation gap personally.

Sleep well brothers!

Strength through faith
dc.


Imagine if Dcharlie's posts were as funny as he likes to think they are?

Man, that would be some funny shit.
 

PistolGrip

sex vacation in Guam
DCharlie said:
oh, lets hope so!

Man though can you IMAGINE how AWESOME the games will be when they FINALLY STOP BEING LAZY and actually USE some of the AMAZING POWER of 7 SPES?
.
It must be sad to be you :( easily annoyed

Its not about being lazy but about time contraints. The same reason why most developers didnt bother with multi threaded coding the 360 for the first year of its life and why some dont bother now.

When you have investors (publishers in this case) breathing down your neck you do whats fastest. A crap game today is worth more than an expensive obsolete great game tomorrow to publishers. So get the f*ck out of here with that sarcastic tone and let us continue to talk about the awesomeness that is the CELL ;P
 

MikeB

Banned
@ DCharlie

is this going to be the big excuse for the next year or so?

Excuses for who?

Super Stardust HD runs freaking great! I don't understand your point, do you think Uncharted, R&C Future, Killzone 2, etc will show poor performance? So far judging from videos I have seen and reports I have read there are no indications for this.

Food for thought: The more complex games actually seem to be performing better on the PS3, than less complex and demanding games. How can this be? ;-)
 

noonche

Member
Merovingian said:
It does get kinda funny that Sony has this thing that game devs PR allways mention Cell, it's like hilarious "With the power of the Cell", it's not even "With the power of the PS3", it's allways the same line, and its sooo forced. They don't do that for any other platform.

Now you think "That's because the other platforms don't...." huh, stop right there. Let's backtrack to last gen, xbox. Did you see developers going "With the power of the XGPU" or "With the power of the XCPU", no you didn't. But you sure heard stuff like "With the power of the Emotion Engine". Oh Sony....

I thought Team Ninja said that they went with XBox because of the power... Also, I didn't see Doom 3 on PS2; it's lighting model wouldn't have worked. There where a number of games that appeared only on XBox that didn't go to PS2 for technological reasons.
 
alske said:
I thought Team Ninja said that they went with XBox because of the power... Also, I didn't see Doom 3 on PS2; it's lighting model wouldn't have worked. There where a number of games that appeared only on XBox that didn't go to PS2 for technological reasons.

Don't forget that SC isn't possible on the PS3 because of its lighting.
 
alske said:
I thought Team Ninja said that they went with XBox because of the power... Also, I didn't see Doom 3 on PS2; it's lighting model wouldn't have worked. There where a number of games that appeared only on XBox that didn't go to PS2 for technological reasons.
The Xbox was obviously the champ in the graphic department last gen. This is a FACT. But it is still my least favorite console of last gen as well.
 

PhatSaqs

Banned
alske said:
I thought Team Ninja said that they went with XBox because of the power... Also, I didn't see Doom 3 on PS2; it's lighting model wouldn't have worked. There where a number of games that appeared only on XBox that didn't go to PS2 for technological reasons.
I think the point is you didnt see TN or ID using PR like drinking the kool aid type speak ("With the awesome power of the whatchamacallitcpu/gpu, we can blah blah blah!") in order to justify why they chose the Xbox.
 

PistolGrip

sex vacation in Guam
lockload said:
The real question surely is why did sony come up with such a complicated design that developers cant be bothered/dont want to invest the time in to use it

Unless the PS3 drastically improves it market share this will always be the case
Unfortunately CPU performance can no longer sustain its growth purely based on cycles per second. Vertical growth is becoming difficult to achieve. Instead CPU's are growing horizontically. Parallel processing is a new trend in the all CPU markets at the moment.

Furthermore, whenever we discover newer better ways of doing things, complexity creeps it. Complexity can be removed from users (developers) with time, however because this is the start of game developing on multi-core systems that complexity is dealt with by developers directly. No worries though like all things that complexity can be alleviated as we better understand the technology.
 

theBishop

Banned
PhatSaqs said:
I think the point is you didnt see TN or ID using PR like drinking the kool aid type speak ("With the awesome power of the whatchamacallitcpu/gpu, we can blah blah blah!") in order to justify why they chose the Xbox.

Because its pointless to say. Its a Celeron and a Geforce3. Its not a notable statement to say "The 733Mhz Celeron allows us to do things we never thought possible!"

But if you go back and look at programmer's statements about the Xbox, I'll bet you will find a lot of stuff about the programmable pixel shaders because they were a pretty new thing at the time.
 
PhatSaqs said:
I think the point is you didnt see TN or ID using PR like drinking the kool aid type speak ("With the awesome power of the whatchamacallitcpu/gpu, we can blah blah blah!") in order to justify why they chose the Xbox.

No they just said it was only possible on the Xbox, its the samething minus the processor of graphics chip talk.
 

MikeB

Banned
phatmike128 said:
the shit we are seeing right now is crazy...in a few years it *may* look twice as good (if that's even possible lol)..a lot would have to do with the ability to draw hi res textures.

Agreed, but the PS3 not only offer performance benefits (bandwidth, memory speed, processing power) compared to console rivals, it also offers a standard harddrive (harddrive caching) and a Blu-Ray drive (sustained predictable reading speed and more storage available for streaming).
 
Merovingian said:
It's a big difference.

No its not, it would annoy the same people as this does by them always mentioning its only possible on the PS3. Adding in because of the power of CELL doesn't change a thing.
 

noonche

Member
theBishop said:
But if you go back and look at programmer's statements about the Xbox, I'll bet you will find a lot of stuff about the programmable pixel shaders because they were a pretty new thing at the time.

I remember those discussions. I dunno, I find it interesting to talk about new technology. I could do without the system wankery though.

@SolidSnakex I don't know what the deal with Splinter Cell on PS2 was. All I remember is that when it was exclusive people made a big deal about it, then it went to PS2 and people stopped caring. I tried the game on PC and hated it.
 
alske said:
@SolidSnakex I don't know what the deal with Splinter Cell on PS2 was. All I remember is that when it was exclusive people made a big deal about it, then it went to PS2 and people stopped caring. I tried the game on PC and hated it.

I'm talking about the new SC coming out for the 360, according to the devs the PS3 can't do it because of the lighting.
 

theBishop

Banned
Merovingian said:
It's a big difference.

Its because Xbox consoles tend to be so general purpose its hard to point to something and say "this was possible because of [insert hardware component]". On the original Xbox, it had programmable pixel shaders so you could point to lighting/shadows and say "this is possible because of the GPU", but not so much on Xbox360. Its powerful all around, but doesn't excel in a particular area.

On the PS3, however, the SPUs are really good at things that can be easily vectorized. So for example, the water physics in Lair are perfectly suited to the Cell processor. Could it be done on 360? Probably, but it would hog a significant chunk of resources.
 
SolidSnakex said:
No its not, it would annoy the same people as this does by them always mentioning its only possible on the PS3. Adding in because of the power of CELL doesn't change a thing.

Ok, look, this won't go anywhere. It's like "It is, it's not, it is, NO IT'S NOT, YES IT BLOODY IS!".

So, you're ok with it, probably you even like it. I'm just saying it's different, and i find it rather funny when the processor inside the console has a name that is as known as the name of the console itself.

And i really wasn't talking about "only possible", beacause i don't think i've even heard that this time around yet, i'm talking more about..."With the help of the CELL, we can have each barrel have physical properties to it, see, they fall and hit the floor, and they roll, it's not scripted, we are doing real time physics by using the Cell to calculate the math in realtime". Well no shit sherlock.
 

noonche

Member
SolidSnakex said:
I'm talking about the new SC coming out for the 360, according to the devs the PS3 can't do it because of the lighting.

Hadn't heard that. Did they elaborate more? I thought both systems worked on Shader Model 2.0 (or the equivalent).
 
Merovingian said:
Ok, look, this won't go anywhere. It's like "It is, it's not, it is, NO IT'S NOT, YES IT BLOODY IS!".

So, you're ok with it, probably you even like it. I'm just saying it's different, and i find it rather funny when the processor inside the console has a name that is as known as the name of the console itself.

Actually I don't, when Polyphony mentioned the CELL in their walkthrough it kind of annoyed me, they don't need to say that shit. The game speaks for itself.
 

herod

Member
This kind of list will never be definitive, but it seems ok so far. Some games on the PS3 seem to just have much more lifelike physics than others, I assume the Cell is a big help in this regard. There's a sense of physical realism from certain titles I've played that are mentioned in this list that I've just never experienced before.
 

dalyr95

Member
Sony appears to be making effort with PS3 SDK this time round, with tools like EDGE.
How did the PS2 SDK kit evolve over time, did it improve dramatically or stall?

The first party tools do seem to be working their way into the toolset, plus Sony have stated they will seek 3rd party help (hence codemasters and the NEON engine), so the barriers to entry will go down as well as IBM working on tools, the Octopiler etc etc
 
alske said:
Hadn't heard that. Did they elaborate more? I thought both systems worked on Shader Model 2.0 (or the equivalent).

- Some pretty negative comments about the ps3 made by the devs. They state the fact that they are exclusive to the 360 allows them to do much more than if they were multiplatform (duh) but they also state they doubt they would be able to achieve what they're doing with the game on the 360 on the ps3 even if it was ps3 exclusive.

The lead programmer told the magazine he doubts they would have been able to pull of the lightning effects they have right now on the ps3. That's the only thing they say straight out, but they do state they believe they're much better off on the 360.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=153514
 

gcfan2k5

Member
alske said:
Or the games only run on a single core on the 360, so they port the code to PS3 and only run it on the PPC. This is likely what happens. This also explains why PS3 games don't have motion blur and some of the other post processing effects that 360 games do. The Xenos has a much higher fill-rate then RSX.

Think about it, games like Half-Life 2 came out years ago for PCs that didn't have multicores and graphics technology that wasn't as advanced as Xenos or RSX. Is it really surprising that they don't make use of the parallel architecture in the 360 or the PS3?

Xenos has the same exact 4Gpixel fillrate RSX has actually..... and both are laughable considering a geforce 7600GT has a little more than that... 8 ROPS is crippling both machines.
 

just tray

Member
cell, xenos,xenon,spe,ppu,cpu,gpu,bandwidth,cache. sure it's nice to know what they all mean (and I do) but it doesn't matter how good the hardware is if it doesn't have a large amount of quality games. when is the last time you walked into a store and asked how many spe's are used in a game and walked out disapointed? Take this for what it is, a good imformative article about cell. but in the end it's all about the games

seriously what would you rather say? That's a cool looking gadget you got there now what does it do
or

That's a cool looking game I like my purchase.

I dont buy into hype which is why I wont be purchasing a PS3 until next year. Is this really what the gaming community has come to? People hopping on the fanboy train of every article written about a console or game?

"I hear Halo 3 lets you shine your assault rifle with the lb button, IN YOUR FACE PS3 LOVERS!"

it's annoying. there's better things worth fighting for (kids,what you believe in, wife) but a video game system? Then again we have people killing each other over systems.

It was a nice article BTW because how tech works does interest me. The PS3 does have a bright future ahead of it. I understand cell a little better now.Now lets just hope that people put cell to some good use because I am really purchasing a PS3 next year. I made the mistake of getting a 360 and wii when they first came out and had to sit through months of no games. Never again(but heavenly sword and ninja gaiden sigma sure are tempting)

speaking of which what does NGS use as far as cell is concerned?
 

tanod

when is my burrito
just tray said:
blah blah blah... about the games... blah

It being "all about the games" is blatantly obvious to everybody posting in this thread already but thanks for the reminder. This thread is about the hardware and how/if developers are using the SPUs of the PS3.
 

methane47

Member
SolidSnakex said:

The lead programmer told the magazine he doubts they would have been able to pull of the lightning effects they have right now on the ps3.

BWwwaaAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH :lol :lol

What an idiot.. is that the same lead developer that said PS3 can't do AI? what a retard...

SplinterCell better have lightning that comes out of the TV and Electrocutes me to death.. or burn my house down or something ... in order for me to truly believe that Only an Xbox360 can do it.
 
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