-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
PS3 games list & SPE usages
- Thread starter MikeB
- Start date
Zombie James
Banned
Wow, of all the threads to troll.
Keep the good info coming, MikeB.
Keep the good info coming, MikeB.
MikeB said:
Some manufacturer specs of a 12x DVD drive (all 12x Max DVD drives slow to x8 Max for DL), relevant to the part underlined above.
3.3x to 8x (4.125 to 10.8 MB/s) Dual Layer
(Single layer DVD storage is small enough to completely install on any PS3's default harddrive, but almost all current disc distributed 360 games are as good as filling up complete dual layer discs and storage demands by devs like always rises in course of time).
Much confusion in many blogger 360 fan articles relates to taking the max reading speed of a single layer XBox 360 DVD [12 speed max, only achieved on the outer edges of single layer discs) and compare this to sustained PS3 Blu-Ray read speeds of 9 MB/s.
InterMoniker
Member
Word _leech__leech_ said:
MikeB said:Hopefully more many more developers will lead on the PS3, which could indirectly improve the quality of XBox 360 games as well, a multiplatform games developer posting at Beyond3D (admitted their initial games were just "quick & dirty ports from 360):
"We all agree given the time we'd like to architect for the SPU's first then work back... giving us cache-friendly algorithms by design"
So, the mindset amongst developing companies already seems to be changing. Apparently they still are leading a game on the XBox 360, but that should eventually change for the better for both platforms in course of time.
A NeoGAF member PMed me an interesting discussion with regard to the multi-platform development of Tomb Raider: Underworld.
Basically expect a technologically 360 orientated game (at least according to this 360 developer), but the end result will probably be similar. Due to the 360 being out first they designed the game around the 360's technical capabilities, for their engine everything is about on par with regard to their game engine except for the physics which runs better on the PS3, a "clear-cut advantage". The dev does state they design their multi-threading design on the PS3, which results into design advantages for both versions.
Some quotes:
"asset-wise 360 was around first, so we made stuff keeping the 360 in mind first."
"Well, that all depends on your definition. Writing code optimized for the PS3 and using threading policies that are suited the SPUs is a given, because not doing so would not be acceptable at all. All our multithreading is done on PS3 first without exception, and other platforms emulate SPURS."
"Secondly, the matters of multithreading policies, the whole job queue architecture, encapsulation of jobs and their corresponding data packets, etc. that work on the PS3 are indeed more than applicable of the 360/PC. And as I've mentioned before, they work better than anything and everything that Microsoft recommends (so far without exception for us). The problems lie in the fact that that work is an absolute necessity on the PS3, whereas they're not entirely necessary on any other platform."
http://forums.e-mpire.com/showthread.php?p=1809841
IMO the situation is quite similar to early Amiga cross platform games, such games were technologically Atari ST orientated.
TTP said:It's the Emotion Engine again!
Their comments and hints are teasing, just like saying the in-game robot within the trailer is Cell powered. Also considering Kojami's statements that they need a dual layer Blu-Ray disc IMO 360 fans can only dream of getting this game released for that platform.
Worm_Buffet
Member
MikeB said:
BS. With real time rendered cut-scenes? Only if you have to fit the voice acting from all regions on there. For FFXIII I could imagine this to be true.
Insane Metal
Member
This thread is great, very useful and interesting!
But, can I ask something here? Not actually SPE´s related but... I need to ask this somewhere.
There´s another board that I attend and a poster in there claims that, if the PS3 shows better graphics than the 360 at some time, it will probably be due to better optimization and developer´s effort than due to a better system hardware. He says that even though people use to say that the PS3 has more horse power, this is wrong and actually the 360 is the most powerful platform.
In another words he states that in a comparison, the PS3 could even do more "things" at the same time than the 360, but in the PS3 they would be jaggier...
Is that anyway correct? Thanks in advance.
But, can I ask something here? Not actually SPE´s related but... I need to ask this somewhere.
There´s another board that I attend and a poster in there claims that, if the PS3 shows better graphics than the 360 at some time, it will probably be due to better optimization and developer´s effort than due to a better system hardware. He says that even though people use to say that the PS3 has more horse power, this is wrong and actually the 360 is the most powerful platform.
In another words he states that in a comparison, the PS3 could even do more "things" at the same time than the 360, but in the PS3 they would be jaggier...
Is that anyway correct? Thanks in advance.
Insane Metal said:
PS3 development requires more attention and to utilize all its distinguishing features requires overall more effort, but the rewards are much greater as well. I think if you read this whole thread and links you will get the full picture.
The jaggier comment isn't really correct neither, although the 360 has some nice filtering abilities and the Xenos (daughter chip) could be used for adding "cheap" (performance wise) AA. However the Cell and RSX are very well suited for this (and other things) as well and with fewer negative side-effects, as the EDRAM's small size is a limitating factor for doing stuff like this in high resolutions.
PistolGrip
sex vacation in Guam
Short answer: NoInsane Metal said:
Long answer: This is troll bait so stay away from discussing such a thing.
Added some links with regard to the Getaway 3 Playstation Edge tech demo:
Presentation sheets
Presentation video (ZIP)
Presentation sheets
Presentation video (ZIP)
neverknowsbest
Member
From what you've said neither of you really have a grasp on what processing power actually means and what relative amounts of effort can produce. Just enjoy the games and ignore those threads/posts. Read this thread thoroughly if you'd like to learn a bit more!Insane Metal said:
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
MikeB said:
This shows why more and more developers (also thanks to the release of EDGE and one nice gem inside it called GCMReplay) were said to be starting to develop technology with PS3 in mind first as it works very well on other platforms that need well optimized multi-threaded engines.
MikeB said:
Some additional information I gathered from Beyond3D discussions:
- Dual layer 360 game discs can store up to a maximum of ~ 6.8GB worth of data. (so about 1/3 to 1/4 of a single layer Blu-Ray disc, 1/7 to 1/8 of a dual layer Blu-Ray disc, and so forth)
- Only a few 360 games like Fight Night Round 3, Tony Hawk and Full Auto games are small enough to be stored on a single layer DVD (single layer discs can be read much faster).
On layer changing penalty:
"Indeed that is the case. Also DVD's suffer from steeper penalties from layer changes than BD-ROMs do. BD drives (and HD-DVD drives for that matter) both also (by nature of the interactive movie requirements) have better support for concurrent seeking/transferring from two different addresses on the disc."
Regarding read times as quoted above:
"Anyway, if one does some decent research, one would find that the 360 drive's 12x pretty much gets downgraded to around 8x when reading dual layer (even plextor's DVD drives do this).
That 8x read speed converts to a ~6x overall read speed (4x~8x depending on the location of the read) and that translates to a generally lower read speed than BD drives."
On seek times:
"for similar sized data sets the BD drive typically has almost the same if not significantly faster random seek times. That's generally because data sets between 4-8GB span the entire disc for for DVD-ROM while only covering a third of a BD-ROM, so on average a BD-ROM is going to have seek times in the range 50-100ms with a worst case scenario of around 200-230ms. The DVD-ROM drive will average between 110-150ms with a worst case scenario of around 170-230ms.
Of course once you start getting into larger data sets that that Blu-Ray can handle the average and worst case scenarios (which is an entire disc sweep which takes around 350-400ms) will eclipse the worst case conditions on a DVD-ROM. That being said, even with 23+GB of data with a 100 randomly generate seek sectors I still get around 100ms on average. Besides, if you find the need to randomly jump around to random sectors greater than 4GB in span, then your title has bigger issues than the capabilities of the drive."
The general consensus seems to be that the 360's noisy scracth prone DVD drives offer no real world technological advantages over the slient PS3 Blu-Ray drive which is better for streaming (constant reading speed, predictable). Also the default harddrive is of advantage, not only for (partly) installing games, but as temporary cache for games which can improve reading speeds as well.
So please take many articles with a grain of salt, even well respected websites have made grave errors in their assumptions (for example assuming ~16 MB/s constant 12x reading speeds for the 360's DVD drives!).
Xenos has a framebuffer bandwidth and fillrate advantage with MSAA even at high resolutions. More eDRAM would be nice to forgo tiling completely, but 10MB is enough. There are already a lot of 720p games with HDR and MSAA on XB360, and even a few 1080p games with 4xMSAA (lots of tiles).MikeB said:
Im won't dispute that PS3 has more overall than your Xbox360, but I think your technical posts can be very one-sided and misleading. It's not PS3>>>Xbox360.
lol.
danwarb said:
Not really. AFAIK fillrate isn't a problem on neither platform. On the PS3 you would potentially use other methods to add AA and HDR effects to games. Sadly many games were developed with the 360/DirectX in mind.
For example even a PS3 exclusive like Heavenly Sword was only a 1st generation PS3 title, still with a lot of legacy bagage. However the game is said to perform (NAO32) HDR, 8xAF and 4x MSAA.
Some Ninja Theory dev comments:
"Not at all; in fact for many framebuffer effects I believe RSX will have an edge over Xenos."
"most developers are barely using Cell's power"
Why GPUs are not (so) good at post processing images
Current PS3 game engines will advance a lot in comparison to what has been acomplished with current games so far (for exclusive games at least, technically the 360 and PS3 are far more different than many people believe).
IMO not really enough, at least not for the more advanced future games.
Worm_Buffet said:
A close friend of mine works in a dev studio and she laughs when he reads posts like this. Games fit a DVD because currently they have to. Not enough HD players in PCs and the 360 has no option. Devs are reluctant to use multiple DVD's on the PC simply due to the added costs.
Anybody who thinks storage size is not a limitation that is considered a lot when designing games is a little silly.
Worm_Buffet
Member
kitch9 said:
The Kojima claim I responded to was "that they need a dual layer Blu-Ray disc" for MGS4. I didn't say there wouldn't be issues fitting it on a DVD, but that it requires a dual-layer BD I find hard to believe. I know MGS4 is an ambitious project and all, but more than 25 GB of textures, 3d models, voice acting etc?
TheBlackLodge
Member
Isn't he suppsoed to be using uncompressed 7.1 sound as well ?
No idea as to the storage requirements of that however.
No idea as to the storage requirements of that however.
Panajev2001a said:
Do tell! Expand on this subject as much as you can, please.
I googled a bit and a short description is to be found here http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK37WP46MVY5P69 in what seems to be an "abandoned" Wolfgang Engel blog. It says and i'll quote:
Is that what it does, it "automagically" shows the performance gain by moving culling into the SPU's?
As an interesting side note, i searched both GAF and B3D for "gcmreplay" and got 6 and 18 results respectively. This means B3D is 3 times more technical than GAF. So there.
If that's the reason why he claims to *need* dual side BD, with all due respect it would be one of the most ignorant claims I've ever heard, flying in the face of the huge jumps ahead that psychoacoustics compression techniques have done in the past ten years or so.TheBlackLodge said:
I really hope the space will be devoted to something else.
Worm_Buffet
Member
kitch9 said:
Game design and psychoacoustic compression techniques are two entirely different things.
Either way, it's all conjecture since we don't have the context of Kojima's statement.
One thing is for sure though: that a game that lacks HD Video and employs sane space management would require 50gb of space is ludicrous.
In a age of memory limited cartidge and double density diskette based games, the introduction of Amiga CDs often resulted in early Amiga CD games using up (less than 1 MB) ~0.1% of the space available on disc. In such an age it would be hard for many people to imagine console games maxing out dual layer DVDs (like later PS2 games and early 360 have required).
I trust Kojami enough to make decisions with regard to game development to achieve the best possible end result.
I trust Kojami enough to make decisions with regard to game development to achieve the best possible end result.
Leidenfrost
Member
cedric69 said:
Do you know the kind of processing overhead lossless/transparent compression models would bring to the table in game development? Honest question.
MGS4 having LOADS of 7.1pcm Audio is great news. These games are so speech and musically intensive, it deserves nothing but the best. I'll accept this with open arms, and it's too bad not enough people didn't start picking up this tech yet to really hear the difference and how much more enjoyability it adds.
Oh, and loli at people calling "BS" on Kojima for claims he made himself. Call BS on posters, but to call it on Kojima himself? :lol
Oh, and loli at people calling "BS" on Kojima for claims he made himself. Call BS on posters, but to call it on Kojima himself? :lol
SolidSnakex
Member
J-Rzez said:
When that story came out the samething happened.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
FirewalkR said:Do tell! Expand on this subject as much as you can, please.
GCMREplay is a code profiler, like PIX on DirectX platforms/Xbox 360...
Think about a version of this:
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=109396
for PS3 with some pretty neat run-time optimization features studied for PS3 (GCM Replay was delivered as part of the EDGE tools... so not at launch... you can hear some pre-launch developers still moaning now...).
Mononofu said:
Makes sense considering the PS3's processing power, regarding Uncharted:
"Oh yeah exactly, zero load times throughout the entire game. It's a full length streaming experience. Our cinematics are all rendered via the in-game engine so the transition between the game itself and our movies is very smooth. So what you're getting is a consistent visual; what players see during the cutscenes is what they see when they're playing the game." Source: Joystick
Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction uses a similar approach, actually I was quite surprised when I dropped a nano-swarm just before entering a cutscene and see it within the cutscene.
Still impressive real-time rendered cutscenes take up a lot of data, high quality textures, geometry and audio. Uncharted already uses up ~91% of the Blu-Ray disc's 25 GB capacity, IMO it's not hard to imagine Uncharted 2 demanding a dual layer Blu-Ray disc (they could enhance prior game assets from Uncharted 1, add new variety and make the game bigger than before).
With hardware as powerful as PS3's? Pretty much negligible to be honest.Leidenfrost said:
It's irrelevant how many games I have made (0 by the way), modern psychoacoustics results are scientifically demonstrated. For average people with good equipment, stereo music becomes transparent with 160kbps or less (even 112 or 96 in some cases).kitch9 said:
Now, if we want to have the psychological crutch of uncompressed everything, then fine, in an ideal world with unlimited space that's the way to go.
But to say that a game *needs* 50 GB and then fill... let's say 35, with uncompressed 7.1 PCM... well, again, that would be ignorant. Kojima's game god status notwithstanding (bear in mind MGS4 will probably the single most relevant reason for which I'm gonna ultimately buy PS3, so it's not as if I don't appreciate the man or something).
Leidenfrost
Member
cedric69 said:
You'd be surprised how many of those same average people 'can't see a difference' between an upscaled DVD and Blu-Ray.
I'm glad game developers aren't entirely basing their quality requirements on those average people.
For the record: I appreciate lossless audio but I'm no audiophile and consider the people who shell out four figures for wooden blocks and claim a difference between FLAC and PCM to be delusional.
However, I'm not really sure why you seem so angry about the 'waste' of all this. Kojima isn't cutting stuff out to include 7.1pcm. The whole point of blu-ray is that developers can spend an enormous bitbudget without having to compromise in other areas.
I think you can't equate these two issues. The difference is that even self-proclaimed audiophiles will fail to distinguish say a 256 kbit audio file compressed with a modern codec from the uncompressed source in a double blind test. Self-proclaimed grphics whores (like me) on the other hand will always easily distinguish HD and SD in such a setup. (Well, if you don't show a single-color planeLeidenfrost said:
)cedric69 said:
In course of time more people will own higher spec audio setups, it's actually already quite affordable for many people. According to a study 24% of PS3 (US, 2007) owners already connect to a 7.1 capable audio setup, combined with those who connect to 5.1 solutions high quality setups make up a majority this userbase already. (Source: Source: THX Gaming Study, The Nielsen Company via C E Pro)
I think most people with good setups notice the difference.
That's very unlikely to be the case.
cedric69 said:
I am not agreeing or disagreeing on your overall point...but this is misleading at the very least.
You can design a perceptual based lossy codec to be nearly transparent at those bitrates (esp higher CPU intensive ones) but it will only be so for the ears you designed it for.
That means that perceptual based coding is completely based around averages, and tested using certain subject samples....results could very easily be considerably different for many other people.
For someone as myself I can very easily hear issues with 128k, and 192 mp3s...so extreme I can be in a car with lots of road noise on a poor factory stereo being fed by a tape deck and still hear it. On higher end equipement even 256k can be picked out.
Audio compression is a different animal because of the differences in how people hear. Visual compression is a bit different, any damage or variation doesn't really affect the perception of quality...from my experience it has much more to do with a person's experience or training to see the artifacts. People can be trained for audio as well, but physical differences in hearing make the biggest difference.
I just wanted to point it out...it has nothing to do with better hearing or even that you need a super high end setup (although that does make differences even more apparent)...people truly hear perceptual based lossy compression differently. What works for you now could become unacceptable as you age and experience hearing loss from noise damage or typical age loss.
BrainZEROX
Member
Uncharted's cutscenes are not really realtime rendered, Ratchet & Clanck's neither. Well... Sort of. Cutscenes for both games were rendered in real-time once and recorded. The PS3 only plays a movie from the bluray, it's not rendering the cutscene on it's own, it is too busy to load and to uncompress data for the next level. Many 1st party games from Sony use the same technique and it works fine, it's really efficient regarding the game's pace.MikeB said:
BrainZEROX said:
Probably some are, but the cutscene where I dropped the nanoswarm in Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction certainly wasn't, likewise the other cutscenes apart from the opening scene changes accordingly when Ratchet is wearing a new suit. Judging from Gran Turismo 5 Prologue footage, realtime rendered movie sequences can certainly be accomplished in very high quality.