PS3 Power “Infinite” vs “Limited”
- Categories: Games, News
- Date: Jan 6, 2010 03:27 JST
- Tags: Comparison, Hideo Kojima, Interviews, Metal Gear, PS3, Sony, Technology
The PS3’s much vaunted Cell processor has been trumpeted as having “bottomless” capabilities by top PS3 developer Naughty Dog, although it seems not all developers are inclined to agree, with Hideo Kojima on the other hand maintaining that his magnum opus stretched the machine to its limits.
Uncharted developers Naughty Dog (who happen to be Sony owned) maintain they can happily develop on the PS3 for another 6 years:
How comfortable are you now developing on the PS3? Are you starting to get an itch for new hardware?
“Absolutely the opposite. We’re pretty comfortable with the PS3, and we made a very big advancement between the first game and the second game, we’re really tapping into the Cell processor, but there’s more there.
The first game, it was idle about 70% of the time, which we rectified for the sequel, and now it’s at least busy 100% of the time, but it’s still not fully-optimized code.
I mean, in order to get to that 100%, it was more about making sure the pipeline was filled, and we weren’t running into one of the processors becoming idle because there wasn’t a job ready for it. But now we have to go into all of those routines and optimize them so we that can get even more done using that Cell processor.
It really feels that sometimes it’s this bottomless pit of processing power, you find the right kind of job for it and it can just churn through those things so fast, which really helps with a lot of our rendering and post-processing effects.
So yes, we’re getting comfortable. No, we’re not itching for new hardware. I would love to keep working on the PlayStation [3] for 5 or 6 more years…I think there’s still a lot to get out of it.
We’re not really feeling limited by the hardware, it’s more about the hours of the day and how quickly we want to get the next game out.”
On the other hand, Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima famously explained that he was “disappointed” with the PS3 and that MGS already stretched the Cell processor to its limits:
“When we first showed the game engine at TGS, the staff were really proud and happy. PS3 was a dream machine, y’know, and we were going to work on this and that – and we had so many ideas.
But when we actually started developing the game, we realized there were a lot of restrictions and so it turned out how you see it today. The original vision was to go ten steps further, the reality was just one step, which isn’t to say we didn’t progress.
I remember saying three years ago that we wanted to create something revolutionary, but in reality we couldn’t really do that because of the CPU. We’re using the Cell engine to its limit, actually.
Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing the PS3 machine, it’s just that we weren’t really aware of what the full-spec PS3 offered – we were creating something we couldn’t entirely see.”
However, lately he seems to have had something of a change of heart.
Time will tell just who is correct.
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1st :D
first to fail
1st to go to hell
Tell us how that feels
Great
"70% idle"
Of course, this shit is over 90% CS and video!
Ironically, it sounds like first to fail, last to learn.
1st
no you are not. get in line
Well, during the time MGS4 was released, no one knew how to work with the Cell processor, and up to today, the PS3 is still a bitch to program with.
However, what Naughty Dog has done is shown exactly what the PS3 CAN do that maybe Kojima Pro hasn't looked into; if you look at their production videos for Uncharted 2, ND's throwing a couple of ideas on how they did new things for UC2 (using up SPU's for graphics, for example), and how it's paid off.
The capabilities Kojima was looking for were there; they're just waiting to be discovered, and for developers to stop being lazy.
WTF, reason that Sony had the RSX end up in the PS3 was because the SPUs couldn't actually handled being both a CPU and GPU. If you actually look at it, it's really thrown together, like how it has shared memory between the graphics and system memory.
What are you talking about? The PS3 doesn't have shared memory between the system memory and the GPU. The PS3 has 256 MB of GPU memory and 256 MB of system memory. I think you're getting the PS3 confused with the XBox 360; which has 512 MB of memory that can be used for graphics rendering or general purpose business logic.
Also considering that the XDR has both the normal IO Bus and FlexIO (Direct Path to CPU)and a pipeline to the GPU to use the XDR for sharing data efficiency, I would say that the PS3 is very well put together, just complicated for the "GPU DOES GRAPHICS! CPU DOES EVERYTHING ELSE!" crowed.
There is also the irony of the developers that complain about the PS3 are ones that use other peoples work (Pre-made game engines) to build games, while ones that actually make their own (Dice, Id, Epic, Criterion, etc) have very few if none at all.
Before anyone screams Valve, remember all their work in Source is built off of Id's engines. Not really great game devs, but I do them credit as the best Quake 3 mod makers ever to roam the earth.
Just to make things clear: Valve's GoldSource and Source engine were based upon iD's Quake 1 engine, aka Quake Engine, not the iD Tech 3.
Dated hardware people. Hell, you could get a PS3/360 level video card for 20USD now. The limit has been set, you can't improve that unless you physically change it. Sure you can improve utilization(with the Cell), but already available more current hardware will give better results anyway. What developers and consumers will always want is the system with the most software and least hardware constraints, which isn't a console.
I agree...
Which is why I would rather have a PC than a PS3.
Higher resolutions, and can upgrade anytime.
I'd rather have both, seeing that it's the games and the enjoyment they give, not the hardware, that matter.
Duh...hardware always matter!
Try playing Devil May Cry 4 on your Super Famicom!
But hardware without games is pointless. I can't play BlazBlue or Senko no Ronde DUO on PC.
You always have the option of emulators, if you are patient. I have used PS, PS2, NDS emulators and most games work well on these relatively well developed emulators.
Too bad you can't get any games as fun and as well built as Uncharted on PC. Trust me, I'm typing this on my thousand dollar Asus and I'm fucking bored just looking through Steam and Stardock's selection. :/
Uncharted's great? I thought it was boring.
And why get a thousand dollar rig if you don't intend to use it as planned? Kinda using a rocket launcher to kill a mosquito. Either that...you are looking at the wrong places.
Well, we can get extremely good games on PC. The thing is, a publisher of such games must be interested to port it in order for us to have it. And unless its a non-system-exclusive FPS or RTS, there's no guarantee that it'll happen.
I can't play Uncharted 2, due to the retarded commercial that was put out for it. The one where the guy was complaining that his girlfriend was watching him play. Let me tell you something. If you have a girlfriend who is interested in a game you are playing, for the love of christ encourage it. Unless its world of warcraft. Less time of them asking you to do stuff you don't want to, like work, or have sex.
What people want, that don't use PC is a stable system that just works. So the PS3 does the job, but unlike the PC Video ability lags way behind and your right the GPU is old school. Upgradable GPU would have been a great way to differentiate over the life of the system.
But to me the PS3 had potential but lacked real GPU power from the start.
What happen to all the 1080p games?
No better than a xbox 360 so why buy a PS3?
I'm sorry growing up Kojima was my hero, I grew up with the series, but I fucking hate him. I remember all of his bullshit "The last MGS". He was great until he said games aren't art, from then on every time he spoke he seemed more arrogant. He reminds me of Moleneux almost with his talk of everything he does being revolutionary. He has no loyalty and refuses to leave his MGS comfort zone for more than 1 game. At TGS I want to fucking punch his face every year, he could at least make a ZOE3 trailer instead of more MGS spin-offs. He is killing his own franchise. He seems afraid of any competition, he likes to keep everything under thumb. The reason he has long cutscenes is because he wanted to be a film director. I love his work but when he says natal and MW2 are inspiring but games aren't art, he needs to shut the fuck up. People like him ruin my and people like me's games because we have vision but all they care about is newest graphics and technology.
Yea Hideo Kojima made good games but he is an arrogant little prick. In MSG4 ending credit he had his name attached as the "Voice of God". And he dissed Snake's Revenge as a shitty game because he wasn't in it.
Snake's Revenge WAS shit, you ignorant little asswipe and that "Voice of God" thing was in the Psycho Mantis scene (The voice that shouted "Traitor!" before PM vanished).
@ anon 16:28
you're right Kojima just seems to be deep in Vanity Projects instead of making GOOD games. Shit I want a new ZOE, Contra, a Castlevania W/O him. So many people are begging for a new ZOE and with the power of the systems today ZOE can be really epic. Kojima was great when he was underrated with Snatcher and Policenauts, but I just hate how he became an arrogant, vain, cocksucker that seems to NEED to make a metal gear title. I think the Japanese are really scared of using new IP.
Thank you for understanding. I feel he is just making games to stroke his ego now. I hope Shuyo Murata gets another directing role, he is one of my hopes for the next great director. ANUBIS ZOE was a masterpiece, probably because Kojima produced instead of directed. When Kojima isn't in the spotlight he works much better, because when he is it's all graphics and press interviews. Murata I hope you get out from under Kojima.
I like this discovering things ... xD Cell power is really limited . Its more like low end 1 core cpu with h264 hardware decoder :] . Developers need a lot of effort and money to play with this crappy chip and creating something good .
Many people are forgetting that the main role in graphics plays nivdia gpu (crappy and oooold :]) in this black box :] . Cell is only helping with some simple tasks .
Fail!!!
First to be a jackass?
God ps3 developers are idiots.
nah just a spot of bad logic. codewise. mgs4 was a sight to behold, but i bet it could be better.
Sounds like he just had something bigger than really possable in mind for MGS to me. And seeing that there is a huge diffrence in looks between Uncharted and MGS it's probably true MGS is about as good of a looking game as you can get looks more like a movie. Uncharted 2 looks great for a game but still looks like a game a very good game at that.
ditto
well for one MGS uses way more of the PS3 than the 1st game. I mean srsly the 1st images look like shit in pale comparison to MGS. Its like "hey we like the PS3 cause we didn't really make our game that awesome so we have a lot of leftovers". On the other hand MGS used it to its full extent for an awesome game with amazing graphics and rendering with nothing left over.
2nd!
...person to call you a jackass
I won't say the PS3 has a bottomless pit of potential, but MGS4 at no point pushed it to its limits. I played it, and while its graphics were good, there were some things that irked me several times. An example would be Snake's hair, which when looked closely looked horrible, and even more so whenever a dust cloud was close. It stuck like a sore thumb.
So, basically, I believe Kojima was just pissed that they couldn't figure how to best use the machine for what they wanted, and being MGS4 so widely expected back then, he just HAD to say they had pushed the limits of the platform to cover his ass on its shortcommings.
Kojima is rigt :] . PS3 was limited even when its was launching . Hardware was to old for this times . One year to old :] .
Sounds like he just had something bigger than possable in mind to me. MGS is a great game and looks great really more like a movie in most cases. Uncharted 2 while also a great game looks like a great game not so much a movie. So I can see both sides but it doesn't sound like a knock on the PS3 to me.
loser, now everyone will make fun of you. Stupid Anonymous's.. oh wait.
Trivia: apparently, MGS4 runs at a native resolution of 1024×768 anamorphic, while Uncharted 2 runs at true 720p (1280×720, of course).
Kojima is just a tad bit too arrogant about him maxing out the PS3 with his very first game on it. Not to mention he probably didn't use the Cell's SPEs as creatively and/or counterintuitively as Naughty Dog has.
Anyways, by the time developers max out the Cell/ PS3, either Microsoft will have announced (or even released) their new system, or Sony itself will let them in that the system's successor won't be using the same pointlessly complex architecture, so their progress will have been for naught.
Most devs like Cell... what they don't like is the GPU. If Sony were to put a GPU with unified shader, even without embedded DRAM (and probably a unified memory pool or at least a fast read&write to either pool by the CPU and GPU) then a lot of devs would've been happier.
What makes PS3 so hard for devs is because they need to use the SPU to make their PS3 games comparable to Xbox360 games. Imagine what could happen if Sony combine Cell with GPU comparable to the one in 360?
And if you think Cell is pointless, then how about the fact that we are using more and more GPU power for non graphic task? Isn't that is kinda like Cell but doing it from the opposite direction?
If I were to design a next gen console I would definitely choose something like Cell for my main CPU instead of choosing just a simple multicore CPU. Why? because for the same size/transistor count you can get much better performance on Cell for a game/media console type of hardware.
And yes, Cell is still hard to program if you want to optimize the usage to the fullest, but the biggest reason that makes it hard to program Cell isn't because the Cell architecture itself but because the multicore nature of the Cell.
The trend is that we're moving to many cores CPU and probably the one best prepared for next gen platform is those that can use the PS3 to the fullest. I would be surprised if next gen console (esp from Sony and MS) use anything less than 4 cores CPU.... my random guess is that they will use at least 8 cores if all the cores are general purpose or 16 cores if it were like Cell.
You make some really good points. I would argue the last one though where you claim that Cell is preparing developers for a world with multiple cores. While I'm sure this is in large part true, I suspect we'll see some major changes to the programming languages we use in order to allow us to create software that takes advantage of parallel processing. Unfortunately writing software that runs in parallel is so complicated it's almost impossible to do it well. Microsoft is tackling this challenge with a Domain Specific programming language called Axim. Axim takes the programmer's logic and compiles it to code that will automatically run on multiple cores. The only problem is Axim is a Domain Specific langugage, and as a result it is only good at solving the parallel processing problem. We really need a general purpose programming language that solves the parallel computing problem.
Don't know you, but I've seen many a complaint of game developers about the PS3's Cell, specifically. Some of them had to go back on their declarations due to Sony's pressure, pretty much in the same way Goichi Suda had to about the Wii (he's currently moving his stuff to the other platforms, anyways).
Aditionally, I'm not saying the future systems should move to a less powerful, single-core, non-graphics data processing solution, I'm simply saying that the Cell is too damn complex, and I'm not saying it because I think so, but because that's what developers say (those who are expressly asked about it and are not under pressure from either console manufacturer). You don't hear developers whining about, say, the 360's Xenon being too hard to develop for, they just do their stuff just as they did with, say, the PS2's comically-named Emotion Engine way back when. It also seems like Microsoft is way better than Sony at providing developers with a decent enough SDK, and early on the system's lifetime, too. I also don't hear that it's harder to optimize software for Intel's Core i7, which in its lowest available clock speed is at least twice as powerful as the PS3's Cell, so the architecture really IS pointlessly complex.
Sony is moving away from it (http://www.myce.com/news/sony-may-leave-behind-cell-architecture-in-ps4-24198/), and so is IBM (http://www.jabzweb.com/peripherals/2009/11/ibm-abandons-the-cell-processor/). Freaking good idea I say, it'd have been like sticking to Betamax and ATRAC3.
I was waiting for someone to mention the native resolutions at both. My eyes did in fact hurt when playing MGS4 (I'm on a 1080p monitor) but Uncharted 2 is one of the only games that a PC gamer such as myself can just really look at and go "now wow, THAT is how you upscale a game". It was incredibly irritating dealing with the low frame rates as well in MGS4, something else that I didn't find to happen to often, if at all in Uncharted 2.
While there were a few hectic scenes in MGS4, at a lower than HD resolution it doesn't really justify frame rate drops, which in turn could be interpreted as effect of such a new game to the PS3, rather than one made after a while etc etc etc. But Uncharted 2 had incredible detail to surroundings, as well as plenty of chaotic levels, that would surely have dropped without the proper development. I personally don't think the PS3 OR the 360 are going to be the same in the next 5-6 years (especially considering how fast the slim edition came out), but for now the right teams seem to be really putting out games that don't overshoot the PS3's capabilities and do it tastefully at that.
I really don't care what people who i will never meet or ever know think about me :)
“bottomless” capabilities"
Funny, no one would say that of a Nvidia 7800 GTX, which is essentially what the PS3's GPU is. It's obvious that the latest consoles are already taxed to their limits. Just compare any modern game that is available both on PC and console.
Well duh. But the difference with the PS3's architecture is that the Cell can handle GPU calculations which helps offload work from the GPU. Traditional programming logic of GPU and CPU being separate does not apply to the PS3 if you program for it smartly like Naughty Dog.
really...? lol! fuck pc and countless upgrades! uncharted 2 is proof of what the ps3 can do!