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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 12:32 AM EDT |
I am a game developer and have helped ship multiplatform AAA titles on
both Xbox360 and PS3. I don't think there is usually any contractual
obligation to ship with the same graphical quality on both consoles;
indeed, we try to make multiplatform games as similar as possible across
consoles primarily because that's easier for us. A stringent limitation is
RAM; 512MB on both Xbox360 and PS3, but the system reserves a larger
chunk for itself on PS3 so its usually tighter on that platform.
Multithreading is also more difficult on the PS3, with the Cell architecture
requiring code to be broken up into small task-sized chunks that can fit on
the SPUs, and data to be DMA'd back and forth. An engine that is
designed to take good advantage of the Cell will also be able to take
advantage of the Xbox360's six hardware threads (three PPC cores,
compared to the one dual-threaded core in the PS3). The Xbox360 also
has a slightly more powerful GPU, with a unified architecture for running
vertex and pixel shaders on the same pipelines. In practice, this means
vertex shaders get used for tasks on the Xbox360 that have to be done
instead on the SPUs on PS3.
With a game engine designed from the ground up to be optimal for PS3,
and code hand-optimized to make best use of the SPUs, the PS3 is
actually capable of more computation per frame than the Xbox360.
However, almost no one has such an engine (only some first- and
second-party studios, such as Insomniac). Instead, most engines are
multi-platform, and deliver perhaps 60 to 80% of the PS3's potential--just
enough to keep up with the Xbox360 version of the game (which is a little
easier to optimize). Some developers really struggle with the PS3's
hardware architecture, and/or they don't put in the large amount of effort
needed to have a good PS3 version of their game.
Sony may have finally learned their lesson about making consoles that are
difficult to develop for--in the next generation, I expect them to have a
standard multicore shared-memory architecture like Microsoft and the
PCs. If not, they will lose the next round even more convincingly than
they did in this generation, because game developers are really sick of
putting in a lot of extra effort to get decent performance on Sony's
consoles. Three generations of that nonsense was enough.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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