Gast
2008-08-05, 22:14:08
Lemarchand can talk about another interesting subject, though: the prospect that, in the near future, multi-platform PS3 games will outshine the versions running on rival consoles: “There’s a set of tools called Edge that were developed on the Naughty Dog premises, actually, by a group of very, very senior games programmer, some from Naughty Dog and some from elsewhere. I think it’s tremendously visionary of Sony to make these tools, which are largely low-level libraries.”
Before proceeding, we need to explain a little of the unique manner in which the PS3’s much-admired, phenomenally powerful Cell processor works. Essentially, it contains eight mini-processors called Synergistic Processor Units (SPUs), six of which can be given tasks to perform at any given time. Lemarchand continues: “It’s code that runs on SPUs, and it’s to do with things like animation compression, generalised compression and rendering optimisations. These guys are really old-school programmers: guys who are always looking to shave another cycle off an operation. And part of the skill of developing for the PlayStation 3 is getting the GPU to farm jobs out to the six SPUs – seeing which SPUs are idling and can take up some of the slack in a frame-to-frame kind of way.”
Here, Lemarchand comes up with an interesting revelation: “That’s why we think we’re probably only using 30 or 40 per cent of the power of the PS3 right now, and there’s this great, untapped potential. All third-party developers can get the Edge libraries for free and are going to be able to use them in their own ways, to get more and more and more out of the PS3 over the years.”
Lemarchand also waxes lyrical about the culture of cooperation that exists between first-party Sony Studios: “We have this culture of open communication: we like to trade stories about what we found were ways of doing things that worked, and what didn’t. We’re always trading war-stories with Insomniac and Evolution and Sucker Punch. We’re just one block away from Sony Santa Monica – the guys who made God Of War – and we get our designers together with theirs for formal lunches, and just talk about tools, design approaches and so on. So there’s this town square feeling of everybody trading stories about our best practices, and I think it makes everybody stronger and smarter.”
http://threespeech.com/blog/2008/08/naughty-dogs-richard-lemarchand-co-lead-game-designer-of-uncharted-talks-trophies-edge-cells-and-studios/
PS3's cell processor power not yet realised, says Volition
Volition’s Dan Sutton has said that developers have yet to realise the full potential of the PlayStation 3’s cell processor, noting it will be another “two or three years” before PS3 visuals of multiplatform games surpass those of the Xbox 360s.
Speaking to Videogamer.com in regards to why PS3 versions of multiplatform titles generally look identical or indeed worse than their Xbox 360 counterparts, Sutton replied: "Graphically, in itself it's a very very powerful machine. I think the problem is you have to teach programmers how to do that. We have very very amazing programmers on our Xbox team who when they get the PS3 in front of them, it takes them forever, because of the multi-threading they do with the Cell processor.”
“It's just how complex the Cell processor is. As people get their heads around that it gets better and you get more parity coming out, but code has to be written in a certain way for that and it's a lot more complicated than it is for the Xbox."
Sutton observed that although some games such as Konami’s Metal Gear Solid 4 and Insomniac’s Resistance 2 push the PS3’s graphical capabilities “firmly”, he noted that developers have yet to utilize cell to its full potential.
"I think you're seeing development teams now ramp up. You get people who are dedicated to the PS3 and that's why you're getting equal graphics. You see some stuff on the PS3, like Metal Gear Solid, that push it very very firmly graphically, and I'm sure Resistance 2 is going to do that as well. I think you're going to see games that are developed for each console specifically, the exclusives, really push it that way still. I think the Xbox, even though it doesn't have as much hard drive space, is not Blu-ray, you still see that it's a very very powerful machine.”
“I think that's why games like Final Fantasy are coming over to the Xbox. It's still, in essence, as powerful, and people have their heads around that. Maybe two, three years from now when they're very much into the PlayStation cycle you may see better games come out. We don't know. I don't think anyone's really taken the Cell processor to its full potential yet."
http://www.psu.com/PS3s-cell-processor-power-not-yet-realised,-says-Volition--a004442-p0.php
Was ist davon zu halten?
Before proceeding, we need to explain a little of the unique manner in which the PS3’s much-admired, phenomenally powerful Cell processor works. Essentially, it contains eight mini-processors called Synergistic Processor Units (SPUs), six of which can be given tasks to perform at any given time. Lemarchand continues: “It’s code that runs on SPUs, and it’s to do with things like animation compression, generalised compression and rendering optimisations. These guys are really old-school programmers: guys who are always looking to shave another cycle off an operation. And part of the skill of developing for the PlayStation 3 is getting the GPU to farm jobs out to the six SPUs – seeing which SPUs are idling and can take up some of the slack in a frame-to-frame kind of way.”
Here, Lemarchand comes up with an interesting revelation: “That’s why we think we’re probably only using 30 or 40 per cent of the power of the PS3 right now, and there’s this great, untapped potential. All third-party developers can get the Edge libraries for free and are going to be able to use them in their own ways, to get more and more and more out of the PS3 over the years.”
Lemarchand also waxes lyrical about the culture of cooperation that exists between first-party Sony Studios: “We have this culture of open communication: we like to trade stories about what we found were ways of doing things that worked, and what didn’t. We’re always trading war-stories with Insomniac and Evolution and Sucker Punch. We’re just one block away from Sony Santa Monica – the guys who made God Of War – and we get our designers together with theirs for formal lunches, and just talk about tools, design approaches and so on. So there’s this town square feeling of everybody trading stories about our best practices, and I think it makes everybody stronger and smarter.”
http://threespeech.com/blog/2008/08/naughty-dogs-richard-lemarchand-co-lead-game-designer-of-uncharted-talks-trophies-edge-cells-and-studios/
PS3's cell processor power not yet realised, says Volition
Volition’s Dan Sutton has said that developers have yet to realise the full potential of the PlayStation 3’s cell processor, noting it will be another “two or three years” before PS3 visuals of multiplatform games surpass those of the Xbox 360s.
Speaking to Videogamer.com in regards to why PS3 versions of multiplatform titles generally look identical or indeed worse than their Xbox 360 counterparts, Sutton replied: "Graphically, in itself it's a very very powerful machine. I think the problem is you have to teach programmers how to do that. We have very very amazing programmers on our Xbox team who when they get the PS3 in front of them, it takes them forever, because of the multi-threading they do with the Cell processor.”
“It's just how complex the Cell processor is. As people get their heads around that it gets better and you get more parity coming out, but code has to be written in a certain way for that and it's a lot more complicated than it is for the Xbox."
Sutton observed that although some games such as Konami’s Metal Gear Solid 4 and Insomniac’s Resistance 2 push the PS3’s graphical capabilities “firmly”, he noted that developers have yet to utilize cell to its full potential.
"I think you're seeing development teams now ramp up. You get people who are dedicated to the PS3 and that's why you're getting equal graphics. You see some stuff on the PS3, like Metal Gear Solid, that push it very very firmly graphically, and I'm sure Resistance 2 is going to do that as well. I think you're going to see games that are developed for each console specifically, the exclusives, really push it that way still. I think the Xbox, even though it doesn't have as much hard drive space, is not Blu-ray, you still see that it's a very very powerful machine.”
“I think that's why games like Final Fantasy are coming over to the Xbox. It's still, in essence, as powerful, and people have their heads around that. Maybe two, three years from now when they're very much into the PlayStation cycle you may see better games come out. We don't know. I don't think anyone's really taken the Cell processor to its full potential yet."
http://www.psu.com/PS3s-cell-processor-power-not-yet-realised,-says-Volition--a004442-p0.php
Was ist davon zu halten?