Devs Problems: Lack of memory on Sony PS3 and storage on Xbox 360
Filed under: News | By: Daniel
Posted on: November 3, 2007 | 134 Comments
We have heard many gamers comparing the different games on the Sony PS3 and Xbox 360 but today we had a long comment from someone calling themselves “IsThis4Real” and they make an interesting case for both the PS3 and 360.
Also they outline some of the problems both games consoles face and explain a little about the CELL CPU. Have a read a let us know if you agree.
Here is IsThis4Real’s comment:
I honestly wish people would get over the whole “CELL” thing. Its totally, as it stands now, overated - and the concept is still in its infancy. Its not the be all end all of CPUs. Its simply a single IBM Power PC core with 7 SPEs. I think people still make the mistake in claiming and thinking that they are essentially seperate CPUs. They are not.
Its “simply” designed for very fast on the fly encoding/decoding (gross missunderstatement, I know - but I think for some it has to be put VERY simply if you know what I mean) - its specialty will lie in the integration of the home based setup.
This is something Sony mooted nearly 10 or more so years ago, the ability to have every single (Sony based) product in one house hold to be able to communicate with eachother. This is when they forst started announcing that they were working on a single SUPER cpu.Watch that space over the next few years. They might actually get there, but I tell you, it aint going to be this incarnation of CELL, thats for sure.
It is not even an ideal functioning model for multi-threaded coding, an area, which despite a few game companies have said they are able to pull off, is again, still very much in its infancy - especially on the mainstream level - ie to you.
If you really want to be “technical” the PS3 setup is absolutely lousy - plain and simple - for modern game setups. The majority of the work needed for the PS3 is not the so called difficulty of the CELL processor, but its lack of main memory, lack of video memory, and very slow load data-read speeds, and much slower bus speed, all in comparisson to the Xbox 360.
The CELL, despite what is said, is NOT an overly complicated piece of architecture. It has the potential to be quite elegant in fact.
Think to yourselves for a minute, peoples?
You have games on the PS3. Dev kits have only been out X amount of time. Both 360 and PS3 release are identical - dont be anal guys.
Yet, you will notice that the PS3 sufferes time and time again in comparison - just mildly - mind you. The issues being what? Framerate? Resolution? This are problems not associated with CELL, but less memory, fill rate, bus transfer etc. The only way to really optimize is for Sony to “cut the fat” from their supplied libraries. Thats it. Its very little, or nothing at all to do with CELL difficulty. The processors are a non event.
That will possibly be the only major problem for devs for both consoles in the near future.
1). Lack of memory on the PS3.
2). Lack of storage space on the Xbox 360.
Watch out for that one. It will be here sooner than you think, if not already.
Hence the heavy need for almost triple assest content on Blue Ray discs, and very heavy cache useage. But cheers to Sony anyways for bringing something new to the table. But to say that games that are comming out would not be possible without it are just plain rubbish. But not so if on the PS3… Its just a little bit different. Tis all.
You want to talk about technical limitations??
All it will take is one REALLY good game, yet to come, on the PS3, with exceptional graphics and very heavy scripting, and it will absolutely bring that machine to its knees. Just because of the Single PPC core, and small ammount of memory. If you have actually looked at the way the PS3 “works”, it is a very laborious process !! There is so much to and fro before it even gets into the pipeline for post processing, any benefit that the CELL even began to pose is vanquished.
But everyone, just bear this in mind. The Xbox 360, for all the bagging it gets, is really quite a powerfull piece of kit. It has 3 seperate PPC cpus, which basically equates to 6 hardware threads. It has more memory to play with, a superior GPU, and superfast bus rate.
All the BS talked about GOW pushing the 360 is almost toss. Sorry. It was only running on two thread system. And even that engine was very buggy and “heavy” at the time. If not totally overated in its own right as well.
Honestly, if MS decided to put some form of a HD disc in it, Blu Ray or HD-DVD, the damn thing would be almost future proof, with the exception of the over heating, ofcourse.
Because, as it stands, the PS3 only has the storage space over the 360. Its not anymore “advanced” at all, and in many ways, slightly less.
Anyways, ive gone on a bit. Sorry.
Sometime soon, some dev will get around to managing the PS3 with a par excellence attitude. It looks like Infinity Ward might just be there.
Take it easy, guys. Sorry for going on a bit.
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Well, as someone who owns 4 Xbox 360’s and only 1 PS3 (Halo 3 is the greatest 16 player LAN game on a console, simple as that.) I think that I can be honest when I say that the Xbox 360 definitely has it’s flaws.
Admittedly, I have not had a single one fail, but that’s because I treat them like a PC, and make sure that all of them are very well ventilated. Despite this, I have several friends who have had their systems fail, and it’s extremely easy to see why. When the Xbox 360 is under heavy load, it gets EXTREMELY HOT AND LOUD. It’s not hard to see that the system is very poorly designed and obviously cannot be kept in a standard entertainment center.
As far as games, there is no question that the Xbox 360 has more and better games, but I do get that strange feeling I got with my beloved Dreamcast. The Dreamcast had graphics that were as good or better than the PS2, and it had tons of great games, but unfortunately it was a half a generation behind the PS2. The Xbox 360 is very competitive now, but with the very limited space on DVD-9, limitations will become more and more obvious over the next couple of years. Multiple discs only work in very limited types of games, and it will inevitably show up more and more as a huge liability.
I also feel that it was a poor decision to not go with gigabit ethernet on the Xbox 360. While obviously not much of a limitation right now, I can easily see this as being a bottleneck 3 or 4 years from now. This may not matter in the Microsoft world where they only supported the original Xbox (shamefully) for 4 years, but as most consoles have a lifespan that is twice that long, it will definitely matter 4-5 years from now.
As for graphics, again, they are slightly better overall on the Xbox 360 right now, but from what I’ve seen in heavenly sword, it appears that the PS3 has a much higher potential then the Xbox 360.
The only other thing that annoys me is how Microsoft has become so obsessed with hardware profitability this generation (They never made a dime on the original Xbox) that they have actually become the absolute worst deal of all of the 3 consoles. Forget the inexcusable Core system, which was an absolute joke. Even the much better valued Arcade Pack is still a terrible deal. The best value by far is the Xbox 360 premium at $349. But even in that system, the additional peripherals are ridiculously overpriced. Nintendo and Sony both have built in Wifi, and yet Microsoft charges a ridiculous $99 for it! (I know that wifi sucks, blah blah blah. I prefer wired as well, but it’s a nice option when you want to put one where you can’t get wiring thanks.) Then I have to pay $50 for a controller, $20 for a battery pack, and another $10 for a charging cable! Forget the $179 HD-DVD add-on, since it can’t be used for games anyway, your better off just buying a $199 HD-DVD standalone player. And if I want to upgrade the hard drive to 120GB it’s going to cost me a ridiculous $179, whereas I can add a 160GB or more for half that price to a PS3. For all of you who own an Xbox 360, just add up all of the money that you have put into it in additional accessories. Suddenly, it’s not that great of a value.
The bottom line is that Microsoft has gotten far too comfortable this generation. They really need to fix the hardware once and for all, and they really need to drop prices again soon. I would suspect that they will still easily outsell the PS3 this holiday season even without a price cut, but I honestly don’t see how the Xbox 360 will hold up to the PS3 3-4 years from now, and I strongly suspect that Microsoft will be forced to re-release the Xbox 360 with built in HD-DVD along with the long awaited die shrink to finally fix the overheating problem in a year or so, which may help them catch up in the hardware race, but would also risk further alienation of their loyal existing customer base, much like they did when they prematurely abandoned the first Xbox.
wow.. so many fanboys here. you guys claim “facts” yet saying “best” “inferior” “most powerful” and “ever” are just nothing but opinions.
ITS ALL ABOUT THE f’ing games. not some minor differences between cross-platform games and irrelevent CPU and GPU differences. SO STFU.
Storage Space.. What does the author mean? The PS3’s Hard Drive or Blu-ray Disc Format, or both?
you better get on your knees and prey because there is no way in hell that the ps3 will out sell the 360 for christmas so stop dreaming,and you want me to think hard why sony stuck with the ps3,i hope you didn’t think to hard because everyone knows that except sony fans.the reason that sony is sticking with the ps3 is because of the BR,that’s why sony forced it on the consumers because they was trying to hurry and get br on top as quick as they could because they have more invested then the ps3 then a console and that’s the reason why.
i aso read an article saying that if it wasn’t for the ps3 then hd-dvd would’ve won already,just think sony can’t hardly give away stand alone dvd players because of the price.i’m not saying that hd-dvd wins but if they do then sony would stop making the ps3 and make something that programers want coplain about.
like i said i gcould care less who wins because neither one is making a dent in dvd sales and if they don’t start selling a whole lot more then they will stop selling them because of the price to make them.the only reason i bought a hd-dvd player is because it only cost me &98 and the 5 free dvds and if BR wins then no big deal because it will last another year so i will get my use out of it for the price.
Fortunately there are smoothn00dle & imaballa to try to educate you guys. I’m a PS3 fan, but foremost I’m a programmer, daily writing hundreds of lines of assembly code for PC and embedded devices to earn my salary. Optimizations, bandwidth, cache-misses, memory-sync, cycles per iteration - it’s a daily neverending battle to push the hardware to the metal… But with the Cell, this battle is a piece of cake - XDR serves almost as L3 cache (not L1, smoothn00dle) (L1=0 cycles, L2=1cycle) - thus *poof* you stop fearing 300-cycle pauses now and then - they take mere 40 cycles. On x360 sadly 300 cycles isn’t the worst penalty (but 600..2400), and the worst penalty is taken way too often, all thanks to the GPU and that bus. And the shared 1MB L2 cache of Xenon. In 1MB cache (half core freq!) you can’t fit even the 3D engine, let alone the 50-150MB game-data (excluding textures). So, Xenon is doomed to get stalled often and for quite a long time. But thanks to its 3 cores, each with “hyper”-threading it can overcome this… as long as the other 3 working threads (the 2 left aren’t doing anything… it’s the feature of hyperthreading) do not need memory. And only a few game algorithms don’t need access to a broad range of the memory.
At least Xenon’s multithreading is quite straightforward, and can get good results right off the bat. Cell’s SPEs … require programmers that breathe opcodes and count cycles as they type their code. In each SPE, you have 256KB L1 RAM, and accessing anything like L2 or the sys-RAM … is explicitly coded by you. Generally in computers you let the cpu handle memory caching or issue prefetch instructions on tiny parts of the memory. Here, though you pre-cache through DMA… and can easily make the XDR send the next 100kB right as you start processing the current 100kB-block. Timing and tuning the DMA, or fitting data to get processed in a SPE are the woes developers have. But initially their woes and cries “ps3 is hard to develop for” were because there was no C++ compiler for SPEs at that time (since May 2k7 iirc there is one).
I’ll stop to this tiny overview of the differences between both consoles, as it’s reaching the size of an essay. I might look back here to chuckle at replies, that try to undermine me. Or learn from other real developers, which unlike me know the cpu->gpu bus performance and woes. But the latter are hopefully busy with making games or resting offline to avoid burnout.
Out of interest, who was the person who posted it and more importantly, what relation does he have to the games industry, specificly development?
He may (or may not) be talking sense but if its the general ramblings of a mere mortal then I’m taking a lot with a bucket of salt.
People that complain that the add-ons make the Xbox less valuable have skewed thinking, when all it requires is the orginal 200$ and another 50$ for Live and you’ve got pretty much all you need.
HD-DVD’s and Blu-Rays are completely pointless, you’re depending on a console to play dvds?
Have you completely missed the point that has been made by numerous developers and even the original poster that GAMES will require more capacity?
Microsoft themselves has already shipped a game that fills 3 DVDs, and more than one game has already had content cut to fit onto a DVD, and this is only year 2. So much for their argument that DVD-9 is all of the space that you would ever need.
It’s not a question of if Microsoft will eventually allow games to be released on HD-DVD, it’s a question of when.
Bottom line, the 360 has all the power of the PS3 and is much easier to develop and program for. If MS had dealt all 360’s with a HD, this would not even be a contest, they could load info from a couple discs to play and storage would be no problem. the PS3 is problematic and tuff to program for because it is so much more different - And NOT better - just different. BR drive load times suck, the fill rate is slower than the 360.
Great DVD player, great to “Fold @ home, but a second rate gaming machine…i know, I got one at launch…
http://www.product-reviews.net/2007/11/03/devs-problems-lack-of-memory-on-sony-ps3-and-storage-on-xbox-360/
Where are you finding $200 XBOX 360s? Actually, Blu-ray Disc is not a DVD, where HD-DVD is in the DVD family. Sony might have well called their format the Betamax Disc. Also, with the 360, you’re not depending on a console to play the HD-DVDs..