Splinter Cell Conviction still exclusive to Xbox 360: why no Sony PS3 release

Splinter Cell: Conviction probably won’t be on PS3 because the PS3 hasn’t sold as many units as Xbox 360.

So Ubisoft don’t want to waste their time on the PS3 version, because they know it won’t sell well. That’s the most possible reason.

Its probably more to do with incentives being offered by Microsoft to keep it an exclusive for their console (or possible problems with future 360 releases if they don’t walk the Microsoft line). Its very sad that this happens but I suppose it means the developers can devote more time and resources to the game, rather than cutting it down to make it easier to port to other platforms.

The reason Splinter Cell Conviction won’t be ported to PS3 is because PS3 cannot run it. The integer/branch heavy AI engine is too much for CELL to handle. Assassin’ Creed also suffered from a similar problem, and PS3 version ran a simplied AI compared to Xbox 360 version to cope with CELL’s weak processing power. but Spplinter Cell Conviction was just too much for PS3 to handle, hence the development team gave up on the PS3 version and focused on the machine that could handle it, the Xbox 360.

Contrary to PS3 fan’s belief, PS3 is significantly weaker than Xbox 360 for game processing, it’s roughly 1/3rd the machine that Xbox 360 is.

It costs a lot of money to make a game for a single console, with a lot of additional costs to make it run on a second console, or third, etc.

Let’s say it costs you 1 million dollars to make a game for the Xbox 360, and another $350,000 to make it for the PS3 at the same time.

That 35% extra is alot of money that might be better spent adding extra features on the core 360 game, or in marketing and advertising.

And if PS3 sales are lagging, then a company may decide that it is wasteful to develop for both.

I like to think of the Sims is a classic example of how to do things. EA and MAXIS makes the core game for the PC, and then a year later Aspyr picks up the rights to port it over to the MAC. This way, MAXIS can focus its development on a single platform, while someone else can pick up the tab for porting it (and get some profit too).

you are so dumb the ps3 has way more power than the xbox 360 havent you heard that the ps3 can double as a supercomputer

LOL. Deadmeat is a blithering idiot. LOL

M$ paid for future UBI exclusives years ago. This is one that M$ picked for an exclusive.

Just because you say it’s superior doesn’t make it superior….and no matter how you try to spin it, the PS3 is getting the short end of the stick on many fronts.

1. No Virtua Fighter 5 Patch.
2. No Splinter Cell.
3. No Custom Soundtracks in Burnout Paradise.
4. No Les Paul Support in Rock Band.
5. No Headphone support in Rock Band.
6. Cancellations
7. List will continue, I’m sure.

And it’s the PS3 that has held back GTV IV which could have been out by October…except Rockstar games ran into many technically difficulties on the PS3.

It’s obvious that developers hate this console because it’s so difficult to develop for.

I have a PS3 but use it mostly, for as you said, playing Blu-Ray discs. Its perfect for that. Maybe that’s what they should just market it as and stop trying to sell it for games.

@ Deadmeat

Are you kidding me! You can’t really, truly, honestly believe one word of what you wrote. Can you? The PS3 is NOT a third of the Xbox 360. Do you even have both machines. I do. I have every machine (Sega, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft) since the Sega Saturn and have had and sold very machine since the Intellivision and Colecovision. I’m tired of the bashing perpetrated on the the Net by semiliterate, ignorant gamers such as yourself. If you knew anything about the PS3, you know how powerful the multicore Cell processor and its eight SPEs are.

“Architecture
Main article: Cell architecture
While the Cell chip can have a number of different configurations, the basic configuration is a multi-core chip composed of one “Power Processor Element” (“PPE”) (sometimes called “Processing Element”, or “PE”), and multiple “Synergistic Processing Elements” (“SPE”).[20] The PPE and SPEs are linked together by an internal high speed bus dubbed “Element Interconnect Bus” (“EIB”). Due to the nature of its applications, Cell is optimized towards single precision floating point computation. The SPEs are capable of performing double precision calculations, albeit with an order of magnitude performance penalty. However, there are ways to circumvent this in software using iterative refinement, which means values are calculated in double precision only when necessary. Jack Dongarra and his team demonstrated a 3.2 GHz Cell with 8 SPEs delivering a performance equal to 100 GFLOPS on an average double precision Linpack 4096×4096 matrix.

[edit] Power Processor Element
The PPE is the Power Architecture based, two-way multithreaded core acting as the controller for the eight SPEs, which handle most of the computational workload. The PPE will work with conventional operating systems due to its similarity to other 64-bit PowerPC processors, while the SPEs are designed for vectorized floating point code execution. The PPE contains a 32 KiB instruction and a 32 KiB data Level 1 cache and a 512 KiB Level 2 cache. Additionally, IBM has included an AltiVec unit[21] which is fully pipelined for double precision floating point and each PPU can complete two double precision operations per clock cycle, which translates to 6.4 GFLOPS at 3.2 GHz; or eight single precision operations per clock cycle, which translates to 25.6 GFLOPS at 3.2 GHz.[22]

[edit] Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE)
Each SPE is composed of a “Synergistic Processing Unit”, SPU, and a “Memory Flow Controller”, MFC (DMA, MMU, and bus interface).[23] An SPE is a RISC processor with 128-bit SIMD organization[21][24][25] for single and double precision instructions. With the current generation of the Cell, each SPE contains a 256 KiB embedded SRAM for instruction and data, called “Local Storage” (not to be mistaken for “Local Memory” in Sony’s documents that refer to the VRAM) which is visible to the PPE and can be addressed directly by software. Each SPE can support up to 4 GiB of local store memory. The local store does not operate like a conventional CPU cache since it is neither transparent to software nor does it contain hardware structures that predict which data to load. The SPEs contain a 128 bit, 128 entry register file and measures 14.5 mm² on a 90 nm process. An SPE can operate on 16 8-bit integers, 8 16-bit integers, 4 32-bit integers, or 4 single precision floating-point numbers in a single clock cycle, as well as a memory operation. Note that the SPU cannot directly access system memory; the 64-bit virtual memory addresses formed by the SPU must be passed from the SPU to the SPE memory flow controller (MFC) to set up a DMA operation within the system address space.

In one typical usage scenario, the system will load the SPEs with small programs (similar to threads), chaining the SPEs together to handle each step in a complex operation. For instance, a set-top box might load programs for reading a DVD, video and audio decoding, and display, and the data would be passed off from SPE to SPE until finally ending up on the TV. Another possibility is to partition the input data set and have several SPEs performing the same kind of operation in parallel. At 3.2 GHz, each SPE gives a theoretical 25.6 GFLOPS of single precision performance.

Compared to a modern personal computer, the relatively high overall floating point performance of a Cell processor seemingly dwarfs the abilities of the SIMD unit in desktop CPUs like the Pentium 4 and the Athlon 64. However, comparing only floating point abilities of a system is a one-dimensional and application-specific metric. Unlike a Cell processor, such desktop CPUs are more suited to the general purpose software usually run on personal computers. In addition to executing multiple instructions per clock, processors from Intel and AMD feature branch predictors. The Cell is designed to compensate for this with compiler assistance, in which prepare-to-branch instructions are created. For double-precision, as often used in personal computers, Cell performance drops by an order of magnitude, but still reaches 14 GFLOPS.

Recent tests by IBM show that the SPEs can reach 98% of their theoretical peak performance using optimized parallel Matrix Multiplication.[22]

Toshiba has developed a co-processor powered by four SPEs, but no PPE, called the SpursEngine designed to accelerate 3D and movie effects in consumer electronics.”

Or go here:

http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell0_v2.html

“The integer/branch heavy AI engine is too much for CELL to handle” – That has to be a joke right?
“…roughly 1/3rd the machine that Xbox 360 is” – Now I know you don’t know what you are talking about.
You are saying that with 8 RISC SPE’s inside the CELL processor (7 of which are enabled with 1 being used for the OS) it is less powerful than the Xbox 360′s processor? The PPE core is dual threaded (two independant threads) and each SPE has its own thread which can be chained together for more power. This means the PS3 has 9 independant threads for execution.
The XDR memory subsystem and Element Interconnect Bus (very high speed bus linking PPE and SPE’s) actually make the Cell ideal for supercomputing applications on floating point tasks. It has been demonstrated that a 3.2 GHz Cell (just like the one in the PS3) with 8 SPEs can deliver a performance equal to 100 GFLOPS, and theoretically each SPE is capable of of 25.6 GFLOPS of single precision performance. If we purely go by floating point performance (which AI will be mostly based on) the Cell can absolutely kill a Pentium 4 or Athlon 64. Obviously other things come into play too, but numerical calculations are a particular strong point.
The moral of this story… do your research.

“1. No Virtua Fighter 5 Patch.
2. No Splinter Cell.
…
4. No Les Paul Support in Rock Band.
5. No Headphone support in Rock Band.”
These are the software developers choices. Not due to limitations of the PS3. Its more than capable of all those things.
I could point out that the Xbox360 has no Web browser, or high def drive built-in, or bluetooth headset support, or free multiplayer gaming, or WiFi built-in, or built-in power supply etc.

“3. No Custom Soundtracks in Burnout Paradise.”
This is a priority for Sony and something which should be addressed in the next firmware update. It should give access to the XMB (desktop) from inside games making music selection, friends lists, chatting etc. available. Its being sorted.

“It’s obvious that developers hate this console because it’s so difficult to develop for.”
Its not more difficult, its just different. The man in charge of Epic (and of course the UT3 engine) recently said that once you get the hang of it, its no more difficult than any other console. People always fear something new, and the architecture in the PS3 is definately new. People fear change but to move on and evolve we need to go in new directions.

Sorry to double (triple) post but I thought this would give some idea of Cell power:
http://spong.com/article/14425?cb=782
Naughty Dog have basically said that “Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune” on the PS3 – which is one of the most incredible and technically impressive games out at the moment on any machine – only uses about a 1/3rd of the PS3′s power! They don’t even use all of the SPU’s.

When they finally “unlock” the Ps3′s potential by 2010 we will be in another console cycle. Sony seems to think anyone has the patience to wait around for this, or even cares. I smell bullshit when developers speak of “1/3 of the ps3′s power” anyway.

It’s not superior when it comes to games. Did they not say that the it was not possible to make the game for the PS3 because the AI was to complex and that the PS3 can’t handle a complex AI. That tells me Games are easier for the PS3 as the AI is not challenging.

All I know is I have both systems…and just when I thought I’d buy the PS3 version of Burnout Paradise, there was a better reason to get it on the 360. Just like Madden. Just like Orange Box ($10 says that the PS3 doesn’t get the upcoming Team Fortress add-on content). Just like Assassin’s Creed.

I’ve already played and beat all the exclusives on the PS3 that appeal to me too…so basically, my 360 has been getting all the love.

Hopefully things change for the PS3, but I’m not holding my breath. Every time I read the news, there’s another strike against the PS3. Fortunately Blu-Ray is winning the format war, so at least I have a relatively cheap Blu-Ray player and multimedia hub.

Splinter Cell: Conviction will do fine on the 360. It’s proven time, and time again that games sell *significantly* better on the 360 than they do on the PS3 (or the Wii). Therefore, if any company would make a game exclusive to any console, it’s smartest to make it exclusive to the 360.

What’s really pointless, however, or exclusives on PS3. They don’t sell enough to cover the costs of development, and they’re no better than anything already on the 360.

Neil, do some research, floating point calculations do not equal awesome gaming machine. In the area of floating point calcs, the ps3 is a very godly machine for the price. The area of gaming code, however, is absolutely dependent on general processing power in which the xbox gives the ps3 a big run for it’s money. Mainly due to it’s 3 cores which can dual thread.(general processing cores). PS3 uses 7 SPE’s and 1 general processing core. The spe’s are the reason the ps3 destroy’s conventially designed CPU’s in math tests. These are, however, not ideal for gaming code. Keep in mind, it’s not impossible, just not ideal. Couple that with the fact that the ps3 gpu can process 250million polygons per second versus the xbox 360′s 500million+ and you’ll quickly see the reason the xbox 360′s games run (Easier) at 60 fps. I’ll conclude by saying in raw power for gaming, the 360 certainly has a bit of an edge, but the more I research it, the more I realize that these machines are more equal than they are unequal. GTA IV will prove my and research, or destry it. Have a good day gamers.

“The integer/branch heavy AI engine is too much for CELL to handle” – That has to be a joke right?
“…roughly 1/3rd the machine that Xbox 360 is” – Now I know you don’t know what you are talking about.
You are saying that with 8 RISC SPE’s inside the CELL processor (7 of which are enabled with 1 being used for the OS) it is less powerful than the Xbox 360’s processor? The PPE core is dual threaded (two independant threads) and each SPE has its own thread which can be chained together for more power. This means the PS3 has 9 independant threads for execution.
The XDR memory subsystem and Element Interconnect Bus (very high speed bus linking PPE and SPE’s) actually make the Cell ideal for supercomputing applications on floating point tasks. It has been demonstrated that a 3.2 GHz Cell (just like the one in the PS3) with 8 SPEs can deliver a performance equal to 100 GFLOPS, and theoretically each SPE is capable of of 25.6 GFLOPS of single precision performance. If we purely go by floating point performance (which AI will be mostly based on) the Cell can absolutely kill a Pentium 4 or Athlon 64. Obviously other things come into play too, but numerical calculations are a particular strong point.
The moral of this story… do your research.”………………….Go deliver your baby somewhere else! for your info ps3 has a watered down version of the cell cpu in it.

Waahh… sounds like some Sony fanboy needs a hug. Don’t worry fanboys, you don’t need the new splinter cell or halo3 for that matter. Just keep playin Resistance and Crachet, while the non-bluray gamers continue to get better titles.

Sony fanboys can’t see reality. The guy who wrote this article is so pathetic trying to convince people that PS3 is superior… such a loser!

I did some research……..and found out your all dorks. Now research that

Nice to see the ‘anti-Sony’ crew have some well thought out views and facts to back them up Haaaa!
I think we can see the age group that the Xbox360 is aimed at now. Try putting in some real facts (rather than opinions) and lets see how that goes, shall we?

They have to make It for PS3 i love this games Splinter Cell us Awsome