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

Neil says:

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 Le says:

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).

Superdynamite says:

LOL. Deadmeat is a blithering idiot. LOL

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

Orvisman says:

@ 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

Neil says:

“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.