Xbox 360 dev: PS3 ports to be "reasonably difficult"

How is blu ray inovative? If inovative is paying extra money for an expensive disc technology when you arnt even going to use most of the disc space, then yes, its VERY inovative.

If you think any of that crap that sonys talking about is needed, then sonys already got you bent over the counter raming your ass.

The Intellivision is going to blow all of these crappy "next-gen" systems out of the water!

Have you seen the disc pad controler and the number pad face. It has SOOOO much that it can do, I can't wait until they re-release it!

Anyway, all of the comments and arguments are useless until Sony produces something that a gamer can take home. Let's re-visit this post next year after all of the new systems are on the market.

My Sebring is nowhere near as powerful as a Corvette but I blew one away because he didn't know how to drive it....power is not everything, keep that in mind.

@Canadian Geese: "I believe that the 360 will rule the market in the west, while the PS3 will rule the east."
Though we are all entitled to opinions, I have to completely disagree. I've seen too much of the 360 so far and I think it's the most bug filled piece of fecal matter I've ever played. Both NFS and Burnout had content loading issues (vanishing cars, "loading area" then finding yourself in last place), the dashboard has crashed on me more than once (once is too much), and the latest release of "content" on live (paying $1.56 for 4 pictures of Street Fighter???) makes me realize this is going to be another standard MS product full of bugs, nickle and dime purchases and constant patching. If you ask me, they prematurely ejaculated the 360 onto market and it's going to come back and bite them in the ass. Also take a look at the sales so far and compare it to the original XBox 6 months from release. I'm sure you'll see an interesting pattern.

@LaughingTarget: The Cell processor is designed specifically for Media content. If you read anything serious on it besides Blogs you would have seen that. The Processing power isn't concentrated to a specifc thread or two. It's design allows you to run multiple synchronous threads, which helps with media content such as sound processing in parallel to video. Current processors are too "one-tracked" and require high core speeds to handle content the Cell can do with 1/10 the power. It's multi-teraflop number comes from the fact that it has 7 cores and can process multiple things at once. If you run the same applications on a core crippled version, the specs are pretty much the same as your 2-4 core processors out now.

"Some of the stories hyped the Cell processor as competition for Intel, but this chip is designed for Sony’s next-generation gaming console, not PCs (although there is the open question of would Apple use Cell). The chip designers did tweak Intel by showing that the prototype chips can operate at clock frequencies up to 4.6GHz (Intel had the very public problems reaching 4.0GHz with the Pentium 4).We’ve made a conscious effort to ignore the hype and focus on the technical aspects of the chip."
http://www-306.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/techdocs/D9439D04EA9B080B87256FC00075CC2D/$file/MPR-Cell-details-article-021405.pdf
"The overarching goal was to create a new architecture
that could process the next generation of broadband media and graphics with greater efficiency than the traditional approaches of ultradeep pipelines and the ganging of numerous complex and power-inefficient out-of-order RISC or CISC cores. The designers took a clean-slate approach to the problem but ultimately based the main core on the familiar Power architecture. Using Power gave them a well-known
base to extend upon and could jump-start software development. In addition to the Power core, the design includes eight other processing cores called the Synergistic Processor Element (SPE)..."

The Cell was not designed out of the box as a data crunching processor, but they found it did a hell of a job doing it as a "side-effect" of the design.

This writup is actually quite interesting if your at all interested in learning the truth.

@Exo: BluRay is very innovative. The disk space, constant read speeds (reduced spin up/down), scratchproof surface, reduced need for layering (atm) reducing cost to produce disks are all valid reasons for innovation. Just because some of you are hung up in the whole "forcing a format war" only proves how backwards thinking you really are. If you argue price, I can point to 4 people that have all purchased well over $800 in 360 related hardware, and they are still stuck with a 4/9G limit on content and all have had freezing, crashing and several other problems with their 360. I only know of one person that claims to never have problems with his 360, but he's like most of you 360 fans and thinks MS can do no wrong. He's also never let me play on his 360...maybe he did have bugs but didn't want me to see them...



Another note on this (and I have to agree with alot of the people above) is that developers will most likely code for the PS3 and port to the XBox. If they do this, they can concentrate on threaded applications which should run on the XBox, though they will need to cut back some of the content to fit both the limited parallel processing of the 360 and the DVD size limitations. I fail to see how the 360 fans fail to see that the PS3 will sell like mad here in the US. It goes back to my whole point that they don't want thier jump to market to seem like a waste _when_ the PS3 takes off here. They accept the bugs and poor design because of this and come here trying to get everyone that reads Joystiq to believe that the PS3 will be broke, won't have support or some other crazy ideas.

Besides the obvious bias of the article (being a Microsoft programmer) it has some valid points. It's completly filled with politics, but the concepts are the basic. If the developers port from MS to Sony, it will be tough. If they port from PS3 to 360, they will have to cut things from the game. It's as simple as that. Which way do you think the developers will go?

"As for the difficulties of programming: I personally believe that it's a necessary requirement for a healthy console industry. The message we hear from Carmack and Microsoft (who are both awfully PC centric) is that developers need better tools to take advantage of hardware from the start."

Microsoft is PC centric? Gee I wonder why. Some people here seem to have no idea as to how much work goes into a game. Go take a look at the Quake 3 source code, it contains about 325,000 lines of code. So no it does not make sense for the hardware to be unnecessarily difficult. Creating a game like Quake 3 is already unbelievably complicated.

Developers are not lazy. It's actually one of the toughest programming jobs around and demands long workdays. Making games is not like making movies, so shut the hell up unless you know what you are talking about.

Most people couldn't write an atari 2600 game to save their lives so give developers a break if they want simplified hardware.

Andir: It sounds like your 360 might be having some problems. Have you called MS about it?

I think alot of people dont really understand the true nature of the "Next-Gen" games... they ARE NOT just better graphics... creating higher-res graphics is EASY... most developers probably create all their graphics in high res and scale them down anyway.

The big difference in this generation is the complicated rendering effects like HDR lighting and volumetric smoke, sell shadowing, etc... those are the things that take GOOD programmers to develop... that is where the development time is spent. If developing those features on 2 different platforms is drastically different it will cost MUCH more for the developers to port games... think about it... many studios will probably have different programmers doing each platform... essentially doubling the cost of development.

The one benefit the 360 does have is XNA and Microsofts commitment to making the 360 work with PCs... the PC gamer base is HUGE compaired to all the consoles... so this really is a HUGE + for the 360.

ps3 is truly next gen what did you thought that it would be easy as talking your cat as for xbox 360 it won't last much longer the life cycle is the only thing that matters to me ps3 has a bigger life cycle imo.

I'm posting this again because for some unknown reason some fool deleted it last time.

Looks like we're going to see developers developing for one machine and then just half-arsed porting to the other.

I remember Saturn ports of Playstation games only using 1 of its 3 main processors because developers just couldn't be arsed learning how to code it properly (though they charged the same prices for those games). As a result Saturn games were often uglier than their PS equivilents, earning the Saturn a reputation as an inferior console. Little did Joe Bloggs know that the Saturn was only running at 33-50%.

Are we about to see a repeat of history? When games are going to cost the best part of 50 quid this time round, I really hope not.

The Wii will have the same graphical abilities as the 360, only with less shader+pixel pipes and speed as these
aren't required for sd def.And remember ATI cards always give superior image quality than Nvidia, who always go for FPS count.

All i can see is 360 doing well and the Ps3 receiving ports, which could cost more as the BD disks are expensive to manufacture, and have low yeild rates due to errors in manufacture.

The Wii will be the one to beat, with a more wider range of games, cheaper to buy and develop, with better reliability not to mention the Virtual Console which in itself is worth the purchase alone.

@ ZeroCorpse. How could you say that Kojima's followups to Metal Gear Solid were garbage? For your information, they were both hits and MGS2 and MGS3 each sold millions. True I don't think MGS2 was as good as the original but MGS3 certainly is and is superior in many ways. And wtf is wrong with you Joystiq for giving this guy 6 stars for such a dumb comment?? Are you saying MGS2 and 3 were garbage also??? you just lost yourself alot of credibility

No matter what time is money and money is power and by time Sony finishes paying off lawsuits and taking loses on systems sold, You will see why the PS3 will become the alternate name for the Sony Viao.