1UP: 360 football games to run faster than PS3
While the additional frames mean smoother, more fluid animation in the 360 versions, it's still unclear how the jump will impact graphical fidelity or resolution. A comparison between both versions of last year's Madden 07 conducted by Gamespot showed the 360 version had "sharper textures on the character models in the close-up shots shown between plays." In comparing this year's games, 1UP simply stated that "All-Pro Football 2K8 definitely runs better on Xbox 360."
The reasons behind this frame rate difference are hard to pin down. Todd Sitrin, EA Vice President of Marketing Sports Branding, told 1UP that there are trade offs in designing football simulations and that "every company making a football game this year made a decision that the best experience for the Xbox 360 included 60fps whereas the best experience for the PS3 was 30fps." Extra time and familiarity with the Xbox 360 hardware could have influenced the development, as could the purported difficulty in programming for the PS3's multi-processor architecture.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
The True Gamer @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:44AM
Flame war commencing in 5....4....3....2....1
don.wright @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:45AM
We all know its because the PS3 sux big ones. Flame Wars! Begin!!
jay @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:45AM
So... 60fps, Xbox Live and rumble (to a lesser degree).
I'll take the 360 version, please. Any benefits on the PS3 side? Is this game 4D compatible?
vidGuy @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:46AM
That must be a typo - the PS3 version is going to run at 300fps, right? I mean, all that power must be good for something... ;)
Whose ready to get charbroiled?
Ian Von Porter @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:46AM
Football? You must mean American Football.. cause no one outside of USA cares about American Football.. next.
Mike @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:48AM
This is what happens when the game is first developed on the 360 and then gimped to the PS3.
Jimmuy @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:48AM
We all know it's popular culture now to like the Xbox 360. But I say it's bull shit, Xbox 360 sucks.
don.wright @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:50AM
Nice try Ian Von Porter. But that still doesn't change the fact that the PS3 sux big ones. Try to stay on topic here eh? We are trying to conduct a Flame War here!!!!!
Shagittarius @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:50AM
No one inside the US cares about Phag-ball...you know that other 'football' game.
deaftly @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:52AM
wow, talk about a serious bitchslap to the pos3, 360 gets more detailed models and a faster framerate because basically the ps3 couldnt do that and make the game enjoyable. pure gold, jerry , pure gold
Jouten @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:54AM
I'll take the 60 frames per second with rumble as opposed to the 30fps in the 4th dimension w/o rumble but a retarded dualshake please. Thank you.
JonnyBoy2U @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:54AM
HAHA! piece of shit 3 gets shat on AGAIN.
God I'm loving my 360 now...
Spitkicker @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:55AM
Is anybody surprised by this?
JodyAnthony @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:55AM
its probably being developed with the focus towards 360 and then being ported to ps3. since its not made from the ground up for the ps3 hardware, and since the ps3 and 360 hardware is so different, its too hard to keep the games exactly the same.
deaftly @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:56AM
lol @ Shagittarius, now football automatically sucks, wait until fifa only runs @ 30fps on ps3, then your "football" will suck to, just get over it and trade your pos3 in for a 360, and enjoy real next gen gaming, not a crappy bluray player that plays games 2nd, half assed and a year to late
JodyAnthony @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:56AM
oh, and both types of football suck ass, so who cares
jay @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:56AM
This isn't football, one country decides to rename their sport to one of the most popular games in the world. 'tis a bit silly.
I prefer the armour-less version myself.
Still. PS3 can't handle it at 60fps? Remind me why the PS3 costs double the price of a 360 yet isn't as powerful.
Shagittarius @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:57AM
I heard that in the PS3 version Peyton manning has a weak point that you can attack for massive damage!
Matt B @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:57AM
Andir3.0 Wrote:
"I would assume (since I don't know what each studio is doing on their end) it has to do mainly with the graphics card mindset. In today's PCs and the 360, the graphics card handles a lot of the culling and visibility checks. (Graphics cards are good at this kind of thing, as is each individual SPU on the Cell.) In the Cell environment, you are given what is essentially a pre-shader video card in the SPU, except it's running at 3.2GHz. Take what video cards could do (as far as effects) back in the nVidia 5000-ish era and imagine if they had a 3.2GHz clock. Now, your not going to dedicate the entire 6 SPUs to video background processing, but you can borrow some of that processing power to do collision, culling, physics, transformation (camera and object movement), etc and feed the RSX only what it needs. You can now use the RSX to process the pre-calculated scene and add after effects (motion blur, AA and the like.) This is also why the split memory can be a good thing. The Cell memory runs at full clock speed. You can virtually apply transformations (object movement, rotation, deformation) in system memory and pass those objects to the RSX for texturing and processing in it's memory buffer.
Why you get these bad ports (IMHO) is due to this mindset. When a developer passes objects to the graphics buffer and performs the transformations using the graphics library instead of the Cell architecture, they are trying to cram what the 360's graphics card can do into the RSX (which is a bit less powerful to be honest [but not by a whole lot]) This is why you get games that look almost as good as the 360 on ports. The port still relies on the video card for most of it's processing leaving the Cell mostly idle.
It's my opinion that a lot of developers are not willing to change the code enough to handle this change. There's also that fact that most of the big name studios want a product right now(!) and getting the game "good enough" is the norm so these kinds of engine changes are usually passed over, giving games that less than polished look.
Why they state the PS3->360 ports would look as good on the 360 is along the line that the dev will have to change these Cell specific functions to run on the 360 GPU instead of the CPU. But the caveat is that not all these functions need to be run GPU side so they can use the tri-core CPU in the 360 for some of the less demanding tasks. Besides, the 360 CPU isn't designed for vector processing, so it would be just as bad to leave these on the CPU if you were going form the PS3 to 360.
It's also worth noting that the PS3 can handle 2 shared thread and 6 unique "unshared" threads at the same time while the 360 is limited to 6 shared threads. Shared threads are kind of like the hyper-threading in Intel processors today. They can perform two operations at roughly the same time, but it splits the workload of the processor between these two threads. When one thread is idle waiting for memory allocation or a return from system IO, the processor will shift it's attention to the secondary thread without programmer intervention. This makes it "feel" like you have 2 cores instead of one. However, you're splitting the processor into two different tasks which is bad for the stuff I talked about earlier (the culling, transformation, etc.) because this requires heavy processor time. Hyperthreading is good when your dealing with things like general desktop systems where the processor can shift between operations while it waits for you to press the next button on your keyboard or it has to wait for the next packet of data from your network.
Does any of that make sense? I tried to make it as non-technical as I could. :p This is why I said the Cell requires a different mindset. "How much of this scene can I have the Cell pre-calculate and how much needs to be done on the RSX?" Honestly, the Cell is highly under utilized in most of the games out there.
Sorry, I skipped one entire thought process...
When developers code a game for the 360, they are coding for a tree core processor and a GPU. It's not too dissimilar from programming on a PC today. When they port these games to the PS3, they follow that same mindset and are forced to use the SPU totally as a secondary general processor. This is why some people say that the Cell would not be good for general tasks. They are really tasking the CPU incorrectly treating the SPU as just another core. While it will perform well, the SPU actually has to perform more instructions to perform the same as a full blown core. This isn't entirely bad as long as you don't rely on it.
As far as texture quality difference. My thought on this can be many differnet things, but I think many of the ports are trying to utilize the system memory as texture cache forcing the RSX to read from system memory at half the speed of it's own.
If they performed some of the transformations before sending the objects to the RSX memory, they can literally cut the objects in half since your not seeing the back side of an object, thus needing half the normal storage.
Anyway, those are just a few thoughts on why porting looks so bad, but it could also be from many other reasons. As I said, it just takes a different mindset. As a programmer you have to accept that your job will change. As a game developer, your going to have to learn something new every new cycle of consoles and even sometimes every year. Your skills will have to change. This is part of the reason why I dislike Microsoft as a whole. Programming for Windows has not changed and this is why Windows will very slowly trumble along and not change drastically. Microsoft loves this though. They don't have to adapt and they get complacent programmers that know only how to program on x86 and windows platforms. This creates stubborn programmers that know one way and only one way. Anything outside that way is ridiculous to them. This happened at the dawn of PC computing with the mainframe programmers. They were comfortable with the methodology they had been using all those years and it took a different mindset to work on personal PCs. Some adapted, others didn't. It's the way of things."
I liked it so much, I saved you the trouble of retyping it. :)
Jake @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:58AM
It makes sense. The system with more technical capability, familiarity, and ease of development has a superior version of the game. Why would anybody be surprised by this? Slow news day, I guess.
Craigo @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:59AM
I think we need some ground rules: Is this going to be a PS3/360 flame war, or an American/association football flame war?
GamerG @ Jul 2nd 2007 11:59AM
This and the fact that GT5 will not have damage because of "licensing issues" (unlike Forza and PGR) suggests to me that perhaps Sony were incorrect when they stated they have the more powerful system.
arch @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:00PM
#6 and #14
where are these desperate assumptions coming from you fucking ass hats? every time this is the sony fanboy argument. THEY ARE BEING DEVELOPPED AT THE SAME TIME!
JodyAnthony @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:01PM
PS3 and 360 both suck. American football and the other football both suck. The only console worth playing is the Vectrex, the only sport worth playing is tetherball.
mike @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:01PM
Look people PS3 sales are so pitiful that its not worth EA's additional effect to make it 60 FPS, the 360 version and the PS2 version will be the big sellers...
At a time when the market is saying graphics ar emore than good enought sony have overrached creating a complicated system that just isnt worth the effect due to pitiful sales..
discuss..
gameforall @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:02PM
Jay-
"Still. PS3 can't handle it at 60fps? Remind me why the PS3 costs double the price of a 360 yet isn't as powerful."
Because it does not burn into flames
horngreen @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:03PM
"every company making a football game this year made a decision that the best experience for the Xbox 360 included 60fps whereas the best experience for the PS3 was 30fps."
Wow that has to be the worst attempt at spin I have EVER heard. So the "best" experience on the PS3 is 30fps? Is that because the PS3 is SOOO powerful it doesn't need 60fps? Or by "best" does he mean the best we could achieve? MAN watching this overpriced turd tank is so fun. Sony should emulate some 3DO games for this thing to give owners the full experience of betting on the losing horse!
Tadioku @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:04PM
talk about lazy developers
JodyAnthony @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:04PM
arch, calm down. dont call me a fanboy. i have better things to do than pointlessly worship some faceless corporation. go suck an ass.
why would ea develop the game from scratch for both consoles? what sense would that make? More americans own 360s. More Americans would play an american football game. Supposedly the 360 is easier to develop for than the ps3. Why WOULDNT they develop with the 360 in mind and port to PC/PS3? Get your head out of your ass.
pandaboy99 @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:04PM
2k football is such a system mover too.. dang.. especially in japan and the rest of the world... ill just be forced to play ninja gaiden sigma while all those lucky xbox guys get to play all star football
Koorah @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:05PM
Phag-ball? Lol, go watch a Rugby match some time then look at the amount of padding your "Footballers" wear and come back to us on who's playing 'phag-ball'.
Oh yeah, flame... er 360 sux PS3 r0x0rs!
I don't actually have either but since when did first hand knowledge have anything to do with it.
Neebs @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:05PM
There are so many backronyms, bad puns, and flaming here it's not even funny.
Personally, I believe it's due to the PS3's non-unified 512MB of RAM: 256 for general use, 256 for the video card. The Xbox has the same amount, but developers can put it anywhere they want, as it is unified.
See, that's how easy it is to use NPOV logic people!
Ian Von Porter @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:09PM
American Football = WWE = NASCAR .. all americans care about is drama, t&a, more t&a, flash, and super hyped, mediocre 'sports' entertainment...
JodyAnthony @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:09PM
side note: i love when I try to use rational thought in comments on this site. It always ends with me being called a sony fanboy. I dont get it. Especially since my game company of choice for the most part is Nintendo (if only for the Zelda series). Luckily I am one of the few people here that can actually enjoy games for ALL the consoles, not blindly love one company and blindly hate the others.
JodyAnthony @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:09PM
Ian Von Porter, I am an american and I couldnt give two mediocre shits about any sport.
konajinx @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:10PM
@31,
No one cares about Ninja Gaiden Smegma. No one playing an actual system that has games to be played on it, that is.
thebigfatj @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:11PM
The 360 has much more general purpose CPU time than the PS3 (and a little more fill rate). The difference is far more likely due to the 360 simply being a more powerful machine than it being a generation ahead games-wise.
Shagittarius @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:11PM
You limeys are all smegheads anyways!
Joshua @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:14PM
360 is easier to develop for. Better graphics. PS3 is overpriced -- sucks.
360 has a 33% failure rate. 360 sucks.
This freaking console generation sucks so far.
T-Roy @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:15PM
@32 So why do they call it Rugby Football if they mainly use their hands? The naming inaccuracies go both ways, soccer rockers. (and it seems like it originated in the UK)
Tukulito-Zakayama @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:15PM
1UP: PC football games to run faster than PS3 AND 360
vidGuy @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:17PM
I've never seen a 350lb Rugby player smash into a 6' 2" 175 pound receiver at full speed, either. Nor have I seen a 18 year old Rugby player hit a teammate head own and be paralyzed for life.
a.j. @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:18PM
it's not the console's fault if developers can't take the time to learn the programming. anyone who's played motorstorm, or F1 knows the shit can handle speed and tons of textures. i own both systems so i don't care either way but you flame boys are all idiots. PROGRAMMING. get it through your stupid heads.
mccomber @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:22PM
"While we haven't had the opportunity to see the difference with EA's titles..." we're happy to jump to conclusions.
Ha Ha! Objective.
The people who make Madden one of the best selling games year after year after year aren't the sort of people who give a damn about framerate, they are the ones that see the game, remember which system they own, and then buy the game for that system. Chances are it will be the 360, so of course it's the one that is going to get the most attention. JodyAnthony explained the logic behind that pretty well.
Maybe they'll have a sticker on the front that says "Tackle your friends at 60fps!".
This is more same old same old; a game built to run on the 360 runs better on the 360. Does this change which version I'm, going to buy? Nope. I'll still just skip them all again.
kingofwale @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:23PM
an American company's game about American pastime favours the American made console??
I"M SUCKED BY THIS!!!!
quazi @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:24PM
i know the ps3 is potentially more powerful than the 360.and i think it comes down to programing. must be harder on ps3.i love my 360 =D
oh and like they said on gametrailers bonus round.if you look at it the best looking console usually doesnt win.ps2 looked like crap over ps2 but i rarely played my xbox over ps2.look at ds and psp.hell ps1 and n64!.gameboy and gamegear.the weaker seem to win O_O.omg wii has a chance.
Tukulito-Zakayama @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:27PM
American football..? Nahh its just a show entertaiment game, get real, get Soccer........
kingofwale @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:30PM
>ps2 looked like crap over ps2 but i rarely played my xbox over ps2.look at ds and psp.hell ps1 and n64!.gameboy and gamegear.the weaker seem to win O_O.omg wii has a chance.
orr.... let me refresh your memory. Maybe it's because whoever had the largest marketshare in last gen (translation, 3rd party support) wins next gen console war?
Applies to PS2, DS.. so on. Market Dominance isn't something you lose overnight, but again, a console war isn't something you win in 6 months, give it a couple of years and then see.
brokenscope @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:32PM
@Matt B.
Im not sure its so much a mindset as it is..
"Oh god how the hell do we program for this thing??!?!"
It may also have something to do with the fact that for the the time being the xbox has a superior dev kit for its platform. Hopefully as it matures more devs will be able to harness the amazing power of the cell. Until then though, they might as well just be silicon paper weights.
Damnit IBM improve the compilers.
Jonathan Tran @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:34PM
Sony defense force assemble!
Dead Goat!
Fake Blog!
Pterodactyl!
Protein Folding!
Haha but seriously, I don't think this is a big deal. It's one game. Let's not blow it out of proportion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyXUVd2c83c