The ramifications of this subdued announcement are actually quite significant. Three titles have been revealed to have used the PhyreEngine for development: flOw, GripShift and DiRT. Of those three, only one is exclusive to PlayStation. It appears that the PhyreEngine is truly cross platform -- Sony is indirectly contributing to the development of PC (and Xbox 360) games.
But why make it potentially easier to make games on a competing console? Well, it's undeniable that developers are increasingly focused on multiplatform development. It's been rather commonplace for developers to neglect PS3 with inferior and oftentimes delayed versions of multiplatform games. With PhyreEngine, Sony is making a much more attractive plea: make games on PS3 first, guaranteeing high quality games that will not only match their 360 counterparts, but in many cases can exceed them. Sony's message is clear: start games on the PS3, and they will be better for both PS3 and 360 owners. It appears to us that PhyreEngine is a crucial part of that plan.
More details of PhyreEngine will undoubtedly be unveiled later today at a GDC dedicated to what Sony has dubbed "the new hotness." Stay tuned.
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(Page 1) Reader Comments
Anyway, hopefully, this puts a little more of a boost in Sonys Arm so maybe some decent new IPs can be made.
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You aren't going to see "Penis's Adventure in VaginaLand"(Copyright 2008 Crono) on XNA. It isn't going to happen.
Any moron can have a camera and upload to YouTube. Talented people make games like Culture, which should be a casual games hit in the future, if not, now, fyi.
@Crono: If you're a college student, you can get a whole slew of programs for free in Microsoft's DreamSpark program including one free year of XNA Creator's Club Online and Visual Basic 2008 Professional, among others. If you have said knowledge of game making (and pure genius, I might add), you can fulfill your dream of making "Penis's Adventure in VaginaLand" with a little elbow grease and determination!
I beg to differ.
"Check"
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SEE YA!
From a business standpoint it does sound like a very viable and logical path to follow.
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/sarcasm
PS3's Cell has eight cores. Xbox 360's PowerPC has three. Both chips run at 3.2GHz. Cell devotes six cores to games, one to the OS, and the last is reserve in case one core is faulty. Think about it. If the PS3's development cycle is going the same way the PSX and the PS2's did (which it already seems to be doing), there's a HUGE amount of untapped power in the console. Like I said, it's harder to write on.
I don't care what you think, I'm sticking by my statement, and for the record I don't own a PS3. I own an Xbox 360, but my PC blows them both out of the water. Don't believe my statements? Here's wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_hardware
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_hardware
The reasons devs aren't using the PS3 as lead platform are many, and why the hell should they change when those reasons have not changed? When the PS3 has a commanding install base lead, then it could be something for devs to consider.
Also, anyone find it amusing that Sony releases this middleware solution, for free, and the sony fanbots rejoice in mass. Had MS done that there would be accusations from them of trying to kill competition, & stifling creativity, and howls of monopoly.
Hell, I haven't even heard a root kit joke jet.
PC/360 > PS3 causes them to have to rework what files are going to be in the ram, because it's possible that they have items that won't fit within one of the 256mb pools.
The PS3 is not significantly more powerful than the 360. Given its unusual architecture, its lucky devs can make it EQUALLY as powerful as the 360.
The PS3 is significantly more powerful than the 360.
For starters, the 360 has 6 threads, but it's using hyperthreading and can only run 3 threads at a time, the other 3 sit "in reserve" for when the first 3 can't run due to a long latency memory access.
And speaking of long latency memory accesses... The 360 has a unified memory architecture. This very much simplifies the job of memory planning for the developer. But that means literally only one device in the entire system can access memory at any given time. When you have 3 threads trying to use memory at the same time, and the GPU trying to use memory for calculations and even the video output DAC reading out the entire contents of the screen over and over 60 times a second, there are a lot of devices sharing memory.
On the PS3, you have a single PowerPC core plus 7 SPUs (one of which is reserved for the OS). The 7 SPUs all have their own memory, so all 7 SPUs can access memory at the same time. The graphics system also has its own memory, so it can access memory at the same time as the CPU too. Net effect, all these devices have their own bandwidth. This can lead to massively higher memory throughput and much better CPU availability. And then again, if the developer does it wrong, it can only do as much work as a single core on 360 does.
On top of this, the SPUs are not regular cores like most programmers are used to. They're more of VLIW machines, like Itanium or an amped up version of a DSP (digital signal processor). That means these cores can do calculations much faster than a PowerPC can, so things like 3D matrix math (like transform and lighting) is much faster than it would be on the main CPU. This again leads to the PS3 having a lot more raw power available to the developer. But it also leads to making it more difficult on developers, because it requires special programming techniques to best utilize the levels of internal parallelism these cores have.
I don't know if Sony made the right move, because there are a lot of developers, and many of them won't put forth the effort to utilize the power of the PS3, especially since the code they write wouldn't be useful on their PC or 360 ports. But for the few that do utilize the PS3 correctly, it will be able to do things the 360 cannot.
I find it funny that in trying to flame somebody else for being a fanboy, you flag yourself as one by the vertue of the same arguments you're serving.
Things fanboys assume :
- their console of choice is the best
- if another console does something good (ie : releasing free extra tools to make everyone's life better), it shouldn't be praised, and even condemned
- but if your own preferencial console *would* eventually do the same, it would necessarily be attacked by everyone else (because anybody that hasn't chosen the same console as *you* must be a witless idiotic fanboy -- cuz he doesn't think like you do, and because you're oh so perfect)
this reeks so much of US chauvinism it's sickening
1. The Xbox 360 has 3 general purpose Power cores, each clocked at 3.2 Ghz. The PS3 has 1 general purpose core + 6 DSPs (actually called SPEs, but it is very important to highlight the DSP nature of these).
2. Each PS3 DSP has a very small local memory (*NOT* a cache - you must manually reserve this)
3. Each core in the Xbox 360 supports 2 hyper-threads. Whoever said that "only 1 thread can run at a time while the others sit in reservation" was out of their mind. Each core has TWO fetch operators, meaning BOTH threads can request memory at the *SAME* time.
4. Hyper-threading is NOT the same as having 6 cores, but it is way better than having only three.
5. Unified memory architecture means you're going to pay a penalty for L2 cache misses. On the other hand, having a unified system saves you the bandwidth of having to constantly shuffle resources back and forth. If you have an SPE generating geometry, you have to shuttle that from local memory to either system or video memory, etc.
6. The PS3 has barely enough backend bandwidth (think fillrate) to supply current gen games. The Xbox 360 has a fast link of 256 GBps to its local eDRAM.
7. I could go on, and on, and on.. but the point is, both machines are powerful - they are more than powerful enough to meet the demands of current gen games.
Nuff said :)
If a core really ran two threads at once, it'd be a dual-stream core. Or a dual core. The 360 cores are hyperthreading. In hyperthreading, the only time the 2nd thread runs is when the 1st cannot be run. Basically, the pipeline bubbles created by the 1st thread are filled with ops from the 2nd thread.
It's a good way to fill pipeline bubbles, but it doesn't produce performance equal or even similar to a multi-thread processor. Thus the 360 only runs 3 threads at once, it just can switch between them very rapidly. The other threads are indeed only held in reserve for when the main 3 cannot run.
The fetch unit (not operator) only dispatches instructions. The load/store unit accesses memory. It's possible the load/store units on 360 can both access the cache at the same time or one can hit the cache while the other hits main memory (cache hit under miss operation), but it's exceedingly unlikely each unit has the ability to access main memory at the same time, there would be no point since only one device in the entire system can access main memory at the same time.
On the other hand, the Xenos GPU is hands down superior to the RSX, so you really have a trade off. The Cell may pay off in the long run, but for most games it's going to be a gamble. We've seen games that suffer on the Cell architecture (Madden) and we've seen games that flourish on it (Uncharted). The Xenon seems to be more of a consistent performer at this point, but again, that may change in the future. However, if only a very select number of studios take advantage of the Cell (which is looking very likely), then I'm not sure if 1 or 2 stellar titles will really justify the Cell amongst the slew of on-par or even sub-par cross-platform titles considering Sony's pre-release claims.
So in short, it's a horse race and it's going to be close. My money is on the 360, but who knows.
- moves it's chess piece and says
- moves it's chess piece
- moves it's chess
- moves it's
- IT'S
Now I don't usually do this...
I'll let you correct yourself.
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- You fail at using the comment
- You fail at using the
- You fail at
- You fail
SONY IS A PAWN... TO MICROSOFT! L to the O-L
Maybe that might of worked if that's what I was trying to do...
MISSION COMPLETE
Oh well.
Oh well.
"Might of" - no
"Might've" - sure!
e.g.
That house is where the dog lives. That's it's home.
If I have shown ignorance then thank you for correcting me.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but [its'] would be appropriate for that?
Oh and don't worry about I was just bein' a jackass todayzzzz
There's no getting around that it seems that "it's" would seem to mean "belonging to it". But it doesn't, it's a contraction for "it is". Just type out your sentence with "it is" where the "its" is and if it still reads correctly, then you need "it's" in there.
Otherwise, you're using "its" which isn't a contraction at all (and thus needs no apostrophe) and means "belonging to it".
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Another thought I had is that since it can use D3D as well as OpenGL, I don't see it being difficult to put games onto the 360 after writing them using this engine.
But then, I know nothing about game programming.
But here are the questions I want to know...
-Can a studio buy a single debug station? I am not a big company by any means but I know my game will flop on PC but on console, it may do decently. I do not have the $10,000 for a dev kit.
-What are the conditions of this free software? The free version of XNA essentially says you cannot SELL your game. How about this toolset?
-Is this a homebrew initiative or is this still just for the PS3 developers?