GDC08: PhyreEngine, Sony's new (free!) cross-platform engine

First comment? Congrats! Your prize is in the mail!

Again "Youtube of games" is just a figure of speech. It doesn't take any talent or knowledge to make a youtube video. It still takes years of experience and training to make an XNA game, AND 100 dollar entry fee.

You aren't going to see "Penis's Adventure in VaginaLand"(Copyright 2008 Crono) on XNA. It isn't going to happen.

Hi. In case you didn't know, XNA requires just a little bit of knowledge more than making YouTube videos. Not only do you need to be knowledgeable in Visual C#, but also need to have the knowledge and wherewithal of making games, like level design, audio effects, and such.

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!

http://img20.imageshack.us/my.php?image=penisye0.png

I beg to differ.

Lol. Good one

Nice

Their development tool works for both platforms, a good thing for the industry and a bad thing for nobody. They wouldn't have put it out if it didn't work for the other platforms anyway, because a substantially lesser amount of people would be interested in it.

MS puts out a Bluray attachment, bundlies it with GTA IV, and drops the price again, looks at Sony and says...
SEE YA!

Who the hell told you *the PS3 is considerably more powerful then the Xbox 360*. You got to be out of your mind. You are a Fanboy at heart. There is still one single game to come out that can proof this. Not a single one. Its really pathetic.

hey they did it with Burnout Paradise and that turned out great. i dont know why developers keep trying to port to PS3 from 360 anyway since its already been proven that you loose nothing when porting to 360 from PS3. that way, everyone can get an equal experience and the companies can in turn make even more money.

Hey KILLA, you forgot the....


/sarcasm

@Cyro:

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

Actually Andrew did =not= bring up any valid points other then the whining musings of a PS3 fanboy.

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.

One of the main reasons that this method is actually better is that the PS3's ram is split, so why not develop there first so your assets that the ram uses are more organized, and then port to the system(s) with unified ram, so that you don't really LOSE anything.

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.

Capt carl, you don't know what you're talking about. The Cell has 1 general purpose CPU capable of and 6 secondary SPE's, capable of running 1 thread each. The SPE's also are not general purpose cores, but specialized. The 360 has 3 cores, each capable of 2 threads each, for a total of 6 available threads. PS3 cell's have 2 cores disable, so they are actually able to compute the exact same number of threads for gaming.

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.

You're all talking out of your asses. Each machine has strong points. It's all in how the devs use these strengths. But it is pretty much a fact that the PS3 hasn't been fully tapped... mostly because coding for all the SPEs is difficult.

Chrono:
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.

LS2/LS7 said what I was trying to say but in smarter-sounding words. Due to its true multistream, multitasking, multithreaded nature, the Cell can put out some serious performance numbers. In fact, IBM is going to start using Cell chips in its high-end rackmount servers and supercomputers.

@ Knight Marquise

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

There is some major mis-information here. Proabably because none of you are actual developers with any experience on this hardware.

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 :)

Fill rate is not limited by the speed of the link between the frame buffer and the RAMDAC as much as it is limited by the speed of the link between the location where the textures are stored and the frame buffer. The eDRAM on 360 is small enough that just the frame buffers use most of it up and thus many of the textures are stored in main memory. Main memory is quite fast on 360, but it is bandwidth shared between all devices and it isn't as fast as the eDRAM link.

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.

I don't think any of us really have a true grasp on the technological intricacies of either the Xenon or Cell chip, but from most technical papers I've read the general concensus is that the Xenon is a better general purpose CPU which could compute the majority of game code (which is branch heavy) better than the Cell. However the Cell has more theoretical power and potential if someone spent the time, energy and finances to cater to its complex architecture. For the most part, the Cell has a higher floating point calculation ability, which doesn't always equate to real world performance.

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.

- You fail at using the comment system.
- You fail at using the comment
- You fail at using the
- You fail at
- You fail

lawlz, sony is a chess piece...

SONY IS A PAWN... TO MICROSOFT! L to the O-L

I wasn't going to point him out, but thanks for trying.

Maybe that might of worked if that's what I was trying to do...

I wasn't trying to "point him out" in terms of lulz btw.

PROTIP: For those who don't understand the above; "it's = it is". For the comment about moving chess pieces, "its" would've been appropriate since it signifies possession. Press (A) to jump.

Thank you FOXHOUND!



MISSION COMPLETE

This exchange was interesting.

I don't think anyone actually understood my comment except me.

Oh well.

I don't think anyone actually understood my comment except me.

Oh well.

Oh, how about that? Oddly enough, Jtenma, you have committed grammatical blasphemy as well.

"Might of" - no
"Might've" - sure!

I learned something here today.

Here I was thinking that an apostrophe can denote ownership; even with the word "it".

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.

@ KYE

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

its' would be wrong too.

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".

I went too grammor school and I can has tells you It's It's's Its' its Itsey Bitsey spider

@Microswirl: Epic finish. +1

Sony did something like XNA with the PS1. It was called Net Yaroze or something like that.

I agree. This is a professional level toolset. Not a homebrew level asset. However, could this be the start of the return of Net Yaroze? Doubtful, but a fellow can hope, can't he?

yea this seems like more like tools to make it easier on current developers who are using the PS3. now i think it could help some indie devs and possibly help bring us some PSN download games since it isnt too terribly expensive but i dont think its anything like XNA (which i am very interested to see play out actually).

Totally agree. XNA developers seem to write their little games with whatever tools they already had. This is basically saying "Here's your fork, now have some cake." And the cake is delicious and moist.

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.

XNA has a devkit. It uses C#, from what I can tell.

But then, I know nothing about game programming.